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Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Early drafts and history.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Monday, December 24, 2012
Thursday, December 20, 2012
On Stupidity
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
~ Albert Einstein
Stupidity and intelligence work on a sliding scale: each of us have some degree of both. The most fascinating aspect of this simple truth is that we can slide the scale in whichever direction we choose.
Just as emotional intelligence can be increased, actual intelligence can also be increased.
A recent study seems to offer fairly conclusive evidence. Dr. Adrian Owen explains:
When we looked at the data, the bottom line is the whole concept of IQ — or of you having a higher IQ than me — is a myth.
The concept is astonishing- but what are we supposed to do with that information?
For starters, make yourself smarter.
There are (at least) two approaches to this: make yourself smarter in a particular area, or make yourself smarter in general.
The first option is quite a liberating one. How many of us do what we dreamt of doing as kids? Too few of us, certainly. I wonder why, then, that is the case.
Most of us are familiar with the 10,000 hours concept- that it takes 10,000 hours of rigorous activity in a given field to become an expert. Prodigies are the exception, of course, but they are just that: an exception. The vast majority of us simply belief ourselves to be of inferior talent or smarts. The only difference, though, between amateurs and experts (allowing exceptions for the prodigies) is the time applied, the hard work.
When put in this light, it becomes obvious that intelligence itself is malleable. Great men and women, be they thinkers, painters, businessmen, or rodeo clowns all began with a simple curiosity that pushed them to begin. They acquired some small sliver of knowledge, a foundation, then they slowly built on that knowledge, piece by piece, until they had put in enough time to be considered experts. Even when that point is reached, you’ll notice, few acknowledge it: they cannot shake their curiosity long enough to stop building their dreams.
That is option one: to find something you love, and make yourself better at doing it. The second option is to increase your general intelligence with no specific aim in mind. Read a great book. Discuss something with someone smarter than you. Travel to learn about a new culture. Or simply open your laptop. There’s more there than cat videos and status updates in that box of transistors; there are free courses at Khan Academy and Coursera, there are brilliant articles, there are actual people on the other side of the world with whom you can converse.
If you want to be more intelligent, pick up an easy book. Then pick up a harder one. Then a harder one. You’ll get to where you want to go. You won’t get there if you keep watching Honey Boo-Boo.
So, those are your two options: general or specific knowledge (option three would seem to be some form of brain training, but the study mentioned above debunks that sort of training as a myth).
You do not get the option of taking neither approach, of doing nothing. It seems quite contrary to the opinion that we should all be free to be as stupid as we want, that somehow liberty entails the right to do nothing.
It does not. Liberty is not an absolute. The right to liberty ends when it infringes on the rights of others.
Here’s the thing: your ignorance on many a subject is detrimental to others. That very fact puts the onus on you to learn more than you do right now. Here’s an example.
I was as emotional as anyone else in this country on Saturday morning; so much so, in fact, that I did something very out of character: I ranted. On Facebook, of all places. I wrote in the midst of a surge of anger which would not be contained.
That, of course, was a mistake, yet, instead of regretting the decision, I chose to think about why I was angry enough to do something so out of character. It didn’t take long for the answer to become clear.
I was mind-bogglingly infuriated that someone would take the lives of innocent children, true- but it was the knowledge that this didn’t have to happen — that sheer stupidity had allowed this to happen — that drove me over the edge.
This was an anger that had been building for some time, in response to a number of issues politicized in the past few years. To explain:
There are some issues in this country that are genuinely a matter of principle. The definition of freedom can be debated. So¸too, can spending vs. saving, the role of taxes and of higher education, the role of government.
Some things, however, are not debatable: namely, those things for which science, also known as reality, is in direct contradiction of a particular stance.
Creationism, for example, is false, period. It simply does not mesh with the evidence.
Likewise, global warming is happening, whether you like it or not.
Next up (surely you saw where this was going) is gun control. Not only is there no evidence that more guns make a society safer, there is direct and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Some would say that there is no harm in allowing someone their delusions- and in theory, that is true. The problem occurs when those delusions permeate the reality of others. There is no harm in a person believing that the world was made in six days. When that belief graduates to trying to teach my daughter, in a public school, that science is wrong, we have a problem.
Similarly, when the scientific world proves that less guns always equals less death, you don’t have a right to dispute that (other sociologists, etc, do, but they have facts and data to argue wth). When lives are at stake, you don’t get to ignore the evidence to protect your delusions. (If you’d like to dig deeper in to the subject, Jason Kottke has dedicated his site to the subject of late, or you can peruse this fantastic list of articles.)
I realize that I am blurring the lines a bit between stupidity and ignorance. Ignorance is the absence of knowledge. Stupidity is the blatant disregard of it, and it is that disregard that I’m addressing. Ignorance is forgivable. Stupidity is not.
It is ignorance that our the age we’re living in best addresses. It’s almost impossible to be ignorant of such pervasive issues in the age of the internet. The information is available to you, and by and large, we’re aware that it’s there- and you don’t even have to leave your front door to get to it.
The internet provides us with a foundational framework with which to combat stupidity in a number of ways, the most undeniable of which is collective intelligence: the phenomenon by which we can store information in an area outside of our brain (the web), as long as that information is easily accessible. Simply put, if we can Google something, our brain does not need to retain that information. The result is that we are able to tap into the collective intelligence of the entire web. We are all smarter by association. To ignore the intelligence that exists at our fingertips is not only to do so at your own peril, but the peril of others as well.
There is a small comfort in knowing that, in the history of our species, science and reason, thus far, have always won out. But it is indeed a small comfort, because the triumph can never come soon enough when reason’s opponents inflict so much suffering on others.
The world is too rich, too full of the beautiful, both known and (as yet) inexplicable to cause needless suffering. And since we are each solely responsible for our own intelligence, we are also responsible for the damage our ignorance inflicts. Sometimes the damage is minimal: perhaps we’re accountants instead of the astronauts we wanted to be. Sometimes, the damage is greater. Sometimes, children die.
All this is not to say that some are stupid and some are not; just as intelligence works on a sliding scale, it is also issue-specific. Rocket scientists can be quite the ignoramus when asked about psychology. There are a great many things about which I am embarrassingly lacking in knowledge, and it is for that very reason that, when someone corrects or enlightens me on a matter, I am grateful. They have given me a gift, a gem of education to be added to the treasure chest of knowledge I’ve spent my life filling.
I’m also susceptible to the very human tendency to see that gem as a lump of coal if it is delivered as an insult or a personal attack and to discard that gem accordingly, so we must take great care to deliver our gems as the precious stones that they are. After all, if our intelligence is in our own hands, it must be properly cared for.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Citizens United: Massive political campaign donations during the Roman Republic are a cautionary tale for the corrupt influence of money in politics today. - Slate Magazine
Thursday, December 13, 2012
The Unbearable Lightness of Being on Twitter and Facebook
There has been a brilliant — and necessary — discussion springing forth from Matt Haughey’s Why I love Twitter and Barely Tolerate Facebook. It has elicited a wide range of responses.
It has sparked a discussion, a conversation that needs to be had. After all, if any had doubts about the profound effect of social media on our culture, those doubts should be dissipated by now; the effect is real. The next phase is to attempt to understand it. To that end, let’s continue the discussion.
Rian van der Merwe pins down the crux of the problem in Facebook and the Imperfect Past: that we are torn as to how to approach social media.
From the beginning (of Twitter, of Facebook), we’ve endeavored to put our best foot forward online. When we open that little box, when we’re presented with that blinking cursor asking us “What’s happening?”, our first instinct is to present the very best version of ourselves.
Look at me! Look how wonderful everything is in my world!
