Bleh: Reading as Mechanical Operation

  In The Sign of Four, Arthur Conan Doyle’s second long story to employ the duo of the romantic Watson and the methodical Holmes, Watson famously calls the detective a “calculating-machine.” The claim is not extreme. Holmes—he who would later be swirled in the nebulous vortex of collective memory into a man wearing a deerstalker hat at all opportunities and saying such charming things as “Elementary, my dear Watson”—indeed was the supreme embodiment of rationality, of attempted objectivity, in Victorian fiction. He was not entirely a machine, of course; he had his quirks and preferences, like his love of the violin and an early, near-Newtonian fascination with dangerous drugs, including cocaine. But he was rigid in many ways. He read nothing but what he deemed would be useful; extraordinarily, Watson informs us in A Study in Scarlet that Holmes did not know the Earth goes around the sun—and did not care to know, either.

            “‘You see,’” Holmes explains to his partner, ‘I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.’” No useless knowledge need apply. And coming from a man so easily identified—quirks despite—with a machine, it is clear that Watson is the old romantic. Or perhaps Doyle is; it was Watson’s creator, after all, who so ardently wished that psychic phenomena could be demonstrated by science that he opened up a Psychic Museum and Psychic Bookshop and funded a Psychic Press after World War I, the same Doyle who clung long to the hope that the Cottingley girls had taken genuine photos of themselves with fairies. (They hadn’t.) He wanted this to be science, of course, and did not accept every “psychic” photograph brought to him; but his clinging to them is more symptomatic of his desires rather than his objective acceptance of evidence, and, in the case of a photo of Lord Combermere, he derided “the extreme lengths to which our opponents will go in their frantic search for a materialist explanation.”

            Nowadays, I’ve begun to feel like I’m an old romantic in a somewhat different way—though, at twenty-four, I hope I’ve a long way to go before I shuffle off the stage. Not about psychic phenomena or fairies, thank goodness—though those could certainly come in handy, I’d imagine. No, my present disappointment is because it seems that the romance in reading books—the feeling of some deep connection with a text, such that you just want to continue reading it long after you should have turned off the lights or such that you are briefly surprised to see the world around you again once you look up from the pages or screen, that thing in a text that makes you continue coming back to it over months and years, though you’ve read it cover to cover—yes, that feeling seems to be vanishing for so many people I encounter who claim to still read nowadays. Reading is no longer, for those persons, an act of pushing away the world around them to sink into the world of a text. Instead, it is simply a form of knowledge acquisition, on the same plane as using any other medium: watching videos, playing videogames. And since texts rarely grasp the viewer as fast as something you can sit back and watch, the act of reading comes up short.

            I recently came across a man in his twenties—let us call him Nod—on Facebook who posted something about this on a friend’s page. She had posted an image of John Waters in a grand library; Waters was saying, “We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” Frabjous advice. Nod, however, was less than impressed. “I mostly read news, but hate reading fiction,” he wrote in a comment. “To be honest: Its just a very inefficient use my time. I can watch the movie, save 20+ hours, and use that time doing something else creative.” In his grand finale, he went further: “To top it off, I can usually out-write 99% of bookworms. At the end of the day, I just think reading isn't as important as people make it out to be (or for that matter, as significant as it used to be 100 years ago).” Quite aside from the somewhat distressing notion that a person unable to distinguish between “it’s” and “its”—apostrophes are not his strong suit, as you’ll see below—believes he can “out-write” anyone beyond a high-school child, note that he has described reading in terms of its perceived efficiency. This is a busy guy, apparently. Note, too, that he has equated watching the movie version of a book to reading it, as though the mediums are different only in terms of the efficiency of their ability to convey information. Nonetheless, he has a point at the end: reading, today more than ever, is certainly far from the only way to obtain useful information.

            Nod was not finished, however. Seeming somewhat indignant at the fact that the photo of Waters had received many “likes” and his own comments had not, he made the—obvious—link to the photo-likers linking reading and sex, and then finished off with a rant:

most of my informative stuff isnt even from books. I can watch 30 min of techtv, and then pop on a random documentary each day on netflix and at the end of the year feel 100 times more intelligent/cultured than people who own tons of books. I understand that reading is an option for a medium of both information and art, but the point that I am trying to make is that in the olden days reading was the only option, and more recently with technology there are other options where people can choose to ignore reading and still not be an idiot.

