(Tip for Playing: Click "play" and then "pause" to allow the video to load completely before watching. Otherwise, the sound tends to jump and skip a bit.)
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Seven Minutes of Heartbeat
Another installment of the GodsEye Project. Feedback is much appreciated, as I'm only just learning how to work with this software and create the effects I intend.
(Tip for Playing: Click "play" and then "pause" to allow the video to load completely before watching. Otherwise, the sound tends to jump and skip a bit.)
(Tip for Playing: Click "play" and then "pause" to allow the video to load completely before watching. Otherwise, the sound tends to jump and skip a bit.)
Friday, August 24, 2007
On Faith & Its Loss
Some of you may have already heard about the letters revealing Mother Teresa's loss of faith in the later years of her life.
It's not so surprising when atheists and believers of other faiths or spiritual traditions (especially those with a particularly anti-Christian chip on the shoulder) mention Mother Teresa's deep doubts about her religion with a kind of repressed triumph, as if they've managed to recruit one more morally superior non-believer into their ranks. Just one more example of how one doesn't need to be a "real Christian" to be a good person.
Yet I find myself wondering what exactly it means to be a "real" Christian, after all. In some ways, I feel as though I can relate to this sense of emptiness and lack of solid deistic ground. Recently re-reading a favorite book of mine (Radical Optimism, by Beatrice Bruteau) I discovered that, while much of her talk of creative freedom and self-giving love still rang true, the idea of the loving, protective parent-god seemed almost silly. For a moment, I wondered where my own faith had gone. Was this just a symptom of cynicism, pessimism masquerading as maturity and objectivity?
Several years ago, while working on my chapbook The Rosary Poems, I began to ask myself about the nature of the Christian spirituality in relationship to an absent God. In a journal I was keeping at the time, I wrote:
What does it mean to be a "real" Christian? Christ is, in some ways, an underworld god, a god of darkness and suffering, a god of death. He has the power (and the self-knowledge of this power) to raise Lazarus from the dead, yet he grieves deeply for his friend--he weeps for him. He weeps for himself, as well, on the night of his betrayal, with an anxiety so deep that his tears run red with blood. He must have known that he would be resurrected and glorified, that his death would be the active salvation for mankind--he is the Divine Son, isn't he? Even if he is just a mythic figure, of all mythic figures his faith must have been the most pristine, the most unshakable. And yet he suffers, deeply, almost beyond endurance.
It would be easy to shut down this paradox, to reduce it, to deny the Is-And-Is-Not nature of the story. Either Jesus' faith was strong and so he did not truly suffer, or he had no faith and he suffered because he was just another doubtful, ordinary man. But perhaps, there is another possibility. Perhaps there is a way in which faith and doubt coexist, and the experience of utter emptiness and the most poignant pain of longing are not symptoms of a lost faith, but a sign of its fruition, its completion in union with a Divine which, as macrocosm, suffers each pain and isolation and fear that shudders the frame of each microcosmic creature longing still to realize its own divinity.
The Christian path is to seek to become "Christ-like" ourselves, to "put on the mind of Christ," to seek Christ-consciousness. But what does this look like? Is it really the self-satisfied, warm-fuzzy glow of the ever-loving mother coddling us all our lives? Or is it, perhaps, what we see in Mother Teresa? A process by which inner doubt and suffering are transformed into loving action, not through faith but through the pure tenacity of the divine spark insisting that it manifest--a love that is truly selfless in having not even a God to justify it. That doubt can inspire faith, that suffering can be transformed into hope... Isn't this a glimpse of the Divine about its work?
Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta's slums, the spirit left Mother Teresa.
"Where is my faith?" she wrote. "Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness... If there be God — please forgive me."
Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith.
"Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal," she said.
It's not so surprising when atheists and believers of other faiths or spiritual traditions (especially those with a particularly anti-Christian chip on the shoulder) mention Mother Teresa's deep doubts about her religion with a kind of repressed triumph, as if they've managed to recruit one more morally superior non-believer into their ranks. Just one more example of how one doesn't need to be a "real Christian" to be a good person.
Yet I find myself wondering what exactly it means to be a "real" Christian, after all. In some ways, I feel as though I can relate to this sense of emptiness and lack of solid deistic ground. Recently re-reading a favorite book of mine (Radical Optimism, by Beatrice Bruteau) I discovered that, while much of her talk of creative freedom and self-giving love still rang true, the idea of the loving, protective parent-god seemed almost silly. For a moment, I wondered where my own faith had gone. Was this just a symptom of cynicism, pessimism masquerading as maturity and objectivity?
