fantasy sprawl

quarterfinals match 4:
The One Ring vs A Song of Ice and Fire

as much as the authors behind these two worlds may match each other for ambition, scope, and nuanced historical detail, the two worlds themselves feel vastly different. both may be vast, rich, strikingly realistic fantasy lands, with some very cool linguistical inventiveness threaded through, but Tolkien and Martin do not tell the same kinds of stories with anything like the same kind of tone, do they? 

I did find the two RPG versions of these literary works equally immersive games, at least. in terms of their layered, evocative gameplay and vibes, the two are very well matched.

in response to my opening round review of The One Ring, friend Chris commented that in no other match thus far had my preference been quite so blatantly obvious from so early on. at the time, I didn't realize how thoroughly, one-sidedly gushing I'd become, even if I did acknowledge that The One Ring had swept me off my feet.  

likewise, the opening round performance of A Song of Ice and Fire may have been just as imbalanced. it certainly didn't have to do very much to beat out Shadowrun (though my one-sided-ness that time ran in the opposite direction).

and now, how does the adventurous-but-still-somehow-cozy epic of Middle-Earth fare against the cut-throat political dances of Westeros? 

I can't say it's quite as simple as it might seem. both games were delightful to play, uniquely engaging, and satisfyingly substantive. the story moments of both felt meaningful, plot lines perfectly in tension among our characters' colorful backstories, current circumstances, and murky reached-for futures.

thankfully, in real life, we don't have to choose between Tolkien and Martin; we can be fans of both stories and make time to play both games. but this is an arbitrary tournament set-up where only one of these sixteen RPG systems can win the prize.

SYSTEM	The One Ring	A Song of Ice and Fire
back cover tagline =	"Enter the world of Middle-earth..."	"Adventure, war, and intrigue in George R.R. Martin's World of Westeros"
publisher =	Free League Publishing	Green Ronin Publishing
pub. date =	2020	2014
original cost =	$49.85	$49.95
length =	10 chapters / 240 pages	13 chapters / 320 pages
my exp. level =	none prior	none prior

---

and so the cozy version of adventure is going to win. me being me (aspirationally part hobbit, after all), how could I not choose the gameworld where extra meals, singing, and warm baths can be part of your character advancement? 

the only thing I found to mope about with The One Ring is that its character creation options feel so relatively minimal. I mused aloud to Jeremiah the other day that if we could mix just a few more of the classic Dungeons & Dragons classes and races and stats into the simplicity of The One Ring, that might be a perfect combination for me. but upon further thought, I don't think it would actually work that well. it would muddy the beauty and integrity of the game's design just a bit too much. 

likely the only reason I imagine myself wanting such a combination is because I feel so familiar with D&D character creation processes. my brain is latching onto it for comfort more than out of any true preference. and that means the real answer here is to do more character creation using The One Ring, to get familiar with it, and to trust that I'll fall further in love.

 

semifinals match-ups (coming soon...): 
The One Ring vs Vampire: the Masquerade
Star Wars vs Dungeons & Dragons

lines from history (or, happy pride month)

last summer I was quite enamored of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. so much of it resonated with elements I hope are part of who I am and plenty that I hope will eventually be part of who I am.

this is one of the former bits-- "My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide." (Kimmerer, p. 42)

how are people, places, things, and ideas like other people, places, things, and ideas? how much can we commune, however briefly, with even the furthest-flung perspective?

I find it fun to connect things that don't seem (to most people) like they go together, just as much as to notice connections among things that do. juxtaposition is a useful direction for thinking. mash this with that, just to see what might happen. some of the weird combinations might not work for everyone. or some of them could be like tuna fish with pears. 

today, I finally finished up the audio edits for the last section of my Librivox recording of Angelina Grimké's Letters to Catherine E. Beecher, in reply to an essay on slavery and abolitionism. the collection was published in 1838, the same year Grimké got married to someone named Theodore Weld (also an abolitionist and writer-- maybe I'll read a Librivox version of his 1839 collection American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses sometime?)

so 1838 and 1839 must have been busy years for Grimké. but most of the letters are dated the year before that, 1837. 

that was 185 years before this one. almost five of my lifetimes ago, so far.

the penultimate letter, Letter 12, was one of my favorites of this little audiobook-to-be. it is so timeless. along with her abolitionism, Grimké wrote ardently about feminism, women's suffrage, and equality on all counts. race, gender, whatever-- all human rights should apply to all humans. 

none of her sentences out of context are as powerful as they are stacked together in this letter, but it seems silly to paste the whole thing here when you can more easily go read it yourself via Gutenberg.org (or wait a few days and then listen to it via Librivox.org, either way).

so to compromise, I will abridge the letter as best and as meaningfully as I can, keeping in what has been most impactful and resonant to my 21st-century brain. and then, carrying on in my own 185-years-later mode of asynchronous discourse, I'll add a few comments.

...The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own. I have found the Anti-Slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our land—the school in which human rights are more fully investigated, and better understood and taught, than in any other. Here a great fundamental principle is uplifted and illuminated, and from this central light, rays innumerable stream all around. Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. 

.... When human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness. My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do. Our duties originate, not from difference of sex, but from the diversity of our relations in life, the various gifts and talents committed to our care, and the different eras in which we live.

This regulation of duty by the mere circumstance of sex, rather than by the fundamental principle of moral being, has led to all that multifarious train of evils flowing out of the anti-christian doctrine of masculine and feminine virtues. .... Hitherto, instead of being a help meet to man, in the highest, noblest sense of the term, as a companion, a co-worker, an equal; she has been a mere appendage of his being, an instrument of his convenience and pleasure, the pretty toy with which he wiled away his leisure moments, or the pet animal whom he humored into playfulness and submission. Woman, instead of being regarded as the equal of man, has uniformly been looked down upon as his inferior, a mere gift to fill up the measure of his happiness. .... 

Measure her rights and duties by the unerring standard of moral being, not by the false weights and measures of a mere circumstance of her human existence, and then the truth will be self-evident, that whatever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights—I know nothing of men’s rights and women’s rights.... 

If Ecclesiastical and Civil governments are ordained of God, then I contend that woman has just as much right to sit in solemn counsel in Conventions, Conferences, Associations and General Assemblies, as man—just as much right to sit upon the throne of England, or in the Presidential chair of the United States.

Dost thou ask me, if I would wish to see woman engaged in the contention and strife of sectarian controversy, or in the intrigues of political partizans? I say no! never—never. I rejoice that she does not stand on the same platform which man now occupies in these respects; but I mourn, also, that he should thus prostitute his higher nature, and vilely cast away his birthright. I prize the purity of his character as highly as I do that of hers. As a moral being, whatever it is morally wrong for her to do, it is morally wrong for him to do. ....

