intellectual properties

dreams of armageddon

thanks to the World Ending May 21st prophecy, and all the associated internet memes this week, last night i dreamed that it happened.  my POV was from somewhere in the north oakland/berkeley hills, and it was a clear night.  then suddenly:  a mushroom cloud and bright orange light from the west, and san francisco was gone. charcoal. obliterated. you would think there would have been more panic in my dream, but there wasn’t.  it was more morbid curiosity, or not unlike going into the hills to watch the 4th of july fireworks.   some time later, a smaller flash of light/explosion, approximated somewhere in berkeley.  even knowing that people i loved had died, i was still unpanicked.  perhaps it was shock.  i don’t remember what i planned to do, only that it seemed beautiful and i was not worried.

i assume this surfacing of the world ending May 21, 2011 calculation is Christian one-upmanship/backlash/backchannel against the “heathen” 2012 prophecy, which i also put no stock in. i mean, i did go to a remote canyon in Sedona, Arizona to Party Like It Was 1999 for Y2K, but that was more because the opportunity presented itself. i didn’t really care if the world ended.

in any case, jokes aside, being as i am, i have been thinking about What If The World Did End Tomorrow? i didn’t do anything different this week. no shopping sprees or sudden forays into hard narcotics, but i did think about the state of my soul. and perhaps from some belief perspectives, this is the sign of a true blind sinner, but i think i’m alright. i do not believe that Jesus Christ is My Savior, but i think he was, whether a fictional figure or a real man, a righteous revolutionary and i’m down with the philosophy of the JC. i’m pretty sure that i have not lied, cheated, or stolen from anyone without asking for forgiveness any time in the recent past, i think my moral compass is compassion-centric, and i believe that i do Good Works and not only avoid but fight against Evil. in short: i believe i have good karma.

i think that’s why in my dream last night i wasn’t worried. because, hey, if the world does end tomorrow, there’s nothing i can do to stop it, and nothing i would’ve done differently about the way i live my life. i mean, i would have DONE some different things, but not changed my philosophy. i think they call this “peace of mind”, and i feel good about that.

non sequitur: fasting

for reasons i won’t go into right now, on certain days i have an inordinate amount of time on my hands, and i often just start reading wikipedia entries on things that i’ve recently heard talk of or seen referenced that i realize i don’t actually know much about.  like Lent.

reading about Lent led me to reading about fasting, which i was also thinking about because some friends of ours are restricting their diets of starches, not because they have any malady, but as yet another nutritional experiment (possibly related to the recent phenomenon of the 4-Hour Body.)  it’s one of the quirky things that always amuses me about the bay area: all the fasting and dietary experimentation that goes on amongst the hippies and hipsters. it’s like a hobby around here, depriving oneself of things and proclaiming certain foods “bad”.  since when are carrots bad for you?  i always think of that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer becomes a minimalist and declares “You know what I discovered? I really like depriving myself of things. It’s fun.”

disclosure: for a couple of years i did attempt to fast on Thanksgiving day as a way to express my gratitude for food, but it turns out i am prone to hypoglycemia and so any attempt at fasting – even juice fasting – has always failed for me. also: this is not cynical. i find the practice of self-imposed restrictions interesting and a worthwhile endeavor in this land of excess and plenty; i am not begrudging it. i am amused.

anyway, the wikipedia article on fasting omits mentions of it being a pastime for the hippie-bourgeois-foodie contingent on the West Coast of the United States. it focuses on the intersection of religion and fasting, which i found quite enthralling, particularly when i got to the orthodox Christan section:

For Eastern Orthodox and Greek-Catholic Christians, fasting is an important spiritual discipline, found in both the Old Testament and the New, and is tied to the principle in Orthodox theology of the synergybody (Greek: between the soma) and the soul (pnevma). That is to say, Orthodox Christians do not see a dichotomy between the body and the soul but rather consider them as a united whole, and they believe that what happens to one affects the other (this is known as the psychosomatic union between the body and the soul).