Several years ago, while working on my chapbook The Rosary Poems, I began to ask myself about the nature of the Christian spirituality in relationship to an absent God. In a journal I was keeping at the time, I wrote:
Word became flesh--Jesus was born--so that he would die, I know that much, it would seem. What I don’t understand is how I am supposed to be a religious person now. The Word became present so that we would be “saved” by its absence? But then, if it is eternal, not only is it not absent now, but it was never not-present to begin with... Jesus is the self-revelation of God in human form--but he is dead now, and now all we have are words, which is what we had to begin with. Am I supposed to believe that if Jesus had never been born, no amount of words would be enough? How are words enough now?The metaphor of the empty grave began to dominate my contemplations, and towards the end of the short collection of poems based on the Mysteries of the Catholic rosary, I wrote a verse entitled "Resurrection," in which Mary Magdalene searches for her beloved:
Resurrection
Tell me where you have laid him,
and I will take him away. JOHN 20:15
I seek you in the garden--
small roses blossom like tombs
from the earth, dark scabs of flowers
that itch between thick layers
of clotted petal, and butterflies
alight, unroll them, opening
with angelic curiosity--but you
are nowhere. Pained and peeling,
I find nothing but the tightened,
milky scar of this new morning.
What does it mean to be a "real" Christian? Christ is, in some ways, an underworld god, a god of darkness and suffering, a god of death. He has the power (and the self-knowledge of this power) to raise Lazarus from the dead, yet he grieves deeply for his friend--he weeps for him. He weeps for himself, as well, on the night of his betrayal, with an anxiety so deep that his tears run red with blood. He must have known that he would be resurrected and glorified, that his death would be the active salvation for mankind--he is the Divine Son, isn't he? Even if he is just a mythic figure, of all mythic figures his faith must have been the most pristine, the most unshakable. And yet he suffers, deeply, almost beyond endurance.
It would be easy to shut down this paradox, to reduce it, to deny the Is-And-Is-Not nature of the story. Either Jesus' faith was strong and so he did not truly suffer, or he had no faith and he suffered because he was just another doubtful, ordinary man. But perhaps, there is another possibility. Perhaps there is a way in which faith and doubt coexist, and the experience of utter emptiness and the most poignant pain of longing are not symptoms of a lost faith, but a sign of its fruition, its completion in union with a Divine which, as macrocosm, suffers each pain and isolation and fear that shudders the frame of each microcosmic creature longing still to realize its own divinity.
The Christian path is to seek to become "Christ-like" ourselves, to "put on the mind of Christ," to seek Christ-consciousness. But what does this look like? Is it really the self-satisfied, warm-fuzzy glow of the ever-loving mother coddling us all our lives? Or is it, perhaps, what we see in Mother Teresa? A process by which inner doubt and suffering are transformed into loving action, not through faith but through the pure tenacity of the divine spark insisting that it manifest--a love that is truly selfless in having not even a God to justify it. That doubt can inspire faith, that suffering can be transformed into hope... Isn't this a glimpse of the Divine about its work?
Cross
Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves
and for your children. LUKE 23:28
Choked wailing, flung out with our
sweat-limp palms along the road,
and pulled back again, rushing gasp
of sand from beneath us--what good
is mercy now? No one can relieve him
of it, when even we are his--our rushing
forward to lift him, only his return
to himself--our cry beneath the weight
of it, his cry--we double over, unable
to tell for whose God we are weeping.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Seven Minutes of Rain
I recently inherited a used digital camcorder from my parents (who have entrusted it to me with the promise that I will make DVDs out of the hours upon hours of footage they've filmed over the years of my brother playing soccer). I've been eager to find creative uses for it, but I've been running up against cinematographer's block. Today, as I pondered and drafted my next post for this blog about cereology, an idea struck me: "The GodsEye Project."
The gist of this idea is to focus on capturing real moments in time, with as little commentary and editing as possible, focusing particularly on the various elements (spirit, air, fire, water, earth; or in Druidic terms, nwyfre, gwyar, and calas) with a brevity and tightness of focus that pushes visual imagery almost into abstraction--or, perhaps, a singular kind of intense clarity. Everything can be mated to poetry, in my mind, and so I like to think of this as a kind of video-poetry, if you will. What follows is my first attempt. It is, like all first attempts, shoddy and full of jitters. I hope to improve with practice.
For your added pleasure (hopefully), here is a short poem I wrote several years ago, inspired by similar subject matter.
Intimation: On the Sound of Rain Falling through Fog
Little bitter fall,
shawl of water, brittle,
splinter into rain.
Shower down from a center,
little bitter brittle splinter
breaking round into shiver,
little pricks at
cloudy skin.
Whittle 'way at the shadow,
shower down
little shiver, wear away
from the fog from
the center, breaking in.
Weave together, loom, the water
from the threads, brittle fall,
little dawn, bitter shadow,
shower down and drift away--
wash forever into shiver
from the center, wearing fog
like a sliding shawl of water
into sun and breaking day.
The gist of this idea is to focus on capturing real moments in time, with as little commentary and editing as possible, focusing particularly on the various elements (spirit, air, fire, water, earth; or in Druidic terms, nwyfre, gwyar, and calas) with a brevity and tightness of focus that pushes visual imagery almost into abstraction--or, perhaps, a singular kind of intense clarity. Everything can be mated to poetry, in my mind, and so I like to think of this as a kind of video-poetry, if you will. What follows is my first attempt. It is, like all first attempts, shoddy and full of jitters. I hope to improve with practice.
