The Necessary Self

When I was young, I didn't really get Superman - I still don't, more than likely, to be honest with you. But one thing one notices about Superman, to me rather apparently, as that at root, he is a character we are to wish to emulate. Superman is, it seems to me, the ideal self in the American popular imagination (well, that's not true - perhaps it is simply the ideal man? I'd love to, as an aside, hear what the impression women had of the character in their exposure to him). He's strong, he's invulnerable, he is noble, he is attractive, etc. He's also an outsider, an immigrant (more or less - does interstellar space count as immigration?), an individualist, an, if you will, entrepreneurial hero - a believer in individual hard work, I suppose.

Well, I  came across this comic via twitter earlier this evening, and it made me consider, what does that mean? To be an ideal hero. I have an interest in this, because once upon a time, I thought I should like to write an epic poem, and epic is, naturally, attracted to the heroic. What always struck and bothered me was that, at some level, I never really believed the heroes of the great epics. Odysseus, Aeneas, Achilles - I never could quite believe the author was trying to draw an image of a real person. Superman? The same way. Batman (in his more modern incarnations) perhaps is somewhat different, he's supposed to have an internal psychology. Superman, in the incarnations I know him (and understand, I'm no comic books expert, I know there were some angsty Supermen out there at one time) is not human. He's an image of a man.

This bothers me, it troubles me. Because, you could not WRITE Superman as a real person. Oh, you could write a real person with superpowers, you could write other stories. But he wouldn't be Superman anymore. Superman can't JUST be someone who leaps tall buildings or what not. He also, in order to truly be what I'd consider Superman, stands for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Not like... he has to put a show on for TJ&AW, or do his best to approach it. He is meant to TYPIFY it. Putting Superman in a situation is less a story than a sort of physics experiment, with the impossibly pure variables that high school physics always presents. This is the difference, to me, between a Superman and a Batman (or even Spiderman, say) - when you ask me what would Batman do if he had to choose between saving a bus of screaming children, or the woman he loves, I think "Well, what is Batman like? What would Batman choose?" When you put Superman in the situation, it becomes a simple matter of ethics: "What is the virtuous decision?" Answer that question, and you know, that's what Superman would do (but then, that's a thorny question, I understand). The rest is just logistics.

At first glance, this limits Superman, perhaps, and this is how I always thought of him - what fun is it to read Superman? He's not human. I can't identify with him. But reading this comic today, got me thinking of all that I could learn from it. Because Superman is the Perfect Man - the Man to Emulate as it were - I can look at a comic book like this, and think:

"What does this say about virtue in our culture?"

Of course, I understand, there are people who would disagree with the comic as presented - culture is a generalization, and we all differentiate from our straitjackets in our own ways. But in general: this comic rang true to me. This is what the movie-ending right thing to do was.We value life, but we value freedom to make our own choices. We value compassion. We value kindness. We value democracy, and just a BIT of anti-establishmentarianism. These are who our heroes are, people like this. Our heroes are NOT John Stuart Mills-like, they do not calculate, they seldom work for the greater good in the abstract (when they do, they often turn evil). They work for the good of the individual, they work, most powerfully, saving one person at a time. Stopping a bomb from going off that will destroy New York, well, that's a MacGuffin, we don't sit there identifying with all the folks that would get blown up. We identify with revenge, or with saving a child, or with redemption, or any of the other human, individual stories that movies are about.

More than this, what is fascinating about this comic is that, in the end, Superman, inhuman, impossible, unapproachable, is all about wish fulfillment. He is superhuman, and this (much like Christ, or Buddha) makes him that-which-we-would-be, you know? And sometimes that's silly. Sometimes its, we wish, perhaps, we had enormous pecs and could look good in spandex, or a good square jaw, or that women swooned, or whatever nonsense.

Sometimes, though, its the utterly impossible and silly situation laid out here. This isn't how it happens in real life. Have you talked to a depressed person? It isn't like this, this is performance art, not mental illness. But, when someone IS depressed, it terrifies those who see them, it's this feeling of utter, complete helplessness. And we want to believe, NEED to believe, 'If I could just talk to her, just me, not all this nonsense the rest of the world is throwing at her, just the two of us. I could change her mind.' There is an arrogance there, but it is the saddest, most human form of arrogance - the arrogance born of desperation and fear. So, Superman, invulnerable, impossibly effective, is less an image of how we think things really are, but instead, a vision of how we wish they would be. If only I had been a bit kinder, a bit wiser, a bit stronger, a bit more steadfast, a bit more loyal.

The truth of course is messier. The truth is, sometimes, there is no strong enough, no wise enough, no kind enough. Sometimes, my apologies to John Lennon, but Love is NOT all you need. We cannot will the world to be right, simply by being our best selves. We can just throw ourselves at the problem, sometimes fail, and usually haunt ourself with that fear: Was I not enough? What if I had been just a little more than I am?

You can't. You can only be what you are. But that's not comforting. That's a pronouncement of doom. Some people perhaps, they can take that philosophically, find the peace of the serenity prayer, often prayed, seldom really attended to. Some people, some people need Superman, some people need to keep trying to be more.

Maybe that's what Superman is. Like Christ, he is the love so great, it inspires self-loathing, the security so great, it pricks our fear, the comfort so great it stirs our guilt. Grace and Works. The queer alchemy of redemption, that says you must be so terribly much, and realize it is never enough, and then it is enough.

Read More......

The Problem I Had With "Plain Kate"

This morning, I finished reading 'Plain Kate' by Erin Bow, a book that Amanda assigned me for our Lovebirds Challenge, and it has been gnawing me since. I'm very glad I read it, because something about it is bothering me.

Understand, first, it was not a book. It was a pretty good one in fact. There was a few moments that lifted me out of the flow of the story in awkward ways, but not very many, and I'm oversensitive to that, and tend to demand that books be written especially for me, in some ways, especially modern ones. And aside from that, it was a well written book, tightly fairy-taled, in a way that is neither cloying or anachronistic (the two ways I usually find that fairy tales find their downfalls).

But, there was something about it that bothered me. (mild spoiler, I'll avoid the big ones). There is this cat, the main character's cat, who at one point gains the powers of speech, and becomes sort of mentally part human, because it's Kate's greatest wish - that she have a travelling companion. A friend, more succinctly.

Now, first of all, I found it a bit irritating that not 10 pages past this point, where she had been a lone and friendless the whole book, she suddenly falls in with some people with whom she starts to develop friendships. But that's neither here nor there, and only bothered me because it seems like it should have been dramatically ironic and wasn't.

What bothered me was this: her love and friendship with the cat is one of the emotional engines of the book. And yet, the cat isn't real. He is only the way he is, because she wished him to be so. He does not awaken and learn to like her, or grow from the feelings a cat would have to a master to the feelings a friend would develop for a friend, to the point of self-sacrifice. He is simply made, immediately, the Perfect Friend. This is realistic - it's what she wished for, after all, not just a talking cat, but a perfect friend, to stay with her when things become difficult.

