This is an excerpt from last year's journal that I've been pondering as I prepare to visit Nice and Paris. Feel free to ponder along.
We should have spent the week in Dublin.
The Guiness Warehouse understands its place in the city, and, tongue-in-cheek, makes you walk up a seven story sensory assault to stand elbow-to-elbow against the dilettantes who lounge disaffected in the only available seats.
Everywhere I can see evidence of the stinking, steady, loud, hard-working and laughing character that populates Joyce, Wilde, O'Casey. But the evidence is painted over, plastered behind new facings. It feels like the streets have become New Jersey debs covering their bad manners with makeup. Keep the bad manners, lose the makeup.
Oscar's statue is covered with colors as vibrant as even he could have wanted. He lounges, as Yeats said, "on the fairy-swept dew" of St. Stephen's Green. They loved you, they hated you. They paint you raucous colors and lay you out on a rock. What else could you have done for yourself?
The Abbey, dressed now in its modern coture but still the cauldron of Irish drama: intimate, inviting, and slyly slipping alternative ideas to this blue-collar town between pints.
Finally, before the train left, we found him. James leans on his cane and muses on the busy pedestrian section of O'Connell Street. And in front of him, separating traffic, the Spire (the Hypodermic, as the more polite Dubs call it.) What do you think of all this, James? Your country (still your country, for all you couldn't work here) has taken you back and trumpets your writing as its own. You are carved into the Guiness tower windows as though the chic crowds never exiled you. Ireland has been to war, avoided war, allowed tolerance and understanding in the back door, and embraced its place in the world with only slight reservations. But is it losing its power over artists and the innovation of their work? Is it becoming the jejune layabout you were so disgusted by? You loved the living city. You loved its wanting and its dirt. Tourists don't like dirt, James, and so the Dubs move on. Why do you think they set this gleaming phallus in front of you if not to deny the impotence of Eire in a world driven by technology and the tourist trade? But you didn't care for either. You cared for heart, for artistry, for inspiration. This city, this country always provided it. Until now. Now they chase the same power everyone else chases, and can't grasp it. They need you now more than ever, James, but once again I don't think they're listening to you.
Doesn't it break your heart, James? The way they never listen until it's too late? What do you think of this city now, James? What do you think of it all?
I asked him that. Do you know what he said?
He said, "Feck 'em."
Yah. Let's go home.
Monday, February 18
Friday, February 15
Reincarnation & String Theory
So someone in one of my forums brought up reincarnation. I know people who believe in this, but to me it seems a very complex explanation for something very simple. On the other hand, I think string theory is an elegant description of the world, and it's damnably complex.
I could argue that the concept of reincarnation is tied to string theory. This branch of physics postulates that all matter AND all energy consists of immeasurably tiny, vibrating strings. The only difference between them is the way they vibrate. That connects with me because it speaks to something I understand on every level. OK, I'm going to geek out here. The quote is from Babylon 5:
"I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules that make up your body are the same as the molecules that make up this station, and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are star stuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. As we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective."
And it's true. Quantum physics also indicates that every tiniest particle of matter or energy, in its eternal dance, affects every other particle of matter or energy. One of the strangest principals of quantum physics is demonstrated by one of the simplest tests: if you observe light as it's directed at a kind of screen, the experiment shows that light is composed of particles. Quanta. If you perform the experiment again, but don't watch it as it runs, the results show waves. So the observer really does change the observed at a basic level.
So here's how this might work from a druidic perspective:
All things are interconnected. All things affect and are affected by all other things. Since this is the case, nothing new is created, nothing old is destroyed. All that is, has always been. The perception of time is a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the differences between things: then and now are simply positions from which we view existence.
It interests me that there is an emphasis in Druidry on sounds, because there is a satisfying connection here: perhaps reincarnation, ascendancy, or the achievement of Nirvana are all stories we tell ourselves to describe a distinct change in the vibration of certain strings.
Perhaps all we are really doing, as we die, is changing our song.
I could argue that the concept of reincarnation is tied to string theory. This branch of physics postulates that all matter AND all energy consists of immeasurably tiny, vibrating strings. The only difference between them is the way they vibrate. That connects with me because it speaks to something I understand on every level. OK, I'm going to geek out here. The quote is from Babylon 5:
"I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules that make up your body are the same as the molecules that make up this station, and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are star stuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. As we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective."
