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White Noise by Don DeLillo – Can We Claim the Powers of our Age?

White noiseWhite noise
Don DeLillo, Don DeLillo; Penguin Books 1986
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I read Don DeLillo’s White Noise in 2005.  The thing I remember most from the book is a key plot event (spoiler).  A main character becomes addicted to a pill that removes her fear of death, the side effect being a loss of ability to distinguish fact from fantasy.  Imagine that. I wonder at the moment if a potent enough fantasy could remove one’s fear of death?  In 2005 I was in the height of my back-to-the-land phase, thinking about family, tools and nostalgia.  I suppose I was trying to sort fact from fantasy.  I wrote down quotations from the book on those subjects and others.

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.   There must be something in family life that generates factual error.  Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being.  Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive.  Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts.  Facts threaten our happiness and security.  The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.  The family process works towards sealing off the world.  Small errors grow heads.  Fictions proliferate. (81-82)

There are no amateurs in the world of children. (103)

On tools, can we claim the powers of our particular age or are we freeloaders on our culture?  Have we taken the time to learn how things work, as shown by our ability to independently recreate its tools and inventions, and articulate its insights?

“It’s like we’ve been flung back in time,” he said.  “Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress, but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers?  Can we make a refrigerator?  Can we even explain how it works?  What is electricity?   What is light?  We experience these things every day of our lives but what good does it do if we find ourselves hurled back in time and we can’t even tell people the basic principles much less actually make something that would improve conditions.  Name one thing you could make.  Could make a simple wooden match that you could strike on a rock to make a flame?  We think we’re so great and modern.  Moon landings, artificial hearts.  But what if you were hurled into a time warp and came face to face with the ancient Greeks.  The Greeks invented trigonometry.  They did autopsies and dissections.  What could you tell an ancient Greek that he couldn’t say, ‘Big deal.’  Could you tell him about the atom?  Atom is a Greek word.  The Greeks knew that the major events in the universe can’t be seen by the eye of man.  It’s waves, it’s rays, it’s particles.” (147-148)

Wilder sat on a tall stool in front of the stove, watching water boil in a small enamel pot.  He seemed fascinated by the process.   I wondered if he’d uncovered some splendid connection between things he’d always thought of as separate.  The kitchen is routinely rich is such moments, perhaps for me as much as for him. (212)

There were times when he seemed to attack me with terms like ratchet drill and whipsaw.  He saw my shakiness in such matters as a sign of some deeper incompetence or stupidity.  These were the things that built the world.  Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species.  What could be more useless than a man who couldn’t fix a dripping faucet – fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn’t sure I disagreed. (245)

It is easy to mistake back-to-the-land thinking as just nostalgia. The modifier ‘just’ is the mistake.  Nostalgia may speak to a misstep, a feeling that something good was lost by accident but the memory is fading.  Many good solutions for the present can be found in the past, but they are ignored because they are not new.  Those who sense it struggle to revive consciousness.

Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there. (257)

I don’t trust anybody’s nostalgia but my own.  Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage.  It’s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.  The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence.  War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country. (258)

Was I immersing myself, little by little, in a secret life? Did I think it was my last defense against the ruin worked out for me so casually by the force or nonforce, the principle or power or chaos that determines such things? …  I sat at my desk thinking of secrets.   Are secrets a tunnel to a dreamworld where you control events?

The north wind blew right through my old farm house.  There came a time to leave.  Still sometimes I think about these things.

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Categories: Fiction, Scratch.

By johnmiedema
— January 11, 2011 at 3:32 am

The Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth, by James Frey

The KeyThe Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth
James N. Frey; St. Martin’s Press 2000
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The universal elements of myth can be used to write good fiction.  The same elements can be observed in the everyday stories of our lives too.  What follows are notes I took from a past reading of James Frey’s The Key.

Myth-based fiction is patterned after what Joseph Campbell has called the monomyth … a reenactment of the same mythological hero’s journey; it is prevalent in all cultures, in every era … ‘a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man (1).