Thou sayest, ‘an ignorant, a narrow-minded, or a stupid woman, cannot feel nor understand the rationality, the propriety, or the beauty of this relation’—i.e. subordination to man. Now, verily, it does appear to me, that nothing but a narrow-minded view of the subject of human rights and responsibilities can induce any one to believe in this subordination to a fallible being. Sure I am, that the signs of the times clearly indicate a vast and rapid change in public sentiment, on this subject. Sure I am that she is not to be, as she has been, ‘a mere second-hand agent’ in the regeneration of a fallen world, but the acknowledged equal and co-worker with man in this glorious work.... Then will it be seen that nothing which concerns the well-being of mankind is either beyond her sphere, or above her comprehension: Then will it be seen ‘that America will be distinguished above all other nations for well educated women, and for the influence they will exert on the general interests of society.’

I can't know what Angelina Emily Grimké would think about the power and influence of women in American society today. hopefully she'd be a little bit gratified, grateful, impressed by how far we've come.

from reading 13 small letters of hers (and maybe a speech or two in an old rhetoric textbook ten years ago, maybe), I really don't know what Grimké would think about trans and non-binary folks, but from her emphatic defense of human rights not being based on gender, I would like to assume she'd be cool and inclusive. she spent her life advocating for the suffering and marginalized in her world. she'd probably do the same now, in whatever ways she could.

here's to making and seeking relationships, connections, and love-- more and more every single sweet day.

saturday night existentialism

this book, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, is an excellent book.

it's by a wonderful and engaging writer, Sarah Bakewell. and she also writes romance novels, interestingly.

I finished the book many months ago now. nine of its pages have been successfully dogeared.

the trouble is... I rarely remember which specific passage or paragraph on each dogeared page is the one I most wanted to go back to. so I reread the whole page, searching my memory and the words and waiting for it to click. sometimes, I don't know for sure if I've remembered right at all. sometimes, nothing clicks and I curse my past self for not adding a little pencil mark in the margin to help me out.

in any case, I'm gonna blog today about my best guesses for the quotes I meant to remember from some of those dogeared pages. first up, the most dramatical of them all, on the topic of love:

"If I love you, I don't want to control your thoughts directly, but I want you to love and desire me and to freely give up your freedom to me. Moreover, I want you to see me, not as a contingent and flawed person like any other, but as a 'necessary' being in your world. That is, you are not to coolly assess my flaws and irritating habits, but to welcome every detail of me as though no jot or tittle could possibly be different." (p. 214)

this is glorious and tantalizing. the idea of being utterly necessary, just the way you are, no matter what, to somebody else's world. so romantic and also so unrealistic. in real life, the practicalities of love are so much more difficult.

many of my other quotes here are on the topic of freedom and its paradoxes. there's one each touching on what Jean Paul Sarte, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have to say about it.

"None of this means that I make choices in a completely open field or voice. I am always in some sort of pre-existing 'situation', out of which I must act. I actually need these 'situations', or what Sarte calls 'facticity', in order to act meaningfully at all. Without it, my freedom would only be the unsatisfying freedom of someone floating in space .... Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free-- context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives-- for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense. / Sarte takes his argument to an extreme point by asserting that even war, imprisonment or the prospect of imminent death cannot take away my existential freedom." (p. 157)

this is frustrating stuff. very familiar, but frustrating at the same time. recognizing that the funnel I feel like I live my life in is actually structuring whatever freedom I do have? not a very comfortable thought. but without it, can I ever really rebel against the funnel and transform my future path into a candy store instead of a funnel?

freedom and control. limits and possibilities. beautiful, ineffable paradoxes. how Bakewell writes about all this is so masterfully smooth. I loved reading this book so much.

"The ambiguous human condition means tireless trying to take control of things. We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir's view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment." (p. 226)

and then in a section closely following that, Bakewell quotes Merleau-Ponty's note that "The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity." and in the next paragraph, she elaborates:

"What Merleau-Ponty is describing here is another kind of 'chiasm'-- an X-like interweaving, this time not between consciousness and world, but between knowledge and questioning. We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. This is the most attractive description of philosophy I've ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point." (p. 241)

I learned about this 'chiasm' concept in Sunday school once upon a time. there were anecdotes about learned, cultured people recognizing a chiasmus as a mark of divinity. the internet tells me that such awe-filled discussion of this literary form in the scriptures I grew up studying goes back to the 1970s. interesting. thinking about chiastic forms and what they can mean, outside of a religious context, is new. expansive.

in the book's last chapter, the discussion of freedom gets pragmatic (or as pragmatic as can be expected for a historical/biographical book on philosophy).

"...freedom may prove to be the great puzzle for the early twenty-first century. In the previous century, I grew up naively assuming I'd see a constant, steady increase in this nebulous stuff through my lifetime, both in personal choices and in politics. In some ways, this has come true. On the other hand, unforeseen by anyone, basic ideas about freedom have been assailed and disputed in radical ways, so that we are now unable to agree what it amounts to, what we need it for, how much of it can be allowed, how far it should be interpreted as the right to offend or transgress, and how much of it we are prepared to give away to remote corporate entities in exchange for comfort and convenience. What we cannot do any longer is take it for granted." (p. 318)

freedom, justice, peace-- what do we say these things are? for whom?

relatedly, I have this twitter thread about how to preserve freedom in the face of authoritarian terribleness bookmarked to read later/soon.

the next few pages I dogeared and remembered more or less why I dogeared them feature an infamous Nazi philosopher, Martin Heidegger. to quote Heidegger is quite often controversial these days. if I were writing a real scholarly paper about anything, I'd very much pause and consider not quoting him-- not giving him any further authority or power in our always-already problematic ivory tower.

for now, I'll put aside the discussion of how and when and why we should or shouldn't separate someone's scholarship from their politics. there is a meaningful discussion to be had there. I may save a slot in my July of blogging to take it up in earnest.

initially I marked these two passages because of their relevance to work, technology, and the way we value human beings. I'm not sure what else to say about them here yet; they give me plenty to think about in terms of thinking and being and material consequences.

"Phenomenology itself is thus threatened by modern humanities challenging, devastating way of occupying the earth. This could lead to the ultimate disaster. If we are left alone 'in the midst of objectlessness', then we ourselves will lose our structure-- we too will be swallowed up into a 'standing-reserve' mode of being. We will devour even ourselves. Heidegger cites the term 'human resources' as evidence of this danger." (p. 183)

the insidious danger of the term 'human resources' reminds me that I still want to write a scathing rhetorical analysis of all the ads for ziprecruiter.com that I hear and cringe at on all the podcasts. someday...

here is the last dogeared page:

"Later Heideggerians, notably Hubert Dreyfus, have written about the internet as the technological innovation that most clearly reveals what technology is. Its infinite connectivity promises to make the entire world store-able and available, but, in doing so, it also removes privacy and depth from things. Everything, above all ourselves, becomes a resource, precisely as Heidegger warned. In being made a resource, we are handed over, not just to other individuals like ourselves, but to an impersonal 'they' whom we never meet and cannot locate." (p. 324)

now, enough writing for this infinitely connected impersonal placelessness of a blog. it's past time for dinner, and there is pizza dough waiting to be pizza-ified and eaten.

worth keeping

I, a person who generally refuses to purchase any book or film or other thing that can be checked out at the library or downloaded from the internet, went and ordered the boxed set of all four seasons of The Good Place television series some weeks ago. when it eventually arrived, we devoured the bonus features (bloopers from each season, some special effects stuff, and a recording of the 2019 Comic-Con panel). I'm eager to rewatch the series proper all over again, but it really hasn't been that long since the last watch... so I'm waiting until it feels utterly necessary.

