If the Medium is the Message...

This is Alexis Gorman, 26, who 'works in marketing' in my hometown of Manhattan. Here she is on the front page of today's New York Times (August 2, 2008). The picture is sort of a re-creation, I suppose, of Ms. Gorman calling her boyfriend and telling him that they were through ... on his voice mail! On purpose!

“Text messaging someone ‘I would prefer not to see you again’ is really not my style,” she added. [Noble! And thanks for not saying 'That's just not the way I roll.'] “But at the same time, I wanted to avoid an awkward conversation.” [Not so much.]

The article tells of 'Slydial' a service that allows you to avoid having a direct conversation with the person you call, ensuring that you go right to voice mail. As such, the service allows us to communicate without communing. Like email, like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and blogs, we can post information and read what others have posted--all without actually connecting.

So are these forms of communication artifacts of an increasingly alienated age? Or is this just technology saving us the cost of a stamp for the letters we no longer have to write?

2007

First, you must know what you are dealing with...

When I got out of music school, I was afraid I was going to starve to death so I got a bill collector job--of all things! Most of the time I'd sit at my desk with a stack of account cards calling one client after another, asking them to pay. But if I couldn't reach them I had to drive to their houses and try to collect mano a mano.

One fine fall day I drove to this nice little house in Charlottesville Virginia and found my client--a skinny, white man of some 60 years or so--planted on his sofa while his wife--not a signatory--puttered around him. Although it was only just mid-afternoon he had already had a couple of cocktails and was feeling no pain. It was obvious pretty quickly that the guy had no means or intent of paying his bill.

'First you must know what you are dealing with, and then you can proceed,' he said as he explained that he hadn't worked in six months. He repeated it probably a half dozen times during our 15 minute conversation - 'First you must know what you are dealing with, and then you can proceed.' Damn It! I thought, We'll never get paid.

Twenty five years later I can still see him sinking into his Early American Herculon sofa with his pants at mid-thorax. Given his age and the likelihood of alcohol toxemia, he must be on a stain-resistant sofa in the sky by now.

But, to me, he resides in a little Cape Cod in my head forever reminding me - 'First you must know what you are dealing with, and then you can proceed.'

And, of course, we never did get paid.

Shoulders of Giants

We understand the world through our direct experience, the shared experience of our communities, and the knowledge and wisdom of those who came before us. But what a jumble this last one is! Let's work on that a little bit. I suppose that should be 'knowledge and wisdom' that have survived the test of time. That's still not enough. It's really what's survived by chance, isn't it? (If you think the phrase 'god's will' might fit in there, what, prey tell, serves god to burn down the library in Alexandria? And what wisdom might have been lost to that inferno?)

Consider the view from here, this generation. We are awash with stuff--cars and planes and cell phones and laser pointers and computers, plastic and magnetic resonance scanners and medicine made by cracking the genetic code, the Internet, and on and on and on. It's everywhere and we use it everyday. So much so it's practically invisible. Two hundred years ago none of it existed. Moreover the science that makes these inventions possible didn't exist. That science, and the engineering and invention, that gave rise to all that stuff, must have a profound impact on how we understand the world. So imagine understanding the world WITHOUT ALL OF THAT!

So, science has changed how we understand the world. Participating in a religion without acknowledging scientific understanding does not return the participant to a purer day, a time closer to eternal truths. It is self delusion and magical thinking. Moreover those that endeavor to do so cannot hope to know how those who lived in pre-scientific times really saw things. Those ancients didn't ignore what their everyday lives told them about how the world works and neither should we.

As Newton said we stand on the shoulders of giants and owe it to those who came before us--in science, in the arts and in religion--to move forward with all the tools at our command.

Addicted to War

Chris Hedges has written a hell of a book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. He describes with significant nuance his experience of war (as a journalist) including his 'addiction' to being in a war zone. For him, with great peril came his most robust life experiences. Recovering from his addiction he writes with passion against wars of choice.

I was raised in a family of Quakers--the Society of Friends, the proper name. While the religion teaches absolute pacifism my father fought in World War II and Korea. I came of age just as the USA withdrew from Vietnam. I do not believe in absolute pacifism but would never have fought in Vietnam or Iraq, wars we undertook inappropriately.

That said even as a 50-year old man I can still hear the call of battle, and almost regret being untested, unproven and unformed by its horrible rigors.

That odd sense of loss has always been stirred by the wonderful movie Patton.

...type, type, type...

In our gut we feel that life cannot have arisen randomly. But consider other hard-to-believe things proven to be true. For example, we know from a wide range of instruments that the universe is nearly incomprehensively vast. If we could truly understand the scope of the universe, hold its disorienting vastness in our mind, then it would be a simple thing to understand how conscious life arose from a serious of improbable events.

Why?

Imagine that the universe was a practically endless field on which you could lay out every possible combination of events necessary to generate life--presence of raw materials, appropriate proximity to a star, animating events, etc. Given the nearly infinite scope of that imaginary field--the universe--the emergence of life is, in fact, practically unavoidable.

Consider the issue from another angle: it has been said that if you have enough monkeys typing for long enough one of them will replicate the works of Shakespeare. This sounds absurd until you imagine that you have a near infinite number of monkeys and typewriters. Given that, success becomes inevitable. So it is with life.

Is God missing from this picture? No. God's being is the fabric of the universe animated by his grace and emerging from his creative pulse, some 15 billion years ago.

What Are The Chances?