Another apostrophe error, lack of capitalization—but this is Facebook—but he can out-write 99% of bookworms (across the globe? The known universe? By the vodka-stained mustache of Rimsky-Korsakov [as the composer was described in an American review of Scheherazade], this is distressing). Nonetheless, here we go again: reading is “an option” for Nod, a medium to be compared, in terms of how intelligent it can make you and how quickly it can do so, to watching videos. There is more than a hint of anal disappointment in old Nod, as though he has not fulfilled the final part of Waters’ message enough, his eyes glued instead to the glistening blue breasts of a Na’vi girl—but let us leave aside speculation. It is clear that Nod views texts merely as a form of providing information—hence his contempt for uninformative fiction—and, ergo, the text has no chance, really, of competing with videos. Why waste time reading, when you can learn the same thing by watching something?

            If one is indeed reading merely for information, it is certainly possible that Nod has a point as far as efficient use of one’s time goes. And yet, even then, the mediums are not always really comparable. To read “informational” texts like Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder, the essays of Christopher Hitchens, David Sedaris, Stephen Jay Gould, Oscar Wilde—you can’t simply transpose these, or many others, onto a screen and come out with the same thing. Mediums are not interchangeable. It is certainly the case that in the century I began this essay with, you can find a great deal of texts claiming that the mediums were, in fact, profoundly linked, if not the same—Henry James, in his famous essay of 1884, “The Art of Fiction,” posited that “the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete,” and Oscar Wilde, more broadly, wrote in 1885 in a response to James Abbot McNeil Whistler’s “Ten O’clock” lecture that “there are not many arts, but one art only—poem, picture, and Parthenon, sonnet and statue—all are in their essence the same, and he who knows one knows all”—but these statements are obviously not literal truths. In nonfiction and news—Nod’s territory—there is still that grand possibility of romance, of seeing the author of a text before you as you read his or her words, of having the text evoke, for you, your own mental images, rather than being given them by the screen. For people like Nod—and he is by no means a lone example—this sense of romance simply seems not to exist, and books, therefore, need hardly exist themselves. Our greatest achievement, for a man like Nod, is our becoming more and more like machines, so that we can do everything we need as smoothly and simply and calculatedly as possible. Not that this is bad, per se—but it is a false, and deeply sad, view to apply to reading, to books, to fiction.

Is it “better” to watch a video of a text? Why compare them? Why are we so anal as a society that we feel the need to waste that time we wish so dearly to preserve through efficient living by making ludicrous comparisons? Gustav Doré beautifully and lovingly illustrated Dante, Poe, Ariosto, Shakespeare, and many other writers’ works. Is it better to look at his illustrations than to read the poems? Rubens painted Greek myths. Is it better to look at the paintings than read the myths? Rick Steves has documentaries about travel in Europe; is it better to watch them than to travel?

These are transcendently foolish questions, and yet they are the kind of questions I see people ask too often.

We have become too self-aware, it seems, too obsessed with gazing at our navels. So often, I see people (in the classes I teach, on YouTube, in cafes, etc) watching video clips or gazing at images or some such activity with utterly dispassionate gazes and still bodies; and when they are done, they respond verbosely, repeating phrases often and reflecting on how they feel about the act of looking. They will often complain about how much time activities like reading waste, and yet they will spend grand amounts of time studying phenomena that could easily be argued are also a waste of time, if time is so utterly precious—articles calculating the mathematical trajectory of the launch of birds in Angry Birds, for instance. These people seem, often, to have some great desire of being legitimized as critics, perhaps partly because it is so hard to stand out from the crowd nowadays. And yet, these persons appear, at least, to refrain from letting themselves be swept up into the experience of a thing; they instead are constantly aware (again, so they appear, at least) of the fact that they are engaged in the act of doing something.

And this, of course, is why reading is so unappealing to people like Nod, aside from its poorer efficiency. The act of reading asks that one unclench one’s buttocks (to your comfort level) and enter the world of a text, that one feel the pulse of the words, that one lose oneself in a text as though it were music. “All art,” Walter Pater famously wrote in an essay on Giorgione, “aspires to the condition of music.” But if you are constantly aware that you are reading lines of ink on a page or pixels on a screen, you cannot do this, and you will end up reading even less efficiently, since you’re wasting time thinking about the act.