For your added pleasure (hopefully), here is a short poem I wrote several years ago, inspired by similar subject matter.
Intimation: On the Sound of Rain Falling through Fog
Little bitter fall,
shawl of water, brittle,
splinter into rain.
Shower down from a center,
little bitter brittle splinter
breaking round into shiver,
little pricks at
cloudy skin.
Whittle 'way at the shadow,
shower down
little shiver, wear away
from the fog from
the center, breaking in.
Weave together, loom, the water
from the threads, brittle fall,
little dawn, bitter shadow,
shower down and drift away--
wash forever into shiver
from the center, wearing fog
like a sliding shawl of water
into sun and breaking day.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Cereology, Ufology & Other -Ologies
Like most people, my first introduction to crop circles was by way of skepticism. Before I knew what crop circles, in all their complexity, were really like, I knew they were just hoaxes, made by bored men entertaining themselves with boards and some rope. Of course, given naturally to skepticism, it was easy to abandon the assumption that all crop circles were man-made upon discovering that the first and most famous of these hoaxers, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, could not replicate even the simplest design to the same level of quality, even working publicly in daylight and taking hours longer than they'd claimed to have needed working secretly in the dark. Since their initial claims (made in 1991), plenty of other hoaxes--perpetuated both by individuals and by groups who, unbelievably, have even hired themselves out to corporations to incorporate company logos into their land-art--have come to light; however, the legitimate phenomenon has continued to outpace such hoaxed crop formations both in intellectual profile (e.g. the mathematical proportions and theorems included in even apparently simple designs) and in quality of work.
As one researcher, Paul Vigay, explained, "Hoaxers must be able to prove that all formations are hoaxes, for it is they that claim the subject to be a hoax. All the hoaxers have to do is stop hoaxing, that way there would be no more circles. The biggest problem for them is that of the genuine phenomenon. As they have no control over the 'real' circles, they cannot force the phenomenon to stop merely because they stop. Therefore, each year, as genuine formations start to appear, the hoaxers have to come forward and say, 'yes, we did them.' (emphasis added)" And, of course, if you're going to claim you did something amazing, people are going to ask you to do it again, to prove it was you and to demonstrate the marvels of your skill. That's where hoaxers run into trouble. My skepticism, so easily won before, gradually turned entirely towards the hoaxers themselves, whose shoddy imitations of the genuine phenomenon were as unconvincing as their spurious claims to be the makers of the real thing when it did appear. This meant, though, that I still needed some better explanation for who or what made these crop circles, not to mention how, and why.
Of course, I was never all that passionate about crop circles to begin with, and so for years I let my questions--what crop circles really were, how they were made, and who made them--rest gently among similar questions like, "Is time travel possible?" and "Who really shot JFK?" Intriguing ice-breaker questions for a party, maybe, but of no real urgency or significance to my personal life. As far as I was concerned, they could just be amazing works of anonymous public art which, given their complexity and the difficulties of the medium, were breath-taking even without any supernatural or extraterrestrial explanation. And so, I was as surprised as anyone when I felt randomly inspired to pick up Daniel Pinchbeck's recent book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl at the local bookstore one day (it was probably that gorgeously green cover, I admit) and discovered a wealth of spiritual and psychical relevance in crop circles I had never imagined.
This was when I first became seriously interested in crop circles, reading Pinchbeck's discussion of the phenomenon in connection with shamanism, world tribal customs, astronomy and astrology, the ancient Mayan calendar, Mayan and Aztec deities, and psychedelic drug use, among other things. This hit close to home for me, at a time when shamanism and tribal rituals especially had caught my attention in my academic work on social and religious ritualization and its connection to the creative process and the creation of "meaning." While some parts of Pinchbeck's book impressed me greatly, I was admittedly turned off by the promotion of foreign chemicals being used to induce unusual states of consciousness (as someone very much into the idea of self-reliance, I've always felt you should do the meditative work to reach those states yourself, instead of using a drug as a crutch or aid), as well as the chosen-one tone that he began to adopt towards the end of the text.
What I found most interesting, however, was his description of crop circles as a kind of postmodern art form meant (meant by whom, exactly, remains unclear) to push the human collective consciousness into higher states of understanding by continually challenging the boundaries of perception. After reading Pinchbeck's discussion of the consciousness-raising and healing effects of crop circles, I began to wonder if they weren't some kind of spontaneous manifestation of a Gaia-like natural will, something that welled up from within the human-earth interconnection itself, expressing visually and physically what we as natural creatures have already begun to understand at a collective-subconscious level. In the same way that dreams concretize concepts, ideas, conflicts and desires while we sleep, so that in analyzing their imagery and events we can gain insight into the inner workings of our own minds (if only into its chaotic randomness, at times), familiarizing ourselves with own personal psychical landscape.