The problem with making someone a perfect friend is the same problem, though, that love potions have: they aren't real. Or if they are real, then love and friendship are, after all, meaningless. I was talking to Amanda this morning, and made an analogy: I'm a computer programmer. So, what if I learned how to program emotions into a robot? And what if I programmed a robot, whose main directive was to love me, to be loyal to me, to care about me? I don't mean, to be a slave, just to be - a perfect friend. If I programmed this robot to be that way, would it REALLY be love? What would the feelign I felt back be? In a sense, Kate's cat isn't it's own being at all - it's just a piece of Kate. Her wish, embedded into another living thing through no will of that other thing's.

But then, what difference does that make, really? At some level, after all, all love is a complex of neurons and memories, right? An instinct. We love, because we have evolved into lovers, because love has proven to be the best way to survive. I'm not a snob about this idea, I don't think that's demeaning to the human spirit, or anyhting, that it makes us less. But, it does beg the question - if I put you to sleep, and then constructed love in your brain, when you awoke, would that love be less real than a love that developed on it's own? In a sense, it's almost like cloning - most of us have a gut level reaction of unnaturalness, when we consider the idea of producing a child without the natural process of human inter-fertilization, apart from any of the moral qualms surrounding how the technology might be used we don't like the idea of the technology, of itself. But why? If an identical child is produced one way versus another, is ther eREALLY a difference? Or isn't there? Mental Illness is another example - if someone is mentally ill, than some of their emotions are not the byproducts of the normal activity of their mind, but rather they are symptoms of an external disease. If someone is furious only because they need medicine, are they any less furious? Does their fury 'matter less'?

I can have this whole argument, but you'll notice, I'm not convinced by it, and I simply don't know why. The idea of that cat being a produced instead of a natural friend truly bothers me. To produce consciousness, that DOESN'T bother me - I do not, for instnace, have the same gut level fear of the idea of artificial intelligence. But emotion does, and I can't quite pinpoint why. It draws into something bigger, something that has to do with the purpose of life itself - in the end, after all, the material effects of life are irrelevant, right? Things don't matter, at the end, its only, as so many people have said, the experiences we've had, the memories we've shared, the love we've given and recieved. What if we only feel that this love was given? Does that make a difference? If there were no way of knowing, if it could be given equitably, if we could make it so every human on earth could receive the gift of memories and emotions, and if we could irrefutbaly show that this, in the end, would let every person mentally have lived the life they wish they could have lived, would that be wrong? And if it IS wrong, why? Is it simply because its unnatural? Is it because we would be foolish with it, and create lives that don't have any regret in them? Is it because it would be selfish, removing the reality of anything done for someone else? It's something else, something, because even if it were possible to remove all these things, it would be wrong. I do not want to be loved, I want to... have lived a love. And the idea of simple accepting the validity of the other option really bothered me.

Read More......

A Sense of Place in Lagerlof and Cather

Alright, slight raving side note: The Story of Gosta Berling, by Selma Lagerlof is one of the most beautiful novels I've read in a very long time. I could do a month of posts on this book. I may do one or two more, and make you all so sick of this book I'll ruin your opportunity to discover the beauty of Selma Lagerlof's beautiful vision. So, I'm trying to restrain myself here.

One of the things I loved about this novel (and there are several others) was the powerful feeling of place - I commented to a few people while reading it that it reminded me of Willa Cather's sweeping powerful Nebraska and New Mexico, and the farther I got into the book, the more I felt this - both Cather and Lagerlof leave me with a deep nostalgia for a place I've never been. Thomas Hardy has this feeling for me in his books somewhat, as well, but I don't feel his love for the place he's talking about as much as his horror at the absence of the place. Victor Hugo makes me feel this way about Paris - but in Paris, he is in love with the city, and a city is in many ways just an expression of human beings (another book that feels this way to me is Moby Dick, but with a ship instead of a city). Lagerlof and Cather make you feel in love with something much bigger than you, with the earth itself, I suppose. In Cather, they are these wild places that humans are trying to find an uncomfortable toehold in - in Lagerlof it is a country that has been settled for thousands of years, but where nature and the man-less world lives just outside the edges of day-to-day life. And in both, you see the country exhibit itself in the souls of the people who live there - but not as a sort of clumsy allegory, but rather in the way that we really that people really DO entwine themselves with their native land.

This is particularly powerful to me, because I don't HAVE a 'native soil.' I love my upbringing in this sense, I love that I could see so many places as a child, I think it was good for me. But, at the same time, I would love to truly know and love a place, to be married to the soil in the consummated way that some people are (less so in America, these days, which I think is interesting). That feeling of deep intimacy with a place makes one feel, in some ways, like a perpetual outsider.

It's strange, because the closest I can come to this feeling of deep and powerful intimacy with a place is with the internet itself (ah, yes, insert laughs here, it's okay). I've lived in the soil of the internet now for almost two decades, at some level, and for most of the time, the internet has been a deep and intimate part of my life. Like Cather knew the sweep of the blank prairie, and the way the earth grows beneath it, the way it bites back angrily at the plow, I know the ether of the web, I know the way an empty palette gnaws at a new piece of code, the way that a refugee can stare at it and hunger for their native land, but also dream deep and strong of what they can make of their new home. The way that Lagerlof knows the wolves, the winter wind, the water that comes in the spring floods, I know the angry rises and falls of this pseudo-landscape, the way worlds will form and dissolve with the impartial fury of a decimating blizzard. I know the way that this land can take a person and gnaw them until it leaps one day to devour them whole, and the way that it can cradle up someone lost and yield a little hole for them to make into a home. I've seen it in people I love, in stories that already feel so strange and elemental to be like folklore, I've seen it in myself - like a land, the internet proves it's veracity by being a place where one can be all the selves one is, at the same time.

The strangeness of this realization was that it feels, to me, more like Cather than Hugo - the internet feels like a land, not like a city. IT's inhabitants feel like they are connected to the earth, not cooped into metropolitan finality. It's the sort of place where I can imagine stories living of their own power, instead of simply as currents in a river of human existence (This is not to say that a city isn't just as beautiful, in it's own way). Sadly, I can't WRITE like Lagerlof or like Cather, but I've wondered how long it is until the Cather of the internet is born, telling the story not of the heroes of the land, but of the land itself, the writer who will see this ether plucked from ourselves almost unwilling as a character instead of a setting.

The power of Lagerlof is that she loves her land so much that she loves it's sins and horrors. Her Gods and Heroes are of the ancient cast, the kind that are equal measures of good and evil - how do you tell that story in a world where opinion is, in some sense, the root of identity?

Read More......

The Relationship Between Significance and Nonsense

I recently read Wicked, which if you haven't read it (that is, you are the only other person on earth, it seems, besides me), talks about the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz, from her own perspective. Honestly, I expected this to be a smirky, silly kind of book, sort of like the children's book where the Big Bad Wolf tells about how he was misrepresented by the three little pigs, only for grownups. In the end, I REALLY enjoyed it (though the end felt a bit forced), and want to read the two sequels now, eventually.

One thing that was VERY interesting to me in the book was how Elphaba (the wicked witch) found meaning in the events around her. If you are like me (I don't know how universal this sentiment is, honestly), there are particular events, concordances, unexpected turns, etc in your life that take on a powerful significance. Some of these events are obvious - if one has, say, a very traumatic event, it becomes significant. Others are not. 

What I loved in the book - and this is something I love in MANY of my favorite books and movies, probably because it is so common to tell a story deceptively to the opposite - is that really, these events, these glimmers of meaning, do not interrelate in a way that one can make a single, sensible narrative of. This feels so personal and familiar that finding it in a book is like finding a piece of myself in someone else. 