You can be smart without being a reader. Nod got that right. And reading is no gateway to assured intelligence. Ray Comfort and Snooki, after all, have books for sale (ghostwritten though Snooki’s was). But to act as though this is a point worth debating is symptomatic of an almost psychotic sensibility, inherited in part from postmodernism, in which people view all topics and arguments as equally worth a response; moreover, it is, if one goes as far in one’s critique of reading as Nod does, symptomatic of a loss of romance, or of being too attached to the contemplation of one’s navel—the latter meaning, in this context, to create a barrier between a work of art and one’s experience of it.

Finding romance in a book does not mean that one is mystically or kookily inclined. I’m a skeptic of high order, after all. I believe in the Romantics’ (capitalized, now) sudden bursts of inspiration; and yet I believe this kind of “inspiration” is simply a neurological state, replicable under laboratory conditions, the product of no god, angel, or muse (though I love imagining my brain state as a lovely girl in Grecian garb descended from the clouds and stars). And as much as I believe that life can be marvelous, as Alejo Carpentier and Viktor Shklovsky famously claimed in their own ways, I nonetheless do not let myself be carried away into mistaking dreams and desires for facts. I am often a pessimist—not quite a Schopenhauer, but not terribly far from it. But this does not prevent me from being an old romantic at twenty-four, skeptical of omphaloskepsis.

Don’t become calculating-machines when you read, if you read, please. Don’t lose the love. Let yourself wander into a text, once you’ve secured a chunk of free time; don’t allow the wonder to wander away. You might not see it again.

What "Everything Is Permitted" Permits

A contemplative Dostoevsky

It's well-known nowadays that Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov that if there is no god, everything is permitted--i.e., there are no absolute moral laws. Many people who have never read and perhaps never will read the Russian novelist (who himself struggled between strong belief and agnosticism, not unlike Herman Melville, though Dostoevsky most likely died a faithful Christian) quote this idea, and, indeed, the notion that "without god, everything is permitted" has become a standard argument against unbelief by theists. After all, if one has no dogma or set of divine laws to follow, how can anyone justifiably prevent anyone from doing anything--murder, rape, physical abuse? I will address this below, but my main point here is really to look at what use of the moral argument reveals about many theists.

You see, when theists resort to asking what moral values unbelief has to offer, it often means those theists have very nearly lost their faith, have virtually accepted that atheism is probably more "correct" than theism.

Extraordinarily, the latter part of that last sentence in fact came almost verbatim out of the mouth of infamous theist Dr. William Lane Craig in a 2011 debate with Sam Harris on morality, when Craig, in his opening statement, said "Maybe Dr. Harris is right. That atheism is true." Craig's point was that it does not matter whether or not a god exists; all that matters is whether or not objective moral values--absolute moral values--can come out of a world without a god, without holy texts telling us what to do.

Here's the thing, though. The moment someone leaves aside arguments for whether or not a deity exists and begins asking how someone can live morally as an atheist, you should begin to look at them with suspicion. The moral argument is important, to be sure, since a world without any morals would not be a pleasant world to live in. But it is an "extra" argument. If there is a god, we must live under its moral code; if there is not, we do not have to. The moral argument cannot say whether or not a deity exists. After all, we can--and do--easily follow the ethics of many thinkers from many cultures and time periods without subscribing to their other views. More broadly, we can accept some of the things people put out into the world without accepting everything they put out. Many people in the world today love Wagner's operas; it would be foolish to assume that all or many of them are unfaithful to their spouses and/or despise Jews. In the same way, we can accept certain ethical ideas from, say, the bible without accepting anything else from it.

Confucius say, Follow this blog.

Moreover, though, there isn't even any need to accept many ethical ideas from the bible, since many of its core tenets existed long before it did. And perhaps the most universal moral truth--The Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you--was uttered by Confucius long before Jesus supposedly walked the earth.

So, when a theist begins resorting to the question of how one can live a morally fulfilling life as an atheist, there is a good chance they either have no arguments for their supernatural claims or even that they are already more or less unbelievers or agnostics themselves. After all, if your foundation rests on whether or not the system is good, you are allowing for the possibility that the system in question--a religion--is replaceable by something else and thus allowing for the possibility that it can be discounted if something more ethically fulfilling comes along.