That predisposition is a natural one. Were it not inherent in human nature, status symbols would not exist. No one buys a BMW for the experience. BMWs sell because they proclaim to the world that the owner is someone to be envied. He has arrived, world: take note.
I’ve been as guilty as anyone in presenting this polished version of myself, and my motivation, I suspect, is not uncommon: we want to provide those who are interested enough to follow us with some value. We don’t want to drag them down; we want to uplift.
More, we present this ideal of ourselves as something to aspire to. Having spent years in sales, I’m quite aware of the power of creating a unified image of your goals and positioning that image so that it stares you in the face, saying “If you want this life, come and get it.” It works, and, incidentally, that tendency may even be an adaptive advantage.
A shift is underway, though. A potentially transformative way to approach social media — indeed, our entire online identity — that I like to call the new normal.
Rian explains it well:
I’m slowly coming around to the idea that if we’re going to embrace public living (in the form of social networks) at all, we should either go all in with the full spectrum of our emotions, or rather not bother. Because if we only share a small, perfect sliver of our lives, we start to create unrealistic expectations for ourselves, and the people who know us.
JD Bentley expands on that thought in The Imperfect Past:
What I find most intolerable about social media—the ability to “only share a small, perfect sliver”—is what the most ardent social media users seem to like best.
With a few clicks and keystrokes, a perfectly boring, mediocre and unenjoyed life can look downright meaningful.
The word I latched onto here is ‘meaningful.’ We present this meaning as a form of value. Our tweets, our status updates are only valuable insofar as they provide some sort of meaning to our followers. Those of us who don’t post pictures of cats stuck in a box or gifs of laughing babies post things because of their perceived value.
Here is the conundrum, then: how do we present the entire spectrum of our lives, our selves while still providing value?
The answer begins in the difference between Facebook’s Timeline and Twitter’s ‘now, now, now’ approach. I’m not a Facebook fan, by and large, but I have to concede that the Timeline feature is somewhat brilliant. It is perhaps the greatest example of doing something with our updates, our data, something Frank Chimero expanded upon in The Anthologists:
The desire to archive things for posterity is the itch that makes yearbooks and timelines feel necessary. We create edges and impose order on documentation to help us understand time, experiences, and ideas.
We create edges to contain our data; to tell a story, and it is the story that can create the value derived from the full spectrum of our lives.
Rian touches on the story we tell through our updates:
Obviously Facebook only tells the story it knows, and most of the time it only knows about your happy times. What we sometimes forget is that it’s conflict that makes the story of our life interesting.
He goes on to quote Donald Miller in an excerpt from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years:
When we watch the news [and stories about violence come on], we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are in.
The story is how we create value, and a good story must necessarily contain equal parts light and darkness. Steven Pressfield explains:
The antagonist is the dark side of the protagonist.
A story succeeds precisely because of the presence of darkness, of struggle, because, as Pressfield puts it, “these stories provide us with models for dealing with adversity.”
We can create value by linking to thought-provoking articles, by quoting the occasional inspirational thinker, by spouting off a snarky comment about the latest story to break.
But we can also create value by telling our story. The hopes, the dreams, but also the heartache, the struggle. The world in which we live, like a good story, contains equal parts light and darkness. We’d do well to present each to the world, to better mirror the intricacies of the offline in the online.
I’m not convinced, though, that that reflection should be a perfect one. JD disagrees:
People like me would prefer that the online world was a better reflection of the offline world. People who drive social media prefer the opposite. Social media is a platform for publishing exaggerated accounts that support one’s values. It’s not a collection of facts as much as it’s a collection of persuasive arguments for particular worldviews.
To hope for a better reflection seems necessary, but it can only go so far: no one wants to know what I had for lunch, or that I just stubbed my toe. We can and should be true to our story, but we must also respect the time of our followers, friends, and colleagues. If we fail to do so, they, like us, face the prospect of an endless stream of banalities.
JD gets that, of course. Lamenting the data-mining motivation behind the Timeline, he goes on:
So, on the one side, you have a company that cares about telling a profitable story. On the other side, people who care about telling a good story.
Social media isn’t interested in telling the whole of the truth.
Leaving aside, for now, the motivation behind the platforms (I think we need to delve much further into that discussion, but that’s another post), a couple of points can be made.
Firstly, those people who care about telling a good story are those who will drive the future of social media. As early adopters (read: geeks) are those who now drive, to a large extent, the future of our culture (what is geek culture today is mainstream culture tomorrow), so the passionate voices in the online world have the power to shape the direction of that world.
That’s us. We’re the passionate ones, as evidenced by the fact that we’re having this discussion, that you’re reading this piece.
On the other hand, there will always be the others. There will always exist those for whom banality is the mainstay of their existence: just take a look at the TV ratings for Honey Boo-Boo or the prevalence of celebrity gossip.
We have to be okay with those people living out their existence in the same space as we do. The solution is simple: unfriend, unfollow.
Then move on to witnessing the stories of those who actually give a damn.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Subjectivity & Objectivity: a Contrast
Recently, I’ve come to a crossroads in my writing: I’ve written many essays over the past year or so, but I’ve reached a point at which the things I want to say are too large, too abstract, or too fundamental to properly convey in an essay. The things I want to say are those types of truths that can only be properly told through a good story.
Socrates and Jesus told parables for a reason: they had a greater impact than any other form. We are creatures of story, in fact: it is the thing that our entire world consists of. We tell stories to our children and grandchildren to teach them of our own past. We read newspapers and magazines for their stories of success or failure: the poverty-stricken rise to success through ingenuity; a celebrity meeting his demise at the hands of an ill-advised bender.
As I made the transition to telling stories, I began to think more and more about subjectivity. Even now, as I write this, I struggle with the distinction: do I outline this piece, form a coherent structure, then fill in the blanks? Or do I write it as it comes, so that it becomes a mirror for my stream of consciousness? One implies objectivity by mimicking a sort of journalistic narrative; the other implies subjectivity by letting the thoughts in my head spill out onto the page.
In the end, I’ve chosen a combination of the two.
Let me give you an example of the distinction we’re discussing.
To my mind, there are two titans of Russian literature who perfectly epitomize the effects of subjectivity and objectivity.
Tolstoy was a master of objectivity, if not the master. Take this excerpt from War and Peace:
For him, it was no new conviction that his presence at all ends of the world, from Africa to the steppes of Muscovy, struck people in the same way and threw them into the madness of self-oblivion. He ordered his horse brought and rode to his camp.
This is a remarkably poignant observation, made all the more effective by its striking tone of objectivity. The subject of the paragraph is Napoleon, and Tolstoy gives us extraordinary insight into his psyche by remaining detached. “Threw them into the madness of oblivion” is particularly effective. The phrase conjures such a wide array of emotion and thought in the reader in so few words. Tolstoy could describe the “madness of self-oblivion,” but he doesn’t, instead opting to allow room for the reader’s thoughts to echo, enhancing the effect. By remaining objective, he allows the reader to transfer something of himself onto the text. The last sentence tells us of the sociopathic demeanor of Napoleon: though he causes this absurdly strong reaction in people, he himself couldn't care less: he simply goes about his business.
Tolstoy gives us the facts, allowing us to draw our own conclusions from them.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
~ Abraham Maslow
Now, take a passage from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment:
Coughing stopped her breath, but the tongue-lashing had its effect. Obviously, Katerina Ivanovna even inspired some fear; the tenants, one by one, squeezed through the back door, with that strange feeling of inner satisfaction which can always be observed, even in those who are near and dear, when a sudden disaster befalls their neighbor, and which is to be found in all men, without exception, however sincere their feelings of sympathy and commiseration.