This seemed a romantic, panentheistic and comfortable opinion of crop circles, avoiding silly and easily disproved ideas about little silver spaceships and Grays running around paying our inconsequential species so much seemingly undeserved attention. The idea that literal extraterrestrials would waste so much time buzzing and bothering our little rock-in-space has always struck me as a rather egotistical belief on our part. Not that I ever believed it was categorically impossible, really. As my uncle recently told me while on our family vacation, after asking me about the book on Celtic faery folklore that I was reading, "Everyone believes in something. For instance, I believe in UFOs." You have to know my uncle, but this comes as absolutely no surprise. I smiled at him and said, "O yeah, I believe in everything." Which in some respects is true--I believe that anything might as well be possible. So while I certainly couldn't rule out Grays and flying saucers, they remained, for me, rather unlikely an explanation for the very real and very baffling crop circle phenomenon. I looked, instead, to more mystical, spiritual explanations regarding energy patterns, creative collective will, and the interconnection between thought and physical coincidences in nature.
Until now.
I haven't thought much more about the topic of crop circles since reading Pinchbeck's book, though they've remained an area of interest to me. However, after the death of my friend, I found myself sitting alone in my apartment for a few days in a row and, having run out of DVDs to watch, to keep myself from feeling lonely and swallowed by grief, I went online and randomly began looking for documentaries and educational specials on YouTube and GoogleVideo. I stumbled across a two-hour documentary about the crop circle phenomenon, and suddenly I was hooked again. The next day, I went out to the local bookstore and bought the only book on crop circles they had: Freddy Silva's Secrets in the Fields: The Science and Mysticism of Crop Cirlces. Two chapters away from finishing the book, I find myself back at square one, questioning Pinchbeck's psychical, aesthetic explanation and seriously wondering if, just maybe, we aren't "alone" after all.
In my next post (once I've finished the book and had a chance to organize my notes), I'll go over some of the evidence that Silva discusses, and exactly what its implications might be.
As one researcher, Paul Vigay, explained, "Hoaxers must be able to prove that all formations are hoaxes, for it is they that claim the subject to be a hoax. All the hoaxers have to do is stop hoaxing, that way there would be no more circles. The biggest problem for them is that of the genuine phenomenon. As they have no control over the 'real' circles, they cannot force the phenomenon to stop merely because they stop. Therefore, each year, as genuine formations start to appear, the hoaxers have to come forward and say, 'yes, we did them.' (emphasis added)" And, of course, if you're going to claim you did something amazing, people are going to ask you to do it again, to prove it was you and to demonstrate the marvels of your skill. That's where hoaxers run into trouble. My skepticism, so easily won before, gradually turned entirely towards the hoaxers themselves, whose shoddy imitations of the genuine phenomenon were as unconvincing as their spurious claims to be the makers of the real thing when it did appear. This meant, though, that I still needed some better explanation for who or what made these crop circles, not to mention how, and why.Of course, I was never all that passionate about crop circles to begin with, and so for years I let my questions--what crop circles really were, how they were made, and who made them--rest gently among similar questions like, "Is time travel possible?" and "Who really shot JFK?" Intriguing ice-breaker questions for a party, maybe, but of no real urgency or significance to my personal life. As far as I was concerned, they could just be amazing works of anonymous public art which, given their complexity and the difficulties of the medium, were breath-taking even without any supernatural or extraterrestrial explanation. And so, I was as surprised as anyone when I felt randomly inspired to pick up Daniel Pinchbeck's recent book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl at the local bookstore one day (it was probably that gorgeously green cover, I admit) and discovered a wealth of spiritual and psychical relevance in crop circles I had never imagined.
This was when I first became seriously interested in crop circles, reading Pinchbeck's discussion of the phenomenon in connection with shamanism, world tribal customs, astronomy and astrology, the ancient Mayan calendar, Mayan and Aztec deities, and psychedelic drug use, among other things. This hit close to home for me, at a time when shamanism and tribal rituals especially had caught my attention in my academic work on social and religious ritualization and its connection to the creative process and the creation of "meaning." While some parts of Pinchbeck's book impressed me greatly, I was admittedly turned off by the promotion of foreign chemicals being used to induce unusual states of consciousness (as someone very much into the idea of self-reliance, I've always felt you should do the meditative work to reach those states yourself, instead of using a drug as a crutch or aid), as well as the chosen-one tone that he began to adopt towards the end of the text.
What I found most interesting, however, was his description of crop circles as a kind of postmodern art form meant (meant by whom, exactly, remains unclear) to push the human collective consciousness into higher states of understanding by continually challenging the boundaries of perception. After reading Pinchbeck's discussion of the consciousness-raising and healing effects of crop circles, I began to wonder if they weren't some kind of spontaneous manifestation of a Gaia-like natural will, something that welled up from within the human-earth interconnection itself, expressing visually and physically what we as natural creatures have already begun to understand at a collective-subconscious level. In the same way that dreams concretize concepts, ideas, conflicts and desires while we sleep, so that in analyzing their imagery and events we can gain insight into the inner workings of our own minds (if only into its chaotic randomness, at times), familiarizing ourselves with own personal psychical landscape.