well that definitely jibes with all the yogi-fasting-tribal-ritualistic-hippie talk i hear around here, but although i grew up in a very Christian town -protestants and catholics alike – no one i knew ever fasted a full day in their lives that i was aware of, and this reverence for body-mind connection was never discussed in my church that i recall (outside of some being teetotalers). yet it seems if you read the bible closely enough and take its instructions literally, as many followers do, you should be fasting (or preparing to fast) MOST OF THE TIME.

i guess the nugget that stuck with me is that for a supposedly “christian nation”, most have managed to ignore the biblical bits about mindful and grateful eating and the body as a temple for the soul, and instead we have a land of processed fast food and an obesity epidemic.

oh, and this: “Moses fasted for forty days and forty nights, twice back-to-back, without food or water; the first, immediately before he received the tablets on the mountain with God. And the second, after coming down, seeing the Israelites practicing idolatry, and breaking the tablets in anger.”

well, isn’t that some interesting context.  i might see/talk to God after climbing to a mountaintop if i hadn’t eaten for 40 days too.

the book of eli (spoiler alert)

last night we watched The Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic film.  the setting: nuclear (?) war causes hole in atmosphere, sun scorches earth, most people die, the scattered burnt-out civilization that remains looks a lot like hanging out with the DPW at burning man, only more desperate and violent.  all books were burned, and water is so scarce it becomes the controlling force for everything people do.  it’s sort of a cross between an old cowboy movie and mad max.  what makes it exceptional is 1. it’s beautifully shot in black/white/monochrome, and the mood is minimalist and desolate and 2. the cast: denzel washington, gary oldman, tom waits, jennifer beals, and mila kunis.

the premise, however, is tricky, and where i got a little put off (spoiler alert):

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the game

he wrote this (heavy sigh), and all i could think of to say was this:

from 10,000 feet, the way i look at it is there is no winning.  this isn’t a game. therefore: there is also no losing. n’est pas?

sometimes this makes me feel incredibly, interminably pessimistic.  i don’t believe in “true love’ as usually defined.  i don’t believe in God, or even souls. i think humanity is animalistic, and our attempts at control are futile. i think this is all an accident. honestly, and i am not exaggerating when i say this, philosophically, metaphysically, i am a total nihilist.  i do not believe ANYTHING has objective meaning.  none of it. everything is subjective, and in my line of thinking that equates to meaninglessness on any scale outside your own brain.

other days, that point of view is the only thing that keeps me sane and alive, because if you look at it from the flip side – if nothing means anything then everything is ok, and somehow sort of beautiful.

surreality

surrealism was once partly defined by the belief that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values bring conflict and war upon the world.

i am definitely having one of those days.

i ask myself

noting that the ordering of these two questions changes the meaning/subtext of the exchange:

Q: “does it matter?”
A: “who cares?”

Q: “who cares?”
A: “does it matter?”

whether it changes only a little or quite a lot depends on context.

memories and dreams (Waltz with Bashir and Inception)

“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.”

— Jeremy Irons

(note: this was written before having read any one else’s email/posts about Inception, so as to not blur/influence my initial thoughts, so this is probably missing many things other people have already discussed. this doesn’t really have any big spoilers but you might avoid reading the Inception part if you haven’t seen the film yet and are going to.)

memories, dreams and reality – how distinguishable are they? i have fairly vivid dreams almost every night, and also a lot of memories i’m not sure are real, so this topic is of high interest to me personally. the function of dreams has been studied at every angle from spiritual to physiological, and the psychological process of creating memories has been well studied and recorded. memories and dreams have been the subject of art and films for as long as can be traced, as these realms are difficult to understand, and seem to contain keys to human consciousness. recently i read that recent experiments with sleep deprivation and “dream withdrawal” showed that if a person is deprived of dreams they begin to show psychotic tendencies while awake, and therefore maybe the function of dreams is to allow for a time of quiet insanity and that maybe it is not sleep that is necessary for well-being, but dreams (sorry, cannot find citation).