Humans are a mythmaking species. For all the trouble this practice has caused us over the years, I think it is, to some extent, intrinsic to who we are - I think for instance it is the root of the idealistic leaping I talked about with Ms Wollstonecraft. There is the macrocosmic version of this of course - religion. But the microcosm exists as well. I think most people gneerate their own personal mythologies, stories they construct about their own internal gods and heroes. For me, at least, time ceases to exist without a narrative to lay it across, and some of the bleakest, most horrifying moments of my life have been those in which I saw my life stretching ahead of me, devoid of any particular story-thread, simply a span of indifferent years and directionless existence, even if this is the more honest way of understanding my life.

The problem, of course, is that life does not always tell a good story. Sometimes, life's stories are kind of awful - not awful like scary and miserable, but awful like, they wander around and make no sense, and at the end you wonder if the author was even paying attention, or if maybe you just were paying attention to the wrong narrative. Like Ulysses (joke. Well, kind of a joke). But we NEED them to make sense - just like our ancestors NEEDED there to be some REASON that the Nile flooded every year and the sun rose, and the winter was cold and harsh. Because without a reason, first of all, the awful things of the world are unbearable, and second of all, the future is scary and unpredictable. In our own lives we do the same thing - how many of us, for instance, comfort ourselves with some variation of "everything in life has a purpose?" In the paraphrased words of Christopher Hitchens, we simultaneously believe ourselves to be the most insignificant of worms, but also that the omnipotent universe has a plan for each of use individually, that the universe loves and directs us as single humans. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't. IT feels too... easy to be true, I guess, sometimes.

And, yes, this mythmaking makes terrible messes, it makes us do terrible things. What is the classic 'midlife crisis' but a realization that our identity does not match our own narrative? I have done too many things, too many terrible things, because it felt like the way the story should go. Others are better about this than me, but I don't think it's a completely unique behaviour.

At the same time, mythology was a precursor to magic, and magic was a precursor to science, and science a precursor to real knowledge (alter this sentence according to the dictatates of your worldview). And, after all, in some sense, the 'story' that is told by, say, modern astronomy is any ways as awe-inspiring, beautiful, and meaningful as any sun and moon and stars myth, the tale of evolution lists a human destiny as compelling as Ragnarok. Maybe this is the way personal mythologies must work - as a sort of alchemy by which we learn our personal chemistry. But life is so short, so short, and the time to know the weight of your own atoms is so long...

Read More......

Fear and a Handful of Dust

I made a snide comment earlier today, about Victor Hugo, how certain elements exist in all his books - this was in mind, because I've just finished listening to my third of his novels: Toilers of the Sea, a very Hugo-ish novel about a man from one of the Channel Islands struggling against the elements. I loved the novel to death, another consistent element of Victor Hugo novels, that I neglected to mention this morning. It was wonderful, I listened to the end while grocery shopping, and knew just where it would end up pretty early on, but just about started crying walking the aisles of the grocery store.

So, if I enjoyed it so much, why did I feel the urge to make a snide comment?

In specific, here is what I said:

"How to recognize a Victor Hugo novel:

1) Accidental love triangle
2) Heroic Gesture
3) Suicide near the end
4) Tangents
5) French People"

I do not intend to make of this comment more than it was. I think it sounded not too mean-spirited, a sort of gentle ribbing between friends. So, this post will not be one of my confessionals, I promise. But the question itself is interesting to me - why, if I really enjoyed the novel, did I feel the need to be snarky about it? I didn't say anything nice about it, which is what one would expect in a perfect world where I loved the novel. Why?

Well, I will tell you, after much thinking - it's a kind of self-defense. I don't think this is particularly uncommon. To love a thing is to give power to it, and power to others who know of your love. Love is a distilled and keened kind of vulnerability. And we live in a world, honestly, where it's necessary to keep yourself safe. Say all you will about how it should be from a practical standpoing, but having had people laugh over things I thought were sacred and beautiful, and it's a painful thing. I've done the laughing too, I know how easy - and socially acceptable - it is to twist each other's knives. 

Fear of other people (or of myself in the midst of other people, more precisely), though, is a theme I probably talk abotu too much already. What's more interesting is that part of this fear, this vulnerability is a vulnerability to the book itself. 

People spend a great deal of time talking about how a book can change your life for the better, how books can salve wounds, or staunch sorrows, or teach lessons. But people seldom mention the ways a book can stab you, mock you, or break your heart. In order to let a book change you, you HAVE to unshield yourself. 

I have experienced this myself, in the best and worst of books. I read a book earlier this year that nudged me into a good few months of depression. I read a Jeffrey Archer book when I was about 12 that has a scene that has gnawed painfully at me ever since. Nor is it simply a matter of 'this book really made me sad'. In my more lucid moments, I can look at some of the books that I love, and see what they've made of me - and how it is sometimes a bad thing. Victor Hugo is a good example, one that probably goes back to why I avoided being honest with myself in my tweet.

I read Les Mis a long, long time ago, and loved it. Something in the way it echoed and spoke felt very familiar and honest to me. The problem is, of course, Hugo is a wild-eyed romantic idealist, and the echoes of his hopes for a lot of things - for love, for revolution, for the success of virtue over the world - do not necessarily reflect the world. One of the reasons I never dated in high school (one reason, of many), for instance, is because all of my favorite love stories (Valjean and Fantine, Quasimodo and Esmeralda, to an extent Romney Leigh and Aurora Leigh) were these wild, chaste, hopeless loves, loves that cannot be, and that are beautiful because they exist precisely BECAUSE they cannot be. Love, in real life, doesn't work that way. When I did finally get married, this desire for the ideal, for a love affair that told a story, instead of a love affair that was real and present, gnawed at me, made me feel as if I was failing to live up to my ideals, made me do wildly, stupidly foolish things as a result. I don't BLAME this on Victor Hugo (and his various friends). To write an ideal is beautiful and valuable, and I would be horrified if I could forget I'd ever read them. To an extent, this part of Hugo is so imbued into me, now, that I can't even realistically tell you 'this is where I stop and Hugo starts' - I am to an extent the man that Les Miserables made me (along with many other books). But, to be the man that Les Miserables made me is as dangerous (for me and others) as it is comforting. 

Yesterday, Ms Amy put up a quote about characters on Tumblr, and I think it gnaws, in a way, at the duality of this power. The thing that caught me up most in the quote was that the book tv show, in this case, tore her in two different directions: it made her wonder if she could keep watching, and knowing she won't ever not watch. There is something horrible about a well-written character, a great and terrible part to it, because if we allow ourselves to engage entirely with a book, then we can feel for these figments of someone else's imagination as powerfully as for a real person. This is a dangerous proposition, one that produces situations that are almost, ALMOST horrifying. When I look back on my childhood, and try to think of the people I felt closest to, I felt far closer to Anne Shirley, Ozma, Galadriel, than I did to any of my real life friends. There is a little part of me that thinks of Wuthering Heights as a companion from high school who has stayed closer to me than any of my other companions of that time. And my relationship with Emily Dickinson, now, bears a sort of emotional intimacy in my mind, a sort of seriousness and intensity, that makes me feel at times as if I am waiting for a friend to come home who never will. But, you don't talk about it this way in real life, in everyday. IF you do, it's a joke, it's playing. Celebrating Emily Dickinson's birthday is a silly thing. REmembering how I felt about Galadriel is sort aww-cute-adorable in the way that we react to any story about the innocence of childhood. I see other people say things about books, and sometimes, I think I sense that same hesitance, that same sort of terrified self-ignorance, and I wonder if this is something other people feel.

