The Natural Thing
To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were visiting our land. It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.
William James, 1902 (The Varieties of Religious Experience)
How times change.
The Algebraist
The Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, who was Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet (Det.) and who had once been Triumvirate Rotational human/non-human Representative for Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly, in the days before the latest ongoing Chaos and the last, fading rumbles of the Disconnect Cascade, had some years ago caused the head of his once-greatest enemy, the rebel chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay to a long-term life-support mechanism and then hung upside down from the ceiling of his hugely impressive study in the outer wall of Sheer Citadel - with its view over Junch City and Faraby Bay towards the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap - so that the Archimandrite could, when the mood took him, which was fairly frequently, use his old adversary's head as a punchball.
This book gets cool points just for using the word "archimandrite".
I have decided that I rather like Iain M Banks when he's not working in his trademark Culture universe. The Culture books I've read so far have never rung true for me: a society where AIs run everything and never crash, while humans are sort of pets, yet perfectly happy, seems sort of a cop-out. The Algebraist on the other hand is a lot of fun. It's unashamedly widescreen Space Opera - a galaxy billions of years old, with a wide spectrum of races who live at vastly different scales and speeds, about five separate factions vying for power, a billion-year-old secret McGuffin which could Change Everything, a society of very alien aliens, and lots of things exploding in ways surprisingly consistent with the current consensus laws of physics. (Relativistic asteroids are one of Banks' favourite offensive weapons, it seems).
Oh, and it's told from the point of view of a human archeologist - a bit of a rebel and a youngster at a mere couple hundred years old - who spends half the book inside a personalised spacecraft inside a gas giant, interacting with the natives who are kind of like a cross between squids, wheels and crabs, who live for billions of years, and who have a civilisation based around collecting books and fighting sort of historical re-enactment mini-wargames (with live weapons).
Plot? Well, you need wormholes to get around the galaxy. A large chunk of the galaxy's 'holes are still offline after the last war (a mere few million years back) - it takes between dozens to hundreds of years to travel at sublight speeds - and the current consensus civilisation, the amusingly Byzantine Mercatoria, has its hands busy fighting both the uncivilised Beyonders, and various dropout cults such as the Epiphany Five Disconnect (home of our Chad Vader-ish villain, Luseferous. He likes blowing up planets, but he's a little out of his league when it comes to the galaxy's real hard lads. Invading 117 stellar systems is about the level of 'loud annoying domestic dispute' in this milieu.)
Meanwhile, a little system in the middle of nowhere that happens to be home to an archeological station researching the enigmatic gas-giant Dwellers (the squid-wheel-crab people) stumbles on The Ultimate McGuffin - a long-lost epic poem titled 'The Algebraist' which supposedly reveals the location of the Dwellers' secret private wormhole network - which is the sort of information entire civilisations would start a galactic war over. Or at least invade a system for. Which all sides then proceed to do, and wacky antics ensue.
The Sense of Being Stared At
It's time for some belated reviews.
The Sense of Being Stared At by Rupert Sheldrake is another interesting little piece in the puzzle of religion, spirituality and the paranormal.
Sheldrake has become infamous for his theory of 'morphic resonance' - which I'm not too invested in either way or the other - but what I find particularly interesting about his work is that in investigating paranormal phenomena (particularly telepathy-like occurences) he does not focus only on humans, but also on animals. If his findings are to be believed (and I see no reason why they shouldn't be, if you believe any of this stuff) then animals are at least as good as, and in many cases better than, humans at second sight or sixth sense. And that certainly fits with the pop mythology. It's a cliche in ghost stories that 'the cat/dog reacted strangely'. Oscar the hospice cat is a current example. This raises interesting questions about the nature of consciousness and the soul: like intelligence (or potentially sentience), it doesn't appear to have a hard cut-off point between species, if dogs are able to tell at a distance when their owner is planning to come home. An African Grey parrot featured in the book is apparently able to read its owner's mind.
(This opens all sorts of weird-science ideas to me. Could we use African Grey parrots in space missions, using telepathic instructions? If a parrot is able to access the psi dimension, which presumably means it has a soul, then what about a planaria, or an e. coli? If we either a) get enough computing power to simulate an organism at the atomic level, or b) develop a teleportation technology (remember, we can already destructively 'teleport' whole atoms, preserving quantum state) and get to the point where we can teleport living things, and then want to determine 'does the process of simulation/teleportation destroy the soul' - well then, don't bother waiting until you can send through a human or even a great ape - just run a psi-attuned African Grey through! And see if it behaves the same afterwards.)