Myths are core story telling patterns which writers can draw upon in the fashioning of their own stories.  It is not the only type of story, but it a powerful one.  If nothing more, myths are like old familiar songs that people love to hear, a trustworthy source of entertainment.  More deeply, myths express fundamental patterns of human experience — archetypes in the collective unconscious.  As such, myths tell the handful of stories repeated in the ordinary lives of humans of all ages, informing us how to be heroic when we need to act, gradually molding our culture.  The telling of mythical fiction blurs the distinction between the personal and collective unconscious – between present and past, self and others – offering the reader a passage from the personal to the universal and perhaps the divine, a moment of transcendence.

The structures of the monomyth can be sorted into two types: traits and characters, and regions and motifs.  Certainly never mistake the structures as requirements.  Nearly all are optional and subject to wide variation, doubling up, or absence.  The structures are merely story telling ingredients.  Heroes and villains have some consistent traits:

Trait Hero Villain
Courageous (or finds courage) √
Very capable; clever and resourceful √ √
A special talent that sets the hero apart √ √
Lives by own rules, or on the fringe √ √
Takes the lead at some point (perhaps reluctantly) √
Has been wounded, or becomes so √ √
Motivated by idealism, or becomes so √
Sexually potent/appealing √ √
Hubris √ √
Stoical √
Unusually Loyal √
Physical Superiority √
Special Birth √
Prophesied Destiny √
Sometimes branded, e.g., a scar √
Sometimes cynical √
Sometimes mouthy/sharp tongued √
Cruel √
Wins key victories by luck √
May quit at end √
May whine and grovel √

Campbell identified three “regions” or phases of the monomyth: Separation, Initiation and Return. Each region has standard motifs.  Each motif is associated with a change in the Hero.  Separation motifs include:

  • Hero exists in common, Ordinary World, dealing with ordinary scale conflicts.
  • The Herald delivers the Call to Adventure.  If the hero resists the call, he is an anti-hero.  He degenerates, turns into a victim, and faces increasing external pressure until he heeds the Call.
  • The Hero may be warned not to go by a Threshold Guardian.
  • He may seek advice from a Wise One.
  • He may seek weapons from an Armorer.
  • He may obtain magic from a Magic Helper.
  • He may have a tearful good-bye with a Loved One.
  • The Hero crosses the Threshold.

Initiation motifs:

  • Frey calls this region the “Mythological Woods”.  It does not need to be fantastical, just different and strange for the Hero.
  • The Hero is in new territory, and must Learn New Rules.  He will obey some of the rules he learns, and ignore others.
  • The Hero is Tested, often by the Evil One, and often fails some or many of these tests.  The tests may take the form of physical challenges such a heights or a long journey, or inner struggles.  The tests ready the hero for transformation.
  • Death and Re-Birth.  The Transformation.  The Hero becomes a new person.  Affects self and external perception of Hero.  Not always a change for the better – the Hero may become savage and destructive, perhaps experiencing a second re-birth later.  The Re-Birth may be in spirit only.
  • Confrontation with the Evil One, usually in the lair of the Evil One.  Hero may lose this confrontation, narrowly escaping, perhaps facing the Evil One again later.
  • May obtain a Prize of Value, if the Evil One has been defeated.  The prize could be an item, e.g., grail, or knowledge.

Other initiation motifs:

  • The Hero Uses Magic, and/or Magic is Used Against the Hero
  • The Hero Falls in Love
  • The Hero Rescues a Captive
  • The Hero is Betrayed
  • The Hero is Marked, e.g., a scar, Frodo’s finger, indicating a change in character.
  • Hero may Explain Himself, once, saying why he is the way he is, focusing on his wound.  Occurs before Death and Re-Birth.  Foreshadows the change. E.g., Hamlet’s soliloquy.
  • The Hero may be Rescued by Allies, but only once.
  • The Hero Loses an Ally to Death, e.g., Obi Wan Kenobi.
  • The Hero may be Rescued by Divine Intervention, but only once, and never at a critical juncture, e.g., Pinochio rescued from the Fox by the Fairy.
  • The Hero shows his willingness to die for a cause, and maybe does die.
  • The Hero experiences a Change of Consciousness, perhaps drunkenness or a vision.
  • The Hero attends a Grand Celebration, as the guest of honour, or perhaps uninvited.