The Good Place has become my comfort show. despite the fact that it's contrary to my nature to rewatch things much, I basically can't get enough of this particular bunch of half-hour-long television episodes. the series is clever and deep and has plenty of texture to reward multiple watchings. there's also a great podcast, where the actors and producers and others involved in the show talk about each episode-- so after listening, you can go back to that episode with extra insights about what it took to create it.

and now, I have directors' commentary and such. so much potential for rewatchability.

it's hard to list many other serial stories I've gotten so very attached to. Discworld, undeniably. and the Chronicles of Narnia were very exciting to me as a child. I once was obsessed with Xena: Warrior Princess to the point where I begged mum to buy a pattern for a Xena costume. (the costume never did get made, though, I don't think.)

one of the only other series that has maintained my fascination and devotion beyond the youthful obsession phase is Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials. such a world! such piercing philosophizing, even for a young adult book. I own a nice boxed set of the original trilogy and will keep it forever.

last year, HBO released a television adaptation of the books. in preparation for watching it, I reread The Golden Compass. and paged idly through the other two. and then--partly because I had a gift card to use and partly because I already owned the other three and trusted that any more of this fantasy world would be worth owning too--I bought a paperback of Pullman's La Belle Sauvage (book #1 of his new series, The Book of Dust).

I loved it. it's very different from Lyra's initial adventures, but also not. there was suspense, so much beauty, all in that similarly thoughtful, delightful style.

once I'd devoured that and nestled into my shelf next to its predecessors, I searched about for book #2. but as it didn't yet exist and wouldn't be in paperback for who knows how long, I resorted to having the library buy a copy for me. they kindly did so, and I finished The Secret Commonweath just in time for the premier of the television show.

it wasn't perfect, but I liked a whole ton of things about it. Lee Scorseby played by Lin Manuel Miranda! and the Gyptians! they're not at all what I imagined in my head but I adore how they're portrayed here anyway.

I look forward to the next season, and however many seasons they'll do of the show. but I don't think it'll be worth owning in a boxed set. I may not ever rewatch any of it, either.

but I'll reread those books. I'll read them and reread them to my grandchildren if I ever have any.

is The Secret Commonwealth in paperback yet? (not yet... but the local indie bookstore does have it for preorder, so...)

on being intellectual in public

sometimes you hear about the dearth of brilliant public intellectuals these days. where is our 21st-century Marshall McLuhan or Noam Chomsky or Susan Sontag? headlines like this one seem to resonate, recurr. how nostalgic and melancholy for us, that somehow the world's society is just too big and fractured now for anyone to uniformly celebrate and respect any public figure. everything and everyone is too much undermined by shadows of problematicalness.

but at the same time, it's easier now to be a intellectual in public with the internet. public doesn't just mean on mainstream television or at the top of the best bestseller lists or in the biggest newspapers anymore. you can be intellectual on twitter (like this historian who has a pet bunny), or on Twitch (like these climate scientists), or on your own little blog (like Sara Ahmed).

all of us on the internet are more or less in public, whenever we want to be and sometimes even when we don't want to be.

do I count this little blog as part of being a public intellectual? not really. it's not quite public enough. it's not always very academic either, despite its humble ivory tower origins.

but is academic the same as intellectual? not always. you can have one without the other. academic seems more of a form to be followed-- conventions and styles you expect scholars to use. intellectual feels more inward, more spiritual almost-- of the mind. regardless of outward form, we can be intellectual as long as we're sharing our understandings of things or exploring our thoughts and reasons.

this brings me back to Sara Ahmed. she's someone I'd vote for in the category of admirable public intellectual for this century. since 2016 she's worked as an independent scholar, which makes her an academic intellectual without a formal academy. that takes guts and clout and determination. very admirable.

I'm glad she does the work she does in public. someday, hopefully, I'll get a chance to hear her speak. until then, her writing is all over the internet, and in some books and articles, and I really should read more of it.

who gets your vote for coolest public intellectual? I feel like this post could've been much longer and ramblier, full of disjointed musings about other public figures who work with thoughts and ideas in front of large audiences. Neil deGrasse Tyson probably counts, though he says some wacko things about the arts and humanities from time to time. Gloria Steinem and Jane Goodall too, though they seem like figures from the core of the 20th-century even though they are surely still using their intellects today. do John Oliver and Trevor Noah count? Oprah? what about YouTube personalities like this lawyer or the Green brothers? are they all public enough? intellectual enough? I think they are, at least some of the time. let's not pretend we have to separate intellectualism from entertainment.

maybe anyone can be a public intellectual for at least 15 minutes. and hopefully those who get more lasting attention are those who really deserve it.

affection, safety, and a puppy

I learned just today that the German word halten can mean in English to hold or to stop.

this seems profound for some reason. the sentence in my Duolingo German lesson was "die Eltern halten ihr Babies (the parents are holding their babies)" and when my first instinct was to translate that verb as are stopping, I figured I should check the app's hints for it first. they did show both options, but the context seemed to call for are holding instead. depending on the age of one's baby, there aren't that many things you need to or can stop one from doing, really.

if I stop to think for a moment about the same range of meanings in all the history and senses of to hold in English, does that make the whole thing less profound?

the word's etymology is a long one. some snippets that resonate this afternoon:
"to contain; to grasp; to retain"
"to possess, control, rule; to detain, lock up"
"to foster, cherish, keep watch over"
"to keep back from action"

all this potent potential meaning curled up in to hold. and then there are all these phrasal verbs, too: hold back, hold up, hold out, hold off, hold against, beholden to...

to be held as a parent holds a young baby is to be safe. comfortable. cared for. right?

to be held is also to be restrained. controlled. and to be restrained isn't usually considered comfortable, though... right?

or is it?

maybe it is.

paradoxically.

in a "limits are possibilities" sort of way.

I don't remember when exactly this photo is from. September 2016 when we went to the National Zoo? probably. it's been sitting on hold in a blogpost draft for at least three years or so.

to hold also has a sense of continuation. to hold a note. to hold your position. to uphold a ruling. to have and to hold.

sometimes all of that isn't comfortable either. but sometimes it is.