One of Sheldrake's experiments involves the power of gaze: he believes that humans and animals have the ability to somehow detect when they are being looked at intently (or rather, I expect, that it is about the detection of the intention itself - the idea that the universe is constructed primarily of intentions rather than objects recurs a lot in the mystics and in the Gospels - the parable of the Widow's Mite, for example). I personally have never noticed that I have any particular ability to attract the attention of people by either looking at them or concentrating on them. In fact I feel like I'm spectacularly under-endowed in that department. But the idea is intriguing and it would be easy to run the fairly simple experiments he describes.
Sheldrake also has a fairly weird-sounding take on how human (and animal) vision works; he feels that (in accordance with ancient belief) it involves the eye sending out 'rays' to the subject, rather than the processing of incoming photons. This makes absolutely no physical sense, but it does have a certain kind of logic if you view the universe as a computational or simulation system, where the value of a quantity is not calculated until there is a request for it: in fact, this is exactly how the CGI methodology of 'ray tracing' works. I am not sure if this is precisely how Sheldrake is arguing, but I can see how (if attention is a real thing, at an underlying 'spiritual' layer to the universe) focusing one's mind on a distant object - by means of 'paying attention' to the signal path of a physical receptor - could send some kind of underlying 'probe' back up the line of sight to the object being studied. So even 'passive' sensors could leave an 'active' trace on the universe at a subliminal level. Which is a pretty freaky thing when you think about it. It's the sort of weird aliveness we take for granted in computing - that merely by interrogating an object you can alert it of your presence - but we moderns tend to live under the reassuring assumption that the outside, physical universe is 'dead' and doesn't notice when we pay attention to it, until we start bringing out the sharp sticks to stand well back and poke it with.
This 'deadness' is of course what religion has always argued strongly against - religion is all about the universe being alive, and is why the existence of religion seems so weird and unnatural to the modern mind - but intellectually subscribing to that idea is one thing. Becoming terrifyingly aware that everything you do, in fact every thought you think generates real and literal interactions with the cosmos - not limited in any way by any of the usual physical quantities like space, time, energy or matter - is something else. What does that awareness do to science? If our very breath, less than a breath, stirs worlds - how can we move, how can we possibly have any space to exist as separate beings? Science is all about making sure our sticks are sufficiently sharp and sufficiently long and then poking at will - if it turns out that you can't make a stick long enough to isolate you from karma, how can we move without hurting ourselves?
Or put a little more bluntly: If we can't vivisect a cat without scarring our soul, how do we develop new eco-friendly detergents to replace the ones that kill fish?
(The answer would seem to be: we're not separate beings and it is impossible for us to be. And that an acceptance of deep interaction, wired-in at the lowest levels of physics and sub-meta-physics, does us no harm. And that we have to accept somehow that there exists something more than karma, more than cause-and-effect blowback: forgiveness, release, repentance, centering, whatever it is that allows us to somehow realign ourselves with the True World. And that somehow there are two kinds of science, knowledge of the outer world, and knowledge of our inner selves, and our greatest ignorance seems to lie in the second.)
Lock S-Foils in Attack Position
Thirty years after the first Star Wars movie, the Cassini probe has done a flyby of Iapetus, the moon of Saturn which looks strikingly like the Death Star (complete with big crater eye and equatorial trench, well, ridge).
And we get pictures in near real-time on the global compu-mecha-info-tron. I love living in the SPACE FUTURE.
The Ashes of Pentecost
I sometimes tell people that the church in which I was born, and lived until I was seventeen, was at the time a 'cult'. The label is perhaps half true. Which is to say (to pick a random highly-rated Google link), we met most of the signs listed in the www.ex-cult.org indicators list: Leader claimed special exclusive ministry, we believed we were the only true church, we used emotional intimidation including total shunning to keep members from leaving, (we had 'free-will love offerings' rather than compulsory tithing), we had little time to ourselves (seven meetings a week plus Saturday afternoon labour), massive control over private lives, all criticism seen as rebellion, 'informing' on dissidents encouraged through an informal secret reporting system. Yep, we were objectively pretty much up there.
(A miracle occurred later, as these things do, and the church restructured itself; it's now a fairly mainstream Pentecostal/Charismatic denomination).
