Heart Openers

We had a yoga class last night with our friend Angie in Fall River. She used to teach a regular class years ago, which was great, but now it's a rare occasion when you get to yogue it up under her tutelage. But this was a special benefit class for Japanese disaster relief.

There was some last minute debate on our part over whether we even actually still wanted to go, but because it was for charity and because it was a good excuse to get to see Angie (and her husband, Cliff), we bit the bullet. Good thing, too. I'd kind of forgotten just how enjoyable a yoga class can potentially be. I think I'd started thinking of it as just work that you have to do sometimes. But every moment of Angie's class was a pleasure, and we felt great afterward, like the world was a nicer, more friendly place. Plus, there was a whole feast of chili and salad and cookies after the class. Thanks, Angie, for such a nice time.

The Merkel Boner

There's a house on Merkel Street, not too far from here, that is one of the craziest mishmashes of architectural eras and styles I've ever seen. Alison and I used to walk past it on our way to yoga classes years ago, and it was so ugly and insane looking that we started referring to it as the "Merkel Boner," a reference to the infamous baseball play in 1908 by New York Giant, Fred Merkle. (Different spelling, I know, but too good a joke to pass up.) If you don't know the story, check out the video below — it's seriously one of the most interesting sports moments ever.



A couple of nights ago, we ran into our friend Benn at the grocery store, whom we hadn't seen in a long time. We asked him where he was living these days, and he said Merkel Street. So of course I immediately asked him if it was the "Merkel Boner." And then of course I had to explain my clever joke, and I guess I was kind of long-winded about it and said the word "boner" probably about fifty-three times. In my defense, it is a complicated story, about which Daniel Okrent says, in "Inning Two" of Ken Burns' Baseball (which I just now finished watching), "Trying to explain the Merkle Boner in twenty-five words or less is like trying to explain relativity to kindergartners." I really wish, by the way, that I had the Burns treatment of the story to show you here, because it's quite masterful and poignant and much better than the video above, which, however, will do.

Anyway, when I was finally finished, Benn just kind of said, "Welp, bye!" and scrammed out of the store with his groceries. I say he was hungry and looking forward to cooking the food he'd just bought, but Alison's convinced I came across as a complete lunatic and actually frightened him. I guess the two explanations aren't necessarily mutually exclusive...

Oh, and the answer was no — it's not his house. Too bad.

You Cannot Serve Both Fog and Money

Well, I bit the bullet and paid the government yesterday. My dad gave me some advice that managed to knock almost 500 bucks off what I owed, so thanks for that, Dad! He thought it was pretty ironic that I was trying to pay as little in taxes as possible while voting for the NDP, but I don't think it's so surprising that I wouldn't want to give my money to the government when I don't like what they're doing with it. Plus, 27.7% — come on! I mean, we're not exactly high on the proverbial hog over here.

Today is quite foggy and dreary, but in a spooky, quiet way that's not completely unpleasant. There was a blue jay sitting in the tree outside my office window when I sat down to start working, and the whole scene made me think of this song. Possibly my favourite George Harrison number. I always wonder whether he intended the neat counterculture pun, "Don't belong."

Gloomy Tuesday

Did anyone else feel incredibly bummed out today? I guess saying goodbye to two thousand bucks probably had something to do with it. But also, Tuesdays in general I always find to be downers. Way worse than Mondays. Monday at least is a change from the weekend. But Tuesday just feels like you've still got the whole week ahead of you, except you've had a day already to get stuff done so you'd really better get on things, and what exactly is the point, anyway? Plus it was rainy and cold. I dunno, man... Something I really don't like about Tuesdays.

We went to see Jane Eyre as it was cheap night at the movies. It looked really beautiful and the acting was fine and everything. I guess I just didn't realize what a straight-up romance the story was, having never read it. Kind of boring. That'll teach me to make assumptions about the classics.

Eurrrrrggghhhh!

I just finally did my income tax return today and I owe like 2,000 dollars more than I'd planned for. Wah! I've been putting aside 30 percent of everything I take in all year (including 15% HST), to cover my HST remittance (=10%) and income tax. I.e. 23 percent of my gross income set aside for federal and provincial income tax and CPP contributions. Should be enough, you'd think, right? But no, they want over 27%! What the hell, man? That's a lot. And I had actually been looking forward to seeing how much I'd get BACK. Oh well, easy go, easy go, I guess. Rats!

