Eternally Now

One of my favorite literary characters of all time is the dragon in John Gardner's Grendel. She's a time philosopher in the same fashion as Dr. Manhattan or the aliens from Slaughterhouse Five or Faraday in Lost (SIGH). At one point she argues with Grendel about the future. Just because she knows the future, she says, doesn't mean she can change it, and doesn't mean she necessarily had any pivotal role in its execution. Even knowledge of the future, even actions taken with the intent to prevent it, are all part of the vast unchanging loop of causality. For in no universe, in no instance did the poor, hapless protagonist not know his fate.

Kundera took the notion a bit more literally in Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which history repeats itself over and over again, and all things will happen have happened already, and at the end of time, as the universe collapses in on itself, it creates again an unwitting embryo of all things to come.

I tend not to believe in fate, or even in a destiny. But I do believe that life comes with a sense of should-be, and that somewhere in the subconscious of the individual and the collective human race, we perceive a future ideal, a great shining conclusion to the story of planet earth, and those desiring to be good people strive toward that ideal their whole lives, like tiny ants pulling a boulder across the Sahara.

Once in a car in Michigan Ep told me about some theologian or other who believes that all things are Eternally Now, that everything happens always, and that it is only a function of human limitation that we should perceive time as happening one instant after the other. Basically, that the future informs the present as much as the past.

I like this idea too, generally enough to believe in it. I think our ability to reasonably predict the future is just as significant as our ability to faultily remember the past. I think that knowledge of causality and nature, in couplet with instincts, is the future's way of communicating with us.

I believe very strongly in trusting your instincts. Our instincts press toward the future ideal (if you listen to them and are not evil).

I stood in line at Starbucks. Starbucks has made a trend of fair-trade, which is a bit like Madonna making a trend of Kaballa, but there are more harmful things in this world to quibble about. John had just called me to tell me that the company where he interviewed decided not to call him back for a second interview. It's been three months since he graduated. Three months of no income.

We had decided that this was it. We've tried so hard to find work, we've given up our passions to make a living, we've strung our guts out across Mass Ave. and still no fruit. So this job was it. If he didn't get it, we were moving to Washington D.C. at the end of April, after his installation went up.

In the line at Starbucks, after John called, it occured to me that there was a contradiction in my two beliefs: 1) the Future Ideal acting on our desires and 2) all things being Eternally Now. Because it's highly unlikely that the Future Ideal will actually happen, how can the future (probably quite a sad, violent, dystopian one)really inform the present? How can we feel the presense of an ideal conclusion that will probably never happen?

I had an epiphany. Of course! It's not just one future that informs us, it's infinite variations of the future that informs us. And will every successive decision we eliminate more of those variations. But perhaps we don't elimate them from existence, we just eliminate them from our own lives. Perhaps somewhere, in some alternative dimension, we live the decisions we never made.

I bought John a London Fog as a consolation for not being hired. But the thought of moving to D.C. brought a feeling of immense relief. I'm not happy here. I want to be happy, but I've become a brittle survival machine, a tired sack of life. D.C. feels right to me, and maybe Boston has become so impossible because that alternative future doesn't exist for me. Maybe it never happened.

The days are longer now. The late afternoon sun shines through the windows of the train. I have daylight on my side again.

Milan Kundera

I've fallen prey to my same old habits in book-reading. I start a hard book, some heady non-fiction thing, and I read about 3 pages a day. It takes me that long because, honestly, I'm not smart enough to get them on the first pass. I have to take notes, usually, or at least read the same thing several times. Especially when it's freaking Baudrillard who picks up the same unfortunate habit of obfuscation that I've seen in every intellectual dude except Jung and Chomsky (so far). Once I figure out what he means I could easily have rephrased it to be intelligible. It's just bad writing. Does not impress.

But Anyway! Sometimes I like to read when I am sleepy, before bed, or on the train in the morning when my body still hates me for waking it up and thus refuses to feed any blood to my brain. So, for those moments, I pick up something funner, and fictionaller.

Like Life is Elsewhere! I love this book already, love love love it. I think, in fact, that it confirms my general suspicion that Kundera is one of my favorite authors ever. I hope that my writing eventually takes influence from his. High school English teachers always say you should show and not tell. I disagree, at least with how absolute that sentiment is. My favorite books are ones that tell. This style introduces a meta-person that goes above and beyond the diegetic characters. The narrator is in his/herself a character who flavors the entire narrative, though they are never materialized. The narrator isn't always the author, but in Kundera's case I see the invisible man in the armchair, some old scruffy dude under a yellow light with a cigar.