However. The word 'cult' only carries half of a meaning. What we actually were was a splinter cell of a substream of the Pentecostal church movement in New Zealand: an isolated fragment of a divided subculture within a subculture, that had become frozen in time around the 1940s while even the fundamentalist Christian world moved on. And the story of that movement, what happened to it, and how we came to be who we were, is one that has been largely untold but one that grows increasingly fascinating to me the older I get.
My Pentecostal heritage - and I have not completely rejected it, nor do I plan to, because part of it was good - is the reason why I am interested in anomalous cognition and psychic powers, because the Pentecostal faith was built solidly on the existence of such things. The reason why new denominations formed in the first place was because phenomena were occurring that were beyond ordinary comprehension, and those who chose to practice those strange powers found themselves outside of the boundaries of discreet, safely materialist 'Churchianity'. Naturally they flocked together to escape persecution and create their own identity; unsurprisingly, they found or created strong leaders who would champion their cause while reassuring them that all was still well in God's heaven; sadly, these leaders very often abused their trust, manipulated their flock, and fought among themselves like trapped sewer rats.
In New Zealand, it seems, the very smallness of our country combined with the wideness of our ocean and our many competing overseas influences to bring us a Pentecostal Christian subculture that was riven with discord and factions within a few years from when it began, in 1922. Healing began to come in 1975, but even now in 2007 the church landscape remains fractured. But denominational walls now seem to be dissolving even as new battle lines are drawn.
My main source for history so far has been the excellent 1999 book by Brett Knowles, 'New Life: A History of the New Life Churches of New Zealand 1942-1979'. As one might expect, it focuses mainly on the New Life denomination, but the story around the edges gives some of the shape of what must have happened elsewhere.
There had been of course spiritual movements, awakenings, revivals for centuries. The period from 1850 on had been filled with Spiritualism, faith healers, millennial apocalyptic movements such as the Adventists. But the movement that became called 'Pentecost' is generally acknowledged to have begun on New Years Day 1901, at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas. The phenomenon of glossolalia, or 'speaking in tongues' started there. The second major event on the American axis was the Azusa Street Revival which began in 1906.
Meanwhile, it seems the 1904-1905 Welsh Revival had influenced the Anglican vicar Alexander Boddy, who travelled to Azusa after visiting Norwegian Methodist pastor T B Barrett. A global network had rapidly sprung up leading to at least two (American and British) streams of this new, and yet faction-ridden, religious movement.
The Yorkshire Methodist layman Smith Wigglesworth, a plumber by trade, visited Boddy in 1907 and began a hugely successful public career as a healing evangelist. It was Wigglesworth's visit to New Zealand in 1922-1924 which led to the creation of a Pentecostal denomination - the Pentecostal Church of New Zealand - and the chain of events which led to my particular faith.
The PCNZ, similarly to other groups elsewhere, seems to have had a huge capacity for splintering. The Apostolic Church (affiliated with the Welsh revival) was the first to defect, followed by the Assemblies of God (an offshoot from Azusa) in 1926, a large unnamed group in 1949 influenced by both Seattle's Bethel Temple and the Latter Rain movement - which was later to become the hugely influential Indigenous Pentecostal or New Life Churches - the Christian Revival Crusade at some point, and finally the remains of the PCNZ in 1953 affiliated with the Elim denomination (also affiliated with Wales). Each of these groups appears to have bitterly fought with the others for converts and over points of doctrine, but more often, over issues of church government: specifically, the ongoing tension between centralised control and decentralised individualism. These rifts were to continue through the Billy Graham and 'Full Gospel' evangelism crusades of the 1950s and 1960s, until the Charismatic movement of the late '60s and early '70s led to the legitimising of Pentecostal phenomena within established church structures and a new rapprochement within the warring Pentecostal world.
Within this rather claustrophobic New Zealand religious scene, the founders of my particular sect were some of the more extreme. At least one of them bought into the controversial British Israel race-doctrine (though not so controversial as all that - William Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand, held to it), and it seems that they must have dropped out of fellowship with most of the other branches by at least the 1940s, possibly as early as the 1930s. This period was not much talked about, except in vague and veiled reminiscence as a time of lost glory. Our particular church was built after WW2, brick by second-hand brick, with donated labour from members. It still stands today, remodelled and updated but on the outside still... a monument to something. Faith, pride, sacrifice, hubris, warning, redemption, sanctuary: all of the above?