Happy Eostre!

Hope everyone's annual rebirth is constructive and not too painful. Spring cleaning is healthy, but throwing everything away can be disorienting and scary. Sunshine and chocolate are good remedies for the discomfort of reentry. We've been lucky enough to have some of each today.

Thinking? Um... therefore?

The Richard Rorty book, by the way, is so far just fascinating. I won't know till I've finished it whether I completely agree with everything he has to say, but it sure is making me think, and I find myself really enjoying it. He's quite radical in his rejection of both objective reality and the self as the ultimate location of truth. Check this out, e.g.:

"As long as we think that there is some relation called 'fitting the world' or 'expressing the real nature of the self' which can be possessed or lacked by vocabularies-as-wholes we shall continue the traditional philosophical search for a criterion to tell us which vocabularies have this desirable feature. But if we could ever become reconciled to the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it, and that the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found. What is true about this claim is just that languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences."

I know, right? Maybe it's because I went to sleep reading such heady, abstract stuff right after my last blog post that when I woke up I knew all at once, as deeply as you can possibly know something, the ultimate refutation of Descartes's Cogito ergo sum.

Here's what happened. I was lying on the couch, having unintentionally fallen asleep and therefore completely unconscious in that dead-to-the-world way that only happens when sleep grabs you by force. I don't really know how long I'd been like that, but the phone rang and woke me up. Except that even though I was awake, I found that I had no idea not only where or who I was, but even whether I was. Sometimes you wake up to a phone ringing and at first think, "What is that noise?" or "What am I supposed to do now?" or something vaguely panicked along those lines. This went way beyond that. Even the questions "Am I conscious? Does the world exist? Do I even exist?" don't adequately describe the state, because those questions would immediately be countered by the Cartesian-smart-alecky "Who wants to know?" No, the only way I can express the ultimate doubt I experienced in that moment, which included my own very being in its scope, is as a profound and unanswerable "Huh?" I find myself sort of wondering now whether maybe I actually didn't exist for a brief period of time...

It was Jeff on the phone. He was calling to say he'd be meeting up with us later. Sorry, Jeff, that I didn't answer, but thanks for the very interesting and mind-expanding experience.

Easter Weekend — Oh Yeah

So far it's been as relaxing and pleasant as can be. Just got back in from a bike ride around the town with Alison. We went for brunch and then did a bunch of errands. It was a nice, sunny spring day, a little on the chilly side but not too bad, and we ran into lots of folks we know and like. Now it's colder and overcast.

Tonight we'll go to see the always astounding Bad Vibrations do their terse psychedelic punk rock thing at the always sketchy Gus' Pub. The Robins, Mark Gaudet's Moncton old-school hardcore band, are headlining. Mark was/is the drummer behind Eric's Trip, but he plays guitar in this band. Here's an interesting and funny video featuring both Bad Vibrations and Mark Gaudet. Plus some very informative stuff about Bigfoot.



Our friend Jeff is in town from Toronto for Easter, so he'll be attending the show with us. We got to hang out some with him and the BV gang last night over Chinese food. There was a very drunk guy yelling on the other side of the restaurant, and the waitress gave us meat spring rolls by accident, but it was still a fun time.

The night before that I attended the art college's annual Wearable Art Show. It was quite a well-run gala event, aside from the fact that you couldn't hear anything anyone said into the microphone. A reliable source told me the sound tech didn't know what a D.I. was when it was suggested he should use one. Nerdy techie gossip, but pretty funny and unbelievable if you know anything about sound production.

But anyways, there were lots of people there, and they were all dressed up and having a great time. The runway ran very smoothly and the modeling was impressive. Some of the "art" leaned a little too far into the wearable end, I thought, but some was kooky and interesting. Highlight of the evening was the "collection" that consisted entirely of giant body-painted logos. As in, no clothes. As in, eight models of both genders walked down the runway completely naked. Shocking and hilarious. The logos looked really great, too.

God's Cronies

Here's a little tune for you. Enjoy!

New Morning Sounds

Before you thought of Spring
Except as a Surmise
You see—God bless his suddenness—
A Fellow in the Skies
Of independent Hues
A little weather worn
Inspiriting habiliments
Of Indigo and Brown—
With specimens of Song
As if for you to choose—
Discretion in the interval
With gay delays he goes
To some superior Tree
Without a single Leaf
And shouts for joy to Nobody
But his seraphic self—

- Emily Dickinson

(There's also a dog and a hobo in there.)