This seemed a romantic, panentheistic and comfortable opinion of crop circles, avoiding silly and easily disproved ideas about little silver spaceships and Grays running around paying our inconsequential species so much seemingly undeserved attention. The idea that literal extraterrestrials would waste so much time buzzing and bothering our little rock-in-space has always struck me as a rather egotistical belief on our part. Not that I ever believed it was categorically impossible, really. As my uncle recently told me while on our family vacation, after asking me about the book on Celtic faery folklore that I was reading, "Everyone believes in something. For instance, I believe in UFOs." You have to know my uncle, but this comes as absolutely no surprise. I smiled at him and said, "O yeah, I believe in everything." Which in some respects is true--I believe that anything might as well be possible. So while I certainly couldn't rule out Grays and flying saucers, they remained, for me, rather unlikely an explanation for the very real and very baffling crop circle phenomenon. I looked, instead, to more mystical, spiritual explanations regarding energy patterns, creative collective will, and the interconnection between thought and physical coincidences in nature.
Until now.
I haven't thought much more about the topic of crop circles since reading Pinchbeck's book, though they've remained an area of interest to me. However, after the death of my friend, I found myself sitting alone in my apartment for a few days in a row and, having run out of DVDs to watch, to keep myself from feeling lonely and swallowed by grief, I went online and randomly began looking for documentaries and educational specials on YouTube and GoogleVideo. I stumbled across a two-hour documentary about the crop circle phenomenon, and suddenly I was hooked again. The next day, I went out to the local bookstore and bought the only book on crop circles they had: Freddy Silva's Secrets in the Fields: The Science and Mysticism of Crop Cirlces. Two chapters away from finishing the book, I find myself back at square one, questioning Pinchbeck's psychical, aesthetic explanation and seriously wondering if, just maybe, we aren't "alone" after all.
In my next post (once I've finished the book and had a chance to organize my notes), I'll go over some of the evidence that Silva discusses, and exactly what its implications might be.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
The Blackout
This past Thursday, the city of Pittsburgh experienced what the papers are now apparently calling a triple-hit of violent storms (which included dangerous "microbursts" and tornados), stripping trees of branches, flooding basements, shutting down businesses (including the restaurant where I work) and stranding up to 120,000 people without power for several hours (as of Friday morning, 20,000 to 34,000 were still without power, and as of my writing this, one friend of mine is still whistling--or in her case, going quickly through her store of beer and cigarettes--in the dark).
This wasn't as exciting as it probably sounds. A coworker of mine informed me yesterday at work that the local electric company was actually referring to it as a "natural disaster" situation, but for those of us who experienced the storm and subsequent black-out, it seemed mostly like more of the same (i.e. more f#&king rain!) and a gradual realization that the fridges and television sets wouldn't be kicking back on to rescue us anytime soon. The power in my apartment was out for approximately eight hours, from around 3 PM until 11 PM (11:04 PM, to be precise). When the second of the three storm-fronts hit, I had actually just left my house to walk to work and pick up my schedule for the week. I waited out the brief black-out (before our restaurant's limited back-up generators kicked on) and the rest of the storm in the dining room, sipping on a soda and watching my fellow servers explain to customers that there was a foot of water in the basement, so they had to turn the pilot light out and the kitchen was closed--but please, help yourself to our delicious salad bar of fresh, local produce! Then I walked home in the light rain that followed, surprised by the number of felled trees within only a few blocks.
Once home, I buckled down and finally started reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal Dreams that I'd been meaning to get to. As each hour passed (on my battery-powered IKEA wall clock), I turned to my trusty sky-blue pocket-sized notebook to jot a few thoughts down. Strangely, some of them ended up being rather interesting, and so I thought I'd share them with all of you.
This wasn't as exciting as it probably sounds. A coworker of mine informed me yesterday at work that the local electric company was actually referring to it as a "natural disaster" situation, but for those of us who experienced the storm and subsequent black-out, it seemed mostly like more of the same (i.e. more f#&king rain!) and a gradual realization that the fridges and television sets wouldn't be kicking back on to rescue us anytime soon. The power in my apartment was out for approximately eight hours, from around 3 PM until 11 PM (11:04 PM, to be precise). When the second of the three storm-fronts hit, I had actually just left my house to walk to work and pick up my schedule for the week. I waited out the brief black-out (before our restaurant's limited back-up generators kicked on) and the rest of the storm in the dining room, sipping on a soda and watching my fellow servers explain to customers that there was a foot of water in the basement, so they had to turn the pilot light out and the kitchen was closed--but please, help yourself to our delicious salad bar of fresh, local produce! Then I walked home in the light rain that followed, surprised by the number of felled trees within only a few blocks.
Once home, I buckled down and finally started reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal Dreams that I'd been meaning to get to. As each hour passed (on my battery-powered IKEA wall clock), I turned to my trusty sky-blue pocket-sized notebook to jot a few thoughts down. Strangely, some of them ended up being rather interesting, and so I thought I'd share them with all of you.
