Peace Labyrinth
The 2008 Side Door Christmas Journey Peace Labyrinth is running in Latimer Square, Christchurch, this weekend, 24/7 until Monday morning. If you have Windows Media, apparently you can see a live webcam feed.
Peace Labyrinth
This is what I'm doing this Christmas.
Glueing googly eyes onto driftwood sticks is surprisingly therapeutic.
Advent
I seem to be constantly running at the moment somehow, with little time to catch my breath. It is December; the rough beast of Southern Hemisphere Christmas shambles toward Bethlehem, with stress, gift-buying and end of year panic in its wake. I ended up going to three separate churches this Sunday: Anglican, Baptist alt-worship, and Catholic (ecumenical). It's 1am and I still haven't quite managed to finish the day.
The Urban Seed Advent in Art calendar inspires me. I'm still not used to the whole Advent thing; it's not something we used to do formally in the churches I've known previously. But it does provide a slightly more peaceful counterpoint to the rush and hassle of the season.
It frustrates me that I think in pictures yet I don't draw. An image has been haunting me for a while now: manga space Christmas. Whenever I see a 'stable and manger' painting I think not of animals but a grimy space garage, full of hulking machines. Mary wears a blue NASA jumpsuit. Joseph has a wrench for an arm. The Wise Men are aliens, their gifts a mystery of tangled wires.
In the baptism scene Jesus rises from a hydroponic pond, a ventilation duct fan turning slowly behind. John is startled by the arc of neon plasma in a light fitting overhead.
Good Friday is an explosion ripped through deck plating, a white hiss of oxygen dispersing into space. He lies broken on a gunship's prow. Yet it is the cyborg centurion who has flipped back his own helmet plate and kneels in surrender.
In the garden pod, a wrecked sleep capsule holds no body inside. Mary II turns, attention captured by the figure entering frame lower right with a living branch for a staff, whose face we cannot see.
Rocking the House
I was out at the Crowded House / Supergroove / Pluto concert this weekend, which was great, except for being way too loud (a few decibels above pain level; my ears stopped hurting after about twenty-four hours). My brother and his wife, having done this a few times before, wore earplugs. For whatever reason I didn't bring any; I think a part of me wanted to experience such a big event (the reforming of Supergroove actually interested me more than the reforming of Neil Finn's band) as directly as possible, disintermediated. For future reference, though: earplugs == comfort.
The first two acts were lit by simple coloured strobes, and then Crowded House got the works: searchlights scanning the crowd, a multilayered backdrop/set that slowly erected itself piece by piece between songs, projected colours and logos over curtains over scultures. And Neil doing a perfectly calibrated mix of his new stuff and the old standards which have dominated NZ airwaves for the last twenty years or more. Ending in the big crowd-pleasing finales of not 'Don't Dream It's Over' and 'You'd Better Be Home Soon'. Words everyone knows and can sing along to, in a wall of sound like sticking your head inside a jet engine for four hours that puts you in your own private universe. (A universe of pain, for me, but I could at least appreciate the thought).
It got me thinking, though. Here's a stadium-sized rock concert, one of the defining acts of the Australian/NZ scene, as big as they get in this city. An arena full of people who are all delighted to be there. Huge amounts of talent, creativity and money thrown at the task of translating inspiration to art, art to performance, performance to technology, technology to emotion. Pretty much a peak of the state of the art of the defining art form of our era; an art form that only became possible fifty or so years ago, after electrical amplification techniques invented for or first applied to political rallies became used for entertainment. And I had a flash of how it must have felt in the early days of rock: this new thing, an electrified guitar; a military-specification sonic crowd control weapon wrested from the hands of authoritarianism and war, and repurposed for individualism, for the search for personal happiness and even love.
How it must have felt in those post-war years, the hopes, the fears about technology and for the new baby-boom generation in their cradles, and the silent generation who had been too young to go to war but were old enough now to see a new way to fight. How magical, spiritual the miracle of electrical amplification and the music it created must have seen, at least to some: almost a new form of worship. The Amp, counterpart to the Bomb. The tool for mental revolution.
How much intelligence, how much sincerity, how much dedication, how much time and money was thrown at rock music, and still is! And how powerful a force it was. And I marvelled, with my head in the jet engine, my ears in pain, thinking: how is it that with all this creative power focused on a point - on creativity, art rather than destruction - how is it that the world is still not saved?
The Beats and the sixties generation experimented, did their best to throw their best and brightest minds against the iron cages of the psychic prison that promised only nuclear war; how they randomised their thoughts with drugs and sex and music only to come up short, fail, burn out, defeated by their own hubris, their own darkness, or the sheer impossibility of the task.