Postscript: Oh, man, I just realized Garageband has been using my computer's built-in microphone as the input for everything I record, even when I have a good microphone running into it through a decent preamp. What a ding dong! No wonder that piano sounded so terrible...

Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's Reading Rorty

I've somehow been avoiding Richard Rorty for years, but finally picked some up the other week, and just started reading it. Our old next-door neighbour, Scott, is a huge fan, and was always trying to sell me on him. His wife, Andrea, painted a portrait of Rorty from the cover of the book I'm reading, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, for Scott's birthday one year.

Rorty was a "neopragmatist," "ironist," "postmetaphysicalist" American philosopher. He used interdisciplinary methods to try to reconcile the public and the private, while recognizing that they can never both be accounted for by one overarching philosophy. This recognition, he thought, would create a new kind of liberal culture. He seems to be fighting against a lot of my enemies, but also against a lot of my heroes, in an attempt to transcend the analytic/continental divide in twentieth-century philosophy. I can't tell yet whether I'll love him or hate him, but it's probably going to be one or the other. I'm sure it'll be fascinating, either way.

Baseball

Ali and I started watching our VHS copy of Ken Burns' Baseball 9-part documentary tonight, in anticipation of softball season. I'm not sure exactly when the season starts, but now that curling's over I need a new excuse to get all worked up with a bunch of alcoholics on Sundays, and this is always a good way to get excited about the game. I think this is the third time I'll have seen this series. So far we've only made it through the "top of the first inning," but I'm already hooked. It's such a great and beautiful documentary, but it always gets me all choked up. If I were American, I probably couldn't even watch it.

What I Got

Shoot! I didn't blog yesterday. I've been trying to post something every day for awhile. Guess I'll have to do a second one this evening. Meanwhile...

Here are the records I bought on Saturday. Taz were having a great sale where all secondhand stuff was buy-two-get-one-free. I'm especially excited about the Sidney Bechet — a 3-record set for ten bucks, and it's got "The Mooche" on it, which is one of my all-time favourite jazz recordings.



Jonathan and Ceti Alpha, by the way, were both wildly entertaining. So much fun looking through records while great live music is playing. Oh, I wish it could be Record Store Day every day!

Backing Up

I can't get this song out of my head. So glad someone is doing something with autotune that's not completely evil. OK, maybe it is completely evil, but at least it's funny.

Record Store Day!

I hope everyone gets a chance to go out to their favourite local record merchant, here some good music, and buy some records. Me, I'm about to head over to Taz to hear the fabulous Ceti Alpha and Jonathan Andrews. I watched this documentary recently, and it was really good, so I'm all excited about supporting one of the few independent record stores still hanging in there.

Fear Itself

It's so nice when synchronicities happen. Sometimes, when I'm reading a few books at once, certain ideas from one book will seem to somehow spill over into another, as if the two books want to help me keep their contents fresh in my mind by cooperating with each other. That way, each book gets more neural pathways in my brain and therefore more chance of my putting its ideas to use. It really is a good way for the universe to get me to notice something.

I've been reading this one book called Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life by Ezra Baydra. It's all about how to take what one gains from meditating regularly "off the mat" and into daily life. This passage about the importance of humour from the "Practicing with Distress" chapter recently struck me as significant:

"Once when my Pandora's box [of stressful problems] was opening wide, I went to Joko [Beck, his Zen teacher] to describe what was happening. I felt dark and grim and was embarrassed to reveal that I was experiencing so much fear. She smiled at me and said, "That's pretty interesting. Let's look at this." I got the sense that it wasn't me we were talking about but just "stuff." Here was a wider perspective. It's not that the fears were an illusion and could therefore be ignored, but that they were simply my particular conditioning. Putting them in this context allowed me to look more lightly at "my fears." I even saw the humor in the fact that my father, in repeatedly quoting to me the line "There's nothing to fear but fear itself," had succeeded in convincing me that I should be afraid of fear—quite the opposite of his benign intention. Cultivating humor and a larger perspective was instrumental in helping me to emerge from what had been a lifelong tunnel of fear."