The other thing Ms Amy's quote did, the thing that finally made me change the original topic I was going to write about in reaction to Toilers of the Sea (the idea of 'struggling against nature' and 'subduing nature'). In the middle of the quote, as she talks about how a character exists in the nether regions of the emotions she inspires, she (mis)quotes T.S. Eliot's most famous quote: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." The full quote is longer:

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I will not begin to pretend that I knew what Eliot 'meant' in the Wasteland. I know people spend their lives trying to understand the poem. But for me, this gnawed at me, when I first read it, and again when I saw this in the midst of Amy's quote yesterday. To me, feeling about a person is like carrying a shadow - we can never carry a shadow on purpose, because it isn't really there, but we carry one continuously nevertheless, a shadow that can loom larger and larger as the sun gets cloer and farther from the horizon, until night when the shadow melt into the omni-shadow of lightlessness, and everyone's shadows sort of mingle until the sun returns to tease our bits apart into individual self. Emotions are only safe because, at some level, like a shadow they remain attached when the sun comes up. We each carry our own, and noone else's. To love a thing we have made up ourselves, or interpolated from a book, this is different. There is nothing casting the shadow, it's like a reverse kaleidoscope, little shafts of shadow ever whirling inwards and inwards on themselves, inescpable, and ever comingling, perhaps to form our own shadows. Imbued with meaning, but completely ineffable, inseperable (this happens, eventually with people too, we create our own internal shadows of them). But that is the handful of dust - the infinitely ineffable, gathered together to stare at, to see the two simultaneous horrors, that that which we thought was nothing, was escapable, is in fact a thing, a thing that comes about and can be held in the hand, and msut be reckoned, and at the same time, that all the significances of the world, all the things we feel matter, are just as much nothing as this nothing. Shadows falling, overlapping, combing and shifting, passing through each other, affecting and reflecting (or the reverse of reflecting), but still at some level, atomic, able to touch and combine only in the darkest, shortest moments. This simultaneous isolation into individuality, and knowledge that one's self is simply an absence, the reverse shadow of all the things that have made it, is the struggle that religions have been born over, that philosophers have tried to rationalize, that humans conquer nations and throw themselves off bridges for. And narrative is as close as we can get to it, which is it's combination, in a way of horror and power and beauty all at once. 

People always quote Nietzsche when he said that if you stare at the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back. Then why do men stare at the abyss so long? Maybe it's that the abyss is the only thing that can truly stare back.

Read More......

Thoughts on Heroism From the Odyssey

With Ms Trish's recently completed readalong (which I did a horrible job of contributing to, sorry Trish), I have read the Odyssey three times now. I've read three different translations (my favorite, though I know this is geeky, is the old, inaccurate poetic one by Alexander Pope). I've been told the story in a number of forms outside of this, I've even read Ulysses.

And every time I read this story, my main impression of it is strengthened: that Odysseus and Telemachus are big jerks.

Let me apologize, this is in some ways my failing. I am aware of why I don't like him - it's the classic issue of a 21st century reader trying to sympathize from someone from a very different time and place. Intellectually I can understand this, but it doesn't change the fact that I really loathe the guy. He's just not very nice. At all. Ever.

Looking at WHY I dislike him so much, however, was kind of illuminating to me, so since I want to at least show that I MEANT to be a good participant in the readlong, I will try to put a few of these thoughts down.

Of course, at one level, it's very simple to explain why I dislike Odysseus. He's a misogynistic, violent, seemingly unloving man, dishonest on a whim, unabashed about taking advantage of others, and cruel to even the slightest failing of others (killing the maids of the house because they had sex with teh suitors puts the final nail in for me). But then, of course, I'm left to step back, and ask myself: why was a man like this considered heroic? And why do I hate him so much, when I can like other heroes from later in history that are obnoxious in their own ways? Why, in short, does Odysseus, whether I like him or not, not feel like a hero, when clearly he is meant to?

The trick, for me, in looking closely is that Odysseus's heroism is almost entirely selfish. Throughout the book, his entire purpose is for himself - he wants to get home, and get his life back. HE wants to be back with his wife, but only after he's tested her loyalty. He wants to meet his son, but only if he's worthy of him. He wants to reward those loyal to him, and punish those who were not. In Odysseus's character there is not. one. single. shred. of altruism. No ideals, no grand purpose, or meaningful direction. He just wants to get home, get his stuff back (his wife being more or less just slightly noisier stuff from his point of view, by the way), and get back to being the king.

At some level, this is honest. After all, at some level someone like, say, Joan of Arc to take a somewhat more contemporary mythic hero, is much more selfish. Sure, she goes out with a purpose - to save France and glorify God - but it's not really out of the goodness of her heart. The religious martyr can never do anything truly selfless, because every good thing becomes an investment in some future heaven. Joan's suffering, in some sense, doesn't matter to her, because she knows that when she dies, if she remains faithful, god will pluck her up and reward her for her goodness.

In some sense, then, the closest character to this modern martyr-hero model in the Odyssey would be, say, Eumaeus, the faithful swineherd who is a slave to Odysseus, and who could have made his life easier by being craven with the suitors, but who is loyal to his 'god', believing that when his master returns (or when he dies and the Gods see what kind of slave he was), he will be rewarded.

Not all modern heroes are martyrs, of course. Not all are even saints, to be honest - one of the more popular heroes of the last few years would be Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean. And he's the latest in a long series of rogue heroes - Han Solo is another great example. This woudl seem to be much closer to the old Odysseus model. Sparrow is not a paragon of virtue - on the contrary, his entire motivation is simply to get his ship back, to be captain again, etc. But here too there are differences, two of them really - one the writer juxtaposes the rogue character against someone truly wicked (Captain Barbossa, say, or the Galactic Empire and Darth Vader), making the rogue the lesser of two evils. Who is the greater evil in the Odyssey? The suitors? There's some argument to be made for this, but not to the same extent, particularly because of the second reason: rogue heroes are always underdogs. If they aren't, they cease to be heroes. Third, the sins of an underdog must be presented as, more or less, venial. Sparrow was a pirate, yes, but notice you never see him kill anyone except for Barbossa, you never see him rob anyone who can't manifestly afford it, etc. Of course, a moment's thought will tell us - thi sis a pirate. Of course in the normal everyday line of his business, he's going to rob a ship, which will require the use of martial force, and the indiscriminate robbery of the cargo no matter who it belongs to. But if he did these things on screen, his desire for a ship would cease to be easy to empathize with. Finally, rogues are pretty much universally comic characters, usually even a bit clumsy and clownish. In a serious picture, we'd engage the thinking part of our brain, the part that makes judgements.

Then of course there is the unbelievably competent hero - the action hero for instance. Take, Gibbs, from Amanda's favorite show, NCIS. Taciturn, endlessly loyal, impossibly talented, always wins. This is more the fantasy type - the man designed to be somenoe we yearn for, yearn to be or yearn to be with (Lara Croft, for instance, might be a female example). At surface level, I would say these are unlike Odysseus as well - again, they are always devoted to something - they are patriots, or protectors, or altruists, etc.