But the other side of the moral argument about whether or not everything is permitted is much more disturbing for theists than they often imagine. If you argue that there are no absolute moral laws in a godless world, you are conveniently ignoring an absolutely significant fact about the god of the bible (a fact that can also apply to any omnipotent deity). The god of the bible has absolute control over us, we are told, and anything he wants, he must get. If he wishes to revise his ten commandments, you better believe they will be revised. If he tells you to sacrifice your son to prove your faith--as he reportedly told Abraham to do to his own son, Isaac--you must do it. If he tells you to commit genocide--as he repeatedly not only tells people in the bible to do but actually assists in doing--you must do it. And if he decides to murder you through an almost unavoidable flood--the ultimate genocide, ecocide--you must give up yourself for dead.

If you haven't realized it by now, here's the disturbing thing: following this god leads to almost the same thing Dostoevsky feared--that there could be a world in which any and every action, including murder, can be morally justified. This world? The bible's.

The only thing is that Dostoevsky's dictum needs to be rephrased. In a biblical world, it's not that everything is permitted; it's that "with god, everything can be permitted' or "with god, everything can be commanded." Anything can become moral at any moment, if this absolute dictator of truth wills it to be as such. This is unquestionably the least moral of systems.

But atheists do evil things, are dictators themselves, a theist might reply. Look at Stalin. Look at North Korea. Look at the Cristero War in Mexico. State atheism is responsible for some of history's greatest moral crimes. We cannot live under such a system.

But this does not, firstly, say anything about the supernatural claims of religion. The mere fact that the world is not happy and perfect, an endless cascade of milk and honey far beyond the dreams of Winnie the Pooh--what does this unpleasantness have to do with whether or not religion is correct? It doesn't. Life is not perfect. It never has been, and it probably never will be. We are too small, too insignificant on a cosmic, even an earthly, scale. 99% of life is extinct. We will go extinct one day, too, even if we figure out how to escape the planet we are slowly destroying.

Secondly, the above statement about state atheism is true in the sense that it has been responsible for great crimes, but this is primarily because those who enforced it were mad dictators who essentially formed religion-like cults of personality around themselves (Stalin, for instance, was more or less worshipped as a god), dictators who attempted to force communism upon their countries. It is their forced communism, more than their atheism, that is generally responsible for their death tolls. And, moreover, anti-theism, anti-religion--the things the worst of these dictators practiced--is not the same as atheism. One need not persecute the religious, even if the head of state is an unbeliever. This is why the most successful governments are secular, allowing no special privileges for believers or unbelievers. Forcing any belief upon a people, be it a religion, agnosticism, or atheism, is wrong.

So, when you find yourself in a debate about religion next time and you end up talking about morals instead of whether or not there is evidence for the religion's supernatural claims, there is a good chance you've come closer to winning the debate than you might have thought. It's true that we have to create our own systems of ethics, since we do not have a dictator from above telling us what to do; but this allows us to create systems based on centuries of great thought, and, really and truly, how different would many legal systems be, if you remove religious dictums from them?

Robot Devil from Futurama

If there is a god we must follow or risk eternal damnation, anything can be commanded by that god. That certainly doesn't sound too moral to me.

Especially if you have to listen to the Robot Devil from Futurama fiddling away for eternity. Then again, he's a demon on that instrument, a robot Paganini, so eternal damnation might not be so bad, after all....

Doomsdaze

On October 21st, 2011--just yesterday, in fact--the world silently ended. Or, at least, so Harold Camping predicted prior to the great big nada that actually occurred. That his initial prediction of May 21st was a similar failure--a failure that attracted significant media attention--is perhaps why his latest prediction has been almost universally ignored. It may also be because this is not Camping's second prediction, but his twelth--since 1978.

Zounds, in the sempiternal word of Spaceman Spiff.

Predicting the end of the world is nothing new for Christians. Indeed, the earliest Christian writers seemed to be of the opinion that the world was going to end in their lifetimes--which would date such apocalyptic predictions as early as the first century A.D. That two thousand years have since passed without any signs of cosmic cataclysm has not significantly deterred would-be prophets from claiming that the end is near, however; the most famous of these is perhaps the unfortunate William Miller (1782 - 1849), who announced with grave confidence that the world would end in a period between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844--though this latter date was later revised to October 22nd by Samuel S. Snow. His followers became known as Millerites. Initially a little-known movement, Millerism quickly rose to public prominence in the 1840s, and thousands of people began preparing for the end--some of them by getting rid of all their earthly possessions.