Here, the subjectivity leaps from the page. Dostoyevsky is describing a scene which may or may be not interesting in and of itself, but it is the imposition of his own beliefs onto the scene which lends the passage its depth of emotion. The simple scene of tenants leaving a room becomes quite powerful when we think of the opinion that all men- every single one- feel a sense of satisfaction at the misfortune of others. In this case, the misfortune is death, and it's appalling to think of the tenants squeezing out of the house with a smug smirk of satisfaction on their face. But once we are sufficiently appalled, Dostoyevsky then reveals to us that we, the reader, should also be appalled at ourselves, because these feelings of satisfaction are present in “all men, without exception,” you, dear reader, included.
The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.
~ Hans-Georg Gadamer
Now, it’s quite easy to contrast subjectivity and objectivity in terms of dead Russian writers, but we’re interested in how it affects our writing.
Suppose I’m writing a piece for Sssimpli, a profile of a new startup. I want to give the reader the facts: this is what the startup does, this is the problem it solves, these are the devices it works on, etc. There is an objective element.
I don’t want to remain completely objective, though. The things I write about on Sssimpli (and indeed everywhere) are things that I feel strongly about. I’m excited about this particular startup, and I want to convey that excitement to the reader. I can only do that (or, rather, I can do it much more effectively) with subjectivity.
A similar chord is struck on link blogs: take a couple of examples from Rian Van der Merwe’s homepage. One recent entry points to a New York Times op-ed: Rian offers a simple opening statement, a quote from the piece, then ends with: “I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just link there quietly.” He offers no insight, no dissection. He simply lets the piece speak for itself. He recognizes the impact that objectivity can have here.
In another piece, Rian recognizes the value that some personal insights can offer, so he breaks down some of the recent decisions at Twitter, interjecting his own subjective thoughts into their design process. Had he stuck with the facts, the piece is not nearly as useful.
This is the line we must walk, and I’m convinced that it is not only a remarkably difficult line to toe, but it is the litmus test of a true writer: he who masters the use of these two extremes is a craftsman. Whether the text requires complete subjectivity, complete objectivity, or a deft mixture of the two, it is what transforms the mediocre read into the words that find a home in our soul, never to let go.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Keyholes & Skydiving
Brad Leithauser once took a road trip, during which his child proceeded to school him on the art of living.
While driving home from a wedding, he and his family listened to a recorded book. At its end, the entire family seems quite content, basking in the satisfaction one feels after having finished a good story. They had come to its edge, its boundary, its end.
Not all of them felt the edge. Leithauser’s fifteen-year-old daughter thought nothing of the boundary, of the end, and in her mind, the story continued.
But what was Rachel really like?
Leithauser’s answer, as one would expect from a teacher of undergraduates, stressed the intentional ambiguity that a masterful author employs. He gave the reasoning behind such ambiguity- and his daughter would have none of it.
O.K., but what do you think Rachel was really like?
Leithauser then realized that he and his daughter were approaching the story from two wildly different viewpoints: that of the box and of the keyhole:
Had I been still more articulate, I might have said that there’s a special readerly pleasure in approaching a book as you would a box. In its self-containment lies its ferocious magic; you can see everything it holds, and yet its meagre, often hackneyed contents have a way of engineering fresh, refined, resourceful patterns. And Emily might have replied that she comes to a book as to a keyhole: you observe some of the characters’ movements, you hear a little of their dialogue, but then they step outside your limited purview. They have a reality that outreaches the borders of the page.
The parallels here were more than I could ignore. I began to think of the ‘keyhole’ approach and to what other realms it might be applied.
I thought of creators- those of us who tend to think of life merely as an opportunity to create things. Writers, designers, craftsmen of all sorts. The one thing, it seems, that we all have in common is the keyhole approach.
Most look at the world as a box: it is what you see, and the established boundaries and rules need not be expanded upon. The average person will see a coffee table as nothing more than a coffee table. A designer will see a coffee table as an opportunity, a limited vision of what a coffee table may be. Then he imagines what might lie beyond his field of vision: he imagines what else a coffee table might be.
Writers take a similar approach to people. Where most see a person as the limited sum of the parts that they see- he is a baker who enjoys movies- the writer imagines what might lie in his depths. Perhaps he dabbles in cryptography, dreamed of being a baseball player as a child, and secretly chastises himself for not being the man his father was.
This keyhole approach little more than a capacity to be amazed. As an adult looks out on the night stars and sees nothing more than stars, a child, whose capacity to be amazed has not been narrowed by the mundanity of the world, will see millions of angels shining flashlights.
When most pick up an iPad and see it as an opportunity to browse Facebook, some will marvel at the fact that they can strike up a conversation with an astronomer in Holland.
It is those with the capacity to be amazed that create the future of our world, because to be amazed is to see what might be, and only when we see what might be can we make what might be.
Not coincidentally, our capacity for happiness, for fulfillment also lies in our capacity for amazement. Stopping to smell the roses is a habit only of those who choose the keyhole approach. I will not wonder at the astounding person my daughter is becoming by looking at life as a box.
Say I were to find myself in a restaurant, alone. Next to me, a man sips his beer, quietly. The box approach tells me that there’s nothing more to see here- this is simply a man drinking a beer. The keyhole approach might cause me to wonder what brought this man here on this night, and I may strike up a conversation. Perhaps we’ll become the best of friends, and he will one day talk me into my first skydiving lesson and take me to a ballgame to take my mind off of the fact that I walked my only daughter down the aisle the day before.
Perhaps not. Perhaps he’s an asshole. If I look at life as a box, I’ll never know.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
The Old Man (A Short Story)
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The old man looked expectantly down the street, and, seeing nothing, turned back to his cup of tea.
Five dollars this tea had cost him, but it was worth it, not only for its quality- it was exceptional- but for the visitor that cup of tea would bring.
Again, he turned to look down the street, then, noticing his exposed wrists, pulled the sleeves of his oversized parka to hide them. There was a time when he had been ashamed of those wrists, of their slender proportions, but no longer. He was too old for such self-consciousness. No, now he was simply cold.
He looked around at the other guests. Most were in power suits, and sipped their lattes as if oblivious to the world around them. The old man did not envy them their youth. He knew at what price it came, and would not relinquish his years of experience for their tight-skinned assurance.
He grasped the tea cup with both hands to warm them. It was, indeed, a cold January day, and the wind was balmy. The luxurious red velvet curtains of the cafe rippled slightly, and the old man briefly smiled, thinking that even luxury must still bow to the whims of nature.
He grasped the cup again, thawing his frozen hands, then set it gently down and ran his now warm fingers down the length of his face. Like his wrists, his abnormally large nose had once caused him grief. His fingers traced the deep wrinkles that now dominated his face.
It was unusual for her to be late, but he was not a man to worry. Besides, it had been a long time since he’d seen her. Perhaps she’s lost the capacity for punctuality since then.
He thought of her often, and he thought of her now. He briefly touched the white kopiah on his head, thinking of how ridiculous she’d considered it, never passing an opportunity to ridicule him, although good-naturedly, for it.
She was just a girl when he’d started wearing kopiahs, after a business meeting with a Malaysian man had presented one as a gift. He wasn’t Muslim, but it gave him a certain comfort, and had worn them since.
He realized now that people were staring. He was not one of them, and they were beginning to notice the outsider. Let them stare, he thought. I am here for a purpose. You will not make me leave, no matter how penetrating your stares.
He pulled a newspaper from his pocket, laying it out on the table before smoothing it, then finally folding it carefully to reveal the crossword section, already half-filled in.
This, too, made him think of her- the Sunday mornings by the fire, a father using the New York Times crossword as a conduit to teach his daughter the ways of the world, or perhaps just as an excuse to spend some time with her. She was young then, and uncomplicated. How much easier that had been.