But in a sense, this is the closest equivalent we have to Odysseus, the man who is washed ashore after a shipwreck, and nonetheless can outplay the best people in the land at any sport, who can slip in and kill all the suitors almost singlehandedly, who could outwit the entire city of Troy. And this sort of points out the most interesting fact to me - that the main difference is simply one of cultural values. We, as a culture, value patriotism, and protecting the honor of or our country. The Greeks, at least in the evidence of the Odyssey AND the Iliad, fought more for the honor of the individual. There's some overlap in tribe and family loyalties, but even there, these things are mostly shown as simply extensions of the individual - Odysseus protects Penelope because her honor is his honor. When a friend dies in the Odyssey, it is sad because Odysseus has lost something useful or pleasing to him. To an extent, when a friend dies in NCIS, it is Gibbs' duty to pay back the affront, rather than something he does to protect his honor.

This points not to some civilizing effect of progress, I think, but rather simply shows that there are certain things in our current heroes that are equally ephemeral - heroes from a hundred years ago, for instance, often feel dated to us now, so will ours in a hundred years or so. So the hero who is a model of a 'perfect man' will appear less than perfect with time. And I would venture to say, that's a good thing. Gibbs, at a base moral level, isn't a morally superior hero really, and patriotism isn't really more productive, in the long term (or less selfish) than selfish defense of personal honor - after all, we could not fight wars without patriots, on BOTH sides of the conflict.

But then, of course patriotism has it's purposes, and is not an unalloyed evil. Patriotism and Nationalism, in many ways, were the birthing mothers of republicanism and democracy in the western world - they give a natural scope to a people's ambitions. Patriotism, additionally, does sometimes impel people to truly selfless acts in the defense and for the greater good of a group. The problem in the heroic formula of patriotism (or any other unshakeable loyalty) is in it's absolutism. A Gibbs would never, no matter what, betray his country. Just as an Abraham would never, no matter what, betray his god. In both cases, this produces an impetus in the unhealthy mind, towards extremism, in ways that it isn't difficult to find tragic examples of.

The personal honor of Odysseus, then, is very similar after all. Personal honor is not an unabashedly bad thing. A healthy respect for one's own individual welfare and reputation is, after all, at some level the basis of lawful civil society - there is never sufficient punishment available to deter crime, crime must be deterred because committing it has a social cost that is higher than it's physical benefits. Enlightened self-interest is a building block of civilization. Taken too far, though, it becomes the selfishness and mean-spirited hate of Odysseus.

The question, to me, then becomes what is the value of heroes? IS there forms of heroism that are valuable throughout generations? Or is heroism simply a structure we design to impel people to act in socially useful ways? What do you guys think? And with the age of nationalism and patriotism slowly in the decline, I think (a debatable point, I understand), what will be the next definition of hero, and will it be any better?

Read More......

The Pros of Millenialism

As someone who probably talks too often of having wrestled with God (unlike Jacob, God did not grab the small of my thigh, and I didn't take him down), there is an (admittedly somewhat natural) assumption when people speak with me that there are things that I will not like to hear about. And honestly, this is very, very sad for me (if nothing else, it makes me a little sorry that I must throw off an air of snubbiness, or a lack of understanding, or aggression, or something).

When I started school, a very long time ago, I originally went in order to study religion, mythology, folklore, because the WAY people grapple with the ineffables of the universe is beautiful to me - in all the many incarnations of it. I am aware the reticence on the part of the speaker is my fault:

1. I have my biases, and I can be very rude and snarky. 
2. I have a tendency to feel uncomfortable in a situation where people don't think well of me, so I'll say some very stupid things to get approval of the people around me. 
3. I have a problem with latching onto the idea of a story in a situation, and not being able to accept things that contradict it. 

I know these things, and I promise, I'm suitably ashamed of them. I do my best to fight them, but I know they make me less than a trustworthy person to talk about the affairs of heart and soul. I get that.

But like I said, I think a lot of things that I may not believe can be beautiful, I think the way someone else may believe these things is intricate and beautiful.

I grew up in a faith with a strong millenialist piece - I was a Mormon as a child, and the very name of the church reflects it's sense of history: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Growing up, the idea that history was reaching it's pinnacle, that we lived in the fulness of times, was ingrained in every lesson we were taught. Each week, we would sing hymns, some the same old songs most Protestant faiths have sung (Rock of Ages, for instance), intermixed with Mormon hymns, which seemed to all speak to the coming day of glory when Christ Jesus would return to the earth:

How Blessed the day when the lamb and the lion,
Shall lie down together without any ire,
And Ephraim be crowned with his blessing in heaven,
And Jesus descend in his chariot of fire

These lessons, growing up, were not impersonal theology, they weren't the sort of things one learned if one was interested. They were the bread and butter of everyday activity. Mormon boys should be missionaries when they are 19, because the end of the world is at hand, and God calls forth these boys as an army to spread his gospel to as much of the world as possible before his second coming, for instance. We needed to live exemplary lives, because the world was drawing to it's close, when god is sending his greatest souls, and Satan is setting his worst traps. We sang, forever, of being part of the Army of God: "Onward Christian soldiers," "We are as the Army of Helaman," "Holding aloft, our colors, we march to the glorious dawn."

And there was something glorious, and stirring and powerful in all this, - Religion is not just a search for understanding, it's also a search for relevance. There is something in life, at least for me, that strikes one with a feeling of extraordinary smallness, something that makes you realize how insignificant your actions are in one sense. Millenialism reminds you, that what you do is urgent, by placing a timeline on it. There is no someone else who will come later and do what you leave undone, because there is no time for someone else to come. Christ has saved you, one of his chosen souls, for these last days, because he can depend on you. And that's something you can hear, that can make you feel valuable in spite of any evidence to the contrary. I remember, very strongly in my life really WANTING to believe this.

There is something in that urgency, that compression of time, that can give a clarity and direction to life. The reason, at least to me, that many people could believe in the Mormon church that there was a prophet, and believe that the laws he gave were from God, and worth following, was because the compression of history into it's final moments gives a feeling of perspective. To many of the Mormons I knew who were most faithful, it was easy for them to empathize with history, to feel for Moses, or Daniel, or Jesus, or Martin Luther, or the Founding Fathers more directly than many of us can feel for someone that far from us. Millenialism, because it forces the viewer to broader and broader spectrums, CAN make someone very sympathetic, very compassionate.

It doesn't, always, of course. As with any powerful idea, it can be turned to good or evil, and Millenialism is very easy to twist into cruel, hateful dogmatism - after all, it is just easy to compress history into a story of a hateful god as a loving one, I'm afraid, and I have found, souls tend to live the way they imagine their gods (whether this be cause or effect being a discussion I'm not smart enough to have).