Then last night I was reading a chapter of The Pale King about a 12-year-old boy who would break out into embarrassing sweats in public for no good reason, and I came across this:

"What he thought of as easily the worst day of his life so far followed an unseasonably cold week in early November where the problem had started to seem so manageable and under control that he felt he might actually be starting to almost forget about it altogether. Wearing dungarees and a rust-colored velour shirt, he sat far from the radiator in the middle of a middle row of student desks in World Cultures and was listening and taking notes on whatever module of the textbook they were covering, when a terrible thought rose as if from nowhere inside him: What if I all of a sudden start sweating? And on that one day this thought, which presented mostly as a terrible sudden fear that washed through him like a hot tide, made him break instantly into a heavy, unstoppable sweat, which the secondary thought that it must look even creepier to be sweating when it wasn't even hot in here to anyone else made worse and worse as he sat very still with his head down and face soon running with palpable rivulets of sweat, not moving at all, torn between the desire to wipe the sweat from his face before it actually began to drip and someone saw it dripping and the fear that any kind of wiping movement would draw people's attention and cause those in the desks on either side of him to see what was happening, that he was sweating like crazy for no reason. It was by far the worst feeling he had ever had in his life, and the whole attack lasted almost forty minutes, and for the rest of the day he went around in a kind of trance of shock and spent adrenaline, and that day was the actual start of the syndrome in which he understood that the worse his fear of breaking into a shattering public sweat was, the better the chances that he'd have something like what happened in World Cultures happen again, maybe every day, maybe more than once a day—and this understanding caused him more terror and frustration and inner suffering than he had ever before even dreamed that somebody could ever experience, and the total stupidity and weirdness of the whole problem just made it that much worse.

"[...] He could not understand why he was so afraid of people possibly seeing him sweat or thinking it was weird or gross. Who cared what people thought? He said this over and over to himself; he knew it was true. He also repeated—often in a stall in one of the boys' restrooms at school between periods after a medium or severe attack, sitting on the toilet with his pants up and trying to use the stall's toilet paper to dry himself without the toilet paper disintegrating into little greebles and blobs all over his forehead, squeezing thick pads of toilet paper onto the front of his hair to help dry it—Franklin Roosevelt's speech from US History II in sophomore year: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. [Emphasis in original.] He would mentally repeat this to himself over and over. Franklin Roosevelt was right, but it didn't help—knowing it was the fear that was the problem was just a fact; it didn't make the fear go away. In fact, he started to think that thinking of the speech's line so much just made him all the more afraid of the fear itself. That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which was ridiculous and weird."

Pretty good coincidence, right?

Incidentally, this type of fear-of-showing-fear, bootstrapping, unwilled but conscious behaviour recently happened to me, not with sweating, but with blushing. I was in a hospital waiting room with Alison, where she was having some semiroutine testing done, and the nurse called out the name "Heather Faulkner." I looked up immediately, because I had known a Heather Faulkner in junior and senior high school, and had in fact had a huge and not very secret but unfortunately unrequited crush on her. The woman who got up and followed the nurse out of the room was, I could now see, the same Heather Faulkner. She looked a lot older and I probably wouldn't have even recognized her without being forced to look up at her and determine whether it was Heather. But I was forced, and I did look up, and I did recognize her, and she recognized that I recognized her and smiled a little inscrutable smile without returning my gaze, which was in fact part of how I recognized her.

I asked Alison whether she thought I should say hi when Heather came back, and she said of course I should. But when Heather did return I wasn't looking up and didn't notice until she'd sat down across the room from me, again without looking at me. Alison was gone herself at that point, and I'd missed my opportunity, so I continued reading my book while trying to figure out how best to negotiate the reintroduction.

Then I suddenly thought, "Wouldn't it be hilarious if I started blushing now, the way I used to uncontrollably when I was a teenager? Good thing that doesn't happen anymore." That thought was immediately followed by the thought that no, it wouldn't actually be funny at all, it would in fact be downright horrifying, so I'd better not even think too much about it because I remember that it used to be very possible to make myself blush just by thinking about how embarrassing it would be to be noticed blushing. And then of course I felt that old familiar heat rising up my neck, which caused a mild panic at the thought that there might already be a bit of ridiculous, visible redness, which brought the heat farther up into my head, etc., etc., until I could feel that my whole face had become a blinding purple and might as well be a high wattage lightbulb.