It was more than a little disappointing for Miller and his followers, then, when nothing happened on October 22nd.

People waited until the sky became black and the gas-lamps flared on. The world seemed hushed, except for the indignant children who were pointing their fingers at the astonished Millerites. Indeed, kids and adults alike would ridicule them in the days to follow, laughing at their sickly expressions and the sudden poverty of those who had given away their possessions. Laughing was the best of public response. Less fortunate Millerites were tarred and feathered, physically assaulted, and threatened. Millerite churches were burnt to the ground. Some revised the date to the next year, 1845; others locked themselves into their studies to figure out what had gone wrong. William Miller himself fell into a deep depression, but he nonetheless clung, right up to his death in 1849, to his belief that Jesus would return in the years to come.

On the other hand, some believed the world had ended on October 22nd. It was just such a silent, surreptitious end that no one noticed.

Harold Camping

This was the view put forth by Camping himself shortly after May 21st. He claimed that the world had in fact "spiritually" ended on May 21st and that the true ending would occur by October 21st. The "true believers will quietly receive the new heaven and the new earth," he said. "I really am beginning to think as I restudied these matters that there’s going to be no big display of any kind." The world would "probably" be done for in the months to come.

The word "probably" is significant, since it gives him the chance to weasel out of his latest failure. But it does not give his supporters--a group that may have been as much as 200 million strong--that same chance. After all, there were people who, as with Miller's followers, gave away their earthly possessions. Camping himself received considerable donation money, and he said he would not return it after May 21st's fiasco. 'We’re not at the end," he, in fact, said with some indignation. "Why would we return it?" The same, of course, applies to what his poor--quite literally--followers gave away.

It may not be Camping's responsibility, of course, since those who gave away their possessions usually did not give them to Camping himself. The fanatics who acted so rashly must be held accountable. But it is unquestionable that Camping himself should face legal warfare for his pernicious influence on these fanatics. Ignorant though they may have been, they would not have acted so ignorant had it not been for Camping--or whatever other fanatic would have come around in his place. As absurd and baseless as it may seem, I think Camping should be held partly accountable for his followers' foolishness--just as the Vatican must be held accountable for the results of their inane stance on condom use in Africa.

Nonetheless, what disappoints me the most in these situations is that I do not see people reexamining what "world" means. It's one thing to say "the world is going to end"; but what does that even mean? The Earth will "end?" End how? What about the solar system? The Milky Way? Our local cluster? The rest of the universe, of which we are a near-negligible part? If you're going to predict the end of it all, at least have a specific referent in mind. What does "world" mean in this context? Only a fraction of our planet is even inhabitable by humans, anyway; will all the creatures of the oceans and deserts and tundras have to suffer, too? Why would an infinitesimal planet like ours be worthy of any kind of "ending," anyway? And what the devil does "end" mean?

But I am perhaps ascribing too much critical thought to such doomsday prophets. After all, if you think ancient texts hold the key to all of our astonishingly complex universe--a universe almost entirely unknown at the time such texts were composed--then I shouldn't be surprised if you don't look too deeply into the definitions of words.

Rapturous October 22nd!

On Steve Jobs and the Undersea Demon Factory that Deceives the World, with Further Reference to an Uncharted Island on which Demoniac Technocrats Invent Irreverent Devices; or, It Must Be Said



Perhaps two days after his death, I came across an extraordinary man who claimed to have esoteric knowledge concerning Steve Jobs. A popular web site on the island, Dominica News Online, had posted a story announcing the death of Apple’s cofounder, and a decent number of people had left posts expressing sorrow or their admiration for his work.
Hours after the article appeared, I came across a comment by tiny, a man I had seen post on the site before. The comment, soon followed by another, claimed that a video on YouTube by a wizard-turned-Christian held the truth about those who create technology in the world, and it was not a good truth. I should have been prepared for at least some insanity, as the website, through no fault of its own, has a significant share of lunatics. But this was madder than anything I had seen on it before.

            There is a vast factory under the sea, tiny informed his readers, in which demonic beings toil endlessly to produce machines; there is a city under there, as well. Somewhat redundantly, there exists furthermore a nefarious island somewhere in the world where the inventors of all the most popular devices assemble to create them; their sole purpose is to create addictive technologies that will turn the masses away from the Christian god. Not all scientists and technicians, mind you, but many—car designers, computer designers, etc. A high-tech plot against Yahweh of Brobdignagian proportions, all operating under the darkness of the ocean and on a strange island unknown to GPSes—unless, of course, as is probable, the inventors of those were in on it.