Other authors that tell instead of show: basically every British author before the 20th century, John Steinbeck, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vonnegut sometimes. They all create a sense of distance from the characters. It's paradoxical though, because at the same time we are privy to their most intimate thoughts, things they would never confess, things kept secret even from their own psyche. And at times - Kundera does this a lot - suddenly the reader is yanked back because the narrator pretends innocently not to know the character at a given moment. Or either, the narrator skips over natural facts because they are deemed irrelevant. The reader is kept in the universe of the story teller. They aren't allowed really to descend into the story, but the tradeoff is that the reader gains omniscience.

Anyway, another reason I really love Milan Kundera is because he - more than anyone I know - is able to weave together philisophical abstractions with standard plotlines without sacrificing either. I've tried and failed. Well, maybe not. Mirror Men is like that, but the plot is still subservient to the philosophy and that's my biggest problem in the second draft. It's hard!

I have a secret bias toward Kundera too - He's Czechoslovakian. When my folks crossed the pond, they left from Czechoslovakia, which of course doesn't exist anymore in that incarnation. Of all of my ethnic makeup, I'm most fascinated by being Czechoslovakian. I'm German too, but Germans are Western European and thus too familiar. My father's heritage is muddy at best, and what I do know of it (Scots-Irish, Cherokee) is well-worn in American bloodlines. It's Czech culture alone that remains mysterious, aloof. People hardly pay any attention to Eastern Europe anymore.

And I see it in my features. My full-Czech grandfather is the only person I really recognize myself in. I only know him from pictures, and that may have been a blessing. He never became human to me. He was only a distant, frozen expression locked in sepia. He looked handsome and troubled. He had my nose. In real life he drank his way to early death. He couldn't hold a job and couldn't stay away from pretty women and babysat my tiny mom by dragging her to bars with him. Not unlike a Kundera character, actually.

I even seen a vague resemblance in Kundera himself. It's hard to describe. It's less in the particular features and more in the holistic composition of the face. The full lips and strong checkbones, the squinty eyes, I don't know. But Kundera makes Prague feel like a place of narrow alleys and wide wooden lofts, and his generation was one of artistic - if not nihilistic - abandon, of sexual exploration and political unrest. I've been to Prague - it's as gorgeous as everyone says. But Kundera is one who shared with me the spirit of Czechoslovakia. Otherwise, I never would have known.

Housekeeping

Two Things:

The first, if you are in Boston you should definitely check out the Motion Graphics Fest this weekend. I'm particularly psyched about the Realtime Performance Showcase on Friday night at the Brattle. We're also going, on John's behest, to the Installation Showcase at the Axiom (you have to scroll down to see that one). The Axiom is just down the road from where I live, attached to the Green St. Stop.

John wants to submit his installation to the MG Fest in Austin, which, if he got in, would be a tremendous streak of serendipity because my friend's wedding will also be in Texas, about a week later, and we were planning to take a trip there anyway.

The second thing is this article in adbusters: The Politics of Youth. I'm not sure I catch what Hardt is tossing in the first half, but I do agree with this bit:

You know, the quality of one’s enemy has something to do with making one more or less intelligent. And I think that struggling against Bush made us stupid. Because we had to struggle against the most obvious of things: against torture, against the occupation in Iraq. I hope that we don’t have to struggle against these in the years to come. My hope for the Obama presidency is that we will be able to focus on struggles that really designate a better world. That does not mean utopian aspirations for the Obama presidency, but rather utopian aspirations for the kind of struggles that can be born under, and sometimes against, an Obama administration.

That rings a bell with me, certainly. Being pitted against a creature so utterly irrational as Bush made us all frustrated, and it made us all scared. Our president wasn't listening, and didn't care, and more than likely has a case of early onset dementia, and that freaked everyone out, because people were dying for him. We dealt with this for eight years. It's like the 2000 elections were the big bang of the racing gun, amidst all the struggle and scandle we saw something ugly leap out of the gate. So sure I got angry. Everyone did, our words didn't work so we tried volume instead. Now people on the right were shocked at our behavior in the most recent elections, shocked at how viciously we maligned miss Palin. Well, it's easy to play it cool - or at least to pretend - when you're on top, much harder when you're afraid. (and god! the thought of that woman!)

Now, I may not agree completely with Bama, but I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that at the very least, it's reassuring to know that he listens. I believe (not without a suspicious eye, but I believe) he genuinely wants what's best for the country, and in being that kind of president, he releases us from the anger. We don't need our brute strength anymore, we can use our reason. And isn't that nice?