(And even that mythology is a lie; the weapons industrial-science complex spawned creativity like the Internet; the entertainment industry was bleak and dirty and controlling, the more so as obscene amounts of money flowed in; teen rebellion was inspired by middle-aged teachers and slickly marketed as a commercial product from the beginning. There was no golden generation, just a bulge in the demographic curve and devastated international rivals and a trade surplus; there was no clash of cultures, just a change in tastes and marketing strategies.)
But still I thought: here I am, in arguably one of the best rock concerts, the best popular art our culture can create; and I feel nothing, or close to it. I feel a wall of sound, I feel a huge display of raw physics; I see beams of physical light shining out from the tiny distant stage; but somehow I expect more. I expect to see beams of spiritual light, feel a wall of spiritual empathy and emotion. I'm gathered in this place with thousands of my fellow citizens and fans; it is an iconic moment; I expect to feel something in the way of unity, somehow touch the vast oversoul that binds us; but I do not. I feel more alone here in my stadium seat in a crowd than at home typing on the Internet.
Why do I expect a spiritual experience from a rock concert? I don't know. A part of me just does.
And I think about fragments I've read in various prophecies and channelled writings: visions of Heaven, visions of a maybe future: thousands of people gathering in stadium-like enclosures, generating that kind of spiritual power that a rock concert does in raw decibels. Prayer concerts. Maybe without a stage even; maybe without a focal point. Maybe everyone comes in as they are, lift their hearts to the heavens, and invisible pyrotechnics begin.
I think maybe there's a time coming when we won't have the energy or infrastructure to run the huge audio amplification systems that power rock as a genre. But maybe this other kind of concert wouldn't even need that. I picture something like an event running for days, weeks even: people come in, people leave; the stadium remains packed. It's quiet. There's no infrastructure to speak of, no organisation; maybe some kind of skeleton organising committee, but without a huge sound and light rig, what actually is there to organise? Food, medical care maybe (and with a shiver, maybe in that possible tomorrow that's no small thing). Maybe things run themselves, anarcho-syndicalist collective style, like the Seattle '99 spokescouncils. There are no performers; the audience are the show. Everyone comes, brings themselves, their hopes, their fears, their visions, their inner stillness; the hush comes; something settles on the crowd. It's like the opening notes of a familiar guitar solo; but it's silent. Or at least, it's silent out there, in the air, but everyone feels it in here.
And the song begins, the song we heard a million years ago and all forgot until only just now. And maybe it doesn't ever stop.
And the house truly gets rocked.
Tired
I'm tired. Bone-deep, soul-tired. It's been creeping for over a year. I have a week off work in the hope I can recharge. But it's not really like a holiday because I still have commitments I can't walk away from. Or have chosen not to let drop in a flaming heap. I guess it all comes down to personal choice, but it still sure feels like I'm boxed in.
Reading New Age books doesn't always help, either. There are ones that resonate with me, and there are ones that... don't. Sometimes one will seem okay, will say things I largely agree with, but still give me the screaming yeemies - I mean the deep, oh-god-I'm-really-going-to-hell-for-sure-now kind of spiritual terror that I don't really know how to convey to people who haven't grown up in a fundamentalist household. I really don't understand how the heck this works, and I'm not entirely willing to chalk it all down to Those Nasty Fundamentalists, because when it comes down to it, I actually do believe there *are* such things as fundamentals of the faith, non-negotiables, I don't actually view the word 'Conservative' as an insult, and this sort of belief puts me offside with rather a lot of New Age spiritual guides and teachers, as well as maybe 98% of political activists.
The latest book that gave me the heebie-jeebies was 'Emmanuel's Book II: The Choice for Love'. The weird thing is, that I actually do agree with most of what 'Emmanuel' says. Most of it. And yet...
The New Age idea that scares me the most is that 'there is no external morality as such, anything you do is right if you do it out of love/compassion. When it comes to sex, sleep with whoever you want, break up when you want, it all helps you advance. Abortion/euthanasia is fine if you mean well. Everyone chooses their own path.' While this is quite probably true... as far as it goes... and quite possibly Christian... as far as it goes... (after all, Christ did hang out with 'publicans and sinners', defended prostitutes, overruled the morality systems of his day)... it grates with me to the point of inducing a feeling of intense physical illness, because there's an instinct deep in me that shouts, 'But there *is* big-M Morality, there *is* big-T Truth, it is *not* all subjective, the old-school Jewish attitudes towards, eg, sexuality and euthanasia are more basically correct than the modern liberal consensus of 'anything freely chosen by consenting adults is intrinsically moral', and even if I can't figure out how or if this weird old idea applies to other people, it still seems very important to me that I integrate morality into my life, and there are things that I do not want to do even if supposedly and allegedly I am free to do them - and I believe by making this choice I am doing something more than merely exercising personal taste, nor am I being a knee-jerk reactionary blindly opposing the cosmic forces of progress and light'.
