Category: Writing

I am not the writer in our house; my partner is.  Nevertheless, from time to time I find myself writing a bit of flash fiction or even poetry and vignettes in a series I call The Sparrow Story.

I truly have no pretensions around the craft of the written word at either a sentence or paragraph level, let alone at something as grandiose as stitching all of that together into a written story.  Can you imagine all those words to write?  Crazy!

Nevertheless, given my obvious insanity and lack of sense of my limits, I do have aspirations of someday producing a written story or two that may not be a complete waste of another human being’s time to read.

A little faith, please

In Words Redux I tried to differentiate between to love and to be in love; however, in the process of conversing with a friend I was presented with a conundrum: they did not agree with my usage.  Naturally, not agreeing is oft times the very hallmark of a good and meaningful conversation, and as such is of no real concern.  What is important is to understand the other, though.  This person reserved to love for friends and family and to be in love for someone very much more, a soul-mate.  As such, their own usage encompassed other ideas that I reserve, in part, for to love.  Which is to say, the more we talked the more I realized we were trying to express the same sentiments albeit using terms differently.

This got me to cogitating upon what is it exactly about love that I am trying to express.  And more importantly, I wondered if there there might be a better word that encompasses, even if only for this particular person, these (my) concepts.  Ironic as it may be, I had to reach back to my youth to discover a word that I rarely use out of its ecclesiastical connotations.  The word?  Faith.  It is ironic, as it were, in that I walked away from the Church many decades ago, although I never lost my faith in God-god-Life-Universe [1].  But that evening found me returning to the teachings of the Bible and to the story of the kingdom of God made whole on this Earth.  I started to wonder if the prerequisite events required to herald the creation of this kingdom is not the return of “(our) lord and savior, Jesus Christ”, but instead something both quite extra-ordinary and even more simple?  I wondered if maybe, just maybe, we might instead see “Heaven on Earth” not dependent upon the big-letter “F” Faith in God-god-Life-Universe but upon the little-letter “f” faith in another person: our soul-mate.

In this manner our soul-mate becomes both proxy and mirror for god, whereby our soul-mate transforms into our alpha and omega, the beginning and end of all things.  But we must remember that our soul-mate is our equal; therefore, the transformation of one is also the transformation of the other.  In this way, I very much mean we exhibit both the humility toward our soul-mate as we would god, but that we also exhibit the very qualities of god in ourselves through the act of compassion.  We simultaneously put our soul-mate before and above us, all the while exhibiting love through acts of acceptance, forgiveness and charity.  As in our Faith in god which does not waver or falter and is eternal, nor does our faith in our soul-mate which is to last till the end of our days.  In this manner we find some deeper wisdom in the traditional vows of marriage, for indeed “in sickness and in health, in richness and poorness till death” we discover these very qualities of godliness expressed in this simple succession of dualities the clear statement: we devote ourselves to each other through our faith in each other, that we forever aspire to be true to each other at all times even as we, as imperfect humans, are tried in so attempting.

In this light we might reexamine the words “love your fellow man as you love god” to mean something more deeply, more personal than a mere question of religious fidelity, but humanistic harmony.

Continue reading “A little faith, please”

Avatar, Linqua Franca or just Francs?

This is in response to Dave M. post over at Lost In Translation.

I wonder if some of the general objections made of Avatar and others in its vein can be rolled up to a difference between preferring a story (implying human archetypes) and creating an alternate reality.  Namely, how far should a movie or story be realistic to be compelling?

As a space geek, “sound in space” is one of those classical gotchas.  Also, space vehicles flying around like airplanes (even the beloved Battlestar Galactica straddles this line) can really make some people groan in their seats.  And if we examine Avatar, I am sure many a military geek noted the absurdity of mounting a land and air campaign when you have a ready space infrastructure capable of dropping rocks from space to quite explosive (and safe) effect.  But in spite of these gaffs, a story moves forward; or to put from the perspective of the director, the attainment of reality is not compelling enough reason to adopt it (reality) over something else (fiction).

I still argue Avatar is a (damn) good movie if put in proper context: a story that entertains and makes money.  It takes a lot of liberties (noble savage being a significant one), but it still tells an interesting story of the clash of cultures, loves, and the rest of human life generalized down to 3 hours.  And as such it is open for dissection with extreme prejudice by more critical minds.

I believe one premise of Dave’s argument/critique of the movie is more of the commodification, as it were, of languages (and thereby extension the associated cultures).  Avatar introduces a readily digestible set of sounds that make up a “language”, but a language without a meaningful culture to substantiate and flesh it out. I am not sure Avatar creates this phenomenon, rather it merely exploits it.  And it is a phenomenon that has been around in one form or another.  How many books are there on “Learn XYZ Language in 15 Minutes a Day”?  And how long have they been on our shelves?  Well, maybe not yours or mine, but you follow me.  Let us take Japan as example.  As a culture it has assimilated en masse innumeral words from the English language; so much so that whenever at a loss for a word in Japanese you can throw in the English word pronounced as a Japanese would say and you will often be understood (and right!).