I've been thinking a lot lately about Obama's new Faith Based Outreach program. It makes me squint my eyes. Thinking too a lot about the case of that lesbian who was fired (for religious reasons) from a Baptist non-profit which, incidentally, received federal funding. I believe quite strongly in separation of church and state, to the extent that it usually trumps all of my other beliefs. I think it's one of the best things in our constitution. But this particular situation is really tricky, as is the FBO program. And, of course, it's way more than I'm able to talk about tonight, when I should be sleeping an hour ago before I have work tomorrow. Eek!

A Great and Sleepless Weekend

This has been a fantastic weekend, even though I feel like I spent the whole time awake. Still lingering in sickness but slowly crawling out, I spent most of the nights coughing up my lungs and trying to breathe without my nose.

Friday I picked up the BUFF postcards and came home to hammer out some final notes on the Holly Hox shoot the next day. John and I fell asleep late, and somehow managed to continue arguing as we slept. I have no idea, I just remember talking and being angry without really processing how or why. We sort of get on these bickering streaks sometimes, it's just dumb stuff that doesn't really affect us emotionally. There's just a lot going on now, with the potential move to DC and the job hunt and the BFA and the wedding. We feel the weight of everything, definitely. But we keep each other around.

Saturday morning we drug ourselves out of bed, made a hasty pot of coffee and headed for Allston. My friend Caity invited me to dinner that night, and in a miraculous stroke of convenience, she lives with Nate, who is in the Holly Hox band. We had the shoot during the day and then hung out all night with beers. They are all people I don't see nearly enough.

Woke up this morning surprisingly hung over (3 beers?). Made some coffee and got to work cleaning the house like mad. Between my full time job and John's, um, indifference, the mess started piling up until it reached epic, war-zone proportions. I really wanted to get to the BUFF meeting today, but we ran completely out of time and had to start setting up for the evening Holly Hox shoot, as well as getting the food ready for dinner.

Five people over for dinner, crammed in our little kitchen over vegetarian coq-au-vin (keep an eye out for it on John's blog). When they left, I couldn't help myself, I started cutting the Holly Hox footage together. It looks great, which makes me really happy, and makes me feel confident for once. I haven't made anything of my own in a while, and though this is being done for someone else, it's to the same effect. Mirror Men has been my only self-contained project, really, in an extremely long time.

Now I have to work on the BUFF calendar a little, see if there's something I can go to tomorrow night (probably at the Milky Way if you kids want to join me), and write Anna Feder an email. It's three in the morning, I have work tomorrow, and I'm dog tired but I honestly don't want to sleep. I want to make more coffee and keep going. I really want to do well at everything I've got in my hands right now. I guess we'll see.

Festival Madness

The Boston Underground Film Festival is going to be awesome this year. Please do go! I'm going around to events in Boston with these postcards, so I might as well drop one on my blog.

It'll be March 19th through the 26th, and I'll post a notice when the site has listed a program schedule. From what I know and what I've seen of the programming though, it's really great and wet and awful and sometimes thinky-thinky.

(Card design by Bryan McKay, I'm 95% sure).

I'm going to be on the ground at a lot of the parties during the fest, and John is going to be doing videography, probably with an awesome dude named Dave. So, you know, sexy times.

And while I'm at it, if any of you are presumably coming to my wedding in Oct, and you want to do a performance or a vid or artwork or whatever, shoot me an email. I'll make a folder for it.

The Blessings and Burdens of Local Media:

I love NPR. Adore it. That is the true godsend of my day job. I realized that I can happily carry on in the most mundane tasks if I have a steady stream of public talk radio in my ear. Where normally I would have gotten my daily dose of current events from skimming the metro on the T on the way to work each morning, now I get more streamlined information virtually all day long on a myriad of subjects: politics, history, science, opinion, the arts, anything I want.

All public media outlets like NPR and PBS are extremely, inexpressibly valuable to our cultural welfare. On a national level, there is virtually no qualitative difference between these and commercial stations (I mean in terms of production value - I prefer the content of public media). I only wish that local public stations were...how to put this sensitively...better. But of course that defeats the purpose of being public, doesn't it?

Not necessarily. The problem inherent in public access stations is that, when you let anyone do anything they want, the quality of programming goes so far down hill that no one watches the channel. Community or Public Access is amazing in theory, but usually fizzles in practice. I'm not suggesting that we restrict people or programs, no no no. That is what I love about public access. I think every municipality should have an open TV station, just like a library. Media technology is at the heart of mass information in this society, and we need to keep up, teach people how to be active participants, or at least literate viewers. No one really acknowledges how important that is.