Return motifs:

  • Two parts: Journey Home and Arrival.
  • Modern stories often shorten this phase, focusing instead on the individual achievement over the community.  This is the fulfillment phase, and very poignant – use it!
  • On the Return Journey, the Evil One may try to reclaim the prize, causing another Confrontation, e.g., Saruman in the Shire.  If the Hero was bested by the Evil One, he gets a second chance to defeat him.
  • Hero crosses the Threshold back into his community, the Ordinary world.
  • The Hero uses the prize to Bestow Boons on his Fellows.
  • Hero is hailed as a Hero.

Resources:

Campbell, Joseph (1948). Hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Egri, Lajos (1946). The art of dramatic writing. NY: Simon amd Schuster.

Frey, James (1987). How to write a damn good novel. NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Frey, James (1994). How to write a damn good novel II: Advanced techniques for dramatic storytelling. NY: St. Martin’s Press.

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Categories: Writing.

By johnmiedema
— January 10, 2011 at 4:03 am

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley – Wherein I Prate of God

The perennial philosophy. The perennial philosophy.Aldous Huxley; Harper 1945WorldCat•Read Online•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley is the last in a series of books I read about Christian mysticism some years back.  I found a review of it along with others in a dusty computer folder, and I am now sharing some of the better ones.  The reviews date themselves to the time I still used double spaces after periods (now edited out).   In this book, Huxley articulates some universal themes in religion.  I have added some reflections from my current perspective.

Monotheism.  God is a divine unity, the ground of the human condition.  The concept of God being a unified ground is quite different than the traditional notion of a omnipotent being.  I often prefer polytheism: “When the knower is poly-psychic the universe he knows by immediate experience is polytheistic.”

The human condition is multiplicity.  The self has no substance, and must be in a state of discontent or suffering, always desiring other, and idolatrous.  Political monism is idolatry, causing suffering and obstructing spirituality.  “The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dreams, who do the persecuting and make the wars.”  Very Buddhist, especially if you extend monism and idolatry beyond politics to rigid narrowness of thought in general.

Morality, worship and spiritual exercises.  Morality is selflessness, loving others, and vigilance to do good.  Rituals can facilitate insight, or be idolatry.  Spiritual exercises include contemplative prayer, meditation and silence.  Miracles are not important; it is important to perform common tasks with love.

Trinity.  God is immanent (a personal, inner light within each person), transcendent (trans-temporal, beyond the human condition, rulemaker), and incarnate (in the world).  Huxley might agree with my rejection of the Christian concept of a fall from which humans need to be redeemed through intervention.  I prefer the Gnostic notion that we can become Christ.

Unitive knowledge.  The soul is identical with the Divine Ground, so we may have a direct experience of God.  The experience transcends self, words, truth, even faith.  Again, this fits with Gnosticism.

Two excellent quotes praising the virtue of silence: “Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them.  And no wonder, for the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.”  Huxley said that in 1945.  One of my all time favourite quotes from Meister Eckhart, “Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.”  That said, I close this little collection of reviews on Christian mysticism.

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Categories: Cosmology.

By johnmiedema
— January 6, 2011 at 3:08 am

Not a Tame Lion by Terry Glaspey

Not a tame lion Not a tame lion: the spiritual legacy of C.S. LewisTerry W. Glaspey; Cumberland House 1996WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder Not a Tame Lion by Terry Glaspey is a biography of C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia and a number of books on Christianity.  This Christmas, I will be going to see the movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, despite the lukewarm reviews.  I was a major fan of the Narnia books when I was a kid.  Years later, I appreciated Lewis’ clever apologies for Christianity even if I did not ultimately agree with him.  Despite his claims to be the most reluctant convert, I sensed he felt obliged to give reason its due course before he could permit himself conversion.

Having read several of Lewis’ books, I can recommend Glaspey’s representation of Lewis’ thought.  Lewis was a romantic. He wrote fiction, like Narnia, to baptise children’s imaginations with the mythology of the gospel, to reveal the magic of the symbols so that the gospel might live for them.  This was precisely my experience as a child.  I wished I could go to Narnia and triumph, alongside Aslan, over evil.  Christianity was a pronounced aspect of my upbringing, and it occurred to me that its struggles were of the same mythical proportions, offering me great adventures.  Lewis is at his most brilliant when he talks about myth.  “In using myth, we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”  Lewis argues the importance of desire, wonder, and melancholy in the understanding of God.  No desire can truly be satisfied, which is evidence that there is more to life than we can sense, and that we belong elsewhere.  Fish do complain that the sea is wet.