And here's the part where you'll laugh at me, I had this idea finally congeal into something recognizable, a few weeks ago while listening to Queen and David Bowie singing 'Under Pressure' (Hey! You can't judge me!). And the reason is this: because the idea of millenialism, the song reminded me, is not something that is limited to the religious. Secularly, Millenialism is a huge part of our culture, and has been for years. The lyrics of Under Pressure are not particularly unique:

'Cause love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure

"Edge of the night", "Our last dance", and even the title itself, stirs up in my mind the same feelings I got when I imagined history when I was trying to be a Mormon, this sort of defiant teetering along the edge of the chasm of the end of history. Mankind, particularly I think since the World Wars and even more so since the Atomic Age, has this terrifying, invigorating sense that, actually and truthfully, we really have arrived at the end of history, in some sense. Our history has reached a point of extinction, of course for the gloomy reasons (nuclear weapons, global warming, engineered diseases, etc). But, also, in the same way that the Apocalypse promises the Millenium, there is the vague sense (and a powerful and meaningful one, I think), that there really is the hope of a future grandeur. Really, think of it! We live on the edge of the future! We can grow (mechanical) wings and fly, we can literally move mountains, we live in a greater perpetual level of cooperation and interconnection, in spite of everything else, than the world has ever seen! Think of it, for just a moment, 50 years ago, when my mother was alive, blacks rode on the back of the bus. Heck, 10 years ago, a man could be ARRESTED in Texas for having sex with his boyfriend. 20 years ago, I would never know any of you, and 10 years, I PROBABLY would never have known you. The world is bubbling into the grand struggle for the greatest dreams humanity has ever had, a struggle that really IS very much one between, if not the load words 'good' and 'evil', with their feeling of exclusion, at least between progress and destruction, between the eyes that look forward and the annhihalation of the void.

And of course, this is all nonsense in another sense. In another sense, we all ALWAYS think of ourselves as being that moment. In the year 1000, people believed the millenium was coming, too. In the 50's, people thought they'd be flying rocket cars by the time they died. The world is forever coming to it's end, and forever being born. But, that's not just part of the human mental disease. It's not a weakness - that sense of urgency is, in one way, a gift, it's the root of the urge to go forward, to leap forever into the void. Yes, when we leap into the dark, the lights turn on and we find the new road is the same as the old. But without that millenial urge, that sense of the finality of life, we'd never be able to leap into it, it would be too terrifying and hopeless. Without the sense of future, the world is just what the news always say: an endless progression of crime reports, wicked leaders, greedy corporations, murder, mayhem, the threat of destruction of ourselves, of the very world itself. The sense of apocalypse is unavoidable - the sense of a millenium, that is a choice.

About a year ago, we had some friends over, and we were talking about Mormonism, and I told them, I still have an affection for it in part of me, and when they asked me why, I said, Mormonism tells you there is something worth dying for, and there is nothing worth living for that isn't worth dying for. I wonder, still, if that's true. Of course, the problem is that if something is worth dying for, to some it is worth killing for, or hating for, or mocking for, or, if there is such a thing, sinning for. And that's the great balancing act of life, I guess - do we risk greatness, or settle for fineness? Do we fight for what we think is justice, knowing our own minds to be imperfect, unjust? That's the call of the Millenialist streak in us, whether we believe in God, or not, it's that streak that whispers to us that this day, this hour, this moment, is the very last of it's kind, this instant is the last chance to do what we might do this instant, and that this isn't a curse, it's a blessing.

Read More......

The Sound of Drowning

I read a fascinating article, today, on drowning. I highly recommend it both for the fascination of it, and for the fact that, if you are ever near the water, it is decidedly useful information to know (which, in a story about bad things that can happen to your kids, is a rarity, being far more often drowned out by 'you should be frightened' and 'we are heroic for telling you so'. Sorry, don't mean to snark my bias).

But what was interesting to me was the concept (which I had learned before, but never so vividly) - that drowning, a kind of death that (at least for many people) is inescapably connected with panic, is, more or less, silent. The silence is, in fact, one of the best signs that something is wrong. Which of course, made me consider, the deeper implications of that, the metaphorical parallels. People who are going to commit suicide withdraw sometimes, people who are being abused can become uncommunicative, people who have been traumatised can do the same (this is not a professional statement, I know that people react in very different ways, and may do just the opposite, so forgive me the generalization). But silence, generally, is a sign that something is wrong.

That's interesting to me, because what we, as humans, do (or at least *I* as a human do) is to begin to be afraid of that silence. In a joking way you hear this from parents all the time - 'Those kids are too quiet, they must be up to something.' But in a more serious way, someone who is silent makes other people uncomfortable, makes them want to fix things, to make them not silent. This is good, on the one hand, of course, because it's an instinct that, when our children suddenly stop talking, makes us probe to see what's wrong, to try to offer help. On the other hand, we sometimes confuse things, and become afraid of the silence, in and of itself, instead of the lurking horror of the silence.

The drowning article illustrates this, to me, perfectly: the silence is a sign of distress, but it is also a natural reaction, and one that developed because it is the best way for an individual to try not to drown - they stick the arms out and push themselves up, instead of flailing wildly, they take deep gulping breaths instead of wasting their oxygen screaming, etc. The silence is a coping mechanism, a response where the body takes over because it knows the brain has gone (quite literally in this case) beyond it's depth.

Silence, in a psychological situation, then seems to serve the same purpose, for me. If I am miserable, I grow more and more silent. I've seen this same silence in others, and I know it can be unnerving, threatening even. It makes you uncomfortable. It leaves you in a difficult place. But the problem, for those of us who are the 'lifeguards' (because we all need to be each others lifeguards), is to know how draw the person into shore, without panicking them, or having them pull us down with them - by the time silence comes, reason has been compromised, after all. It has to be, because the silence is a deeper, more bodily response than the very human, reasonable search for daily validation and help that accompanies frustration and problems, normally. Silence comes, instead, when we approach a profundity so deep that we know that to move, to twitch, even to speak is to risk teetering into it. There is a slow work of moving the self, quietly, quietly, back toward a firmer ground, to seek a better crossing than the one that's almost swallowed us. And sometimes, that moving is beyond us, sometimes we are truly drowning, we are, in fact, beyond our depth and struggling to bob up just long enough for a lifeguard to snatch us from the water.

But, in that case, there is two things to remember. First of all, the silence itself is not the true source of our horror. The silence is the sign of a human response, of a living self trying to cling on until reason can be refound. Treating the silence, itself, gets the sort of strained, vague responses that probably everyone has gotten from someone when they know something is wrong: "Oh no, I'm fine, just tired," "Don't worry about it, just a headache," "I'm sure it'll pass." This isn't evasiveness on the part of the drowning person, it's the confused, teetering effort to do nothing too drastic or severe, for fear of losing balance. After all, they don't know if you are looking to find the source of the silence, or looking to just end the silence.

The second thing to remember is that the profundity is real, even if invisible, and terribly, terribly deep, and that with two people, one of them drowning, there is only one person who has the chance of a full access to their faculties. Just as a drowning victim can pull a lifeguard down with them in their panic, and kill them both, a silence disturbed can hurt both parties. On the one hand, this is why it's good to pull in professional lifeguards sometimes (psychologists, psychiatrists, a suicide help line, a teacher at school, a social worker, etc). On the other, it is also a little reminder of the awesome, humbling power that some of us DO have, to draw people up from the depths. The ability to draw someone in from that brink, or at least to give them a life ring long enough to find a lifeguard is an awesome one, one that we forget.