I believe the other premise which Dave introduces inductively at the end of his blog in the form of a question:  “But, given Cameron’s goal of depicting a clash not just of different species but of civilizations … should (and could) Na’vi be so easily, so directly, translatable into English?”  I would agree with the embedded critique within that question if Avatar had truly remained at the level of cultures.  However, at least for me, the movie stayed solidly within the personal spheres of its characters; as such those clashes of civilization and culture remained mere background to a different story, one that I thoroughly enjoyed: twice.

Juxtaposition

I am fascinated by the juxtaposition of concepts and words. Some word-pairs are natural dichotomies whereby there is not much more to understanding them than through simple declination of denotations.  However, other pairs preclude this straight-forward identification through diametrically opposed definitions; instead they exist as opposites while simultaneously throwing off their scent in their seeming very congruence of denotation, or at least intersection or overlap thereof that a person can go a lifetime amidst these doppelgangers without nary a caution of their true nature.  Adding to this complication is the simple fact that we live in a reality originating both from without and within ourselves; whereby scientific fact must yield itself, even allow itself to be fractured and supplanted, by our truths of the intended versus the perceived.

I have written post-facto on two of these even while this entry remained in draft form.  The below is a quick enumeration of some of these such words.

The Most Dangerous Pursuit

I love analysis.  I may love it too much.  I do love it too much.  But it serves me well in my career as a technical mutt; I can suss out the root causes of problems and try to place a framework or taxonomy around a system to better understand and interact with it.  Analysis at some level is a process of reduction and refinement, a process of finding patterns and invariability to attach a “what” to things.  It is ultimately a process of discovering entities and illuminating their important relationships.

But once you have the what, there is in your arsenal the remainder of your primary interrogatives: who, when, where, how, and why.

What happened?

Who did it?

When did it happen?

Where did it happen?

How did it happen?

Why did it happen?

And lo! behold how the danger grows as we move down this enumeration from who toward how and why.  Naturally in the business and political arena all questions must be seriously entertained; however, once we enter into our personal lives all these interrogatives remain safe to ask but one: why.  Why as interrogative morphs into inquisition, forcing us down a very dangerous and very real rabbit-hole that will likely terminate with our, well, termination.

For myself, I believe asking why is a question best left to historians and sadists.  Yes; certainly it is a useful tool for limited introspection, but little has ever been gained and much more lost in asking why of another person.  The seed that most often germinates into the question why is an emotional inability to accept the what, not understand the why.  Someone did something we did not like or otherwise made us uncomfortable; a cosmic injustice occurred that does not meet with our world view and model.  We want a why, we need a why to re-establish balance with this schism between what we believe should be and what is.

It is not mere grammatical convenience that I used the word “should be.”  Should is a strong marker for a judgment taking place, it is the sign of a critical state of mind; judgment walls us from our ability to love (accept) the world around us.  Asking why is promulgated by the belief that the universe operates on reason.  Yes, the universe operates on mathematical laws but that is not reason, but just happenstance of a mathematical convenience with no consciousness necessary.  Why does not apply to the universe: it just is.  But why wants to dig into the conscious and subconscious motives of the what, the what being that we were hurt by and the need to bring the external world and our perceptions of said world back into alignment.  Why is fueled by our need to heal a hurt, but is retarded by our inability to accept the source of the hurt, the what.  Sadly, asking why more often than not is an attempt to re-align the external world to fit our perception of what should be, not the opposite; which is to say we ask why to warp reality to our expectations, not the rational inverse.

But.  But, indeed.  Asking why is born of a real and vital need to both heal and safe-guard ourselves against future occurrences of the same what to avoid a repeat of the current hurt.  And this is no small thing nor a thing we should ignore.  But while the motive is noble, the means is better served with a different question.  Instead of asking asking why it happened, I have found that asking how it could be different gets to the root of the real need and motive.  How could the what be different next time?  Asking why will not change the past; the hurt has happened.  We have a simple decision: accept what is or not.  Trust you I, choosing the latter (not) will end in you broken on the rocks of reality, a reality indifferent to the devastation wrought by your futile, fatalistic rally to change it, to change what is.  While we cannot change what was, we can help influence what might be.  And that is no harder than accepting the past, looking from the perspective of our acceptance rooted in the now, and facing toward the future asking: How can tomorrow be better?

Words Redux

In my last post, Words, I ended on the word alone and the self-actualized person.  But there is another set of words, to be in love and to love, that come to mind as another fine example of the conflation of causal over casual relationship.