Had tiny discovered the abode of Lord Cthulu,
i.e., all the world's technocrats in one?

This story was so wondrous that it had to be true; and, indeed, it is, or, at least, so the YouTube video tiny got it from claims. The video does not mention Mr. Jobs, and tiny, once pressed, was quick to assert that the deceased might not have been one of the blasphemous villains. It is worth noting the “might,” as well as the fact that this extraordinary theory appeared for the first time on the site, as far as I know, under the article about Jobs. I requested of tiny proof of his claims, such as where this island is, miraculous claims requiring miraculous evidence; he told me that he does not deal with the occult and will not look for the island and that it is in fact I who should find it, since I had implied it was so easy to locate things with GPS technology.

            Greetings, and we come in peace.

            It is easy to dismiss such ideas as more lunatic than Neruda’s city where crowds of people blanche on their porches; it is easy to assume tiny or the creator of the multi-part Youtube video had simply had too much fun playing BioShock or reading Bacon’s New Atlantis; it’s easier still to ignore these claims altogether. When such ideas become the foundational beliefs of presidential candidates, it may be somewhat more difficult to ignore; but I assure you this is no—hardly a—political essay.

            Tiny, you see, cannot be ignored. It is partly because of the disturbing fact, in my view, that he can believe such a thing at all. But it is primarily because that thing I claim is so mad, so much the product of Jobs’ drug of choice, LSD, or perhaps something closer to home—yes, precisely because I claim it is so, I am forced, suddenly, to reexamine why I can claim this. It can be shocking, indeed, when you come across an argument you can’t counter because you don’t know why you actually believe what you do; but it is a good shocking, unlike most forms of electrocution, a non-sparking shocking that many a person needs many a time.

            We must allow this person to speak, just as the Holocaust-denier and the gay-bashing Jamaican dancehall artist and the Young Earth Creationist must speak—not because they are to be tolerated as equal to those with sense, but because such outlandish claims force us to reexamine the sensibility of our own claims. To do otherwise is a kind of dictatorship. I do not want to hear the words of people like Kent Hovind, the mad barbarian behind a theme park that attempts to prove not only that Adam and Eve existed but that they existed contemporaneously with dinosaurs; but the real reason I do not want to hear them is because they might deceive others who hear them, not because they can personally harm me—except for my intelligence, and that will pass. But why should he be prevented from speaking? It is unwise to compare him to, say, Copernicus or Galileo, both of whom were terrified to put forth their theories, but the comparison is instructive in one way: the authorities, a true dictatorship at that point in time, believed the non-geocentrists to be lunatics and would have silenced them—and did. And yet it moves—but we need movers to prove its motion.

            Free speech, in this context, is not the same as an abolition of rationality. Creationists can claim whatever they like under free speech, as can I, but this obviously does not extend to what categories items fall into, and creationism, therefore, cannot be taught in a science class of any kind, unless it be a course on the history of science. The history of science, after all, is riddled with the marvelous and the maniacal, the ingenious and the comical (from our vista now, of course): Newton’s obsession with injecting himself with mercury, along with his other alchemical pursuits; Lyell’s belief that dinosaurs would return one day because the Earth changes in cycles; Linnaeus’ addition of dragons, hydras, phoenixes, and manticores into his classification of life. Categories, then, will not change unless their internals do. But what we can say, far apart from what we should, will not. In a rational society, after all, few, if any, of these concerns over what should be said should—word that shines like an alchemist’s dream—exist.

            Go draw a terrible porno of Muhammad, right this moment, and do what thou will with it, and do thy will with it in public.

Or, at least, I’d like to say we should be able to do this. But we aren’t free. An oppressive regime of the easily offended, a regime distinct from political correctness, towers over us here. I’m talking, of course, about those followers of Islam who believe those who depict Mohammed should be put to death, as was the case with the infamous fatwa on Salman Rushdie’s head (that, extraordinarily, is still in effect), the murder of Theo van Gogh, and the death threats to the makers of South Park for depicting Mohammed on their show in a bear costume. This cannot be the case. No one group should be able to have a monopoly on freedom of expression like this in any society in this century. And the only way to fight it may be to take risks.

Just don’t become a martyr en route to the undersea factory, now.