The only way I could think of to keep my head from actually exploding was to look demonstratively at the clock, feign remembering something, and walk very quickly out of the waiting room and down the hall. For some reason, my shoes made a really loud squeaking sound all the way to the elevator.

I went downstairs and bought some snacks. When I got back to the waiting room, Alison had just gotten back too. She was happy to see the snacks. Heather was still sitting across the room, but she was soon told she could leave, which she somehow managed to do with even less than the zero amount of looking at me she'd already done, but also with still the same inscrutable smile that I now didn't find nearly as charming as I had thirty years ago. I wish now that I had gotten over myself and just said hi, how's life, nice to see you again. She deserved that much, and I really would like to know how her life has gone, and it even was nice, for a minute, to see her again. But at the time all I could think was "Good riddance," as I sank into my chair, pale and exhausted.

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

I know I've recommended this website numerous times, but you just have to check out the latest post on Bibliodyssey. It's a bunch of beautiful old illustrations of various sea anemones and related critters. The colours are comely and the critters creepy. Reminds me of some of Jim Woodring's rococo flora and/or fauna.



Last night I checked out the new Duncan Jones movie, Source Code. Jones is the son of David Bowie, and the same guy who directed last year's Moon. I really liked that movie, and this was another philosophical sci-fi offering, so I figured there was a good chance I'd like it. And I did, but it felt a little too much like a rehash of the same kind of story as in Moon to really be great. Again we have a guy awakening in the midst of a mission whose purpose and ultimate end he doesn't really understand, experiencing the problems of multiple identities/realities.

This story's less sad, but could just as easily have turned out as badly as the first one did. The premise this time is also a little bit silly and inadequately explained to be taken seriously. One interesting subtheme: Jake Gyllenhaal plays a soldier who keeps trying in vain to contact his dad from an unreachable reality, and I couldn't help but think of the director's own dad in his "Major Tom" persona, "floating 'round [his] tin can, far above the world."

One very nice part of the moviegoing experience was that they played the trailer for Terrence Malick's newest film, Tree of Life. Only six years since his last film, and this one looks to be beautiful, meditative, and poetic, as usual. Can't wait for it to come out!

Oh Yeah...

I forgot to show you these cute li'l glam rock guitar key covers Meg gave me as a thank you for playing at her benefit show. Pretty nice, eh? She's so great.

Showtime

Well, yesterday went about as well as it could have, I guess. My curling team won the trophy handily (11–1!) and I played the benefit show and didn't die or anything. There were some microphone and tuning issues, and plenty of muttering and fumbling around with equipment, but the crowd was very kind and appreciative. It was a nice show all around — small, intimate audience; quiet, personal songs; and there was still light outside when it was over. And it seems like a fair amount of money was raised for Japan through donations and purchases, too. Thanks, Meg, for putting together such an all-around winner!

Benefit organizers Meg & Ami

Chief Thundercloud — I was still at curling for this set, but I guess it was quite something.

KC Spidle, aka Husband & Knife

Me & the Incredible Sinking Microphone

The effortless Laura Peek

Ill Health & General Discomfort

A friend of Alison's has a whole case of film that fits our Polaroid camera, so we've been taking some snaps. It's really old, though, so you never know what you're gonna get. Well, actually, you do: very washed out colour with some random areas that don't develop.

Ali's sick with a cold right now, but Buster's keeping her company. I've been gobbling up echinacea and ginseng left and right over the past few days, in order not to have the cold for this solo show I'm playing today. And I think it's worked. Yesterday morning I was kind of hoarse, but today the throat feels all right. Now it's just butterflies and shaking hands I need to worry about.

Head or Heart?

"There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."
- Kurt Vonnegut

I guess we've got a federal election coming up soon, hey? Our local Liberal candidate came to the door yesterday to talk to me. I thanked him for the personal visit, but told him I'd be voting either Green or NDP, hadn't made up my mind yet. To which he responded with a too-pithy-not-too've-been-rehearsed "Well, I guess you can either vote to make a point or vote to make a difference."

The sting that remark left in me made me realize there must be something to what he said. If I sincerely want to get Harper out of there, should I really be voting for parties I know will never form a federal government, even if those are the parties I would most prefer to see form a federal government? Am I just being an irresponsible child?