Twenty-one across: “Benjamin’s love in ‘The Graduate.”
These had gotten a bit easier over the years, he thought.
He thought of that film, of the amazing performance of Dustin Hoffman. Then he thought of The Wizard of Oz, the first movie they’d ever watched together- at least, after she’d become old enough to sit through an entire movie without getting distracted. They had reenacted the story in the backyard, pitching tents for landmarks and laying down bags and bags of sand as the Yellow Brick Road. She had done the most awful Wicked Witch impression, which, of course, had been the most adorable thing he’d ever seen.
The reenactments always ended the same way: he as the tornado, whisking her back home to Kansas (or, in this case, the kitchen) to make peanut butter cookies.
The old man sighed.
He took another sip of tea, which was getting cold.
Two down: “neighborhood.”
Carefully, he wrote: C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y. He glanced again at the pen. He remembered Bobbie Kopecki, who’d stabbed her with a Bic pen on the schoolbus in third grade. She had shrieked in pain, the bus driver later told him, but then forced her lips shut and insisted that nothing had happened. She was okay.
She stifled the tears until she came home, and they came out in a flood as soon as she crossed the threshold. She had stood there, waiting for him to come to her. He had picked her up, setting her on his lap, and let her sob for two or three minutes without asking a single question. When her eyes dried, she told him what had happened, raising her skirt to show him the ink-stained bruise forming on the inside of her left thigh. He tended to the wound and took her out for ice cream, where he explained, for the first time, why good people do bad things.
The old man checked his watch.
It was a good watch, and for the longest time he’d avoided wearing it, out of defiance. It had been a gift from him on the old man’s sixtieth birthday.
He closed his eyes and imagined the wedding. A beautiful church on a warm Sunday morning, the sun’s rays bathing the church’s occupants in a sea of color as they burst through the stained glass depictions of so many ancient saints. She in her snow white gown, smoothing down the fabric that hugged her hips every time the nervousness seemed to be too much. The smile that had not left her lips since she’d awoken that day, betraying the happiness that would not be contained. The rose petals being strewn along the path that she was destined to walk by a rose-cheeked girl of about five, the daughter of her lucky groom.
He imagined every moment, as he must, for he had not been there to see it in person. For that, at least, his heart ached.
He remembered, too, the fight. She met him in the park for a Sunday picnic, and he had been excited to tell her of his recent promotion when she interrupted, telling him of her plans to marry.
The old man had objected. No one was worthy of his daughter, it was true, but he was especially unworthy. He defended criminals for a living, and when the criminals didn’t pay well enough, he chased ambulances. He seemed entirely too sure of himself- a sure sign of a man that’s completely unsure of himself- and never looked anyone in the eye while speaking. He had a weak handshake, and once, the old man had caught him treating his dog unkindly. A man who cannot treat a dog well cannot treat a woman well.
So, he had objected. He had mocked their love, telling her that it couldn’t possibly be real. She didn’t love him, could not possibly love that sort of man, and that was that.
She had cried. She had counted on her father’s blessing, and was shocked to see him withhold it. In the end, she had walked out.
Fourteen years later, he’d received the watch. He had stood in his doorway, staring at the package on the front porch for a long time, unable to move. Fourteen years of absence, and now the unmistakable handwriting on the package shook him. Finally, he picked it up, took it inside, and opened it carefully on the kitchen counter.
When he saw the watch, his face sagged, grew older. It was not a gift from her- it was a gift from him. She was of extravagant tastes, and this was an elegantly understated watch. She had always forced her elaborate sense of fashion on him, saying he should “spruce it up every now and then.” He resisted, but she never gave up. She would never give him a simple watch with a flat leather band. It was not her style.
He put the watch in the drawer of his nightstand, and didn’t see it again until one day when the pain began to dull, when it was no longer a pain, but an ache.
That day, he’d opened the drawer, and, for the first time, looped the watch around his thin wrist. He was truly an old man now, and needed to be reminded of the ache, needed to live with the pain that he’d caused.
Every morning since, he had donned the watch. Now the pain and the man were one: inseparable, indistinguishable. That unity had cost him everything: his position, his stature, his life. He’d let it all evaporate the day he became aware of how meaningless those things were.
The old man turned to look down the street. So many people were going about their lives. Soccer moms from Iowa drug their kids along behind them, trying desperately to fit all the sight-seeing into one day. Power brokers talked on their mobile phones, finalizing the deal that would finally get the attention of the boss. Teenage girls stared into window shops, desperately wishing that their bodies could more closely resemble the perfection of the mannequins.
The old man turned back to his tea to find the waitress standing above him.
“Sir, are you waiting for your daughter?”
“Yes,” said the old man. “I am.”
“I’m afraid she’s not going to be able to make it. She just left the message with a member of our staff.”
She pretended not to notice the heartbreak in his face, and instead offered to refill his cup.
“No,” he said. “I think I’ll be going now.”
And with that, the old man slowly stood, zipped his parka, and started down the sidewalk on the long journey home.
This story was inspired by this photo.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
The Children and the Analog
Over on the New Yorker, a thought-provoking piece entitled Spotify and its Discontents recently captured my attention. In it, Mike Spies recounts the story of a potential album purchase at a flea market. The seller refuses the author’s purchase offer, so Spies goes another route: he goes home to download the album digitally. There, an interesting thing happens:
This was supposed to be a victory of sorts, but I was quickly overcome by the blunt banality of the moment. In front of me was not only the album I desired, but also every other Butterfield recording ever made. And once I sampled and sated my hunger for Paul Butterfield’s blues, I could locate just about any recording ever made. But what, I wondered, were the consequences?
That’s a fascinating question. Spies goes on to contrast the experience of buying a CD with the experience of Spotify’s instant, all-access pass, concluding there is something to be said for doing things the hard, old-fashioned, “analog” way.
I remember my first treasured CD- Pearl Jam’s ‘Ten’. It must’ve been destroyed three or four times (ten-year-old boys tend to destroy things with much more effectiveness than they preserve them). And every time it was destroyed, I found a way to buy it again. It was a fantastic album, yes, but my attachment to it would no doubt have waned had I not put so much effort into owning it.
We digital savants often extol the virtues of the internet age. It will make things easier, more enjoyable. It will do so by eliminating the time and effort required to perform the menial tasks life has hitherto required, leaving more time and energy for the meaningful. That, of course, is an admirable goal. We must be careful, though, not to overemphasize. There is something to be said for the work that goes into the analog that we grew up with.
In February, Alexis Madrigal wrote a brilliant piece called We, the Web Kids, which opens thusly:
We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not 'surf' and the internet to us is not a 'place' or 'virtual space'. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it.
When I read that piece, I thought merely of the benefits: the magical effect of the internet is so pervasive in the lives of the young. Imagine what that familiarity, that understanding of the technology will allow them to do with it. They won’t be stuck in old modes of thought, bringing along assumptions and prejudices to their contributions to the world; they will see with fresh eyes.
What I missed in that piece, Spies’s New Yorker piece brought to mind.
My daughter will never know the pleasure of doing yard work for two months to earn the money to be taken to the bookstore. She will never know what it’s like to dream of the scent of the pages, the feel of the pages being flipped beneath her fingers. She will never know what it’s like to walk up and down a book aisle, overwhelmed at the thought of all the stories, all the magic, all the humanity that surrounds her in that moment.
She will never know the satisfaction of taking it home, that one special book that she decided was worthy of ownership. The similarities between picking a dog up from the pound and taking a new book home (either way, you’ve rescued what will become a great friend) will be unknown to her.