I do this gratuitously philosophical training module, which I might call 'What are the chances?' In it, I step the students through their lives in reverse, noting moments that would have led them somewhere other than NYC in this particular moment ... class, career path, etc. I then extend the exercise to their families, home towns, respective nations, the earth, solar system, etc., back to the Big Bang. (A bit like the scene from Our Town.) From all this we are able to do a rough calculation of how infinitely improbable it is that we find ourselves here and now. I show them a picture of a person standing on the tippy top of a pyramid to illustrate the point. But then I ask them again what the chances are that they are here. It's a trick question in that the answer given that they are here is 100%.

The sense from the ensuing conversation is that miraculously--god or no god--we are here against incredible odds and that means, in a sense we arise inevitably from an environment well suited to bear us up--a beautiful idea. And even if this weren't true, it can be significant if one student hears it and believes it. Because, then, they might take the chance in the next moment to do something truly weird but deeply true to their deepest natures, and from that something beautiful might arise.

Buy!

'Buy the appliance and your life will never be the same,' the salesman said as he drove his pitch to its climax. Pretty corny. But even though the guy had a steely edge, I was hooked. 'I really do need to slice my vegetables a whole new way,' I thought, '…and two for the price of one, no less!' I looked in my wallet and found nothing but dry cleaning slips. Then I noticed it almost 5 o'clock. 'Damn, gotta go,' I sighed thinking of all the potatoes I wasn't going to crinkle cut.

I walked next to the salesman's platform on the way out and looked up at him again. There was something dark in the corner of his mouth. 'That's gross,' I thought, 'What the hell is that?'

It was blood.

Somewhere during his spiel he'd bitten his lip or burst a vein or some such. Whatever it was or however much it hurt, he didn't stop. 'This sales thing is a primal business,' I thought as I waited for the bus. I changed my mind and decided to walk by the stables on on my way to Time Square.

'That's the world, man, you gotta sell or die.'

Where there is despair . . . hope.

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always.

~Mahatma Gandhi

A Sunday Morning Reflection

Really Close ...

"Through dance, we're as close to God as we're going to get — until he calls us home."

--Judith Jamison. artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York Times, July 5, 2006

It's the Corporatorial Me!

Okay I had to post this so I could host it so, so; okay, Narcissus? hELLO!?!

Our Pocono House

You Never Know Who You'll Meet in the Poconos

The World as I Found It

As I was walking through the 204th Street A Train station in 'Upstate Manhattan,' I happened to see this. It's a panel where they hang posters. This is what happened after they took down the old poster and hadn't put the new one up.

Is it art?

Well to me it seems beautiful in a way. I wouldn't hang it over my couch but there seems to be artistry here. It arises from the interaction of random patterns left by bits of glue and old poster, and from the choices that someone made to 'decorate' the spaces in between--the random and the intentional.


Perhaps even more interesting is the way nature presents a mix of order and chaos without a visible artist. Having seen beauty arise from the work of artists, do we not require that God exists given so much beauty in nature?

By the way, check out this outrageous site from which I got this picture.

Work

Here's Prince Arjuna on bended knee before his part-time charioteer and full-time god Krishna begging out of his job as a warrior just as the battle is about to start. This story is told in the Bhagavad-Gita, which has become a central episode in the epic Hindu scripture of the Mahabharata.

Their discussion yields a mythos and logos for moving in and through the world in peace--the paradox being that throughout the work Krishna tells Arjuna to fight because he was born a warrior.

Now the Bhagavad-Gita is very subtle, wonderful and strange but it just struck me this morning how at odds it is with our modern American view: work should be something that, at least potentially, we enjoy, that might help us achieve self actualization. Here, however, Arjuna hates his job but must do it or the community will collapse. Now, as a near pacifist, the choice of the allegory makes me uncomfortable but the concept, I think, is right.

But to the writers of the Bhagavad-Gita this zeitgeist is an anathema--the individual is here to participate in a community where everyone has a role to play. When such roles are taken on--and the grasping ego left behind--the individual is freed to become part of something greater than himself: a community.

I agree with Sartre that, at least at times, 'Hell is other people.' But, from what I can see, the only way this life makes sense for the individual is by doing his work for, and in community with others. As such, there is a paradox: Sartre was right but, it is also right to say that heaven is other people as well.

Done

Flocks

For years I've held the idea of complexity in nature arising from very simple rules in my mind and, I suppose, my heart. I am often in awe when I watch a flock of pidgeons flying outside my bedroom.

This is particularly striking as I find the beasts themselves fairly objectionable. But in a flock in flight they are beautiful.

God in the News

There are a dizzying number of stories in the press about God this week. What with it being holy week for the Christians and the approach to Passover for the Jews it's hardly surprising.

These stories by the nature of the News media bring us 'new' information about God--a newly discovered gospel according to Judas, an op-ed piece in Sunday's NY Times noting that God and politics are by their natures mutually exclusive, and an article from Salon.com discussing all this madness surrounding "The Da Vinci Code."

In honor of Jesus, the last first. The Salon article exposes a lot of the hokum surrounding Brown's Code and reveals that the book upon which it was 'inspired'--Michael Baigent's "The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History--is even worse. He suggests reading James Tabor's "The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity" as having a stronger tether to the earth. Tabor speaks of the creation of Christianity in the very earliest years of the Church as a struggle between Paul, whose religion is what we now call Christian, and that put forth by Jesus's family headed by his brother James, which has faded away.

I would love to know what was lost.

Keeping Your Evil

The Bhagavad Gita contains one of the most illuminating ideas I've ever found. It states that the Creation--all the physical and metaphysical worlds--comprise three characteristics called Gunas: Satwa, Rajas and Tamas. Satwa is that which conducts consciousness, Rajas that which reflects consciousness and Tamas, which absorbs it. These characteristics are always present and always interacting with each other. Strengthen one and the others will reassert themselves. I've found this formulation descriptive of my life's experience.

Springtime perturbs the balance.

What does this have to do with evil?

Stay tuned ...