A few years ago I was a production intern at Somerville Community Access. They were pretty happening as far as that sort of thing goes. I loved Critical Focus, which, despite understandably low production value, was always smart and earnest and engaging. I just wish I could take moments and shows like that, including shows which are really fully about the community, and grow them to occupy a larger time slot. Because the truth is, you turn on most local access TV and it's a near incomprehensible mumble of people who simply don't know how to use the medium. So no one ends up watching even the good stuff.

I've got no clear answers to how to fix this, and it's probably arguable that we should leave well enough alone. I certainly don't think we should restrict member's abilities to air programs based on quality; that defeats the very foundation of membership. However, I suspect that everyone who cares enough to submit programming would also care enough to make it good, so the problem of quality could be solved in a more grassroots manner. I think people ought to be trained better, and I think youth-produced programs should be more integral. I think people should really pro-actively pursue a means of filling up what is literally dead time (by which I mean the endless rotary of lime-green announcements with elevator music), with real, quality, intelligent, provocative television.

Here we have, in our hands, the golden means by which media can be produced without FCC interference, corporate control, commercial obligations, and large special interest agendas disconnected from the needs and concerns of real people in the community. Here we have the perfect outlet for real interaction, real education, unbiased (or totally biased) interpretations, free education, and just about the most unrestricted speech you can put on the screen. SCAT let any member or resident bring in programming and it would get aired. You could show virtually anything, and that is amazing. Why aren't more people taking advantage?

It also concerns me because pressures are mounting on these little stations. As far as I know, institutions like NPR and PBS are safe for the time being. But local programming, which in my mind is theoretically more awesome than national broadcasting, is feeling the weight of big conglomerate cable providers who no longer have to compete and thus no longer see the need to fund such trivial pursuits.

Even your local news affiliate is almost certainly controlled by New Corp., which not only owns a strikingly large share of global media, but is controlled by a strikingly small number of people. And lets just say Rupert isn't exactly a paragon of journalistic integrity. So if people don't start recognizing this, don't start truly engaging with the blessing that is public media, then they won't even notice when it's taken away from them.

I guess that's just what I'm worried about.

Theologic: Refuting Atheism as "Logical"

This idea came to me today while I recalculating GPAs. It took me so long to jot down the notes that I had to call it a "lunch break" and ended up not actually eating. So I hope it was worth it.

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I'm sure that anyone who catches the sight of this title and who probably also knows that I believe in a "god" would expect an entire litany of earthly properties inexplicable by science alone, all sorts of proclamations about the awesome improbability of life itself, the beauty of it, yada yada.

I hope you know me better than that.

There is certainly a wide spectrum of those who would consider themselves atheists, I realize that. Most of them would be considered agnostics by a lot of outside standards. Conversely, a lot of agnostics could be argued as atheists. By some standards even I would fall into those categories (though I try not to fall at all). Some self-titled atheists believe vaguely in a higher order, but not a sentient, omnipotent entity, not a "person-god" as is common in western religion. Some atheists believe there is quite a lot of layered mystery in the universe, but do not consider it "higher", or even paranormal. A disturbing number of general atheist types have revoked specifically the religion of their upbringing, including its historically violent rise to power, which is a faction I could easily be considered part of, but we part ways where they use this momentum to reject god itself. Personally I find this shortsighted. since they make a point to deny specifically the god of their religion, and in doing so accept all of the terms and features attributed to god by the very religion against which they rebel. Does that make sense? It's not the belief, but the lack of analysis that I take umbrage with.

And again, to a fundamentalist in any religion, others of a different faith are just as good as atheists. So here is what I mean: for the purpose of this essay, an "atheist" is a materialist, a total reductionist. And atheist is one who specifically refutes even the possibility of some higher order, who negates the existence of a soul, who claims that even love is nothing more than a rush of neurotransmitters, that life was a chemical accident, that science is the only truth, all "transcendence" is a function of human subjectivity, etc.

Those are the most extreme of atheistic ideas, the materialist. I'll use them for the argument, not to build a straw man, but to cover all bases, from farthest left to farthest right.

Then there is "god". I use lower case god, and quotes, to get as far away as possible from the connotation of the Judeo-Christian god. He's in there, but not what I'm talking about. Ok, I'll drop the "god" quotes because they are annoying and I'm sure you know what I'm saying by now.

Also, I am certainly not setting out to say that atheism is illogical. The point is that atheism, like theism, is neither logical nor illogical. I'm saying that in trying to saddle the cosmic "what" and "how", logic is both useless and irrelevant. And no, the irony doesn't escape me that I would use logic to point this out. I hope only to dismantle the erroneous belief that atheism is logical, intellectual, while belief in a higher power is emotional, cultish, and ignorant.