She will never know what it’s like to take a walk in the woods, alone, with nothing but a pen and paper to talk to. She’ll never know the escape that it can provide, the flow of the pen as the ink spills onto the page while fall leaves come to rest at your feet.
She will never know the power that a simple phone call can infuse when you haven’t spoken to someone in days, simply because instant messaging, and mobile phones, and email, and texting didn’t exist. No, you had to wait for what seemed like hours for your parents to get off the phone so that you can call that someone that you so dearly missed. And, oh, how much sweeter was the sound of their voice after that wait.
This new generation knows the internet, is the internet, and that is a wonderful thing, because they will do things with it that we wouldn’t, couldn’t dream of.
But we are the last generation that knows the value of analog. Whether that is a knowledge, or a feeling, or a intuition, it is something that our children will not experience.
That is, unless we teach them. To value the things that we know, the experiences that an unplugged world can provide. They must know this, if only to contrast it with the world they live in.
More than that, though, we owe it to them to let them feel what we felt when we bought our first CD, when we took that walk in the woods, when we had that riveting conversation about nothing. It’s a joy too wide to keep to ourselves, and maybe... just maybe... if we can make them understand, they will pass that experience onto their kids, and the joy of the analog will survive us and our quirky nostalgia.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
On Pain
The child huddles in the corner of her room, her hands covering her ears. She crawls along the floor, careful not to let go of the wall, careful not to lose the strange comfort it provides.
She reaches the closet, grasping for the knob with her elbows, before she realizes that she must let at least one hand drop from her ears to open the door, to hide in the precious anonymity of her own closet. She must drop her hand, and she prepares herself, knowing that her ear will be left defenseless against the screaming.
The hand falls, slowly, and the demons enter her room, her ear, her head. She listens to her mother shriek in pain. She hears her beg, please, no, stop, and she marvels at the fact that a fist can turn her once proud mother into the defenseless creature now pleading for her life.
The child closes the closet door carefully so as not to remind the monster of her presence. If she sobs too loudly, he will come for her, too, and surely, she will die.
The story above is, quite obviously, one of tremendous pain. Pain itself is a word so often thrown about in this English language of ours, and yet so few of us understand the depth of the word; far fewer know its power.
Those who know me or read me know that I am no stranger to pain. I have that experience to cling to, to remind me, and now I have the benefit of hindsight to help me understand pain.
The story of the child is one of unimaginable pain. Few of us can ever truly know the feeling of listening to your mother being beaten to death in the next room, of knowing that if you utter a word, you’re next. Yet we read this story, and countless others like it. We watch on the television as character after character walks through the pits of hell, some to emerge, and some not. Those that crawl their way back from the inferno are scarred, sometimes beyond recognition.
Those people know more of life than we ever will.
To live is to feel, and to feel is, inevitably, to feel pain. When it comes, we hide, like a child huddled in a closet. We tell the pain to go away: we just want to feel joy again.
But when that pain comes for you, opening yourself to it can be a great gift. When it comes for me, I embrace it as one would embrace an old friend. I take it in my hands, I roll it over the tips of my fingers, and I notice how deep my breaths are, how alive my mind, how tender my heart. It never stays long, this pain- that is important to remember- but when it leaves, something is lost. The farewell is bittersweet, and I always thank the pain for visiting.
Life can be precisely measured by how deeply we are cut. The little girl in the story has felt life to a degree that the comfortable among us will never know.
Suffering is optional; pain is not, the Buddha once said. He was right. Everyone that lives will feel pain. To some, it will be foreign, something to be rid of as quickly as possible. To some, it will be so intertwined with life itself that they can scarcely distinguish between the two. To those, the embracers, life is fuller and richer than can be imagined by those who think it a nuisance.
To go through life avoiding pain is as pointless as pretending that you have only one arm. Despite your delusions, the other arm remains, and by denying its existence, you deny its usefulness.
Get to know your pain. Hold it up to the light and see how parts of it reflect the sun’s rays, while some parts absorb it. Get to know its feel, its texture. Listen closely that you might hear its voice. It may one day whisper to you the secret of life.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book
Henry David Thoreau (via taylorbooks)
Thursday, November 1, 2012
On Contrast
When it comes to pixels, I’m a bit OCD. Case in point: when I switch wallpapers on my desktop PC (which I often do), I switch the wallpaper on my laptop and phone to the same image. It’s an exercise in consistency. There’s something comforting in seeing the same image across all devices, something comfortable in weaving all three platforms together by a common thread.
The other day, for no apparent reason, I changed that. I selected a wallpaper for each device, giving each its own personality. I realized at once how much easier it was to select an image for each platform. Whereas before I needed to select a wallpaper that would display the proper contrast with each of the three menu bars, widgets, etc., I was now free to select an image based on the visuals of each individual device, making the process that much simpler, the results that much more striking. Each device assumed its very own identity.
I reflected on that for a bit.
I began to think of my relationships. Friends, parents, colleagues, children. How often had I applied the same approach to the people in my life? The more I thought about it, the more I realized it to be true: I was attaching a uniform image to each person in my life, depriving them of their own personality.
On deeper reflection, it became clear that the image that I was transposing onto my loved ones was me.
I have a dear friend who’s overly analytical, mostly on a micro level. She likes to analyze people, situations. I can also be overly analytical, but usually on a macro level- ideas, cultures. So many discussions arise between us in which I silently wished that she would see things from my perspective.
Look at the bigger picture here!
When I think about it, though, it’s precisely this contrast in thinking that makes our discussions so fruitful, so engaging.
My daughter is many, many parts me. Because of that, it’s easy to relate to a large part of her nature, the things that she encounters, and the way she approaches life.
She’s also, in large part, her mother. These portions of her are largely alien to me. I’ve no idea what she’s thinking, how to get through to her, or what advice to give when I see her mother coming through. It’s unnerving.
And yet it’s precisely this dichotomy that makes her who she is. It creates a wondrous being, full of surprises and unexpected gifts.
If only everyone could be more like me.
I’d never thought about whether or not I thrust my own personality onto others. Once I did think about it, I was a bit alarmed at the frequency with which I do so.
I will never know what it’s like to write like David Foster Wallace, with such paranoia and an almost unthinkable attention to seemingly trivial detail. Reading Wallace is that most exquisite of gifts- to travel into the mind of another human being and observe the inner workings, the quirks, the brilliance, the life inside. Imagine, then, what I would miss if I simply lamented the fact that he doesn’t write more like I think.
The contrast is precisely the thing that the value derived depends on.
We are unique creatures. For all our childhoods, this simple fact is reiterated over and over to us: you are special. Somewhere at the intersection of adolescence and adulthood, we forget that fact, or, even if we are lucky enough to consciously recall it, we forget to apply it to the world around us. We look at others and hope, wish, and pray that they could be more like us. See things my way. Do the things I would do. Each of us, though, need our own background, our own contrast. It is the contrast that gives us our shape.
The world is nothing if not a puzzle, and we are simply pieces. A puzzle requires pieces of many different shapes to form a coherent whole. That is precisely why your circle of friends feels so complete when you are all together, why your family feels less total when someone is missing, why you, yourself, feel incomplete without your significant other, your adjacent piece.
Embrace the contrast. The world would not be whole without it.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
All is Love
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
~ Albert Camus
Life is Silly
Life is silly. It’s absurd that we’re even here, that we exist; ridiculous that we have arms; laughable that we discuss; ludicrous that we eat breakfast. Yet we do all these things, against incredible odds.
Why do some celebrate life while others endure it? Because those who cherish life understand that it is absurd.
The promotion. The breakup. The traffic. The move. This is the stuff that life is made of. From inside our bubble, these things are of monumental importance.