I've been doing this year's 30 days of yoga. it's wonderful even when I don't think I have the time or energy for it-- alternating movement and holding, centering body and mind and breath so all is balanced. not always easy. but it is enough.

I am enough. now is enough. I hope.

in other news-- last week we added to our household a new puppy.

his name is Hamilton.

or, if you're feeling extra fancy, Hamilton Chidi Chewbacca Chesley Alonzo. he's already learned to come when called and to sit on command. Wesley's still warming up to his rambunctious, half-tamed puppy energy, but they're getting along pretty well so far.

what good pugs.

“libidinal multiplicity” is a cool phrase?

this handy borrowed image here is my reaction to the section of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble we read this week for my Postmodernism seminar.

and this blogpost, the one you're reading here, is a slightly smoothed over and abridged version of the reading response I posted to our class forum. yes, I posted it under this very title. the phrase "libidinal multiplicity" is from this little chunk of Gender Trouble:

For Kristeva, the semiotic expresses that original libidinal multiplicity within the very terms of culture, more precisely, within poetic language in which multiple meanings and semantic non-closure prevail. In effect, poetic language is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law.

see why my brain is crying Escher?

I know Butler and her theory is purposefully difficult. this section (and lots of this week's readings, actually), so crammed with according to so-and-so, and she says and he believes, and for this person, and if we accept that then, and allegedly etc., is live intertextuality. so exciting. Butler references Foucault’s “matrices of power” and seems to surrender to the fact that we are always participating in them, somehow. she picks apart Julia Kristeva's theories relentlessly, resigning everyone, much like Richard Rorty seems to do in his “What Can You Expect from Anti-Foundationalist Philosophers?” piece, to a world where everything is socially constructed and nothing else makes any reachable sense. In Rorty’s words “We anti-foundationalists have no hope of substituting non-social constructs for social constructs; we just want to substitute our social constructs for theirs” (726).

Dr. Salvo asked us, earlier, whether or not the articles and excerpts this week were going to cohere. in my notes I have tried tracing behind Butler’s complaints about the circular self-defeating nature of Kristeva's arguments. it's not easy. I am distracted by the words. libidinal. cathexis. semiotic. repression. ontological. circular.

as I ponder the word “circular,” and how many assumptions and perspectives and arguments about the world seem inescapably circular, I also let myself entertain appreciative thoughts about how satisfying circles can be. “to come full circle” in a story or a presentation or an experience always feels so right, and fitting, and complete. maybe even… coherent? I’m not sure this is anything like what Dr. Salvo is really asking, but the noticing of circular constructs seems like a theme of sorts to me.

these two Kenneth Bruffee pieces I had read before. the bibliographic essay on "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge" has been especially useful in previous composition theory classes. Bruffee implies that knowledge is a social artifact and asserts that because of this, collaborative learning and the synergy of working together = awesomeness. he makes an especially bold point about better conversations leading to better thoughts and then to better writing. I am not so sure about this. Richard Rorty, also dealing with authority and language, touches on and troubles a similar-ish idea. to Rorty, vocabulary matters. but he also points out what he sees as a virtue of his anti-foundationalist pragmatism: that “pragmatism doesn't provide much of a jargon. So it is hard for devotees of pragmatism to hypnotize themselves into thinking that by reciting the jargon they are changing the world” (725). however... just one page later he admits that the particular ways we talk about ourselves and our potential can be way rhetorically powerful. this latter comment seems more in tune with what Bruffee is saying, too: “I see no better political rhetoric available than the kind that pretends that 'we' have a virtue even when we do not have it yet. That sort of pretense and rhetoric is just how new and better 'we's' get constructed” (726).

that reminds me of the time I wrote this.

we are not only creating a world. we are creating the we that lives in it, too.

interesting.

scraps of life and truth and such

last week I was losing sleep over a ridiculous little essay about Plato's take on Socrates' take on a mysterious woman named Diotima's take on our deepest, most irrepressible human instincts and motives. that Plato buries his opinions three layers deep in this dialogue probably means something interesting, but I didn't focus on that. I took the words on their own and teased them apart into a giant fraying mess of ideology and metaphor. and then I tried to weave that mess into four thoughtful pages of inexact philological interpretation. maybe this isn't true for everyone else, but when my writerly self is losing sleep over such things, those things usually read like overly-obvious watered-down drivel.

I decided to title this four pages of watered-down drivel "A Supreme and Treacherous Pursuit: Creativity and the Endlessly Cyclical Quest for Immortality," which reads like what it is: a quite wordy and slightly pompous title. I like the contrast there hiding right in the space where Supreme and Treacherous seem to overlap a little. our many grand ideals, so lofty and pure-seeming--how often do they betray us, or turn out not to be so lofty after all?

whether I found whole premise of my essay hiding there in that overlap too, or whether I am only trying to cram my premise by merciless force into the space I thought maybe might be big enough, I am not sure. re-reading the essay now, one week later, lets me see, along with a few pesky typographical mistakes, that it might not be so greatly watered-down as it seemed at 2:29 a.m. the other night.

if you haven't ready any Plato lately, there's a handy translation of the Symposium here for you. the section I tore apart for this class, Diotima's second-hand ramblings on Love and Beauty, as reported to the gathered party by Socrates, come in about two-thirds down. what struck me about this section was its odd emphasis on creative (and procreative) processes.

immortality and endless copies... are those things the same? if we design the technology to make copies of ourselves and our things forever, will we have somehow unlocked the fountain of youth?

I don't quite ask those questions in the essay. I only had four pages. another bit I didn't end up having room for was this tangent into popular biology or genetics or whatever field it is. I wrote and scribbled and excised the following:

This deeply-rooted and almost irrepressible need for continued existence brings to mind Richard Dawkins' allegory of genes and memes. As human genes desire to perpetuate themselves via sexual reproduction, so ideas might be said to desire a similar avenue toward immortality. Dawkins famously introduces this concept in The Selfish Gene, saying,

“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. […] When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.” (192)

what would Plato think, seeing me compare him to this raving evolutionary biologist fellow? who knows? I think it works though, even if just barely. there's something in us that seems to be forever stretching to get out, to reach farther, to be more. maybe it comes from Plato's unchanging Form of Beauty or from the stardust in our DNA. I'm not Plato and I'm not an evolutionary biologist either. what do I know?

just for randomness, I'm throwing in a handful of excerpted and carefully un-contextualized sentences that actually did make it into my wordily titled conference paper. I can't decide if they sound better or worse or more or less watery without all the quotes from Plato and associated criticisms stitching them together.

Our desires, which spur us toward the good and beautiful, are themselves spurred by this yearning for an identity and influence beyond the limits of our own. 

To be mortal almost by definition involves ceaseless wanting. 