“We are not merely trousered apes.”  I just like that line.  Lewis insists on the existence of objective values.  Naturalism provides no basis for objective values, he says, since there is no outside frame of reference in naturalism, and the consequence would be a morality of subjective choice.  I do not find his argument compelling.  Morality could be a social construct, devised for the wellbeing of the whole against dangerous individuals or small groups.

Lewis turned the Christianity I knew on its head by saying that God is the author of pleasure.  In fact, evil could never invent a pleasure.  Well, that sounded good.  Lewis liked smoking a pipe and having a mug of beer.  “I have tried to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration.”  Spiritual vices, like pride, are much more evil than bodily vices.  Excellent.  He is a great writer too in describing the importance of a sensual relationship with God.  “All kinds of simple experiences can awaken within us a sense of God’s reality, whether it be the call of a bird, the crisp sweetness of an apple or a refreshing splash in cool water.  As our mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun, so these patches of Godlight give us a tiny theophany, a vision of God.”

I leave you with a few more choice quotes.

You would not have called to me unless I had been calling you, said the Lion.  The Silver Chair

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.  Mere Christianity

The coarse joke proclaims that we have here an animal which finds its own animality either objectionable or funny.  Unless there had been a quarrel between the spirit and the organism I do not see how this could be: it is the very mark of the two not being ‘at home’ together.  Miracles

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Categories: Cosmology.

By johnmiedema
— December 20, 2010 at 4:28 am

Meetings with the Archangel by Stephen Mitchell

Meetings with the Archangel Meetings with the Archangel: A Comedy of the SpiritStephen Mitchell; Harper Perennial 1999WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder “To discover now, after twenty-two years of Zen training, that I was still susceptible to otherworldly visions …. Ah, well.”   The narrator has written a book, Against Angels, protesting all the popular attention given to angels in recent years, and rationally discussing the facts known about angels.  Now, he sees an angel.

The fictional book has enough substance to have been worth writing.  It contains a section with six pictures depicting a maturing understanding of angels.  The chief theme is that angels are a projection of our spiritual selves; it is important to stop seeing angels.

  1. Longing for the angel.  The young man looks to the sky for angels, shading his eyes from the sun.  He is open to possibilities but still thinks freedom belongs to somebody else.
  2. Seeing the angel.  The young man is kneeling and trembling.  Perched on a rock, a fierce angel stares down at him.  He has seen the angel, but the beauty makes him weak and confused.
  3. Wrestling with the angel.  The young man stands wrestling with the angel.  The wingless angel strains but has a hint of a smile.  “At last! He has come to grips with the essential point.  There is neither heaven nor earth, holy nor unholy, just the mysterious other, bearing down on him with all its might.  He has no choice now.  It is not a question of victory or defeat.  As long as he is grappled by an other, he is grappled by a self.  And though he may not be aware of it in the midst of their sweaty embrace, the other wants nothing more than to be defeated.”
  4. Letting go of the angel.  The young man sits comfortably, gazing into the distance, holding a flute.  The angel, naked, tiptoes off, weary, content, maybe limping.  The struggle is over; he no longer remembers who won.  The light of creation shines from him.
  5. No angel, no self.  Both angel and man have vanished.  The angel is integrated; the man has no one left to confront.  He has stopped looking inside or outside.  “He has hung out a shingle on his front door that says, “Vacancy: come on in.”
  6. Entering the marketplace with angelic hands.  The young man is middle-aged, bearded, and smiling.  He holds a basket of goodies for children.  He has graduated from spiritual practice, from obligations, from enlightenment.  He acts for pure pleasure, the benefit of all beings.  But all beings are already saved.  Open his basket, you will find as much or as little as you need.

Upon seeing the angel, he allows it to teach him angelic sex, and guide him on a tour of the heavens.  He learns that the sorrow of humanity is a special thing, the opposite pole of the joy of the angels, a necessary experience to understand others, to truly have love and compassion.  “You can love only where you enter.”  It is for this reason that when angels meet humans the help they can offer is so limited.  “Actually, our greatest service is to stand before you as clear mirrors.  The compassion that a human may feel coming from us is his own mirrored compassion.  The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.”