Set against the backdrop of the cosmos, however, these things become comically insignificant. For some, that depresses. For others, it uplifts. What is the difference? And what’s love got to do with it?
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
~ Carl Sagan
Inconsequential. Fraction of a dot. I’m reminded of an opening scene from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, in which our young protagonist is taken to see a therapist. His mother sits beside him on a couch, and implores Alvy to tell the doctor what ails him.
“The universe is expanding,” he mutters.
“What has the universe got to do with you?” his mother asks. “You live in Brooklyn!”
The universe is expanding, and Alvy is depressed by this. What does anything matter if one day it will all end?
What does it all mean?
Love. Everything we fight for, whether on the battlefield or in our hearts, is love.
But why? If everything is so insignificant, why is love the exception?
If absurdity is the First Truth, love is the second, and the last.
Imagine you’re a therapist. A troubled soul comes to your door, begging to be rid of their problems. Could you use Carl Sagan’s advice to lift her spirits?
I understand that your husband left you, that you lost your job, that your mother didn’t show you affection, but none of that matters, you see. We’re only a pale blue dot.
I somehow doubt that this would provide any comfort. Let love enter the picture, though, and all becomes clear.
Let me give an example or two. In Changeling, a distraught mother loses her child. It’s easy to understand, then, how this struggling mother would fail to attach any significance to things like promotions and long lines at the grocery store. Her child is lost, and her missing love is all that matters.
Why is Romeo & Juliet the ultimate story of love? Imagine our two tragic heroes lamenting the ‘C’ they were just given on their latest college exam. It’s an absurd notion, of course, because nothing matters but their love.
Go back to your patient. Would she feel so despondent if there existed some trace of this all-encompassing love? Probably not. Everything else pales in comparison.
But can you lead her to these conclusions through logic and reason? Can you simply explain it? No. Of course not. She has to feel it, because, supreme principle that reason is, intuition must, on occasion, make up for its shortcomings.
Imagine watching over a colony of ants. For hours, days, weeks, you watch over them. You watch them struggle, overcome, fail, succeed, live. You know, of course, that their actions mean relatively nothing, that their struggles are insignificant. Now, imagine two of your ants fall in love. Would you attach the same meaninglessness to their love? Most of us, knowing its power, would in fact feel that their love is now the only thing that matters. That is life, and life is love.
Insignificance is a depressing thought for some, only because it is viewed through a constrictive lens. Widening the lens reveals love, and only when held up to the light of love can the illusion of darkness be revealed.
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
~ Leo Tolstoy
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Secrets (a Confession)
This is an attempt at The New Normal.
This is a personal post. The personal post, in fact. It almost feels as if all posts have been leading up to this, in a way, since most of my thoughts tend to circle around the premise. Warning: this may be a long one.
I didn’t go to college. There. I said it. This has long been, literally, my only regret in life. To understand why this simple fact has played such a major role in my existence for the past ten years, I have to go back a bit.
In high school, I lost my love to a car accident. Until that point, it was simply assumed that I would go to a good school after graduation. I had good grades, was very knowledge-hungry. When she died, though, I stopped trying. I barely managed to pick up a pencil for the next year. Honestly, I’m not quite sure how I graduated.
So I never applied to college- never even tried. And here’s the thing: nobody said a word about it. Not one word. Nobody ever said “What the fuck are you doing? Here’s an application. Get to it.” Everyone was afraid to speak up.
“He’s having a hard time letting go. Just leave him be.”
Before I knew it, I was nineteen, living in a shitty apartment and making seven dollars an hour moving furniture for a living. I came home from work one day, to what would become my wife, and as I sat down on the couch, exhausted, looking around the room at the cheap faux leather furniture, I realized that I hated my life.
I decided to do something about it. I joined the Navy, following in my grandfather’s footsteps, and opted for the college fund they offered in lieu of the enlistment bonus. Fifty thousand dollars (plus the GI Bill) would be plenty. I’d serve my four years, go to school, and get myself back on track.
It didn’t work out that way.
I made another mistake- one that has haunted me ever since.
I committed a crime. I engaged in a sexual act with a person who was, at the time, not old enough to consent to such an act. I was not aware of that fact until it was too late. Three months later, I was called into NCIS. who informed me that I was to be court-martialed for violation of Article 114 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
I was court-martialed, and my sentence included six months in the brig and a Bad Conduct Discharge.
I lost my college money- all $89,000 of it.
Around the same time, I found out that I was going to be a father. I couldn’t apply to college and take on the required student loan debt. I had to find a job.
A lot has gone on in the years since, but fast-forward to today, and I’m thirty-one years old, and still have no higher education.
I’ve come up with many excuses along the way as to why I haven’t taken the plunge. None are justified, or rationally sound. Most have something to do with that fatal mistake I made ten years ago: I’ve carried it around like a fifty-pound ankle bracelet, hiding my past from everyone I encounter while using it as a crutch, an excuse to fail. I hid it even from most of my family. (If you’re family, and learning of this for the first time, please accept my apologies. It’s much easier to tell these things to the blank page).
I used what I want to do as an excuse: the job that I want does not exist. I want to write, but I don’t want to be a conventional writer. I want to write novels, true, and freelance magazine pieces, but I also want to deliver stories in a way that’s never been done. After reading Craig Mod’s Hack the Cover I became fascinated with the idea of merging a book’s cover design with the text itself. I came across Days with My Father, a brilliant and immersive story told through pictures and text on a simple webpage.
I began to think of my dream job: telling stories in a completely new way, through a completely new medium. The evolution of the story began to take a firm hold on my mind.
How the hell would college help me land this job? What the hell is the job I want, anyway? It resides somewhere at the intersection of my interests- philosophy, literature, writing, design. A formal education in these disciplines would almost certainly not yield a job in any of these fields, let alone all of them, so how could I justify spending, say, 50k on an investment that was likely to produce almost no return?
I was missing the point. The point, as David Foster Wallace so brilliantly points out, is to develop the ability to think in a way that is required to move an industry, a person, forward.
My thirst for knowledge has led me to educate myself, in a way, over the years: I devour articles, books, videos- anything that furthers my grasp of the world. This is a helpful, but flawed, approach. It feels like erecting a structure on a bed of sand. My body of knowledge may contain all the pieces necessary to complete the structure, but the foundation on which it sits is porous and unsteady. I may be able to grasp a piece on Kant’s Categorical Framework, but I’ve no idea what prerequisite knowledge may be missing (Rumsfeld was onto something with his ‘unknown unknowns). I have the talent, but lack the skill.
Even my writing is haunted by these unknown unknowns. Is there a technique I'm not privy to missing from this essay, this short story? Is there a fundamental character development principle that dooms my writing to fail before it begins?
Besides, no progress will be made unless I take a step- any step.
Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection.
~ Khalil Gibran
I’m finished hiding from my past. I’m finished hanging my head when friends gather to share college stories, implying, by omission, that I have college stories, too (I’ve even made some up a time or two). I’m finished setting a bad example for my daughter. How could I possibly look her in the eye when the time comes for her to go to college when I haven’t done so myself?
The world owes me nothing. What I will gain, I must take from it. So, while I work on a play this winter, I will study my options. Come January, when the play is over, I will continue my education. I will take the next step, which is, in fact, the only step.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Feature Creep
Feature creep is a phrase often used in the tech world to describe a product that, as it slowly adds feature after feature, becomes a bloated and less useful version of its previous, simpler self. It’s a malady that often afflicts products in and outside of the digital world.
It can happen to people, too.
The other day, I found myself in a conversation in which I was dismissing the opposing perspective almost as soon as my brain registered it. These were valid arguments that directly conflicted with my point of view- typically, the stimulus for growth.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
This was not the sign of an educated mind.