To be in love is the both the great gift and possibly even greater scourge to come out of the 12th and 13th centuries economic and religious doldrums, swirling down the courtesan halls in both handkerchief and corset alike in European courts of the 16th and 17th centuries, culminating with Romanticism in the late 18th century that heralded arguably the modern age where we find ourselves now.  The great emotion!  The greatest of emotions?  To be in love is to to be in a continual state of ecstasy, an endorphin rush of sing-song dance and technicolor bliss that washes away all mars of age and life, leaving us and the target of our fixation as unblemished, godly perfection brought down from the Heavens and put on this earthly firmament in human guise.  This is nothing to be trifled with; to be in love should be put in a medicine bottle with one of those caps that requires monkey-like dexterity, cunning intellect, and herculean strength to open.  Potent stuff, indeed!

I am tongue-in-cheek with this state of human arousal because it in part enjoys such a deep seat of reverence in our culture, one that is at times deserved but more than not misplaced.  And let us be clear, this is not the stuff that fuels only the girls who grow up dreaming of being swept off their feet; boys, too, want to find their soul-mate in love and live happily every after.  It is part of culture, one that is never challenged or explored but accepted and expected. But what if to be in love is a mere feat of the external form, a consequence of a potent concoction of chemicals in our bodies?  How then do we examine this thing, this emotion?  It is just one form of lubricant before another kind of lubricant, all but to help get an improbable rock rolling down the hill, we then falling into the bushes and nine months later three walk out?  To be in love is a grand thing for sure.  It is a wonderful thing.  It is a splendid thing. But it is an emotion, not a state.  And it is as dangerous as any sin when we conflate it with love itself.

But before we get to this mating as it were of to be in love to to love, let us first clear up a potent conflagration of words when we use to be in love with someone who we attach the label “soul-mate”.  I have experienced from both ends the devastation of attaching our sense of soul-mate to the person we are in love with.  It is quite understandable, even natural, that the person who is the center of our emotional universe should also straddle the center of our spiritual and substantive universe.  But no matter how strong this connection appears to us, I can guarantee you that if you are in love with someone now then eventually, eventually indeed, you will not be.  There will be a morn, some morn, when you wake up, turn over to them and you realize you are no longer in bed with a person you are in love with; whatever passionate fire that consumed you for them will have been utterly, completely extinguished.  It may indeed also be very true and likely that some morrow after your passions will be rekindled, but in the interim you will not be in love with them.  Period.  Full stop.  Given this then how devastating indeed is it for us to attach the most sacred role one can occupy with another person — soul-mate — in connection to at best a perennial emotion: to be in love?  One moment we are in love with our soul-mate, the next moment we are not in love and they, too, then are not our soul-mate?  Sound ridiculous?  It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous.  But in our culture this is the norm, not the exception to the gestalt of being in love, we confuse our lovers with our soul-mates but then wonder why we find ourselves confused and disappointed when they “disappear.”  They did not disappear; they never existed as our soul-mate in the first place.

As depressing as this may all seem, it is not.  Let us return to our other infinitive form, to love. While I have no inkling of the relative closeness or distance between the etymologies of to live and to love, for myself the only significant difference I can tell between the two is the one I can spell: i versus o.  For myself, to love is life made manifest and whole, it is taking all the potentials of our the world and people around us and making it wholly manifest through our simple act of acceptance.  To love is to be in a state of acceptance, no more nor no less.  I do not believe you can both love a person and also judge a person.  We can and should love every person we meet — it is both our sacred duty but greater still blessed gift to learn about the world around us through the act of accepting people for who they are and are not.  If we believe the world must be good then it is difficult, even impossible, to truly love everyone we meet.  We create a schism whereby we must sit as judge over people, putting them in our various arbitrary camps of good and bad.  And if we wish to throw the Hitlers and Stalins of the world into this argument then we confuse the extremes with the middle.  We are all humans; we all, every one of us, are imperfect.  We do both good and bad things even as we are all good people.  At least in my own experiences, people who judge others are most often the self-diagnosed victims, too hurt and angered by the indifference of the universe and prompted by their misguided belief that the world should be fair, that in their act of self-defense that they lose the ability to recognize this simple fact: good people do bad things.  I am hungry to make this point that judgment is in polar opposition to love.  Love tempers us, tenders us with the capacity to forgive.  We forgive the people we love who hurt us for that simple fact that good people, all people, do bad things.

When we do finally come to accept the world and more so accept ourselves as whoever we are alone then do we have a chance to find on the most intimate level, the most sacred of roles our soul-mate.  And it is only in this state of acceptance that soul mates can be found let alone nurtured and sustained.  Note my use of temporal change through the words nurture and sustain; soul-mates are not born but grown through shared experience.  When we accept (love) a person for who they are and are not, we are ready to take a journey with them through life.  We are able to accept the many forks and cul-de-sacs they take as they learn and grow, making mistakes and even doing bad things all the while remaining a good person and all the while we loving them for who they are and are not.  In this context we are able to grow with them and they with us; we are willing to let the road lead us on and forever on, and we find ourselves in places and in states we could have never have foreseen or imagined the long years before when we were merely in love but had not yet found love.  And once something as precious as love is found, I guarantee you there is no way to unfind it with the days you have left in this world: love truly is eternal and forever, it is life itself.