I started looking into vote swapping, a strategy I'd actually resorted to the last time we had a chance to give Harper the boot back in 2008 (I know — little good that did!). But the more I thought about it now, the queasier it made me feel. Isn't the whole point of democracy that everyone is supposed to say which party she personally wants to rule, so that one can be chosen fairly based on what the majority wants? If we start messing around with strategies based on what we think others will do, in order to choose the closest thing possible to what we'd like, isn't that just a recipe for an unfair outcome? It reminds me of the story about the two people deciding how to share a cookie. The first person wanted the whole cookie to himself, but the second person thought they should share it equally between them. So the first person decided they should compromise, taking three-quarters of the cookie for himself and giving the second person the remaining quarter.

The whole thing reads like one of those prisoners' dilemmas that game theorists like so much. And to look at things that way strikes me as a particularly neoconservative way of thinking. You know: turning everything into numbers in order to calculate odds, making all complex systems into a sort of free market trade-and-try-to-get-the-most-you-can game, ignoring pre-economic human values and pretending they will be sorted out automatically by the systematic practice of selfishness.

As an aside, I should point out that the NDP is actually expected to take my riding, as usual, so in that sense a vote for them could NOT really be considered a "wasted" vote. On the other hand, the Conservatives are expected to win the election overall quite handily, regardless of what happens in my riding, so in that sense my vote can ONLY be a "wasted" one, whatever I eventually decide!

But those are mere accidents of circumstance, beside the larger point of the dilemma I'm talking about. I guess a more pertinent argument for strategic voting would be that this electoral system we have is so messed up that it can barely be called democratic in the first place, so you might as well pervert the spirit of it in any way you need to, in order to get the closest thing you can to what you consider good government. I'm not sure whether I really buy that one or not...

I guess what I can't decide is: Is it naïve and stupid to vote for what you actually want when you know others will be trying to calculate how to arrive at the least possible evil, or is it a cynical corruption of democracy to vote for something you don't actually want in order to prevent others from getting something you REALLY don't want? Other things being equal, given a choice between naïve idealism and cynical manipulation, I'll usually opt for the former. But what do you think?

Friday Night Date

Some weekends I can be tempted out by the promise of beer-soaked carpets and loud 20-year-olds expressing their drunken joy directly into my ear, but tonight I've got an airtight excuse to stay in. I just bought The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's finally published, unfinished novel about boredom, which he tidied up as much as possible before committing suicide in 2008, seemingly in the knowledge that people would want to read it even though it was incomplete. I've read other unfinished novels before, and there is always something a little disappointing about the way they just fizzle out, or whole sections are skipped over. But still, I've been hotly anticipating this one since I found out about its existence right after DFW's death. I'm not expecting his best work, but it's writing of his that I haven't read before, so it'll be kind of like he's still be alive for a little while in my mind.

I'm not sure whether it's technically available for purchase in Canada yet. I tried to buy it first from Diesel, but they said I was outside the area of distribution. Then Google found it for me on a Borders website, so I went there, thinking it probably wouldn't work. For some reason, the site thought I was from Australia, and for some other reason I had to enter a delivery address, even though I was just going to be downloading it, if successful, from the internet. So I entered my actual address, chose Queensland as my "Suburb," and that actually worked! I got the epub file, put it on my Kobo, and am looking at it right now.

Never in my life have I been so excited by the prospect of boredom. I feel like Bert must just before "Pigeons in the News" comes on! My new companion is 540 pages long, so you might not hear from me for awhile...

Plucking the Ivories

Here's a little snippet of me noodling on our piano. It's a pretty terrible recording — I think I need either a different microphone or a different preamp. Maybe both. There's some kind of limiting going on so that it kind of sounds more like a banjo than a piano, and that's even after I loaded on tons of compression and reverb to tart it up. Plus, the sustain pedal makes an awful lot of noise. Have to get that fixed.

But anyway, I guess you can at least hear THAT I'm using the piano, if not what it actually sounds like. I do like this little tunelet...

Will they be serving hemlock?

Today at noon I'll be going to a local private school for a three-hour "Career Café." I get a free lunch, and then kids in grades 9 through 12 who are interested in finding out about graphic design as a career option will sit around a table with me and ask questions about the work I do and how I've gotten here. I'm excited to represent my profession and give them a real example of a workable life path.