It is easy to empathise with multiple sides, reading accounts of these emotionally jarring times. By all accounts, the early Pentecostal pioneers had a hard row to hoe. They - most of them - were hot-blood battlers, outcast from the mainstream denominations for practising what they believed was the original, pure form of the Christian faith, 'with signs and wonders following'. And many of them did appear to work genuine miracles, sometimes easily and sometimes at great personal cost. Though it is hard to escape the feeling that many of those preachers also brought opposition upon themselves, in fact relished it. The Pentecostal preachers who quietly and wisely sidestepped division appear thinner on the page than those who launched 'great moves of God' amid great splash and fury.
It is harder, looking back, to separate the pain from the dream.
WILFCTDRTAWIHBLL
A quick link before I go to bed. I've not been reading the post-evangelical / emerging-church blogosphere much lately (it's too big) but somehow stumbled on this:
What I Learned From Church That Didn't Ring True And What I Have Been Learning Lately
Yes, yes and yes. Not that I've been invited to 'synchro-blog', whatever that means, but I'd like to add my own notes to this particular pile shortly.
Wilberforce and Werecats
I have many posts which want to write themselves, including one on the history of the Pentecostal churches in New Zealand, and quite a few book reviews. But for the moment, a report on my evening's entertainment.
I finally caught Amazing Grace, and it's just as brilliant as so many people have been reporting. I think in terms of movies that make me walk out of the theatre feeling like I just witnessed something unexpectedly wonderful, the last one that did that to me was Batman Begins. Yes, I really am comparing them.
Amazing Grace is one of those movies which is not only heavily and deeply Worthy in subject matter (dicey at best) but is also being actively marketed as a Political Event Movie by a number of Causes (mostly the Fair Trade people). Worse still, it's got a religious subtext, and is also being actively marketed as a religious movie. The combination can be awkward at best and heavy-handedly dismal at worst. I've seen, eg, Human Rights Festival documentaries and been challenged, terrified, inspired, manipulated etc, as expected. I saw Syriana, Goodnight And Good Luck, The Good German, and nodded wisely at Politically Worthy History As Story even as they hammered their (left-wing) point home so hard they dented the pile-driver. What is different about Amazing Grace - and why it's like Batman Begins - is that it works as a pure rip-roaring story, while at the same time having multiple subtle and beautifully balanced themes about the interplay of politics, religion, revolutionary idealism versus moral cowardice versus pragmatic caution. And it's a love story, and a historical epic. And somehow all put together it works.
What Batman Begins did - and did brilliantly - was to take a stable of standard superhero characters and subvert our lack-of-expectations about what sort of story could be told using these well-worn pieces. It played with themes of justice, vengeance, terrorism, and fear, and the delicate line between righteous anger and ruthless hate. It told a story gently critiquing the '00s War on Terror from the viewpoint of a character created in 1939. It wasn't perfect but by the standards of the filmed superhero genre, it was light-years above what had been done before and was well into the realms of the best of print superhero graphic novels such as Watchmen.
What Amazing Grace does is quietly startle us with the realities of a historical period where the world was swimming in revolution and either a new, more perfect social order, or the end of all things in blood and anarchy - or both - seemed to be breaking in everywhere. And a time where the religious and political battle lines were drawn differently than they are today. I walked out of the theatre with my head spinning. Was that really true? Could there have ever been a twentysomething Prime Minister of England and young political activists successfully fighting the system - and that in a time of war, revolution, insurgency, the rising power of capitalism, an insane king? The feel of the movie is of the English counterpart to the American Revolution: coffee-houses, Quakers, pamphleteering and sedition everywhere. And the dialog sizzles, with a Jane Austen kind of wit. If nothing else, I want to look up the real history of the late 1700s, of Pitt and Wilberforce, and find out just how liberal the scriptwriters were with the facts, and how much they embellished, because surely it can't have been like that. It has a graphic-novel kind of visual craftmanship to it: the swirl of capes, the clash of sabers in the glint of an eye.
And there aren't many historical movies I can make that claim about.
Afterwards, I heard The Ragamuffin Children doing, erm, 'tea-folk', which probably sums them up about as well as songs about werecats, pirates and the moon, performed with breathy vocals and keyboard in a teahouse, can be summed. This is the kind of music that Shelley Winters should be listening to or performing or both. (Though I am bitterly disappointed that neither 'My Alienfriend' nor 'If I Were A Werecat' are on the 'Werecat Lullabies' album. For shame!)