I. 2 weekends ago we watched Waltz with Bashir (available on Netflix) – a mostly-true film about participants in the 1982 Lebanon War and the horrible civilian massacre that occurred (warning: i was unprepared for the actual real footage of this event shown at the end of the film). the mission of the main character is to determine which of his memories of such a chaotic and traumatic period as a solider are true. the film is done in absolutely gorgeous animation, which supports the dreamlike quality.

i found this film not only educational (i myself had no idea what happened in that war, as i was an American and only 6, but i remember Beirut being a city name i heard on the news quite often during that time), but brilliant in that it captures not only the confusion that soldiers feel in chaotic wartime (forgetting all training/orders and acting only in self-defense, mass hysteria, trauma), but also the crux of the question of what memories are and how they are created. all but one of the characters in the film is a real person, and each of them, through the series of interviews, questions who/what/where/why/how. if 2 people are in the same place at the same time, but each remembers it differently, how does anyone ever know what really happened? i highly recommend Waltz with Bashir not only for its beauty and history, but for the bravery to question traumatic political events that collectively have a million different memories contributing to the public understanding.

II. watching Inception last weekend [SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING HERE], i have to say i was unimpressed by its lack of creativity and i got bored. my brain just kept returning to every other film on the relative subjects of the intersection of dreams, memories and consciousness manipulation i’ve ever seen (Waking Life, Scanner Darkly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dream a Little Dream, and the director Nolan’s previous film, Memento), and most of all, the classic Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. the idea of the film was simple but the execution was overly complicated, and somewhere around the “third level” snow scene i was completely bored and wondering why we were being taken through all that ridiculousness. for other people that was probably a very entertaining part of the film, but i’m not someone entertained by shootouts and explosions and special effects, so it all seemed incredibly superfluous and that last 1/3 of the film just dragged on forever for me. that, and the whole embedded love story, there to give personal weight to the intentions of the main character and provide another plotline (and possibly a whole subplot of her participation not brought to light in the film), seemed entirely unnecessary to what otherwise would have been a fairly straightforward idea: we plant an idea in a dream, and make the dream complex enough for the dreamer to believe it was their own, and s/he wakes up and changes life course. however, the big question on that premise, for me, was this: has a dream ever made you actually change YOUR life?

the final question laid in front of the viewer in the final second of the film was just so OBVIOUS – was it ALL a dream? if so, whose dream was it? – that i am not even interested in addressing it, because i think 1. the point is that you will never know, and 2. the script doesn’t seem mature enough to actually have a tight resolution to that even if you watched the movie 100 more times looking for “clues” (here’s a link though if you want to).

the psychological aspects of the film are of more interest to me than the film itself, and while i understand they are all intertwined, the substory of the wife going mad after spending 50 years in a dream and not believing “reality” (i guess i should put that in quotes) was much more intriguing to me than the main plot, looping back to the idea of what it means to remember, and what our consciousness decides our story has been, and how.

i am more intrigued by the ranting homeless people i see screaming at bus stops or cases of extreme savants and schizophrenia: science-fiction unnecessary, there are humans on this planet at this very moment who are living in an entirely different world than we are. those of us who consider ourselves “sane” are only such because our brains have set up layers of filters for the infinite amount of sensory data it receives. what if those filters were to disappear? many suggest that perhaps this is what manifests in our dreams.

i know i am going very wide with this, but i have very little use for fiction unless i can relate it to and question real life (i guess that makes me a “plausibilist”). i am not big on fantasy, and i have little suspension of disbelief when it comes to films. so i spent most of the time watching Inception thinking about all of these other things, and caring less about the plot and the characters. is that what the film was supposed to do? if so it did its job, but i could have done without the blockbuster bits (i much prefer Linklater’s style).

(btw if you haven’t seen Ellen Page in Hard Candy, i highly recommend that deeply twisted film.)