This instinct seems to put me in a very lonely position, because quite frankly I'm out of step with both conservative Christianity and consensus pop-spiritual culture on a lot of social issues, and I'm not sure how I'm ever going to reconcile such opposing forces so that my head stops exploding and my heart stops breaking. There is a deep psychic pain in me from this out-of-step-ness that I've almost got used to being there, but hurts like heck when I stop to think about it. And yet I'd much rather it be there, because it feels to me like it's representing something important that should not be forgotten. And it feels like somehow I'm carrying it mostly alone, and I don't understand why.
And I wonder why I feel tired so much.
As a sort of hair-of-the-dog antidote, I read some Frances Bird, who seems to have been doing automatic writing around World War I, as part of a cluster of similar writers (mostly women, apparently). I generally seem to have had the best experiences reading material from this era, as it seems to be more aligned with my Christian intuitions, and puts emphasis on the idea of self-discipline as well as that of freedom. There's also a kind of, for want of a better word, solidity, a sort of intellectual and religious rigour, to both the writing and the thought-forms from this older stuff that I don't really get from a lot of the post-WW2 material. A sense of God's role as a real Father and Creator, separate from us and transcendent, in a way that's not present in much of the later stuff, which tends to major on interconnection, immanence and 'we're all God really', even though it's friendly and happy enough.
(I find it interesting that Frances Bird is almost invisible on the interwebs. Possibly it's because although she seems to have written in the pre-copyright era, the books I've seen were republished in the 1980s, and so will still be locked up for a while.)
By comparison, I tried glancing at Neale Donald Walsch's 'Conversations With God', not for the first time, and try as I might, I just couldn't stomach it. Maybe it's the record of a genuine personal spiritual experience, but as channelled material, it just seems incredibly... shallow. And very trite and pop-spiritual in its teaching. I suppose people have got something out of it, but it really doesn't do anything for me.
A Mission Statement, Of Sorts
Who are you? -- The Vorlons' Question
What do you want? -- The Shadows' Question
-- Babylon 5
I move through the day in the rhythms that I've known.
I've got this crazy dream of stripping down to truth and bone.
-- Heather Nova
When trying to write honestly about one's personal views on science, politics, religion, philosophy - but especially those last two - it is hard to avoid offending people. I have insulted a friend in the last week and that hurts. Another friend asked me in some bafflement 'you write about a lot of different things, but where are you going with it; how does it all tie together?' I was also baffled, since to me it's perfectly obvious: I write about who I am and what is going through my mind, and if what is in my mind doesn't eventually fit together, then I will explode or go insane; this weblog is my attempt to document part of the long process of slowly crawling toward sanity. And I try to avoid offending people, but I'm not always sure how to do that.
It's probably time that I tried to explain what I'm trying to do on this weblog, at least the general theme of my interests. There is a point to what I write about, of sorts. Less of a point perhaps, and more of a gently tapered ellipsoid curve. A kind of rounded blob you can wave in an overall direction.
There are several categories of posts here. Ones which begin with 'Dreamlog:' are probably the most confusing. They are exactly what they seem, which is documentation of actual dreams I have, or at least the fragments I can recall. Mostly verbatim, sometimes edited for PG rating. I write them for two reasons, one as a sort of vague spiritual discipline, two because it seems like good practice for creative writing and I've been in a creative writing block for about seven years, and three, because dreams amuse me and Slow Wave is one of my favourite webcomics. Possibly they don't really belong on the front page, but so far I haven't hacked WordPress to do anything else.
Some posts are marked 'Poem:' - these are original poems, generally ones I have written previously and have had up on the web elsewhere. I'm slowly migrating them over to WordPress, and when I do I tend to backdate them to a (usually fictitious) date in the year in which they were written, so they don't spam the front page.
One of my narrow interests is Interactive Fiction, a retro-hobbyist gaming genre with roots in the old-school days of 1970s Artificial Intelligence research. It's an interest increasingly honoured in the breach rather than the observance, but a frightening amount of my social life revolves around friendship with fans of this genre, and of board and videogame designed in general.
For the rest, they are generally responses to media or materials I have been reading lately, or to current incidents. I read insane amounts of the Web; I play video games; I watch movies and very occasionally TV; often things jump out of pop culture at me. These posts may be serious or unserious. I don't always make that much distinction.