And it's true. Quantum physics also indicates that every tiniest particle of matter or energy, in its eternal dance, affects every other particle of matter or energy. One of the strangest principals of quantum physics is demonstrated by one of the simplest tests: if you observe light as it's directed at a kind of screen, the experiment shows that light is composed of particles. Quanta. If you perform the experiment again, but don't watch it as it runs, the results show waves. So the observer really does change the observed at a basic level.
So here's how this might work from a druidic perspective:
All things are interconnected. All things affect and are affected by all other things. Since this is the case, nothing new is created, nothing old is destroyed. All that is, has always been. The perception of time is a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the differences between things: then and now are simply positions from which we view existence.
It interests me that there is an emphasis in Druidry on sounds, because there is a satisfying connection here: perhaps reincarnation, ascendancy, or the achievement of Nirvana are all stories we tell ourselves to describe a distinct change in the vibration of certain strings.
Perhaps all we are really doing, as we die, is changing our song.
Thursday, February 14
Existentialists are wussies
You heard me, Sartre. Suck it up.
Looking out my library window onto an acre of flat white snow bounded by a swamp, I could argue that this environment is exactly the negative of Sartre's France in Nausea. The lack of stimulation in this scene throws every piece of sensory data into stark relief, making the sweep of a hawk's wing full of meaning and emotional response.
I understand and empathize with the narrator of Sartre's masterwork. The sheer horror at the discovery that flesh is empty, that the sensations of the world are forced upon one through these globulous, slimy, and grossly earthy senses-- this is not new to me. I cannot remember a time when I did not have moments of vertigo from simply being in my body. I understand the compulsive feeling that I cannot move a finger, swallow, or speak because any motion would solidify this prison. I get it. It's the terror of reality.
But there is more than terror to be found here. If you can become determined to experience the overwhelming feeling of moving your head--experience it to the full, experience the fear as fear-- you are identifying part of yourself with the universe around you. Be nauseous. Be afraid. Be disgusted. Be human. This sensation will be replaced by others. Experience them also. The trap of existentialism as practiced by so many is to neglect the experience of change by refusing to experience the change itself.
If when writing in a stream of conciousness way as though Faulkner was looking over your shoulder and sounds pour into your head impossibly loud though nothing is nearby you cannot grasp it, it slides away and the emptiness replaces it, yawning with its great red wet mouth velvet so that no sensation escapes, listen. Listen to the breath held for that moment and in letting your mind wander stop to examine where your mind has gone.
In other words, existentialism is great and allows a freedom we rarely experience to--well--experience things as they happen. But the unexamined life is not worth living. And if you go there, you might as well be nihilistic and give up.
So if you're feeling lost and alone in the sense-filled city, come out to a plain of white, where the white sky is interrupted by a single curve of brown. Then you can understand "alone" and rejoice in it.
Looking out my library window onto an acre of flat white snow bounded by a swamp, I could argue that this environment is exactly the negative of Sartre's France in Nausea. The lack of stimulation in this scene throws every piece of sensory data into stark relief, making the sweep of a hawk's wing full of meaning and emotional response.
I understand and empathize with the narrator of Sartre's masterwork. The sheer horror at the discovery that flesh is empty, that the sensations of the world are forced upon one through these globulous, slimy, and grossly earthy senses-- this is not new to me. I cannot remember a time when I did not have moments of vertigo from simply being in my body. I understand the compulsive feeling that I cannot move a finger, swallow, or speak because any motion would solidify this prison. I get it. It's the terror of reality.
But there is more than terror to be found here. If you can become determined to experience the overwhelming feeling of moving your head--experience it to the full, experience the fear as fear-- you are identifying part of yourself with the universe around you. Be nauseous. Be afraid. Be disgusted. Be human. This sensation will be replaced by others. Experience them also. The trap of existentialism as practiced by so many is to neglect the experience of change by refusing to experience the change itself.
If when writing in a stream of conciousness way as though Faulkner was looking over your shoulder and sounds pour into your head impossibly loud though nothing is nearby you cannot grasp it, it slides away and the emptiness replaces it, yawning with its great red wet mouth velvet so that no sensation escapes, listen. Listen to the breath held for that moment and in letting your mind wander stop to examine where your mind has gone.
In other words, existentialism is great and allows a freedom we rarely experience to--well--experience things as they happen. But the unexamined life is not worth living. And if you go there, you might as well be nihilistic and give up.
So if you're feeling lost and alone in the sense-filled city, come out to a plain of white, where the white sky is interrupted by a single curve of brown. Then you can understand "alone" and rejoice in it.
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