But I also feel a little weird about potentially undermining the advice they're probably getting from their parents and guidance counsellors. "If you want to work from home, make your own hours, and rely on nothing but your own creativity and ability to communicate, the best thing is to drop out of school, find some friends who work at a design agency, and get them to teach you everything they know. Then get some jobs doing in-house design and quit the jobs once you've developed a dependence on your talents in the people who hired you. Voilà! Instant clients!" Makes me very grateful to think about all the random coincidences and sheer luck that have brought me to where I am now.

Got to Keep Practising

This is the act I imagine I'll be following on Sunday.

Gulp.

This Sunday I'm playing a short solo set as part of a benefit for victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. My friend Meg has put it together. It'll be an afternoon-and-early-evening, low key kind of thing at Lost & Found, a cool second-hand clothing store on Agricola Street. Acoustic style indie folk, I guess.

So, it's for a good cause, and I'm glad to do it, but I'm also REALLY nervous about it, because:
a) I never play solo;
b) I'm kind of shy;
c) I kind of suck at playing guitar; and
d) some of these vocal parts I've written are at the very top end of my range.

The store is quite small, so the show is going to be unamplified. I hope that doesn't mean I'll have to belt it out to be heard, or we could all be in big trouble. Why do I sing so high when I'm writing songs, anyway? Ai yi yi!

I'll be curling in the final game of the season, for the championship trophy, right before heading over to play the show. Either the curling will help relax me by taking my mind off my performance, or thinking about my performance will screw up my curling and cost my team the trophy. I guess we'll see which.

What If It's Not About Belief? Part III: Translation

OK, I guess that was kind of a weird thing to do. I've just had these notes sitting around forever for the third and final installment of WIINAB, and the thought of working them up into an actual semi-coherent post has been intimidating me since I wrote them almost a year ago. Then I was reading over them the other morning and realized that they stand pretty well on their own, so I thought, "Screw it, I'll just scan them and post them as is. It'll be funny to see the doodles and crossings-out and whatnot."

But I realize they're not really legible and don't really expect anyone to try to read them. So here's what they say, typed out for universal accessibility. I'm still not going to bother filling in all the logical cracks, because I think that makes them less of an academic case, and more of one person's thoughts on the subject, open for discussion. Wittgenstein wrote in disjointed thought-blocks, so why shouldn't I?

Oh yeah, and let me apologize in advance for any repetition there may be here of ground I already covered in WIINAB I and II. I started writing Part I from these notes, but ended up mostly just introducing their content, and then I wrote Part II in the form of an allegory because I didn't have the notes with me. Still, though, there may be some redundancies, and I beg your indulgence in those cases.

So. As you may or may not remember, WIINAB Part I ended with my wondering why scientists are so driven to reduce inexpressible but rich personal experience to something they can argue rationally about, or else dismiss it as meaningless. That's where I'd like to pick up again here, right after a couple of introductory quotes:

[T]he intentional stance, used correctly, provides a description system that permits extremely reliable prediction of not only intelligent human behavior, but also the "intelligent behavior" of the process that designed organisms [i.e. natural selection].
- Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all the everyday language-games because the clothing of our language makes everything alike.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

- Reason is just one human quality, to be balanced with others, including uncertain ones like imagination and intuition — John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium

- I can see why this idea worries the rationalists — doesn't giving up rationality, even temporarily, allow in all sorts of irrational arguments, like we've seen with organized religion so many times?

- Seems to lead to moral relativism if belief becomes just a temporary thing that can be picked up or dropped as needed. Are there hard-core beliefs which can't be shaken? Maybe. Wittgenstein definitely admits that there is a spectrum of more and less axiomatic beliefs. Quine refers to a "web of belief." (Or is that Wittgenstein again?) I would say that it's probably healthy to think of ALL beliefs as changeable, but especially at least in the religious stance, where the point is to see your life as part of something much greater and more incomprehensible. If the type of compassionate, non-judgmental, wise understanding this allows for is to be called moral relativism, so be it.

- But think about it — if someone is telling you what to believe when you've supposedly gone beyond rationality, and making arguments for their case, you haven't gone beyond rationality at all, because beliefs and arguments, even when they're irrational, still belong to the world of the rational mind which we're trying to transcend.