Nothing flakey about this book.  It has survived many weedings of my book collection.

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Categories: Cosmology.

By johnmiedema
— December 16, 2010 at 8:59 pm

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

Gnostic Gospels Gnostic GospelsElaine Pagels ; PHOENIX (ORIO) 2006WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder In 1945, an Arab peasant discovered a number of manuscripts near Naj Hammadi, Egypt.  These manuscripts were eventually published and became known as the Gnostic Gospels, a set of gospels that may have been suppressed by the orthodox church of the time.  The Gnostic Gospels contain many ideas that differ from orthodox Christianity.  The differences are described in Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels.  It was published back in 1979 and I read it some years ago during an exploration of Christian mysticism.  I chanced upon a summary I wrote back then, and I’ll share a bit with you.

According to the Gnostics, we have a divine nature or soul that is identical with God, but we mistake our ego for our true self.  We recognize our ego is fragile and spend all our energy trying to preserve and promote it, denying that it will die.  Our ego may mature to sense God, but we think of God as something distinct and separate from our ego.  We mistakenly feel sinful or fallen because we think our ego can never reconcile with God, except perhaps through divine intervention.  “Whoever comes to experience his own nature — human nature — as itself the ‘source of all things,’ the primary reality, will receive enlightenment” (pg. 144).

Our soul or divine nature is not at odds with our ego, only greater than it.  Identifying with the divine makes our ego far more effective in dealing with the practical world in a meaningful way.  Our ego is a vehicle of creation in the world and must be cared for, not hated or destroyed.  By recognizing our divinity, we become equal with Christ, and have the ability to even surpass his achievements.  Gnostics do not become Christians, they become Christ.

In the orthodox view, God is a male, suggesting male dominance in the church, part of a hierarchy leading up to the Pope.  The orthodox church emphasizes the suffering of Christ on the cross, and its implication that Christians should suffer.  By submitting to the Church’s doctrine, a sinner is reconciled with God.  In contrast, the Gnostics observe that Mary, a woman, was the first to see Christ in a vision, not the flesh.  They distinguish between the Old Testament and the New Testament God, and organize their worship in an egalitarian form, with men and women members of the congregation taking turns as leaders.  The Gnostics seek a spiritual church rather than an empirical one.  Christians need not suffer away but can claim the power of Christ.  “Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds.  When he finds, he will become troubled.  When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over all things” (pg. 127, quoting Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas.

The concepts described here fit nicely with the Buddhist ideas I have been exploring more recently.  I prefer to avoid talking about God as an entity, but I can work with it too.  Like some Buddhists, I think it is more important to advance a secular ethics and practice than to fuss about particular religious views.  In the end, I subscribe to the common view of a perennial philosophy underlying both the world’s religions and humanist views.

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Categories: Cosmology.

By johnmiedema
— December 12, 2010 at 3:59 pm

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

Shop class as soulcraft Shop class as soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of workMatthew B. Crawford; Penguin Press 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder I suspect that Matt Crawford’s publisher came up with the title of his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. The title attracted and repelled me for a year before I read this book. The now largely defunct shop class was still around when I went to high school in the eighties. I learned a measure of competence in handling materials and their machines that has proved useful and satisfying over the years. This connection piqued my interest, but “soulcraft” had the distinct ring of marketing. The subtitle was even more difficult, a clear pitch to fans of Pirsig’s famous novel, a book I have read once per decade for the last thirty years. I would not lightly judge a poser. Fortunately, Crawford speaks with his own voice on a timely issue, the role of the trades and right livelihood in the information age.

Too many children are being hustled off to university in pursuit of so-called knowledge work. Trained in electrical work and vehicle maintenance as a youth, Crawford pursued a doctorate in philosophy. On the way he took a job that seemed ideally suited to him, writing abstracts of journal articles for a database, only to find the quota impossibly high for comprehension. After obtaining his PhD he was hired by a think tank and paid very well, only the results of their “thinking” were predetermined by the oil company that funded it. He left the academic world to open a motorcycle shop. To hell with economics and opportunity cost. He preferred the cognitive challenges of the trades. Historically, scientific thinking came from a close handling of materials by bright workers. Crawford explains how the separation of thinking and doing is an artificial and harmful practice that started with industrialization and advanced by Taylor at Harvard.