ISO: No to OOXML
Against all expectations and in the face of some pretty serious voting irregularities (hundreds of Microsoft partner companies joining up at the last minute in order to pack the vote), the International Organisation for Standardization voted 'No' to Microsoft's bogus Office document standard.
I'm impressed. It was very much like watching the UN refusing to endorse the US invasion of Iraq. A huge effort by a major player using all-out dirty tricks to bribe and coerce an international body into doing something blatantly wrong, almost getting there, and yet failing. As then, so now my respect for international democratic institutions just went up a notch. I thought the ISO was completely sold out to power and greed; turns out it's only mostly sold out. And there'll hopefully be a huge backlash against Microsoft for this. The first rule of bribing the judge is, make sure you don't accidentally try it on an honest one, and if you must, for goodness sakes don't do it right out in public, in front of the whole world. Threats, bullying, and the ability to turn off a huge portion of the world's communication grid at a switch only get you so far. At some point, to continue to rule, a superpower actually needs to have some measure of respect from its subject races and at least a pretence of lip-service to being an honest broker.
But this should never have happened in the first place. Too much of the world's information infrastructure is currently held hostage to proprietary monopoly cartels, and we now depend far too much on that infrastructure continuing to run. The world needs open, honest data standards and it needed them yesterday.
More than that, though, we need open, honest governance at the global level, and as far as I can see so far, an open Internet - while not being that itself - is our last, best hope for a place where we can start to build such a thing. Projects like Wikileaks, for instance, give me hope.
I can dream, anyway.
Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds
Just watched the DVD of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds stage show. A co-worker is going to see the real thing in Auckland; it's not coming to Christchurch or I'd be there.
There are a number of pop-culture artifacts that to me pop out of the background and make me go 'wow, I'm living in the future'. Little perfect iconic capsules of future-shock. They feel as if they belong in science fiction and give me a strange little shiver - did the world just take a wrong turn and I walked into a movie?
1. Microwave ovens. Radar! Cooks food! From the inside out! And doesn't kill people!
2. Compact disc technology. Silver discs! That reflect the light! And so cheap you could literally tile your walls with them if you wanted.
3. The first time I saw a URL advertised on a bus. At that moment I knew the Web had arrived. A globe-spanning data network and it's being used to sell stuff.
4. The Palm Pilot, circa 1997. A real computer, in your pocket. Star Trek's PADD made real. Now they're just 'phones'.
5. Secure Digital Cards. You've seen them everywhere in bad cyberpunk movies, tiny 'data chips', size of a postage stamp, store more info than a CD. Now they're real, too.
and now add another one: Jeff Wayne conducting his 1978 War of the Worlds album live in a huge arena, as a musical, with a movie backdrop, a Martian Tripod that lowers from the gods, while the giant floating head of Richard Burton narrates.
I think it's the giant floating Richard Burton head that sold it to me. The show itself is one of those parallel-universe blips - it's been a 'musical that wasn't' for so long, everyone asks 'so what was the show of this like?' and the answer is always 'there wasn't one! it's not a cast recording! it's a concept album!' Now the universe has walked quietly into another room and there is a show of the show that wasn't. So far, so groovy.
But reanimating a dead actor, and glueing his face to a ten-foot high sculpted floating plastic head... that's magic. Or at least another step toward the Sci-Fi Future, where virtual actors make Hollywood obsolete and suddenly we have stars leading the anti-robot union.
Another of those little shivers of recognition that I hadn't realised, is the link between Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and Space Invaders. I didn't realise that both came out in 1978. I don't know the release dates down to the month, but the game's creator Tomohiro Nishikado is on record that the concept of the Invaders is definitely based on at least the novel of War of the Worlds. Wells' aliens (tentacles, aggressive, advanced technology, death-rays) are of course the prototype for just every 'alien invasion' scenario ever, but I hadn't put Jeff Wayne's piece together until hearing the concert DVD and realising how similar the soundscape - moody synths, an alien 'heartbeat' while the first pod unscrews - is to that whole dawn era of videogames.
Of course, it was 1978 and in 1977 the pop-culture world was already looking toward the skies: Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had been blockbusters, Battlestar Galactica was launching on TV, Skylab was struggling to stay in orbit (it would crash in Western Australia in 1979). Star Trek Phase II, then to become The Motion Picture (and then the Next Generation), was in production. Space was cool again.
But was Nishikado inspired to think about H G Wells by Jeff Wayne's album, or it just one of those cases of interesting synchronicity? I'm not sure which idea I find cooler, but the two pop-culture properties do seem to just go together.