Beyond the Horizon

It's easy to forget that we're quite forgettable--on a cosmic scale, that is. The Earth, after all, is a less-than-microscopic fleck from about 4.5 billions years ago, going around a sun that is one of perhaps trillions upon trillions, in a solar system that is perhaps one of trillions upon trillions, in a galaxy that is perhaps one of billions upon billions, a galaxy so large that we can scarcely even foresee traveling in a spacecraft to Pluto, much less anywhere near the edge of the Milky Way, much less to the super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy, much less to our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, much less to--but you get the picture.

Or do you?

It all sounds like a lot, but maybe it sounds more like a great amount of words than a great amount of distance. After all, the sun is just there, we've been to the moon, and surely everything isn't really so far and we aren't really so small and cosmically forgettable.

But we are. And more so than you or I can begin to imagine.

And yet it is easy to forget this, even if we've studied it. It is easy to drive down a long road and be impressed by the sheer distance we have to go to get to from Point A to Point B; it is easy to look at other largenesses, like skyscrapers and mountains, and to forget just how smaller-than-small even they are, pitted against the rest of the universe. It is easier still to be caught up in our conversations, our day-to-day interactions, with others, and to think, at least subconsciously, that it is those that take up all the space in the world. Love and fear are the great space-fillers; and there's nothing wrong with that. I love love. And in so much of life, simple interaction between two persons can seem to require an infinite bridge, as though, even if we are face to face, we are still universes apart; Schopenhauer, and later Freud, referred to something like this as the hedgehog's dilemma, whereby we cannot get too close to one another without hurting each other (i.e., the hedghogs' spines will cause some problems), so we must find the right distance at which we can coexist in comfort. So it goes. I am willing to bear pain for someone I love, and I have no problem, after all, with my cosmic insignificance. But I accept it.

The problem, of course, is that many do not even know how tiny we are to begin with, much less to forget or subconsciously replace it with something else. And if you do not know anything about the universe, it is easy to think your world--your island, city, town, village, neighborhood, home, room, the grand ampitheater inside your skull--is truly all there is. And we all do this, at some point. We forget. We forget the rest of the world exists when we get dive, descend into something specific. And when we reemerge, when we untangle ourselves from our webs like the Lady of Shallot in her sad castle, the world briefly becomes new again: yes, there is an entire island beneath my feet, and there are continents there, and they are large, and there are entire wars, rallies, movements, life-changing experiments, beauties, horrors, births, and deaths occurring in them all at once. Often, we do not really understand this, though; at best, it's usually just a vague truth, perhaps reinforced by images on the news of distant conflicts in distant lands that may well seem unimaginable to us until we are similarly caught up.

At such times, it is easy to think the horizon is all there is to see.

Religion, on the surface, makes so much more sense in small areas. After all, when your village is all there is to know, it is not hard to feel as though you must be special. This is partly why religion seems to have taken root so easily in the Caribbean, all history aside; the clear borders of our islands become, at least subconsciously, our mental borders, and the events in our island seem somehow to be those of the world. But this is by no means restricted to islands, nor is it a necessary result of insularity. It can--and does--happen anywhere, as long as we believe ourselves to be beings who are large enough to matter on some cosmic scale--a scale that most do not really begin to envision when they think like that. How, after all, can we imagine that we are the center of all that is, and all that is around us is just there for kicks and has been there for as long as 13.7 billion years, the supposed age of the universe?

Mind you, our place in a large universe isn't a new question by any means. The idea that Earth was not unique and that the other planets around us were inhabited was huge up into the early twentieth century. Many believed that at least some of the planets around us were earthlike and contained life; Emanuel Swedenborg went so far as to claim that every planet around was inhabited. Comforting as this view might have been, it presented theological problems. If we weren't the center of the universe, as Aristarchus, Copernicus, and Galileo had pointed out, now we weren't even the only planet with life; what did that mean for religious teachings that pointed so firmly towards the Earth? Swedenborg "solved this" by claiming that every planet was not simply inhabited but inhabited by beings who embraced the Christian faith. I myself was once told by someone that if other planets have life, it doesn't disprove Christianity, since that religion only applies to Earth. Possible as that argument is, it's an absurd reach and implies cosmic deception--a term itself wonderfully absurd. Nonetheless, some situations where people claimed to have found life elsewhere in the universe involved false claims of creatures that had no religion, and, of course, the missionaries were in position. There is a great story about John Herschel, son of the great astronomer William Herschel (who himself believed the interior of the sun was inhabited), being misquoted in a newspaper in 1835 about the moon being inhabited. The public believed the misinformation, and before Herschel clarified the matter, a mid-West preacher had already begun collecting subscriptions for bibles to send up to the lunar inhabitants.