The desire for immortality prompts a unique and paradoxical creative journey: supreme in the sense that it leads us to ever greater and purer understanding, yet treacherous in its demands for never-ending, Sisyphean progress. 

Somewhere between strength and weakness, between good and bad, progress and learning take place. Desire and pursuit flourish in these middle spaces, spurred by elements on both sides. 

To begin, we must realize and appreciate the times when we are not so ignorant as to have no desire for wisdom, but neither so wise as to have no room for learning. We must remain somewhat stranded between mortality and eternity, in order to sustain the potential for unlimited growth. The processes of meaningful creativity involve recognizing both the inevitability as well as the irrelevance of limitations to this transformative work.

I sound like such a grad student.

the road to where?

one week ago, at brunchtime on the sparkly penultimate day of December 2013, I spent two hours guzzling hot cocoa with friend Wilson (who does not have a blog, but does regularly post wonderfully thoughtful and provocative things on facebook). we discussed many things over our sugary beverages: families and freedoms and connectedness and consequences. we told each other long stories and caught up on each others' lives a bit. it had been at least seven years since we'd spent much time in the same vicinity. I think at least since back around this little era of my life. long ago. that version of this amelia girl seems a long way away.

{ photo borrowed from A. Hoffritz on flickr. }

at one point Wilson and I came around to the subject of good intentions, their worth and efficacy. I don't remember the very beginning of that conversation, but I remember cringing a little and conceding that in so many spaces, it isn't ever what you intend, but what happens to result. it can't be what you meant, it has to be what all those other humans in the world interpret. yes, okay, I see... but really?

once, much longer ago than last week, I was asked, in exactly this odd mathematical construction, if I thought "inferences > implications or vice versa?" the questioner meant to say, "which has greater weight when it comes to meanings made and shared and used to construct what has happened and why?" is it the meaning in your own head, the implicit, transcendent mush behind all the words and gestures you're making to your friend or partner or colleague? or is it the meaning that person is building, piecing together from her memories and experiences with you and your world and your shared vocabularies of sounds and spaces?

I am still not sure I can answer. you need them both, or you're only talking to yourself, right? does one of them have to be > or < at all? is there no way to = them or smooth them closer to each other? no way to make a little more certain that they match?

last Monday when I brought up the low-rung place intention seems to keep, Wilson elaborated interestingly on the whole idea. whenever we speak or act, we usually get to learn things about how the world works, how the world will respond (re-speak? react?) to our movements. our intentions are answered by those results, those interpretations, and if we find they do not match what we intended or expected, then we'll know better how to speak or act in our next set of circumstances. at least, hopefully we will.

{ photo borrowed from Sarah Ross on flickr. }

the beginnings of a million yoga classes and yoga videos will tell you, everso calmly and confidently, to set an intention for your practice. quiet your whirring mental contraptions and come to light on one small thing--any lovely little thing--one thing you and your yoga might accomplish together in the next hour or half or however long. one candle-bright thing with which to fill your world and your mind and your life in seeking, moment by moment, more breath, more joy, more peace.

set an intention, they will say. and then in the middle of the million yoga classes, again: reconnect to your intention. tune in, remember, bring awareness to, focus on. intend.

I'm struck by the similarities to 'attend' and 'tend.' they all have slightly different but unsurprisingly analogous etymologies. 'tend' looks to be a shortened alternate of 'attend,' and their history goes back to the Old French "to direct one's mind or energies," "to expect, wait for, pay attention," or more literally from Latin, "to stretch toward." the direction seems important here. the destination. the discipline. we must attend to what is. no effort of ours will necessarily make a difference.

this is only a hair or two different from the etymology of 'intend', which gives "direct one's attention to," also from Old French, and then from Latin, "turn one's attention, strain," or "stretch out, extend." and here, is the center more important? is this version a little bit more egocentric? more powerful, more wild? is this where we can gently start to bend reality?

both words share roots in the Latin tendere, or "stretch." and I suppose to stretch must imply more space than a single point, no matter which (the center or the edge, the to or the from) gets the focus. all this stretching and turning and yoga go pretty awesomely together. there is a substance to be stretched and space to stretch across--both are just as crucial. the resonant tones + the silences between them. the great nothingness of space + the little spheres of something scattered around it, all pulling and tugging at each other. there is the you and all the not-quite-you. the dust and the sunlight, inside and outside and everywhere. a whole lot more of our brunchtime conversation could fit here; we talked about the oneness of the universe, our limited abilities to do anything about anything, and the paradoxical, quantum possibilities of all things--but nobody wants this blogpost to go on forever.

Wilson's parting thought was something like "may the eventual results of our good intentions be well-matched to what we intend," which I thought was just about as profound and poetic a prayer as any.

{ photo borrowed again from Sarah Ross on flickr. } 

ours was, as most awesome, beverage-accompanied chats with friends are, much too short a chat. with any luck we'll fulfill an intention to meet up again before another seven years stretches by.

for the moment, I am going to put my memories and wonderings away and embark on a short, solitary practice of equalling out my intentions and attentions with the calm and confident Adrienne Mishler. may all your good intentions for this brand new 2014 lead you to happy, well-lit, friendly, open places too.  

traffic

I still need to find a good sunrise watching space in this town. maybe I'll try the roof one of these days, (if I can get up there). several weeks ago, I walked downtown and watched from above the train platform as sleepy-looking Sunday morning travelers waited for their train. last week I wandered up on the bridge over the river, making my way against one-way traffic, wrapped up in a jacket and layers of soft music.

I'm starting to think everything is a matryoshka (some people say onion, but I think matryoshka dolls are prettier than onions, and right now I'm going to say they fit more nicely with my notion of a socially constructed reality), so it isn't surprising I've framed that morning as a bundle of serially enclosing sets of experiences. my little thoughts inside my little brain, housed in a sturdy skull, covered with fairly average skin and freckles--all of that--we could call it me--walked around inside the music. and all that sound, recorded into digital files and lined up in the software of my little ipod, was being fed into my ears to melt around the thoughts. beyond that thought-music hybrid of a person were the streets and sidewalks, dirt and moss and grass, the air and fuzzy predawn light all making space where I could stand and walk and breathe. even further away--standing on different ground and breathing different air, everyone and everything else, their own bodies and music, possessions and agendas went about in the middle of their own complex matryoshka. beetles, birds, and traffic. neighbors, pets,  these worldly, distant sounds from such distant, not-me things, nevertheless layered on to what made that morning what it was (and is) in my head.