Finally, and perhaps a bit more troublingly, the thing this story made me realize was the great, and terrible beauty of nature itself - not just the sea, though the crushing, silent force of the sea is certainly great and terrilby, but of us, of our human frames, so great, silent, and terrible, able to save us in ways we cannot expect, and destroy us with the same innate force. When Emily Dickinson said her life was like a loaded gun, this is what it means to me - we are each of us a coiled spring of great, terrible force, force that can save and destroy, ourselves or others. A force like that should be nurtured, trained, applauded, kept sacred - and treated with a healthy dose of sober respect.

As a final note, please do not think I mean this as a subtle commentary on anyone who has dropped me a line or said hello over the last little while when I haven't been very talky. Rest assured, I'm not feeling totally silent, just kind of agoraphobic, and the big, big room of the internet is just a bit intimidating right now. Thank you very much for everyone who DID drop me a line. If I were Emily Dickinson, I would have sent you each a cake or a flower, and a poem. I can't bake very well, and I have a black thumb, and my poems are grouchy and far between, so I virtual hug will have to do.

Read More......

"Creating Artifacts to Experience"

I read a very interesting article on Bobulate recently (Bobulate, btw, is a very wonderful blog that talks about beauty and design and their interaction with our lives - the author Ms Danzico is a unique genius, and if you've never read her blog, you're missing out. If you're keeping your blogroll short, drop mine and read hers - I fumble awkwardly at ideas that she presents iwth clarity of a grocery list). Anyways. I read an interesting article, talking about design, particularly in the case of Frank Lloyd Wright. Conceptually Wright designed buildings to generate a particular experience - his determination of 'perfect' home living. The houses are beautiful and well designed for that particular experience. But unfortunately, many people who actually LIVE in the houses come to dislike them. The kitchens are small and out of the way for instance, the furniture is built in usually and difficult to move. The little things that they want to be their own way simply aren't that way, aren't MEANT to be that way. The assumption in a Wright house is that the occupant should adapt to the perfect lifestyle Wright discovered for them, rather than the house adapting to the lifestyle the occupant wants.

Of course, this is an oversimplification of Wright's work, and I don't bring this up to get into an argument about architecture (a subject which I admittedly know very little about). What was interesting was the way the author described this problem - designers cannot design experiences, they can only design artifacts to be experienced. In other words, designers (and I would argue all artists) must eventually accept that they cannot force an experience on their audience, they can only give fodder that the audience generates their own experiences out of.

I, as a budding, awful writer, have struggled with this myself. When I write, the writing comes not because I have these plots float through my head, but because I have specific impressions, sensations, and internal moments that I want to communicate. My writing, thus, has a tendency to be very pedantic, sometimes even badgering, as I smash the reader over the head, INSISTING that they FEEL THIS ONE THING. Which, when I go back and read it, if I'm not feeling that one thing, is grating and a little dull. Some writers make me feel this way too, and I see the outlines of it in the reviews people put up of some of the books that they dislike (or like - it can be quite flattering to have a book tell you that what you believe is ever so clever).

The BEST books, of course, are EXTREMELY subjective, and SHOULD be so. I was thinking of this after reading the very intelligent review Ms Nymeth put up recently of "The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ." She put this very well in terms of the Bible:

The appeal of stories is of course that they’re both memorable and open to interpretation, and this allows them to illustrate more complex realities than simple definitions ever could. But this also means that absolute truths cannot really be built upon them.

This gets into the problem with most religions to me - the law is a series of strict, dogmatic standards by which things can be scientifically judged, but the stories largely deal with the exceptions to those rules. To accept the stories as evidence of the law too often leads to an exclusionist megalomania, either saying that the rules apply as long as the church leaders say so (there is, for instance, in my mind, a subtle kind of arrogance in the Papacy deigning to forgive the sins of the Beatles or to allow Galileo posthumously back into the arms of the Church), or even beyond that, as long as God says so. It is, I guess, something that is a bit dangerous to say, but I offer this as a struggle, not as an attack: it was always difficult for me not to think the God of the bible was something of a hypocrite, like a parent who teaches their children rules they themselves are unwilling to follow (in this sense God seems very human, since parents make this mistake all the time, but it undermines my desire to worship him, since it seems to me to point out his fallibility).  Either way, the problem is that the power of stories is best used to make people look at themselves and others and society and the universe, not to tell them what they would see if they bothered to look.

But, again, at some level this is advice that goes beyond the composition of scripture and the building of houses. This can be true of any book (or work of art). The power of literature is in it's ability to draw people out of themselves and illuminate the bits of human nature that it's difficult to see on our own. But, the power of this illumination comes from us nooking ourselves into the empty places. Like a fortune teller, the great author tells enough to compel attention, then leaves the listener to fill the magic in themselves. That's the thing - there is no perfect work of art, because art requires two things - an artist and an audience, and neither of those things ever SHOULD be under the control of the artwork.

Read More......

Ada Byron Lovelace Day: Susan Kare, Graphics Pioneer

Happy Ada Byron Lovelace Day! I've been mentioning this around to a number of folks, but a group of very nice people have been organizing today as a day for people to talk about some of their female heroes in science and technology, to raise awareness about women in these industries (where they're sadly underrepresented :/ ). There are SO many women I could feature here, so many great heroes, I just wanted to mention one of my personal favorites, and why. I work in computers, as many of you may know, specifically with Macintosh computers, and (now, please, no political arguments), one of the reasons I like working on the Macintosh is because, since it's inception in the early 1980's, the Macintosh has worked hard to make itself beautiful. Pretty. Call it what you will. Some people call it cute, or fluffy, or showy, or whatever. I call it beautiful. I am NOT someone who is good at making beautiful things, but I love beauty - it is beauty that, in the end, helped me to be okay with my career path. In the modern world, we spend enormous amounts of time in a world entirely of our own construction, one made of devices, files, graphics, data streams. This is no longer just somewhere geeks and techies spend their time, it's a home to people of all stripes now. Yet, in spite of the amount of time we spend on these devices, we do not think of any of this as 'real' - and therefore we tend to just think past the computer, to attempt to ignore it and marginalize it in our lives. Working for a large corporation, I see this all the time. Computers are tools. We treat them something like enormous staplers - only staplers burdened with a great weight of machinery meant to make sure that the user doesn't accidentally waste staples, or staple their hand. A computer - or more accurately, a virtual world, since a computer is mroe than simply a box - is more complex than this, it is, temporarily the home of one's consciousness, often for hours and hours at a time. It is an office, a lounge, a night club, it's many places rolled into one place - a place designed not for users but for managers, for profiteers, for technicians. I find this very, very sad - to me, my duty as a computer worker, is to give the people I work with somewhere they can be happy - at least a little bit. A computer should be a place that listens to you and acts the way you'd like it to, rather than one that retrains you into being something you're not. Of course, huge strides have been made in this area over the last 30 years - and Susan Kare is one of my heroes in this work. Kare is a designer, her portfolio is available, in part on her website. Flipping through that portfolio, for an old geek like me, is something like looking at your childhood picture album. On the Mac, she designed most of the original icon set, things you take for granted now - things like the happy mac and the bomb icons one used to see on startup, or the command key logo that's on an Apple keyboard. She designed the Monaco typeface - the one that, for instance, was the text on all of the original couple of generations of iPod. She design Moof the Dogcow - which, if you don't know Moof the Dogcow, you should look it up, because it's a happy, happy little bit of joy. And that was just it - in a world where computers were beige and bland and meant to feel like accountant's tools, the little splashes of life that Ms Kare designed were whimsical, playful, and very, very human. On Windows, she designed the cards in Solitaire. Most of her most famous work is not used anymore - or it's used in a highly refined form. Part of the beauty of her work was her ability to render ideas with clear meanings and a distinct soul in the kudgy, bitmapped screens that computers had when she was building - 8 bit color, drawn one bit at a time. While her icons themselves are slowly dissapearing or being reformed, the spirit behind her work is still a guiding principle across the computing world, and one that is growing more important today: that a computer should speak to humans, should help them to relate to the unfamiliar, should be beautiful, and fun, and simple. The visual look of the iPhone - simple uncluttered design with subconsciously recognizable, bright iconography - owes an immeasurable debt to Susan Kare. Every graphical operating system - Windows, Mac OS X, the various Linux desktops - looks and feels the way it does, at it's best moments, because it's imitating the successes that Kare was such a part of in the beginning. Susan Kare is one of my heroes in technology. She didn't invent the microchip, she didn't program the Linux kernel, and the work she did is largely defunct now. But what she DID do was, in a culture of insular, excited technospeak, whisper out in her little way about people, humans, and about the noble reality of a geeky, copper-wire dream - that computers are more than table saws, they are ways to live more fully, more completely, and more beautifully.