So it goes.

Unless we see beyond our horizons--literally and otherwise--I'm not terribly hopeful for change in the region. But I'm definitely glad to see that there is a growing, if currently small, movement of skeptics and information-seekers in the region. Still, there are still too many who do not look beyond the horizon, and, when you try to show them what is out there, they tell you to stop, as though you are either committing some kind of crime or are hurting their worldview. The latter, to be sure, is probably true, but the truth is the truth, and there is no need for it to hurt (unlike, say, in The Matrix or BioShock). In the novel Two on a Tower, Thomas Hardy's young astronomer, Swithin, tells his future lover that no one who wants to be happy should take up astronomy seriously, since the distances one will uncover are ghastly and monstrous; Edwin Hubble, who discovered (or, technically, took credit for the idea) that the universe is expanding , claimed he felt like he was in a Buddhist trance after a night of observing the night sky. But after the horrors and before the trance, there is astonishing, if spare, beauty to be found.

If more people knew a few basic facts about astronomy, I think we'd have more skeptics, or, at least, fewer people who literally treat their island like the universe itself (galaxies, somewhat ironically, were once referred to as island universes). So, the next time you find yourself faced with a fundamentalist in an argument, consider, if you haven't already, just talking a bit about the universe. At the very least, it was what got me wondering and wandering; and, if nothing else, what better than bringing out the distances in the night to narrow other distances here on our lonely planet?

Look up.

The Skin-Shedding Fire-flying Vampires Will Not Come Tonight

            The skin-shedding fire-flying vampires will not come tonight, so Ma Perry believes, anyway, for she has fortified her front verandah with a line of salt and the windowsill with a line of salt and the spaces beneath doors with salt and even blocked up the tunnels used by mice with salt, you might think she was trying to keep out slugs and not bloodsucking horrors but it is in fact a well-known fact that vampires simply must count whatever they come across, and when they come across salt, well, to hell with dinner, mind you, you might think they could not move from where they start off from at all because of all the things around them to count, Look, three prostitutes wearing two pieces of clothing, look, fifteen yellow moths, look, the prime minister’s secret mansion has five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, forty-six thousand windows on the left side, look, count the craters in the moon, but anyway we are looking at Ma Perry, a small old woman in a baseball cap and a worn pink dress down to her skinny knees in the Caribbean island of Dominica and we are looking at this woman not because she is on film or in this case on the page for you to imagine in your minds but because this simple act, the laying of the salt along the cracks where things could enter, is the link in a chain that never seems to end or rust, for that matter, a chain that stretches from the time we are told what to do by those who are smarter and older than we are and when we end up telling our children to do the same, even if we do not realize we have simply imported the superstitions of the colonists into the Caribbean and turned it into our own mythology, of course in the morning the salt will still be there, uncounted as ever, and yet I see myself, years in some silly future, telling my children to do the same, if they like, like little things in a foolish zoo.

Prayers on a Runway

Prayers on a Runway

            As I touch down on the gray runway at San Juan, I hear people clapping. It is mainly the older persons; some of the children, grinning and straining against their seatbelts, clap high above their heads, as well. They pray out loud, a chuckling chorus of Thank you, God, thank you Jesus, praised be your name, down the seats. None of the Americans have done this, though one has clapped. It is the people from the island. They do not glare, those descendants of transatlantic trade, if the others do not pray; and yet, if I, who live between worlds, were to say, There is no need to send up prayers because an airplane has landed where it has landed every day for years, there is a chance I would find something of mine besieged when I return home: a poisoned dog, a defaced gate, an emptied house, a father with crushed ribs.

            When we were still on the plantations, in chains or like monkeys in suits in the Big House, the bible gave us hope that those same slave masters, blind fools, would burn in the same hell they warned us about. We would be saved, not them. Or, if they were saved too, they would be our equals.

            But now, when we need a hope that is not holding a saw, when we can fly on the same plane to the same place high above the clouds we were told held angels with six wings—now, I sit on the plane, listening to the happy claps, and wonder why nothing is any different.