{ photo courtesy friend Mel }

this photo is most unconnected to the above description, though it does include a snippet of a sunrise. friend Melanie took it months and months ago on a late summer morning. there are ponies just south of what was then our new neighborhood. on whichever morning this happened to be, we noticed this mother and foal shyly watching us jog through the dirt alley. newborn day. newborn pony.

having a record of that morning and these ponies and the light coming up so bright behind them somehow seems to loop time in on itself. I can't really reach backwards toward that summer, that neighborhood, the jogging or anything else. the photo isn't the moment. the moment is not there in that photo. my access to the moment is mediated much more from here. I have to reach back through a this screen to a photograph to a memory of a thousand-miles-away space and a thousand-hours-away time.

during my more recent but at the moment no less inaccessible experience walking around a new neighborhood at dawn, I looked through all my layers of self, sort-of-self, and non-self, trying to notice and soak in all the things I love about sunrises. do you remember? do I remember?

the waiting, pacing, wondering where the horizon will break open against the sharp light.

feeling a shift from stillness to rustling as the colors in the sky brighten, fade, and smooth into regular daytime blue.

letting the whole world pull itself out of the monochrome blandness of predawn grey and into a gradually more and more detailed light.

seeing your own shadow come loose from the shadow of the earth.

then, turning back, watching the shadows of everything snip themselves separate and scurry into the spaces west. I once wrote about reverse sunsets. if I ever have a nice west-facing office I'll do my best to take good notes on reverse sunrises.

"reverse," I expect, is a very wrong word for what I mean. maybe "mirrored" or something would be better. the earth and the sun and astrophysics and entropy make sunrises and sunsets both into irrevocably one-way affairs. do the sun and the earth get bored of this arrangement, I wonder? I can turn around to watch east and west, and north and south, too--but our lovely sun cannot. the earth spins the same way, steadily around and around, never backwards and only a tiny bit tilted.

we can turn around, walk across the street, go back the other direction, and watch all the shadows changing.

but when it comes to the fourth dimension, I'm just as stuck as the sun and earth on a one-way track. there is no reaching back to yesterday or last week. every newborn day has to keep going, sweeping the rest of us along with it toward another sunset.

sunsets are very nice too, of course. often even more visually striking--more dramatic somehow.

I prefer sunrises. they speak of more hope and more potential. more beginning.

unterschreiben

I'm not exactly sure, but I think perhaps I have found another linguistic skeuomorph. you remember me talking about these, eh? this one isn't a total skeuomorph yet, I don't think. maybe a hybrid.

the word is subscribe.

originally and long, long ago this word meant a few different things. "to sign at the bottom of a document," or "to write underneath, sign one's name." later on we get "contribute money to" and "become a regular buyer of a publication." you might like to see the more complete etymology here.

to subscribe...
to underwrite...

and now we use these words differently. subscription in a digital open-access universe doesn't involve money in the same way a subscription to a magazine or newspaper does. but I guess time and attention are money in their own ways.

oh words and all their shifting stretchable meanings. so fascinating. all the Locke and Hume and Derrida we've read this semester has been messing about with what everything really means, or if anything really means. almost nobody agrees with Plato anymore, about the existence of actual forms and essences and realities beyond the bits we can see and touch and talk about. does that make things difficult?

or does it not matter? even if there is a truth beyond language and perception, perhaps we'll never reach it.

and now that I'm thinking about this, Nietzsche might say all language is skeuomorphic. endless, inescapable skeuomorphism. chains of metaphors that tell us nothing. and everything is just an illusion that we've forgotten is an illusion.

(the semester will be officially over for me on Wednesday next. but I can't promise that such an event will make me quit talking about Derrida. sorry?)

delta

I was thinking about that Gandhi quote as I biked to work yesterday. you've heard it, I'm sure. it's probably on a thousand bumper stickers and a thousand fridge magnets and a thousand little plaques on a thousand office desks all across the world. it goes like this:

"be the change you wish to see in the world."

and as I was thinking about that idea, the questions I kept looking back to were:

what change do I wish to see in the world? what does it look like?

I'm sure all of us have things we wish we could change about the way things are and the way things work. I wish there wasn't so much noise. I wish I didn't have to sleep so much. I wish it was a tiny bit easier to travel great distances and see faraway places.

but are those changes something I can embody? are those changes anything I can do anything about?

and more importantly, what would the consequences of those changes be?

I wonder what Gandhi hoped we'd do with those words. was he thinking we could each envision a perfect world and then live as if we were already a part of it? what kind of change did he imagine we could become? did he even have a specific sort in mind, or does he trust the masses of people who quote him to latch on to a type of change that will be for the better?

be the change.

he didn't say make the change. he didn't say initiate the change. this isn't just an action, or even a series of actions. this is who you are. it's everything.

I'm going to keep coming back to this.

amelioration

on Tuesday, March 22, somebody googled the phrase what word will make everything better, and not surprisingly, the greatest of all search engines happened to point that somebody to this wonderful blog of mine. whoever it was didn't stick around. for all my writing about words and what they mean to me, I guess it's not immediately obvious that anything here has any practical application. my ramblings are not very helpful. (semi-random fact: the day before this happened, a completely different someone found me by searching for backwards pocketwatch reminder quote. sadly, that person didn't stay long either...)

words make everything better, so I say.

I really believe that, you know.

but which words? they've got to be the right ones, don't they? random words hardly constitute proper communication, and when I say words make everything better, I am really saying that communication will solve all your problems. communication is the answer. communication is essential. a lack of communication means everything starts falling apart. not being able to talk about things means not being able to fix them.

although... not all communication requires words. and sometimes, no matter how many words you use, communication fails. maybe there's too much noise. maybe there's nobody listening. maybe you don't mean what you say.

so maybe the secret isn't just words. there's a lot of stuff behind the words that make them powerful. communication takes effort. patience. understanding. that's why it can be so wonderful when you take time to make it work. when you and whoever you're talking to can give and take and build and rejoice. to make things better you need a few people to want them better. and then you just have to keep wanting it, and keep doing and saying whatever it takes to get there.

there isn't one single word that will ever automatically make everything better. sorry to say so, random googler, but I am not a magician.

can I say anything about what the right words might be? or how we might be able to sort them out of our lexicons and use them properly and recognize them when we see them in the world around us?

yes. I could say a million things about that. maybe I will have to start documenting moments in my life when words have made something better. I could start with songs. I could hint at a handful of crazy relationships. I could talk about my job.

any situation...

any collection of stories...

they need the right words. and the words need meaning, and they need authenticity.

one of those things you can get from a dictionary (more or less), and one of those things you can't get anywhere else but inside your heart.

---

PS. for your information, I have revised my about page. and no, I don't think I will always tell you when I have revised my about page. it changes randomly, much like its subject tends to do.
also, I posted over here today. lovely old photographs. mm.

syrupy cynicism

xkcd (you've heard of it, right?) has a tagline. Randall Munroe, the ex-NASA employee who writes the thing, announces it as A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. and apart from the math in there, what's not to love?

xkcd also comes with a warning. at the bottom, just so everyone knows what they're getting into when they show up to read it, it says: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors). not counting all the programming geekiness and occasional vulgarity, xkcd is all smart and insightful and amusing, wrapped up in an adorable minimalism. (okay, the programming geekiness might be insightful and amusing too, but I wouldn't know half the time, would I?) it's art. it's social commentary. it's philosophy.