Read More......

Apology and Crito by Plato

So, you may have seen my beloved wife the other day link to a list of books we got at the library sale, including a big box of old boring books from Encyclopedia Brittanica I picked up. I will not talk much about the series itself (though I could) here, but just wanted to say real quick AMANDA DOESN'T WANT TO READ ANY OF THEM AND THEY HAVE BIG MARGINS AND BEAUTIFUL PAPER SO I CAN WRITE ALL OVER THEM AND THAT TOTALLY KICKS TEH BUTT HURRAH! Okay. That's out of my system.

So, quick fact: I have never sat down and read any primary source in philosophy, ever. Not ever. This is what happens when you flunk out of college and go back for computers - you never read these things. I picked up bits, pieces, here and there, sure. But I've never actually READ a philosophy work, ever. So this is my first. So, if I talk loud and silly, plese just understand that I'm ignorant and doing my best.

Apology is actually Plato's transcription of the defense that his mentor, Socrates, made for himself before the Athenian court, where he was accused of corrupting the youth of the city. If there is a spoiler in this, here it is:



He loses. And they sentence him to death by being forced to drink hemlock.



Crito is a meeting in the prison between Socrates and his friend, Crito, who has come to say he has gathered up resources to bribe the guards so that Socrates can escape. The two discuss whether that is the best moral decision.

This sounds surreal and unrealistic, I know, two guys sitting going 'so, Socrates, do you think you ought to stay in prison or die, or leave prison, and not die? Just askin'...' But it isn't. It's actually, weirdly, human, so much so that I'm either impressed with Socrates writing skills or convinced that the transcripts are, at least in part, taken from life. There's also something immediate and powerful about reading philosophy that ISN'T just people abstractly discussing what they ought to do. The guy is living with real, palpable, extreme consequences of his convictions, and explaining why he won't abandon them anyway.

It's also creepily prescient of today. When Socrates talks about his accusers, and then about politicians, he says:

How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that they almost made me forget who I was -- so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth. But of the many falsehoods told by them, there was one which quite amazed me; -- I mean when they said that you should be upon your guard and not allow yourselves to be deceived by the force of my eloquence [when I'm obviously not eloquent]... unless by the force of eloquence they mean the force of truth; for if such is their meaning, I admit that I am eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs!

Socrates is an interesting man to read, because one can imagine him as any number of men - arrogant or humble, pompous or self-deprecatory, playful and strident, detatched and intimate. The reason for this, is that he's none of these things: he simply always speaks the truth. When Socrates says he is wiser than the people he meets, it is, genuinely, because he met them, spoke to them,and saw their foolishness. There's no other agenda behind it, he's not trying to impress his listener, or demean the fool, he's simply stating a fact: I got a reputation for being wise, because the people I could find who said they were wise were fools and liars.

This is particularly interesting to me, because this way of living is so reminiscent of some of the powerfully intelligent left-brained people that I love in the technical industry today. I know, boring, feel free to skip this paragraph. But, the people who made the internet and technology what it is today were, in their roots, hippie philosophers (as was Socrates). Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Larry Wall, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, the very culture of the technorati, in it's seminal, and still central, form, is very much the reasoning idealist, who believes that if humans would analyze themselves enough, they'd learn to be happy and make the people around them happy. They call a spade a spade, because there's no benefit in telling it that it's a pitchfork, no matter how much it might wish to be one. Reading the interchanges between these people, they are acerbic, playful, arrogant and humble in turns. This is why it's so easy for the media to paint disagreements as great battles, to paint leaders as jerks. IT both is and is not that simple.

The real strength, after all, of Socrates is not in his answers, but in his questions. He has certain basic principles ("I do know that injustice and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonourable, and I will never fear or avoid a possible good rather than a certain evil." or "For wherever a man's place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger;") and they are powerful principles, but this isn't the Bible, and Socrates' goal is not to lay down laws - his laws come from his secret voice, an internal compass that tells him when he is doing evil. It is his own work in the world then to analyze these laws, to understand them, and then to make good choices from them.

It is the reader's work to look at the questions he's asking, and ask them to him or herself, to look at his premises and ask if they are sound, and if they aren't, to say what is sound - to have a dialogue with Socrates, though Socrates is dead and gone. Reading Socrates logic about whether we avoid humans who do evil led me into a long reverie about why I both agree and disagree with him, and why this speaks to, for me, the impossibility of an entirely benevolent god - not probably an interesting discussion here, but the sort of question I need to ask myself sometimes, the sort of thinking that I need to do.

As a teacher, Socrates is beautiful and almost perfect. As an ethicist, as a book to live by, this endless belief in reason and absolute law that makes him such a good teacher leaves him somewhat short to me. PErhaps perfect reason can be perfectly moral, but this is the same problem that the Utilitarians run into in my book - the assumption is that we are capable of making those decisions. I don't think it's possible for us to know sufficient information to make a fully informed decision on anything, ever. So decisions are endless combinations of reason and emotion, of knowledge and intuition, simply because we are not capable of a perfection of either faculty. And in some sense, even, I wonder if Socrates was right to die. I believe for him he WAS right, but I don't believe he HAD to be right, if that makes sense. But that's the paradox that Socrates life is in my mind - how can a thing be right (or wrong) if we cannot know perfectly what it's consequences will be? If Socrates had been killed and then forgotten (which could have happened simply by luck - it happened to so many of the great thinkers of the ancient world) then would his standing for his principles have been the most good he could have done for the world? We simply cannot know - it is impossible to know. To study knowledge in a world where the most basic knowledge is impossible to pin down is both terrifying and exciting - just like to study To the Ligthhouse is an exhilerating and terrifying view of the unknowable depths of human emotion and attachment. Socrates is a beautiful man to read and learn from - as long as we don't begin to feel compelled to agree wtih them. And given the choice between a Book of the Answer and a Book of the Question, perhaps a Book of the Question is better...

Read More......