I also read books of a spiritual or philosophical character, following my own personal reading track which mostly consists of following up ideas that jump up and wave at me saying RESEARCH THIS. I try to write reasonably serious posts about these, because what I am trying to piece together in this research feels something like a spiritual/philosophical archeology project: tracing the course of a cluster of interesting ideas which have emerged over about the last 150 years, and which center (for me) around a version of Christianity that I find appealing.
But although I say Christianity - and I consider myself to be a Christian of a fairly orthodox stripe - I am finding overlap with some of these core ideas in various religions, sciences, and political streams of thought. I very explicitly don't make a distinction between groups or disciplines: I believe fragmentation and the building of artificial walls between disciplines and organisations to be a curse, and I don't believe any human being needs any kind of formal theological or academic licence to practice study and free thinking. I go where I see the ideas going, or I try to. Sometimes I get scared and have to back off for a bit. Sometimes I don't have the academic skills to follow the path of an idea completely. But I'm trying for an overall, birds-eye, gonzo-philosophy approach here. I feel sometimes like I'm jumping from idea to idea like a frog across lilypads; if I stop too long I'll bog down. The important part is to get an outline of connections where they seem to have been hidden, and try to get what I think are maybe-useful insights down in text before I forget them.
If you want some words to describe my main themes, I could give you these: truth, peace, unity, love, Christ.
The search for truth is always important to me. I am possibly a little on the Aspergers spectrum there. I want to know and speak the true idea more than anything; sometimes this means I don't bite my lip when I should, and people get hurt. I don't always notice this.
The search for peace started in 2001. I got involved in the peace movement; it was the most fractious bunch of misfits ever in one room together; we just barely avoided fistfights. I loved it, and it nearly killed me. And I realised I had to seriously reexamine all my ideas, political and spiritual and scientific, to get a grasp on what I wanted to do with my life.
Unity is a true idea (possibly the One True Idea) which I have fought for a long time, but find myself drawn towards again and again. All things are connected. It is scary to me because a large part of my personal and religious identity has been invested in the idea of separation, holiness-through-withdrawal. But I looked for peace, and peace led me to unity, and unity is leading me to some fairly radical philosophical ideas in domains I had closed off as unscientific and occult. I'm opening those boxes and letting whatever is in, jump out. I'm trusting that everything will eventually fit together, even the bits that don't.
Love is a nice word that has scary consequences - at least for me. In the Christian tradition - or at least in some of the more fundamentalist sects - love is deeply associated with suffering. I'm not sure that that's intentional, but whenever I hear that word I have imagery of crosses, graves, violent death by torture. It is perhaps no concidence that I am single. I want to try to get past this deep fear of the kind of unconditional love described by the Christian faith - but the fact remains that an innocent guy who'd die staked out on Death Row and still love his enemies - and who says 'do what I do' - is deeply, deeply troubling, and if this doesn't bug you, it should.
Christ is a word burned into my brain from my childhood. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. Not all of these people can stand to live on the same planet as each other, let alone enter the same room without wearing explosives. Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, Buddhists, we've all heard of Jesus, and some of us (maybe not the Buddhists) are willing to kill each other over that name. But what do the formulas and rituals of the Christian faith actually mean? Is this Christ person... entity... force... thing... something real? If He is, what does that do to science, to religion, to politics?
(I've probably offended a dozen people just in that paragraph alone. See what I mean?)
Why do I call this blog 'Life in the Cultlane'?
Well, for one it's an anagram. For another: I grew up in a church that by most rational standards was a cult. Now I'm opening the doors to exploring philosophies which are also associated with groups which could be called cults. It's where I am, it's my patch, I'm claiming it. The word 'cult' means 'group of worshippers'. It's not irrational to worship, the important thing is what you worship and how well it matches reality. Not all cults are necessarily wrong; not all wrong things are necessarily called cults. We need to investigate with our eyes, our minds and our hearts, find the bits that fit, discard the rest.
Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Of course. So can a whole lot of bogus messiahs. But that doesn't mean we don't go looking.
Comments are welcomed, though I would prefer that they are on-topic to the post at hand. You will almost certainly disagree with me on a number of subjects. I'm okay with that. If I contradict what you say, I'm not mad at you. I'd like it if you agreed, obviously. But I'm almost certainly wrong on some things and I reserve the right to make my own way to truth.
I generally won't delete comments, though I will point out if I think you're not on-topic. If you post comment spam however - by which I mean obviously automated content-free 'visit my site' messages - you *will* be deleted, rapidly and with extreme prejudice.
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.
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.
Ten Years Apocalypse-Free
Happy ten years since Judgement Day! Remember, living as a nukaholic means taking it one day at a time - every day that you wake up and don't accidentally start World War III is a success.
Oh, and also happy tenth birthday this week to Sluggy Freelance, grand champion of webcomics.