Fundamentally, we do not totally know the true nature of our universe (here the scientist would agree with me much more enthusiastically than the zealot). The problem is that logic relies on evidence, but evidence is only good if you know what you are trying to make evident.

In a courtroom trial, both the prosecution and the defense must state their aims before going any further. What good is exhibit A if you don't know the charge?

In the same way, all attempts to prove or disprove god fall flat, because they first presume to know the nature of god. For example, there's a pretty funny lecture on the internet about intelligent design. I will try to find it. As an actual theological argument, though, it's not much though, because it argues that we are too dilapidated to have been intelligently designed, and in doing so presumes that everything god creates would be perfect, or even good.

Given that, lets accept for a second that we don't know the reason we exist because we haven't been able to prove anything. It's a question mark. I hope you can at least accept a question mark, broad enough for literally every belief you could possibly have.

Now picture that the universe is a closed cardboard box. Inside that box is the ultimate truth, is the why-are-we-here. Christianity says there is a red rubber ball in that box, Judaism says there is a wooden spoon in that box, Islam says there is a tiny kitten, whatever. But atheists say there is nothing in the box (or science could be in the box, it doesn't matter) that the box simply assembled itself through a random but meaningful accumulation of cardboard particles, and trust me, that's okay.

The problem is that as a culture we are trained to think in opposites, in contrast, in dichotomies. There is black and white, yes and no, up and down, substance and absence. And our popular mode of thinking is that there is either cosmic substance or there is cosmic absence. There either is a higher force, or there is not. So, for every possible option, there is a corollary absence. For every spoon, or ball, or kitten, there is a not-spoon, a not-ball, a not-kitten. You add all of these up, and it seems far more likely that there is "nothing" there than there is specifically one of these things.

It looks like of like this: (forgive me, I never took statistics)

It could keep going. Add up the totals there, it seems in this case that "Nothing" has an infinitely greater chance of being in the box than David Duchovney.

To a materialist, "Nothing" is the great big counterpoint to any and all supernatural possibilities. It is infinitely more probable that any one belief, yet powerful enough to hold its own against all beliefs, and and it is this notion which falsely ties together materialism and reason.

But get this: Nothing is not nothing.

Nothing is Something.

Nothing is not the absence of belief, it is a belief, pro-actively made. It's strength is derived when two ideas contrast each other.

The key point is this:

Ideas have opposites. Not things. Absence and substance are only opposites in concept. In reality, substance has no opposite.

A chair has no opposite.

A table has no opposite.

A tiny kitten has no opposite.

Outside this box, we must think in ideas. Unable to see through the box, ideas are all we have. That is why spiritualists and atheists alike find it so easy to draw the neat line between something and nothing.

Inside the box, however, is not an idea, but a reality. Even if that reality is nothing. In this case we are dealing with real substance, "nothing" is not the opposite. Nothing is only one of the possibilities, including all the various incarnations of "nothing" that people think up.

So it really looks more like this:

Inside that box there can only be substance, again, even if that substance is nothing. Nothing has weight. Nothing is exactly equal to all other possibility.

The ultimate purpose of religion is to shake that box long and hard, to listen for clues and make compelling and educated guesses as to its contents.

Ludicrous is the religion or the individual who stands back and points resolutely at the box (especially if it is only hearsay and they have never themselves touched it!) and says with utter certainty that "X is in the box", because no matter what, you're hedging 100% of your bets on an infinitely small chance, and that certainly is illogical.

To say "I shook the box and heard nothing" has a great deal more reason behind it, because it stakes no guaranteed claim and speak only from experience, which is all we ever have to speak from beyond studying what the great shakers and listeners of our time heard themselves.

There is, of course, always the option to stand back and say "I have no idea what's in the box" but what a hard thing to do when it is so close within your reach!

It may seem now, from my little flimsy percentages, that I believe it far more likely that something exists than nothing. Not so. Because once you start adding up the disparate substances, you are back to the Idea-of-substance (real life objects cannot be added to each other like a chair added to a fork). Each separate answer to "what's in the box?" must be considered individually to maintain their substance-hood, for you cannot weigh an idea (all anything!) against a substance (the lone nothing). It's nonsensical.

And I'm sure there are those who reject the box metaphor all together, who say there is no interior and would rather fold it up into a piece of flat cardboard. But know that if you do this, you are not refusing theology in the name of science. You are refuting science. You are negating Darwin, you are killing Nietzsche and the big bang. You are refuting every possible cause, refuting even that we were ever caused at all.

You are welcome to do that, of course, but it's trying a bit hard, if you ask me.