Crawford asserts that the separation of thinking and doing is now being applied to office work. In my dozen years of work in corporate IT, I personally find there are some satisfactions of the manual kind that Crawford thinks are reserved for the trades. Like the craftsman, I take pride in writing code that I know will never be appreciated by anyone except perhaps another developer. I get excited when the switch is about to be flipped on for a major program I wrote. Still, it is true that the only tactile experience I get is that of the keyboard. Worse, as programs begin to write programs, lower level coders are being phased out in favour of higher level configurators who have little real control over their products. This shift eliminates the need to master technical skills. Computers are becoming the assembly lines of thought sausages.

The problem is not technology. Crawford knows his Heidegger. We are technological beings, handy to the core. We need to feel our tools in our hands, not manage them remotely or regard them abstractly. There is a big difference between the explicit and universal nature of Ohm’s law, compared to the tacit and situational knowledge of the mechanic that electrical circuits must be tight, dry and clean. He is not being anti-intellectual, but attesting to the satisfaction and cognitive challenges of the trades. It is good advice even from an economic viewpoint. In the face of global outsourcing, one still cannot hammer a nail over the Internet.

The book is dedicated to his girls, which is nice, but the sexism in Crawford’s writing is glaring. The text is masculine in almost all of its pronouns. References to firefighters and chess players are stereotypical, while the one “she” plays music. Sexist jibes are considered appropriate training for young men. Classrooms can only contain boys prone to action by the use of psychiatric drugs, and corporate teamwork is for girls. Call me politically correct if you must, but the sexism is too much. We should have learned by now to welcome girls into the trades rather than scare them off with this tiresome prejudice.

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Categories: Scratch, Technology.

By johnmiedema
— December 11, 2010 at 5:28 am

PlayerOne by Douglas Coupland – An Anti-Story for Mid-Life

PlayerOne PlayerOneDouglas Coupland; House of Anansi Press 2010WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder Douglas Coupland speaks difficult truths. Generation X rang true for those of us in our twenties: I get it, they’re not living, they’re shopping. Microserfs messed with the digital hopes of our thirties. Now, PlayerOne tells a tale for our fourties, an unexpected and worthy selection for the 2010 Massey Lectures.

Five men and women of various ages and motives occupy an airport cocktail lounge when oil hits $250/barrel and rises. Chaos and violence follow. Those sheltered inside the lounge contend with a new world without oil. What does it mean to be human? Love and sex, jobs and money, family and faith; all come under scrutiny. Life as they know it is unraveling. The end of oil is a realistic prospect. Last Tuesday, the International Energy Agency warned that oil prices could average $113 a barrel by 2035. Are there too many humans casting too heavy a footprint on the planet? Were we meant to live past fourty?

With so many people on the planet, what is our unique story? Information overload has washed out our individuality. Death is closer than expected. PlayerOne is an anti-story, telling small fractured narratives in the absence of a grand coherent one. Every decade we observed the waning influence of a layer of infrastructure: our parents and schools in our twenties, our jobs in our thirties, religion in our fourties. What institution will give us meaning now? Frightening, but exciting too, like a rocket that has just left the atmosphere. Do we have enough fuel onboard to venture forward?

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Categories: Canadian, Fiction.

By johnmiedema
— November 13, 2010 at 7:47 pm

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer: Scratching the Itch

Into the Wild (MTI) Into the Wild (MTI)Jon Krakauer; Anchor 2007WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder Chris McCandless, a young man with a fiery intellect and strident health, lived and died by his dream of Alaska. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer tells the story. Graduating from college, McCandless donated the last of his $24,000 savings to Oxfam, a charity dedicated to fighting hunger. He left behind his dysfunctional parents, his ID, and his car. He wandered America, by foot, kayak, and train. Sometimes he hooked up with people he met along the way for a meal or a job. Ultimately he made it to the wilds of Alaska. It is clear from his notes and photos that he lived a remarkable hundred days in the wild, feeding himself and contemplating nature and life. A few mistakes trapped him out there, and he starved to death. It is easy to condemn his foolishness. For some of us, it is hard not to envy his courage.