The power's still out. It's almost 6 PM--it's been out at least since 4 PM, when I got home. Maybe the bookstore is open now and its power back on. In another half hour or so I'll walk down to see.
[The bookstore, incidentally, was still closed at 6:30 PM, and would remain closed until about 11 AM the next morning, when power was finally restored. And gosh darnit, I'd really been looking forward to getting that book on crop circles that I'd had my eye on!]
If I feel any more--if my capacity to really feel gets any greater--I think something bad might happen. I can't possibly meditate or practice opening--I have no safeguards in place for the subsequent disaster. But I think I'd make an excellent lover, the way Venus is an excellent lover--too close, unbearable and burning, but bright and liquid all the way through.
7 PM, still no power. No fans, no air conditioning, no light. The dusk is coming, and more rain.
8 PM, reading Animal Dreams by candlelight (though it's a bit of a strain--and it's only just twilight out still). Got myself a caffeine-free Pepsi and an applesauce from the fridge, though neither are all that cold. Worrisome. I'll have to empty the fridge this weekend when I have time. I wonder what's taking so long to get the power back. I can't remember the last time an outage lasted this long. Once it gets truly dark, everyone will start in on the sex. I wish I could call Ray [my best friend, out of town this week] and tell him I'm lonely, but my cell phone is down to one bar and I need it as an alarm for tomorrow if I still don't have power.
9 PM, it's honest-to-god dark out now. Needless to say, still no power. I'm beginning to think television and the computer were rubbing me raw. Somehow, this dark is soothing, like a balm. So easy. I can feel, but it doesn't hurt so much. Maybe I'll make an effort to leave the computer off most of the time for the next week or so. At least until Ray returns. I feel kind of pathetic that I'd almost rather be a pet, a family pet who gets to sit and watch my lovely people move around and who nobody minds too much. I don't need to be anyone's girlfriend, not for now. For now, let me be a pet, is all.
10 PM, still no power. A little while ago, someone in the darkness on the street yelled something about light, and I found my heart pounding, feeling exposed and vulnerable with all my candles lit--as if they could see my one window barely flickering in the whole dark facade of my apartment building. As if I had stolen something, as if I had done something wrong. I am so much more afraid of human beings than I am of coyotes, of light more than darkness. Still, it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes ago, and already I feel safe and invulnerable again. And outside all is quiet. No rain. No people quietly talking. Not even the noise of sex. [The sex remarks are references to the fact that I have very... enthusiastic neighbors, even on nights with power, and they'd been at it earlier in the evening, around 5-ish, already.]
Almost 11 PM, still dark. I'm not so tired anymore and would like to keep reading, fairly sure there's no point in going to bed when I don't have to be up that early tomorrow. I know that if I had regular light, I wouldn't have to sit up straight and carefully hold the candle over my book--I'd drift off in ten minutes with the lights on. My body wants to lay down, but my mind doesn't. Reading Animal Dreams, I'm jealous of Codi--with a shit hometown to go to, people to watch come and go, a confused family history, a man who wants her to love him. I can't go home or stay put. Once you know the twists and turns of your family's history, there's not much more to do with it, is there? My mother will always be the mother she had, always hard-done-by and cold. She doesn't want to be filmed. She hides behind a camera because no one takes a picture of people taking pictures. Except me. I don't hide behind the camera, I want to be in two places at once. The best conversations are never caught. It hurts to look into a single candle flame, but I could stare into a campfire all night. I have so many thoughts in my head every hour, I sometimes wonder what would happen if I just got them all out, if I wrote and wrote until there was nothing left. How much uselessness could I generate? Reading a story slows my thoughts enough that they don't feel so overwhelming. A few a second, maybe, or vague intuitions and emotions only half developed. Reading someone else's story quiets me down, turns down the volume of my own living--which sometimes feels all tangled up in the living of every thing, so that it's just too big--and for a little while, I can feel human. A quiet, small thing conversing with other quiet, small things. Instead of a rushing vortex of noisy everything.
Everything just came on. It's 11:03 PM.
[The feeling, just as I finished writing the last sentence, was eerie and put me out of my skin with goosebumps for a split second. It's hard to explain the strange presence of everything familiar suddenly rushing back into awareness.]
11:04 PM, after I'd blown out all the candles and reset the clock, the power died again then struggled to come back on. I'm leaving one candle lit this time, so I don't stumble on anything... just in case.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Bitter About the Internet
Any time I hear a lot of people all clamoring for and falling over themselves to praise something--I get suspicious.
It's been happening recently with the internet, and specifically this "Web 2.0" stuff, which I'm not sure I quite understand (though this encyclopedia entry makes it sound like a convenient viral marketing system for ensuring corporate profits by encouraging an increasingly splintered community of marginalized cultural groups whose only common bond is their role as consumers--but maybe that's just me).