Once I noticed my behavior, I stopped the conversation and began to investigate. When did I reach this point? How did I reach this point? I constantly praise the ability to see things from a different perspective, so why was I doing the exact opposite?
Feature creep.
Those of us who pride ourselves on personal growth- who seek out new ways of thinking, who strive to educate ourselves, monitor our habits in order to change them- run a dangerous risk of succumbing to feature creep.
My mode of thinking was, “I am the one who reads a lot, who works on bettering myself every day. I am the only one whose opinion matters, because I am the ‘enlightened one.’
I wasn’t thinking this out loud, of course, or even consciously. It only became clear when I put myself under a microscope... but I was thinking it. Every day, I add a new feature to myself: I read more articles, more classic fiction. I examine my modes of behavior, then modify them. I seek out the thoughts and opinions of those smarter than me, in order to claim their wisdom as my own. As I added feature after feature, I momentarily became the thing that I loathed.
I had become a product too complicated to remember my original purpose: to be better. I was certainly not being ‘better’ by embracing the sort of close-mindedness that I so often rail against.
I listened to the first episode of The Partially Examined Life the other day. In it, the trial of Socrates is being discussed, in which Socrates famously says that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In dissecting that sentence, a thought arose among the podcasters: how many times can you revisit something? Once you’ve reflected on something to determine your stance on a subject, isn’t that it? Won’t you run out of things to ponder unless a particular situation comes up?
I thought of this after I realized what a schmuck I’d been. A supposition is never complete. You must revisit it every now and again, not only because your opinion at forty years old might differ from that of your thirty-year-old self, but because we run the risk of feature creep if our stances go unexamined for too long.
It can happen to your personal self, or even your professional self. Writers, designers, lawyers, managers: how often have you dismissed the opinions of your subordinates, simply because they’re your subordinates, or because they’re less experienced? Pay attention to your conversations. If you find yourself discarding input as soon as it comes in, you’ve come down with a serious case of feature creep.
We are imperfect beings, subject to lapses. Only when we realize that the examination must be ongoing can we personally realize the potential of the most important phrase ever to grace our ears:
The unexamined life is not worth living.
~ Socrates
Sunday, September 23, 2012
I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (via junkycosmonaut)
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
The New Normal
Every day, I am amazed. I’m amazed by the things people build, by the depth of a person’s being. I am amazed by the fact that these things are readily available for me to witness.
I’ve marveled over the fact that friendship is changing because connections are changing. Not so long ago, friendships were largely determined by geographic proximity to another person. As the web becomes more pervasive, location is being replaced by other factors more conducive to true connection: interests, beliefs, ambitions.
I’ve noticed, too, that as these connections run deeper, another effect has emerged: the New Normal.
Twenty years ago, as I was growing up, people shared very little of themselves with others. A close-knit group of best friends could claim to know each other very well, but even that paradigm, in retrospect, seems one of closely guarded selves.
For contrast, take the recent piece over on Deliberatism, in which Eric Karjaluoto laments the effect of Facebook and the like on his life. Eric speaks with remarkable candor, giving us a glimpse of the inner workings of his psyche. By doing so, it feels as if I know a small portion of Eric better than I knew most of my ‘best friends’ growing up. By baring his soul, he’s uncovered a portion of mine in one simple, truthful piece of writing.
This is a trend I see more and more around the web, and I couldn’t be more ecstatic about its implications.
We all hid(e) the more neurotic, darker regions of our brains from our circles. In fact, we still do. Somehow, though, the web has made full disclosure a more inviting prospect. Perhaps because our words can now float in the ether, with no threat of immediate rejection, we are freed to shed more light on the corners of ourselves so long neglected.
The result, if this trend continues, will be deeper connections, since we are no longer connecting by favorite ballplayers, or soccer matches, or the watercooler, or through some mutual acquaintance. We are connecting to people across the world by threads as yet unseen, from places we’ve been afraid to access ourselves, let alone reveal to the world. This is crucial to our understanding of the world. If we hide so much of ourselves, how can we expect to gain a true understanding of our world, since we, essentially, create the reality that we occupy?
This candor, this truth, reminds me of the Slow Web Movement, but feels much more deliberate, more profound, more meaningful. Call it the Deep Web Movement. Show me who you are. I will reciprocate, and the web- the world- will be a better place for it. After all, our reality is, at its simplest level, a vast network of connections between you, me, and everyone in-between. Our world can only go as deep as those connections. Be you. All of you, without censors. This is the New Normal.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
On Beauty
To reach its current position among our society and our psyches, beauty has had a long and arduous journey. It constantly redefines itself as human tastes evolve. In On Beauty, Umberto Eco summarized the ever-changing role of beauty thusly:
Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.
Knowing that the role of beauty has been so “immutable,” I find myself wondering how we would currently define the concept. To a pessimist, the question would yield a depressing answer: one need only to glance at the stick figures in the latest Vogue Magazine to conclude that beauty is a 98-pound blonde who eats every three days.
Centuries ago, that wasn’t the case. In fact, quite the opposite was true. Women were revered for their shapeliness, as it suggested a natural ability to give birth. Birthing hips were beautiful.
The process of the evolution of beauty brings to mind a story from philosopher Daniel Dennett regarding sweetness. The question asked is, simply, why are sweet things sweet? Dennett tells us that during man’s hunter/ gatherer days, our bodies developed a penchant for sugar because we needed the calories sugar offered to fuel our long days of hunting. Rigorous activity called for many calories, and since sugary foods had high caloric content, we developed a taste for sugar as a byproduct of our lifestyle. Today, evolution simply hasn’t had time to catch up. We no longer live that way, now leading much more sedentary lifestyles (in comparison), so our sweet tooths do more damage than good.
The same could be happening to our concept of beauty.
The Turning Point
In the early 1900s, Oskar Kokoschka began to tamper with the concept of beauty. Early in his career, Kokoshka began to focus on the idea of truth as beauty, and in doing so, turned the art world on its head.
Until Kokoschka’s arrival, art was largely revered for its adherence to one concept: the more aesthetically pleasing (read: beautiful), the better. Instead of trying to mirror reality, though, Kokoschka deliberately distorted it to reveal a hidden inner truth.
Kokoshka began to create, in traditional terms, ugly things. To his mind, however, they were in fact more beautiful than works past, simply because they revealed a truth hitherto unnoticed- a truth that the traditional concept of beauty could never reveal.
The Academy of Fine Art rejected his work, stating that if he were going to skew reality, the least he could do was make reality more “beautiful.”
Kokoshka persisted in painting what he saw below the surface, and the face of art began to change: truth was beginning to rival beauty. Indeed, truth was beauty. This was his lesson to the world: a thing is not beautiful because of superficial aesthetic qualities, but for what it reveals about human nature. This is the mantra that must define the next phase of our evolution.
Our Role
The question, of course, is how to proceed. After all, the idea of realigning truth with beauty seems to be quite an abstract one. For a concrete, modern example, take a look at what Jonah Lehrer (yes, I know he’s been discredited, but the piece is still fantastic and appropriate) wrote in the June edition of The New Yorker in the essay The Virtues of Daydreaming. Lehrer quotes Virginia Woolf, who encapsulates the process of daydreaming:
Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she
lost consciousness of outer things … her mind kept throwing up from its
depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a
fountain spurting.
Lehrer expands on this concept, saying “A daydream is that fountain spurting, spilling strange new thoughts into the stream of consciousness. And these spurts turn out to be surprisingly useful.”
Lehrer’s point is that daydreaming has, to this point, been largely viewed as a useless thing, the product of a lazy or undisciplined mind. The piece goes on to cite multiple studies that suggest that mind-wandering can be an extremely valuable tool in generating ideas and solving problems. More often than not, our unconscious minds are much better at problem-solving than our conscious minds are, so daydreaming may actually be a valuable tool when properly understood.