Dreams like this are always fuelled by literature. McCandless read Tolstoy, London, and Thoreau. Regular readers might remember my “Scratch” collection of books. It is the best word I can come up with for a cluster of ideals, starting with going back-to-the-land, simple living, and self-reliance, stretching to authenticity, personal sovereignty, and absolute enlightenment. Mind you, I am a complete amateur outdoors and a living example of the mundane. For a few years I lived with my family on a rural property, trying my hand at country skills. I called it my Scratch collection, after Carl Sagan’s well-known quote, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe”. It was not so much about the land as the freedom. Being alone in nature, we lose track of our ego. It is a hint of enlightenment.

Sean Penn made a movie adaptation of Into the Wild, with a compelling performance by Emile Hirsch, and a haunting soundtrack by Eddie Veder. I had watched the movie before, but have watched it twice more since reading the book. The story of McCandless on its own leaves the viewer aroused but fearful, hungry for insight. The book goes deeper, offering the perspective of other perilous adventures, including Krakauer’s own insane winter climb, the one that later compelled him to follow McCandless’ trail.

Near the end of his short life, McCandless underlined this line from Doctor Zhivago:

… Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name …

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Categories: Scratch.

By johnmiedema
— November 1, 2010 at 7:06 pm

The Art of Happiness at Work, by the Dalai Lama and Cutler

The Art of Happiness at Work The Art of Happiness at Work14th Dalai Lama, Howard C. Cutler; Riverhead Hardcover 2003WorldCat•Read Online•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder “There are only two or three human stories …” said Willa Cather. Fed up with hearing the same frustrating stories going nowhere, I left my early counselling career in the social services. Three hour meetings, fundraising my own job, bureaucracy, politics. Helping is not a profession, I concluded. I stumbled my way into information technology. 15 minute meetings. Good pay. Working for a multinational IT company, I never stayed long enough with a client to get mired in politics. Programming has about five years of juice in it. At first it seemed that a technical job escaped people problems, but all problems are people problems. I noticed how I only speed-listened; people rightly regarded me a prick. The juice tapped out. If not social services, and not IT, then what? I saw librarianship as a blend of the two trades. Five years later, part-time library degree completed, I have yet to find the right library job. What now?

I picked up The Art of Happiness at Work by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, a psychiatrist. The Dalai Lama honestly admitted that his work as a spiritual and political leader differs from the average job. The book is deliberately light on Buddhism, and his advice sometimes just seemed common sense, e.g., we should be grateful for the opportunity to work. My recurring finding with Buddhism, however, is that its seeming simplicity can yield unexpected depths. The Dalai Lama suggested that one who unceasingly changes jobs is failing in normal human adaptation. It is unexpected advice coming from a Buddhist; their primary philosophy is that everything changes. It stung because it hit home. I change jobs often, only staying with my IT firm for ten years because I can change clients often.

Cutler and the Dalai Lama discuss the vital role of self-understanding in happiness at work. Employees need to realistically appraise their skills. Personally, I cast a pretty good spell at interviews, only to panic later about my claims. It is ego talking, of course, the usual cause of suffering. Honestly, I am slow to process new ideas. This slowness is a function of my introverted brain. Like all introverts, I engage long-term memory when processing new information. Slowness can be a strength. It is also true that I sometimes miss the central point of a discussion. On the other hand, I have a radar for the offbeat, for inventing unusual solutions when none seem available, for anticipating long-term consequences others miss, for appreciating underdogs whose talent often goes unnoticed. This kind of self-assessment helps employees find their sweet spot at work.

Right livelihood is part of the eight-fold noble path of Buddhism. I had this idea that librarianship would be right livelihood for me, using my information management talents to serve people. Maybe, but the more I learn about working in a library, the more I see it may just be another job after all. The Dalai Lama surprised me by his lack of insistence on finding a so-called ‘higher’ job. His modest advice, “If you can, serve others. If not, at least refrain from harming them” (173). Evolution may have us wired to need work for happiness, but it is important to see the limits on finding meaning at work. Do the job, okay, but complete your meaning elsewhere. We can serve people, not because we are in a helping profession, but simply by being more mindful of those at hand. I remember the other half of Cather’s quote, “… and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before”. Human stories may vary little on the surface, but most meaning comes from the small details of our lives. I find myself listening more to co-workers and clients, as people. It helps.

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Categories: Cosmology.

By johnmiedema
— October 20, 2010 at 9:38 pm