Category: Thoughts

My thoughts, ramblings, and pontifications.

Tickity-tockity-tick-tock-tock

It is an interesting thing: growing old.

I expected a few things to happen.  Thinning hair: check.  Worsening eyesight: check.  Epidermal blemishes: check.  Crow’s feet: check.  Biological clock:  what?!

I recently finished reading a book where in one of the early protagonists is a very young girl of all but six years in age.  As I read of her plight in the book and her flight from one danger to the next, I could not help myself from feeling this deep sense of longing to protect her.  I found myself telling myself that if she was my child none of this would be happening.  Which to be fair, if it were true, at least in context to the story, then it would have been some other little girl at the center of the epidemic, and the original little girl and I would have been ripped in half by the ensuing epidemic of vampires.  Keep with me here, even in a vampire story one can find humanity, right?

What I found interesting at both a personal and detached analytical level was this soft, undefinable emotion around caring for a child; not just any child: my child.  The aspect of taking care of children is not new to me.  I always made it a point to be near the infants.  Even when I was very young, starting as soon as 3, I would “volunteer” at the child care-center at our church.  I recall even back then quietly believing that someone (I) needed to be there to care for them in case they started to cry.  It is not something I voiced (granted I did not speak English for another year or two), but I just thought everyone thought and felt this about children.  Truth be told, I have had to actually learn to stop and consider the situation when I hear a child cry as instinctually I will seek them out and scoop them up into my arms, even a complete stranger’s child.  So this sense of protecting children is nothing new to me.  It is a truly natural sense of proportion I have of this world: protect children.

So I found myself immersed in this book (“The Passage” by Justin Cronin) and this young girl, Amy, finding myself morphing into another character of the book, Brad Wolgast.  He is a man who has lived a life in ways I can clearly and deeply identify with.  And he takes on as his mission to protect this young girl, Amy.  I became this character.  Even after I closed the pages for an evening, I was still him, still wondering how my Amy was.  It became, for me, more than just protecting a child; but, protecting my child.

What is so odd is how clearly I feel the desire (albeit not the need) to have child, a daughter.  I have no illusions.  Two divorces later I appreciate my probabilities of marrying again are low.  And lower still are my chances of having children as I grow ever older.  Regardless of this intersection between this desire and these realities, I harbor no need to rush matters along just to have children.  It is both very foreign and very familiar for me to feel this deep impulse to want to be a father, to bring into this world another human being to raise, to nurture, to love.  And to point, I never really appreciated, till now, that sublime peace that comes from listening to your biological clock surface itself into your consciousness.

And it may be, in passing, even stranger that this surfaced while reading a book about the end of the world.  Tickity-tockity-tick-tock-tock, indeed.

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?