I've been thinking about this one recently. comic number 807, or, as it happens to be titled, Connected:


the title text is the thought-provoking part. Mr. Munroe continues: "Or love in general, for that matter. It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect, and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you'."

hmmm. is that the idea we're trying to sell ourselves? that there is no middle ground? that it has to be a piece of cake or nothing at all? I wonder why. maybe it's like Frank Chimero said. "It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now and then: it gives you hope." you teach yourself idealism because you need hope so badly. you sometimes forget the 'little bit' and the 'every now and then' and you invest your whole future in unrealistic storybook bliss.

more comics from the Romance section of xkcd, with accompanying random thoughts:

aw, can't you just taste the bitter loneliness they're both shivering with there? it's so cute, right? I think it makes a funny contrast to this one:

such funny, fickle beings we can be. we harbor so much longing for the imaginary and unreal, always looking over that fence, analyzing the greenness of that non-existent grass.

even putting all romanticizing aside, you have to admit that finding and loving a person who loves you back is pretty amazing and miraculous. how does that happen? will we ever understand it? or are you doing well enough if you can simply be grateful for it, and create something equally miraculous with the love you've found, once you've found it?

this one could be sad. but... your heart will always give you a choice, won't it? as much as our internal organs manage to control our behavior most of the time, I don't believe you always have to listen to them. you can choose to trust your heart or you can choose to change your mind. you are the only one who can.

these what if questions are the kind you have to fight with sometimes. who knows where they come from and what they have to gain by planting doubts in your life? I think the trick is realizing that you get to decide. the universe trusts you to do the right thing. and even if you don't, it will all work out eventually. there is no template, no magic checklist, no fool-proof map to go by, and if you keep trying to make your experiences match up with what you see in movies or in books, you'll always be a little disappointed and confused. you have to trust yourself just as much or more than the universe does. go on. put down all those other people's stories and write your own.

frameless

today I was looking through one of my journals. not the everyday one, or the one about dreams--the little flowery one I started writing in on New Year's Eve 2007. it's a list-journal. the first thing on the list is 'write a song.'

not everything on the list is phrased so imperatively; some of it gets really vague and wishful. one of them is 'publish some photography.' another, a few pages later, says: 'photojournalism.'

I'll have to break that one down, I think. what do I know about what it takes to be a photojournalist? this little photo-essay I wrote years ago can hardly hold a candle to other, actually relevant publications like this, can it?

anyway, there are billions of better photographers, with better equipment and oodles more passion for their medium, than me. that's okay. my amateur efforts will do. I read something the other day (here) about how serious photography should be more about 'the experience of studying some object carefully' than about the end result of awesome photographs. sometimes I can get that way about taking pictures--absorbed in actually seeing what's there and deciding which might be the most interesting way to look at it--but other times...I just want a nice picture. a memory-in-a-frame. a moment recorded in pixels for all the people who aren't standing right next to me.

I was browsing design*sponge earlier today. thursdays are their before-and-after days and it's always interesting to see what people can remake out of old stuff. and there are nice photographs. design blogs need photographs just like cookbooks do, if not more so. it was this post about a newly remodeled bathroom that started me thinking... that bright yellow cabinet looks fabulous in the photograph. it's bright and cheerful and very clean-looking. but it's just a photograph. there's a lot it doesn't tell me. if that bathroom were part of my house, maybe I'd get used to it... or maybe I'd get sick of trying to keep it so clean-looking. as Thomas Hardy tells us, "Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged." that's what that yellow cabinet might end up doing:  mocking me.

and while I'm quoting dead writers, some philosopher named Kenneth Burke once said, "A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing." every perspective comes with a blind spot. whichever angle you take, you still end up leaving something out. is there really no way to consider everything?

I guess not. probably because we couldn't handle things if we could see in every direction at once. maybe it should be enough that we can always turn around, if we want.

all dogeared pages

the guy who writes this design blog I follow, Russell Davies, often reviews the books he's read by noting all the pages he dogeared. sometimes he photographs the pages, or scans them. these days he can simply post screenshots full of digital highlighting from his e-book reader, and that works.

me, I've just had to type things out. I think I like that better, anyway.

the book in question is The Kingdom of Ohio, by Matthew Flaming. it sort of surprisingly went along very well with the bits I was reading in Proust was a Neuroscientist about memory and identity and how we create reality in our own minds. all very interesting thoughts, framed in absorbing narratives.

{ picture borrowed from the vastness of the internet }

at the beginning of the novel, our unidentified narrator gets distracted every other chapter or so, and starts wondering aloud why he's telling this story now, after so much time has separated him from its bewildering events. he sounds extremely nostalgic, and despite his uncertainty, not confused at all about the story he sets out for us. his only worry is proving to us what truly happened. making it believable and acceptable to anyone outside himself. why does that matter so much?

"...I admit that although our private memories (like works of fiction) may endure without the agreement of anything outside themselves, at the moment when we try to make our recollections into stories the world begins to matter. By weaving memories into a sequence, they also become joined inextricably with time and history (which is to say, with the memories of everone else)." pg 31

how much do we as an audience need before we will suspend our disbelief? usually not very much. but how much before we set our disbelief down completely? how much evidence will it take before we start inhaling these stories as if they were true?

nothing really can be proven, at the bottom. my memories--your memories--they're all pretty fluid and malleable. put them all together and what do they do for us? they're just the world. just this place we exist as a part of.

experience is so subjective, and nobody else can tell me much about the things I see. there is so much that can't be put into words. or even if it can be put into words, is still almost impossible to really understand unless you've been there.

"Such sentences always end in silence, no matter how they may begin--indeed, this is the very essence of fate: that which we never quite manage to say." pg 109

and even when you have been there, right there where you know and feel and see and are... even then, does it make any sense? can our brains really encompass the hugeness of things as they really, deeply, truly are?

"None of this makes any sense, he thinks. And there's nothing--couldn't be anything, really--between us, at least beyond these moments. Still, at the same time, it comes to him that maybe love is always this way, a long-shot gamble: a bet against the odds that some intangible connection--even one as strange as this--will outweigh al the details and triviality of the world that drive people apart." pg231

and beyond that particular hugeness, the even more spectacular (and potentially terrifying) expanse of how things might be, could be, and will be in the future? how can anyone know those things? how can anyone even pretend to?

and yet we live. we make decisions, we take risks. we tell ourselves so many stories...