.::.

now that i’ve written that, here’s some good bits of what other people have written about Inception:

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online book club: Absence of Mind

i have a few different groups of friends who semi-regularly get together to accomplish various types of activities and tasks, some of them athletic, some of them intellectual, some communal, some artistic, some of them therapeutic, some of them purely entertainment. (the best ones are a combination of all of those things).

and while we’re all in our own sub-sub-sub culture together at least enough to know one another, there are in some cases some deep divides in terms of belief systems, and the topics of religion and science.

i just saw Marilynne Robinson on the Daily Show promoting her new book about religion vs science, Absence of Mind. She articulated my position better than anyone i’ve seen/heard/read in a while. that position is something more in agreement with religion than even i would think, in that i don’t necessarily always believe what scientists have determined is empirical evidence, and that – in many cases – what science claims is evidence enough to prove a theory is not much different at the core than many religious arguments.

In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought—science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.

or maybe this is a rather exaggerated distinction the author used to rabble rouse and sell books; i’d be interested in hearing the discussion either way.

watch: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-july-8-2010/marilynne-robinson

so the book is out in hardcover now, and i’ll be waiting for paperback. a used version. (for those who have asked about using amazon….i first always support buying from your local independent book store. but for the purposes of providing onlinks here, i support buying books from small booksellers selling on amazon, which you can readily find by clicking the “new” and “used” links.) i have no idea what level of understanding of the belief systems of these fields the reader needs to have to engage this book, but it seems accessible to me.

now, of the things that none of the groups i currently semi-regularly meet with is a book club, although we have talked about it numerous times. so what i am proposing here is that it be an online book club (hosted where tbd), and possibly also an offline book club, if enough people in the immediate Bay Area want to join it. we’ll have to see how many people participate, so the format remains to be seen. but if you do want to participate, online or off, leave a comment or email me, and when the book comes out in paperback, i’ll let you all know (how long is that?). if you’ve already read it, good for you. you’re ahead. do you recommend this book?

postmillennial hope

“I give thanks to America, a country insane enough to declare the pursuit of happiness to be an inalienable right.”

i’m reading Susan Sontag’s most excellent book In America: A Novel, about a group of well-to-do Polish people who give up everything – for some of them including fame and wealth – to become farmers/settlers in Southern California around 1876. why would these people, who had everything, give it all up to work as field hands? the book is amazing at expounding on the thoughts/ motivations of the such early immigrants – The Dream of America was *so big* that even those who had everything in their homelands were willing to give it all up for a shot at The Dream. how many of those dreams came true?

relatedly, yesterday i shared on gReader and facebook this piece from Adbusters written by Michael Larson, a philosophy teacher from Pittsburgh:

Postmillennial Tension: Can we be the ones we’ve been waiting for?

some excerpts:

That dominant ideal of modernity is tied to a notion of ever-expanding progress and limitless consumption. The oil crisis of 1973 signaled the onset of the postmodern malaise. “Our future was all of a sudden mortgaged,” writes Bourriaud in Altermodern. So while capital has continued expanding its reach in other areas, there has been a lingering denial – an inability to mourn the lost object and the dream’s impossibility. If this was the death of the dream, then our present reality of global warming, water and food shortages, market collapse and the continued proliferation of violent factionalism make it clear that we had better get on with mourning and confront the sorrow we have been trying to repress. Putting it off has only allowed the problems to grow.

We have had a century of continuity in which the basic operating assumptions of the economic system have been hegemonic. In fact this version of “modernity” was to have closed the book on history: We have reached the best of all possible worlds; there are no alternatives. Proclaiming the end of history intimates that our desires have been satiated and that there is nothing further to strive for.

i don’t read adbusters too much anymore because i think a lot of it IS too hopeless/ armageddonist/depressing, but i still subscribe to the online feed and what caught my eye about this one is that there has been something in my mind for a really long time now with respect to my particular demographic – educated middle class americans with plenty of food, clothing, shelter – that goes something like “WE HAVE EVERYTHING.  WHY AREN’T WE HAPPY?”, which seems simple, but it is all heavy with a million questions about both of the words “everything” and “happy”, and extends way beyond myself and my community to America as a whole, and our self-image of always “the best. america is the best. the best of everything is here. it is yours to take if you work hard enough”.