This type of thinking exemplifies a profound shift in the way we operate in the world: question an existing mode of thought, test it, and use the results to better understand our minds.
What has been done, then? Truth has been given a rank above all else, and out of that truth emerges a better world. What better definition of beauty can there be?
This type of thinking must not only persist, but thrive, and with the proliferation of the widening access to information, it’s easier than ever to do so. When anyone can publish (and read what’s published), more outdated concepts can be questioned. In fact, the collective intelligence effect may make us more adept than ever at interpreting the truth of our reality.
All around us, truth bubbles below the surface of our reality. When it tries to escape through the medium of our minds, we must recognize it for what it is: Beauty, disguised as Truth.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Godlessness, Art, and Meaning
In studying the group paintings of seventeenth-century Holland, such as Frans Hals’s A Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia Company and Dirck Jacobsz’s Civic Guards, [Alois] Riegl discovered a new psychological aspect of art: namely, that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer. Not only does the viewer collaborate with the artist in transforming a two-dimensional likeness on a canvas into a three-dimensional depiction of the visual world, the viewer interprets what he or she sees on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the picture. Riegl called this phenomenon the “beholder’s involvement.
The above comes from Eric Kandel’s Nobel Prize-winning The Age of Insight. The discovery Kandel describes here is one concerned with the meaning of art. Riegl finds that a work of art has no inherent meaning, that it does not exist in a vacuum. Since a work of art is only as relevant as its meaning, the viewer is not only important, but essential (unless one argues that art can exist solely for aesthetic pleasure).
When I came across this passage, it immediately struck a chord. In fact, it may be the most powerful- and appropriate- analogy for life itself.
I’m often asked by God-fearing friends and colleagues where I find my meaning. The subject has always been one that’s fascinated me; the argument has a long and rich history. Where a belief in a deity does not exist, it is supposed, there can be no meaning. Is godlessness not a very dire prospect?
The argument was brought to the forefront by the advent of existentialism, usually identified by its adherence to meaninglessness. Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Camus, and the like all battled these demons, and few came up with a sufficient answer. Some would argue that they failed to find meaning (I am not arguing that, mind you). If that were the case, though, it is only because the question they asked is two-fold, and they broached only the first part: is our existence in the universe meaningless? Without a divine text to turn to, the answer must be a resounding ‘yes,’ since the only other credible explanation for the universe is randomness. Here is where most stop: there is no meaning, and that is cause for despair.
Here’s the second part of the question: if the universe does not provide meaning, can there be another source of meaning?
In fact, there is. It is you. You are the source of meaning. As a work of art is incomplete without the viewer, so is life incomplete without you. The Mona Lisa is meaningless until someone rests his gaze upon it, giving the enigmatic smile purpose. The viewer wonders at the smile, perhaps smiles back, and that wonder creates- in fact, is a large portion of the painting’s meaning.
If you live your life on the couch, meaning will be difficult to come by. If you find your passion, are generous with your love and time, and contribute to the world, the search for meaning is no longer an elusive one.
Life needs you and me to complete it. It is, then, not meaningless. It is simply the beginning of a circle: a circle which only you or I can complete, simply by making the decision to do so. Life itself is the Sistine Chapel, and is nothing. Only when we come along to gaze on it does it become Everything.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Death (and a Girl)
I was in my boss’s office. I sat down in the leather chair opposite his desk, looking out over the bay, admiring his view. I tried to think of the people below, but my mind kept coming back to the fact that I was sitting in my boss’s office.
I had no idea why I was there. I had done something wrong, I was sure of that. In an act of sadism, he left me wondering for fifteen minutes. When he entered the room, he smiled at his secretary before closing the door, directing his gaze toward me, and letting a crestfallen look sweep over his face.
He fired me. The rest is a blur, although I vaguely recall wondering what his home life was like, whether he glided through life with the calm assurance that seemed to propel him forward at work.
I was a bit numb as I rode the elevator toward the first floor with a box of my belongings. I wished that I could hide that box. I might as well be wearing a sign saying ‘I was just fired.’
I didn’t go home. There was nothing to go home to. I didn’t want to go anywhere else, either. Everywhere else, there were people, and I didn’t want to see people. When you want the company of others, they’re nowhere to be found. When you want to escape them, they’re everywhere.
I toyed with the idea of suicide, then quickly cast it off. Death wouldn’t be interesting. Liberating, perhaps, but not interesting. I hadn’t yet lived enough to die.
I thought of the bridge on the outskirts of St. Petersburg in Crime and Punishment. In the book, every emotion seemed to converge on that bridge. Fear, ambition, happiness, sadness, indignation, jealousy- all in one place. I decided to find a bridge on which to think. Perhaps they were indeed a gathering place for emotion, and I needed to feel something, to chase the numbness away.
I found respite under a small bridge overlooking an inlet on the northern edge of the Tampa Bay. I listened to the cars pass overhead while watching for signs of life in the water below. The occasional jumping fish caused ripples on the water, and the ripples comforted me. They had a predictable cause and a predictable effect.
I listened to the cars pass over the bridge. I silently cursed each driver as someone blessed with better luck than I, then I cursed myself for cursing them.
I fell asleep. As I dreamed, Death approached me, wearing the traditional garb with one exception: his robe and scepter were entirely white- blindingly so, almost. He sat down beside me with a quiet sigh.
“Do you know why I’m here?”
“No. Are you taking me?”
“No. It’s not time, yet.”
“Then why are you here?”
“You’re interesting, and I need a break. I’m tired.”
“Tired of what?”
“Of taking.”
“Taking lives?”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you stop?”
“I can’t stop. I’m needed. My service is needed.”
He saw my confusion.
“If there were no death," he said, "there would be no life. Loathed as I am, humanity descends into chaos in my absence. Death is the only thing that propels life. Without death, there is no fear. Without fear, there is nothing. Fear drives every action, every thought, every moment of life.”
“It can’t be behind everything.”
“Yes. Everything. A lawyer’s ambition, a mother’s love, a lover’s embrace. A walk in the park, an evening meal, a friendly conversation- all driven by fear. It’s not the catastrophe that you assume it to be. Fear is the necessary ingredient to life, and rightfully so. It is the most powerful catalyst, and the most misunderstood. Fear is not terrifying; that is only one form it takes. Fear is art. It is sadness, it is compassion, it is loneliness, it is love. All striving is a movement towards fear. All suffering is movement away from it.”
I woke up. Above me was a girl, and as I shook off my sleep, I noticed that she was smiling.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi. Who are you?”
“It’s not important. Did you have a nice nap?”
“I’m not sure.”
Still fighting off the remnants of grogginess, she took off her clothes, laid them neatly on a large rock, and walked to the water. She was small, with delicate features and a wave of auburn hair that curled in on itself just above her shoulders. She didn’t look back at me as she walked. Slowly, she submerged herself in the water. I expected her to ask me to join her, but she didn’t. She just floated in the water, not quite swimming, but not quite being still. I watched in amazement, and then I became amazed at the fact that I was amazed. Surely a woman soaking in a body of water is not uncommon. Why should it be amazing, or significant even?
I soon joined her, unprompted. I felt compelled to tell her.
“I just lost my job.”
“Oh.” There was neither sympathy nor judgment in her voice.
“I wasn’t good at it. I pretended to be, but I wasn’t. I suppose they finally found me out.”
“Why did you work there?”
I tried to think. “I’m not sure. It just sort of happened that way.”
“What did you love about it?”
“Well.... nothing, really.”
“Then why are you mourning the loss of it?”
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