What spurred this little blog-rant? (Yes, I am aware of the irony; however, I am not all that interested in it, as I've had my fill of irony lately and would love a few moments of sincerity or genuine communication, for once, even if it has to be digital.) Partly this blog post, directing readers to this blog post, which mocked Elton John's concerns about the role that media plays in the realm of aesthetics and creativity, especially in music. Elton John reportedly said, "The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff." And if, for a moment, you feel a twinge of isolation or alienation from all your fellow bloggers out there and are thinking maybe you should go out, walk in the rain, get a cup of coffee at the local bookstore and engage a stranger in conversation... look at this. There, don't you feel better? Who would take a man in a duck costume seriously? Don't you feel justified in your technobubble now, laughing contentedly at any old "fuddy-duddy" who might dare imagine life-sans-internet? Whew. That was a close one.
I'm also still in the process of grieving, which is influencing my bitterness. I'm not sure if this stage of grief is anger, or bargaining. I feel I've been through all of them several times now. What I can't seem to shake is this feeling of regret--not only for myself, but for my friend who, despite his twenty-five years on this amazing earth, confessed to me only a few weeks before his death that he still felt isolated from many of the people in his life, that his friendships felt shallow and his career goals directionless. Even though I'd never txted his cell phone or spent more than one evening hanging out with him outside of work, he mentioned several times how he considered me one of his closest friends. I feel a wash of guilt when I find myself wondering, as I did each time he said it, if he was being sincere, or simply playing to my ego and insecurities the way we are all encouraged to play to each other's egos and insecurities, in hopes that our own will be placated. Perhaps I will never really know if I really knew him--and I wonder if he regrets that, or if the dead even have such regrets.
What does this have to do with the internet? Not much. Except that it has to do with intimacy, sincerity, and a sense of community belonging. On the internet, nobody dies--they just stop logging on. With morbid curiosity, I recently checked my departed friend's MySpace and Facebook profiles--both eerily saturated with "I miss you"s and "Goodbye"s from virtual and real-life friends, messages sent out into the void of cyberspace, easily written and just as easily ignored and lost. I can't help but wonder if they provide any sense of comfort to his family--or if his family even knows about them or has access to them in the face of password protections and identity-theft precautions.
As wonderful as the internet may be, with its "democratizing of information" and networking capabilities, I do not believe it can provide those things which give a sense of context and meaning to our real, everyday lives as human beings. Sincerity will always be vulnerable to the mockery and misunderstanding of faceless strangers, strangers who will always be plentiful in a social network that undermines any notion of authenticity or intimacy. Without intimacy and sincerity, what is a "community" except a group of noisy individuals all clamoring for or about the latest gadget or political scandal or tragedy? In Web 2.0, there is no such thing as Gandhi's "minority of one." Every subculture becomes a viable corporate market, every quirk or idiosyncrasy becomes an amusing fad, every solitude is invade by the "democracy" of buzzing facts and the opinions of people without necessarily any personal investment in the situation or subject matter. There is no quiet into which the "still small voice" might speak timidly about uncertainty or complexity, might confess to unpopular passions or uniquely personal dreams. There are no personal dreams in Web 2.0--there is only the constant talking of people to people about people (and things)... talking and talking and saying nothing much at all.
This is, I confess, not really a blog. It is an old-fashioned journal, exposed on the internet because I have a certain penchant for masochism (or perhaps a desperation to be sincere and to seek intimacy even where it can't be found). I want everyone to know that I am grieving, I want to force that uncomfortable fact into everyone's view. In part because the family and friends who "irl" should be here supporting me, comforting me and allowing me to engage in the process of grief as part of a community, are too busy playing with their gadgets and keeping up on the latest political scandals, assuming a kind email once in a while is sufficient.
In the end, it is my own solitude that has been the most comfort to me this past week. Those who rule the Web 2.0 have not yet tackled the market of personal grief, they have not discovered any chat rooms or .com sites that can provide the same kind of closure and affirmation as a good summer thunderstorm rushing past your lonely apartment window and soaking slowly into the ground. If the internet has, as Elton John claims, kept us from "going out and being with each other," I can at least be sure it will not stop me from being with myself. And from the company of my own solitude, perhaps I eventually may create something worthy of my friend's memory.
It's been happening recently with the internet, and specifically this "Web 2.0" stuff, which I'm not sure I quite understand (though this encyclopedia entry makes it sound like a convenient viral marketing system for ensuring corporate profits by encouraging an increasingly splintered community of marginalized cultural groups whose only common bond is their role as consumers--but maybe that's just me).
What spurred this little blog-rant? (Yes, I am aware of the irony; however, I am not all that interested in it, as I've had my fill of irony lately and would love a few moments of sincerity or genuine communication, for once, even if it has to be digital.) Partly this blog post, directing readers to this blog post, which mocked Elton John's concerns about the role that media plays in the realm of aesthetics and creativity, especially in music. Elton John reportedly said, "The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff." And if, for a moment, you feel a twinge of isolation or alienation from all your fellow bloggers out there and are thinking maybe you should go out, walk in the rain, get a cup of coffee at the local bookstore and engage a stranger in conversation... look at this. There, don't you feel better? Who would take a man in a duck costume seriously? Don't you feel justified in your technobubble now, laughing contentedly at any old "fuddy-duddy" who might dare imagine life-sans-internet? Whew. That was a close one.