"If it were certain, it wouldn't be love." pg 300

and here's the part where I throw out some fancy-sounding words like ineffable and existential and quantum. maybe I should study more philosophy, instead of just rambling about it.

maybe. mistakes.

there's this thing one reads about so often: causality.

not casualty. no, not death and war.

causality.

the happening of things. nobody really knows how it started. we all pretend to understand how it works. we are all just making it up as we go along.

and by 'making it up' I mean figuring things out however we can. this sometimes involves teachers and textbooks and silly powerpoint presentations. most of the time it involves making mistakes.

I had a good friend once whose motto was 'stuff happens, things occur.'
yep. real profound, don't you think?

there's a rather brilliant webcomic, 1/0, whose title sprang from the premise:

The fact that the universe holds something over nothing, that it prefers to exist, rather than not exist, is fundamentally absurd. No being can ever come to deserve its own birth. 1/0 is a cry out against mere logic and efficiency. Stuff exists. All existence, all truth, cannot be ultimately justified: it can only be described, explained, and enjoyed.
1/0 is illogical. 1/0 is irrational. 1/0 is impossible. 1/0 is transcendentally unfair.
1/0 is true. Deal with it.

I'll hold up a small question at that 'explained' bit. can all this stuff that makes up life really be explained? I mean properly, so there will be no more questions left.

of course not. there will always be questions. why goes on forever. (mostly because ignorance goes so deep)

but to a degree, causality explains the world. it's just a word. it means there are rules.

Douglas Adams:

Anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen, and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again. Although not necessarily in chronological order.

ah rules.

if ... then ...

x + y =

etc.

it gives the poster outlines to our understanding of the world, causality does. it hangs the plots of novels up in coherent pieces. it helps us make sense and meaning out of all the weirdness of the universe. it is behind all sciences, philosophies.

the irony is we have such freedom, even without even the vaguest hint of ever escaping the rules.

I mean, if there weren't any rules, we wouldn't be able to mix a little sugar and salt and flour and get homemade bread, would we?

by 'a little' I of course mean some down-to-the-teaspoon measurements that somebody else figured out, long ago, before there were recipes and cookbooks.

how did they figure it out?

mistakes.

maybe your mum told you not to talk to strangers. but it isn't til you meet one and feel sick at the 'let me buy you a drink' coming out of his mouth that you really get it.

maybe.

compromise and radiation

my dad once told me that if we could see every single radio transmission that went trailing through the air around us, the world would be blackened and dark by them.

if you want something done right, do it yourself, eh?

was it Gandhi who said that you should 'be the change you wish to see in the world'? on sunday one of the speakers at church read a quote about the radiation each human being gives out every day without thinking. the point was that we should all become responsible for that radiation, and train ourselves to think about it.

but we can't see it.

we can't see a lot of things. china. the bottom of the ocean. tomorrow. yesterday. proof is for mathemeticians.

to trade truth for easy assumptions and unchanging memories.

to trade tomorrow for right now and dreams for money and far away for someday.

to trade. give. slack. push. pull. this and that.

all sticks have two ends.

in The Screwtape Letters C. S. Lewis reminds us in a roundabaout way, through the voice of a demon, that everything we do affects our spirit. the cracking of our knuckles. the rolling of our eyes. whether we kneel to say that prayer or simply think it laying in bed as we fall asleep. everything.

does it affect the next guy just as well? how we carry ourselves as we walk into the office? the expression on our face as we silently walk across the street? the three minutes of fidgety silence there is before we make up our mind for the waitress?

i've been taught that everyone gets their share of light. and then they give it oil or let it flicker as they will for the rest of their life, throwing shadows carelessly as they go.

so you pull over to the side of the canyon road and hike up a smooth and awesome rock face. you don't notice how steep it is at all until you stop and your worn sneakers slide a little on the sandstone. you keep climbing, defying gravity with momentum and traction. you stop, turn around, and look down. there is far more of the smooth stone sloping away from you there than you ever saw as you ran up. it all spreads out around and down, yards and yards, to the little snowbank you crossed when you first started. you've left no footprints you can see. but you know you only came up one way out of millions of ways. one narrow path out of all the other ways you didn't come. all the millions of ways connected to this single spot.

what difference does it make? you see no footprints. the rock is too smooth and too hard to take them.

you can't change the past. but in the next second you can learn something new. you can say something you've never said before. you can walk a different way.

yeah, and what difference will it make?

it'll be different, silly. that's what. whether or not it means anything is up to you.

philosophical grammaticality

i just finished Surprised by Joy, the autobiographical conversion story of Clive Staples Lewis. his writing is beautiful and insightful and i enjoy contemplating his phrasing just as much as the ideas presented through it.

he talks centrally (as centrally as an autobiographical work can) about what he calls Joy. a feeling of wanting something so intensely that the very desire itself is more desireable than anything.

now, Lewis's description of Joy does not fully match my religious experiences; i was raised in a very different environment. but i appreciate the idea and am immensely interested by it because of the perplexity it arouses in language. in my own notebooks i have questioned the meanings of words like 'want' and 'lack' and 'have' and 'possess.' lewis makes a muddling paradox out of it all.

i love paradoxes.

my first semester back from england, i took a philosophy in literature class, by a charmingly ironic old man who brought coffee to class every day and betrayed no harsh opinions about anything. it was a classic academic autumn, lit up with exploratory excitement. in the class we talked about another lewis who was fond of writing in paradoxes: lewis carroll. lewis carroll has very little to do with what i'm trying to say here, actually. but among the lectures on alice and logic games, i remember our professor saying that he taught another class, philosophy somethingorother, which had as its most basic premise the idea that all philosophical problems are at bottom problems of grammar.

which struck me, a newly declared english major. how strongly language influences our thinking if its grammar forms all the deepest philosophical arguments, shaping and qualifying all the answers we may ever hope to find.

yet we have power over it. we grant all words the meanings they have, we spawn new words all the time, and we can twist innocent words into completely different connotations merely by using the tone of our voice or the look on our face.

i am also on the verge of finishing orwell's 1984. this book terrifies me. while the thing is more often considered a political commentary, i find it (especially the ending) horrifically religious. the way poor winston is forced to change everything he ever thought and believed, to give up himself and his every emotion, to surrender everything to the Party, all that is eerily reminiscent of the way we as christians are asked to surrender everything up into our love of God. the only difference is that it seems less tortuous. but does it really? is it not life's pain that teaches us, inexorably, that one way is wrong and one way is right. that is guilt. that is consequence. in 1984 it says often that 'the end is contained in the beginning,' meaning every choice contains its results within it, inescapable. that's life.

there is also a lot of talk, in the book, of Newspeak. a language so narrow and so confining that it impedes all heretical thought, making original expression and independent thought impossible. it's all part of how grammar influences philosophy. crazy.

of course i don't believe that God is really equivalent to big brother or that the way life and the world shape us is anything as brutal as the controlled and miserable society depicted by george orwell.

i'm not complaining. i'm just making connections.