but it turns out that maybe, just maybe, that isn’t true, that the American Dream was a fallacy, or, even worse: what if the “everything” isn’t enough when you get it? what if, when you get to the top run of the ladder – the house, the yard, the boat, the kids, the degrees, the “everything” – what if then that isn’t enough? it must be really depressing to get to the top and realize it’s not far enough.

my speculation is that, like the early Europeans who came from perfectly good lives with solid communities to risk everything on the American frontier, there is a part of human nature that is utterly insatiable, no matter what you give it, and that the “everything” we want isn’t as physical as we’ve been lead to believe – via consumerism, marketing – the “everything” is something intangible, and possibly unattainable. it’s what drives us as humans to do what we do. if it were attainable, how would we evolve?

my generation (X), and the next (Y) seems to be the first in a few to really FEEL this. we were taught, growing up in the 80s especially, that once certain things were attained, peace and happiness would follow. but all after our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents hard work, building industries and fighting for civil rights and freedom, those of us in the educated middle-class who have access to all the things our forefathers dreamed about, here we are, standing on the top rung of the ladder, and we’re still not happy, and the world – and the rest of the world – it’s even more of a mess than before.

that is why the one sentence that hit me most in this piece was “Jean-Paul Sartre described anguish as the recognition of responsibility and the ensuing need to act without guarantee, without hope.“  as Americans, we have a lot of responsibility in this world, as we consume most of the resources and control a lot of the politics. but what hope can we feel now about it all, when it seems we inherited a wealth of square pegs but none of them fit in what turned out to be round holes?

so then finally, the author asks:

So we find ourselves in this moment of rupture, precariously exposed to risk and perhaps devoid of hope. Can we think of these facts as possibilities? Can we confront our situation and imagine what things might be like otherwise, even without guarantees? The end of history has reached its end. Can we be the ones we have been waiting for?

i also felt a lot of this, but wasn’t able to express it, during Obama’s HOPE campaign, like all of Democratic and minority America felt like everything had been done – all the groundwork was laid out, and now everyone was pinning their future on one man/one moment that was going to seal the deal. HOPE is what Obama tried to sell us, and for the election season, we bought it. but here we are 1+ years later, and people are getting depressed because the whole world didn’t change when Obama took office.

so what about now? we have to stop waiting for the thing that is going to save us. we have to stop standing on the top rung of the ladder, thinking there is no where else to go. we have the tools to build a new future. we are what we have been waiting for.

the ugly truth

in response to THIS:

But the more I write on the internet, the more I keep bumping up against people who don’t want to wonder and move. They want to stand still in the simplicity of knowing it all.

The truth is a mess of lies and broken bones. First it’s this. Then it’s that. And then it’s gone. Is that bleak and negative and hopeless and ugly? What’s the alternative? If I bring up Haiti (or Auschwitz), it’s not like I’m TRYING to be hopeless and ugly. It just fucking is hopeless and ugly. That’s what it is, man, when people fly planes into buildings and the earth swallows 200,000 people. No one gets out alive. That makes ME a bummer?

If you think I’m a bummer, then I feel misunderstood.

i was just discussing this concept today WRT suburbia, and some of the people who decide to live there, and how different their worldviews must be than mine. not everyone, but some of them, trying to escape all the inequities of the world and live in a clean little bubble, and how i either ride my bike or the bus or the car through the ghetto at least 2x a day, and almost every time i see something that makes my heart break.  why am i choosing this instead of what they have chosen? sometimes i think it’s because it helps me to see the truth of this world, a point of view i cannot live without;  it keeps me grounded, and compassionate.  keeping yourself protected only breeds isolationist tendencies.

that whole Keats “beauty is truth, truth beauty” thing – i call bullshit.  sometimes there is nothing beautiful about it, despite the poetic temptation of believing everything that has truth in it is beautiful.  i agree there is so much beauty in the world that sometimes it is enough to make you want to cry;  that doesn’t exclude the opposite from also being true.  i think about this a lot, really – how to be positive in a world full of negative, without putting blinders on. and i also hate that some people think i’m a downer because these are the things that fill my brain – these things i didn’t create, and sometimes i need to talk about them, hoping that words will help.