I'm also still in the process of grieving, which is influencing my bitterness. I'm not sure if this stage of grief is anger, or bargaining. I feel I've been through all of them several times now. What I can't seem to shake is this feeling of regret--not only for myself, but for my friend who, despite his twenty-five years on this amazing earth, confessed to me only a few weeks before his death that he still felt isolated from many of the people in his life, that his friendships felt shallow and his career goals directionless. Even though I'd never txted his cell phone or spent more than one evening hanging out with him outside of work, he mentioned several times how he considered me one of his closest friends. I feel a wash of guilt when I find myself wondering, as I did each time he said it, if he was being sincere, or simply playing to my ego and insecurities the way we are all encouraged to play to each other's egos and insecurities, in hopes that our own will be placated. Perhaps I will never really know if I really knew him--and I wonder if he regrets that, or if the dead even have such regrets.
What does this have to do with the internet? Not much. Except that it has to do with intimacy, sincerity, and a sense of community belonging. On the internet, nobody dies--they just stop logging on. With morbid curiosity, I recently checked my departed friend's MySpace and Facebook profiles--both eerily saturated with "I miss you"s and "Goodbye"s from virtual and real-life friends, messages sent out into the void of cyberspace, easily written and just as easily ignored and lost. I can't help but wonder if they provide any sense of comfort to his family--or if his family even knows about them or has access to them in the face of password protections and identity-theft precautions.
As wonderful as the internet may be, with its "democratizing of information" and networking capabilities, I do not believe it can provide those things which give a sense of context and meaning to our real, everyday lives as human beings. Sincerity will always be vulnerable to the mockery and misunderstanding of faceless strangers, strangers who will always be plentiful in a social network that undermines any notion of authenticity or intimacy. Without intimacy and sincerity, what is a "community" except a group of noisy individuals all clamoring for or about the latest gadget or political scandal or tragedy? In Web 2.0, there is no such thing as Gandhi's "minority of one." Every subculture becomes a viable corporate market, every quirk or idiosyncrasy becomes an amusing fad, every solitude is invade by the "democracy" of buzzing facts and the opinions of people without necessarily any personal investment in the situation or subject matter. There is no quiet into which the "still small voice" might speak timidly about uncertainty or complexity, might confess to unpopular passions or uniquely personal dreams. There are no personal dreams in Web 2.0--there is only the constant talking of people to people about people (and things)... talking and talking and saying nothing much at all.
This is, I confess, not really a blog. It is an old-fashioned journal, exposed on the internet because I have a certain penchant for masochism (or perhaps a desperation to be sincere and to seek intimacy even where it can't be found). I want everyone to know that I am grieving, I want to force that uncomfortable fact into everyone's view. In part because the family and friends who "irl" should be here supporting me, comforting me and allowing me to engage in the process of grief as part of a community, are too busy playing with their gadgets and keeping up on the latest political scandals, assuming a kind email once in a while is sufficient.
In the end, it is my own solitude that has been the most comfort to me this past week. Those who rule the Web 2.0 have not yet tackled the market of personal grief, they have not discovered any chat rooms or .com sites that can provide the same kind of closure and affirmation as a good summer thunderstorm rushing past your lonely apartment window and soaking slowly into the ground. If the internet has, as Elton John claims, kept us from "going out and being with each other," I can at least be sure it will not stop me from being with myself. And from the company of my own solitude, perhaps I eventually may create something worthy of my friend's memory.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Difficult News.
While on vacation with my family this past week, I received news that a close friend of mine had died. It has been a difficult week, grieving silently on my own as my family (who did not know him) awkwardly avoided the subject, trying to still enjoy themselves without demanding that I pretend nothing was wrong. Now I'm back in Pittsburgh, and instead of unpacking and settling back into routine, I'm getting ready to go to a wake. The last funeral I attended was my grandmother's, almost ten years ago. Even though I have struggled through the depression and grief of losing this person on my own, I find myself scared about facing the friends and family members who have been here grieving with one another all week. I don't know what to do or how to react. A part of me even feels a little happy that I will be seeing my friends so soon, having missed them so much all week, and yet I feel as if this is somehow inappropriate, even selfish.
Needless to say, I'm a confused mess of emotions right now, the underlying one being anxiety in the face of the unknown. I have accepted my friend's passing, but I am afraid of what's been left behind, what will happen in the wake.
I just wanted to let readers know, in case you have been wondering at my silence. I may be quiet for a few more days yet, as I adjust to the situation here at home. Thanks for your patience, and your support and concern.
Needless to say, I'm a confused mess of emotions right now, the underlying one being anxiety in the face of the unknown. I have accepted my friend's passing, but I am afraid of what's been left behind, what will happen in the wake.
I just wanted to let readers know, in case you have been wondering at my silence. I may be quiet for a few more days yet, as I adjust to the situation here at home. Thanks for your patience, and your support and concern.
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