- If we think of a religious way of viewing things as a stance, rather than a belief system, apparent contradictions with reason disappear. Beliefs belong to the world of rationality, but religious ideas like grace and enlightenment are pre-rational — they are ways of experiencing the world before rationality comes in and divides it into neat concepts for linguistic purposes.

- [Outspoken atheist and rational thinker extraordinaire] Dennett himself uses the idea of a "stance" in explaining how we understand the complex behaviour of something as complicated as a human being. Rather than thinking of the person as a physical object obeying an insanely complicated but still deterministic set of physical laws, we move our way of viewing her up to a much more abstract, but much more useful level, where she is regarded as a rational agent with beliefs and desires, trying to fulfill the desires according to the beliefs in a rational way. Thus we understand when a person who has just walked into the restaurant we're sitting in walks up to an empty table and sits down, and we correctly predict that she will next order some food from the waiter, rather than, say, jumping onto the table and doing a jig. And we don't have to know anything about the complex physical, chemical, or even biological forces at work in this situation to understand the phenomenon from this abstract level. Note, though, that the intentional stance doesn't deny that there ARE such forces behind everything — they're just not relevant from this point of view. Thus, the idea that a human is a complex but completely deterministic physical object is not contradictory to the idea that she is a conscious human being with free will. These are just two different ways of looking at her, each with its own system of rules appropriate to its level of abstraction.

- So why can't we also have a way of looking at things called the "religious stance"? It's the stance we take when we see the universe itself as one giant intelligence, composed of all things and their relationships to each other, similarly to how our own intelligence is composed of our brains' neurons and their relationships.

- If the universe can create intelligence, why can't it be intelligent?

- The universe can even be seen as loving.

- Stance doesn't entail belief. Dennett himself gets called on this sometimes — "Yes but do you believe that intention ACTUALLY exists?" He says it exists as much as a centre of gravity exists.

- Other stances: fictional, moral, aesthetic. (Discussion about this last one useful.)

- Looking at a painting, it just grabs you and shakes you before you've even formed any thought about it. That's the aesthetic stance. It gets you interested and then you start thinking and forming thoughts about it to understand how it does that. But the grabbing and shaking itself is pre-rational, and without it there's no point in continuing on with the rest of the process, unless you're a critic or teacher whose job it is to figure out the artist's intention and explain why the work DOESN'T fulfill its role.

- This is the feeling/stance Keats is talking about in his "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." It sounds dangerous because we know that beauty is not always truth, and yet we can understand the state he's describing where, yes, beauty actually IS truth. Why can't we hold both these possibilities in our minds as compatible ideas because they involve two different states of consciousness?

- It's more like "belief within n," where n is some system of internally consistent stories.

- Wittgenstein would call n a "language game."

- So asking whether God ACTUALLY exists, or even which of the many versions of God actually exists, is like saying, "In Crazy Eights, a jack means miss a turn, but in Cribbage it means one point. Which does it REALLY mean?"

- The religious stance may be different from others in that you can't just will yourself into it. I.e. whereas a belief is judged on its truth, a stance is judged on its usefulness. Is something extra to be gained by (temporarily) adopting this "as if" point of view? Well, not really if you just tell yourself these things about the universe. It needs something stronger to be effective, which is maybe why it gets put in terms of belief. But it is possible to get a real feeling or sense of these things — to really SEE the universe this way, though not through any usual belief-validation means, nor through any act of the will. When it comes, it's more direct and less controllable than that, as if it has been thrust upon us. That's why it's called things like "enlightenment" or "revelation." And if we're lucky enough to have this happen to us, life becomes easier, more pleasant. We understand others better, because we understand ourselves better, and are therefore more compassionate. Morality becomes less of a problem because the right thing to do comes to us more easily, with less rumination and internal debate required. We become "unstuck" — there is a sensation of being truly free, fearless, more fully human.

- But how are we supposed to take this stance, if it can't be done through rational or willful means? This is where myths and rituals come in. They're meant to be pointers, leading us in the right direction. There are steps that can be taken that will generally bring you closer to experiencing the world from the religious stance; they just have nothing to do with believing or trying to make yourself believe certain things! It's when they get turned into belief systems that both the believers and the non-believers get into trouble. In fact, they're more about letting go of preconceived notions like belief and allowing the world to let itself be known in all its mystery through your senses, without having the filters of language and rationality and hope and fear and all the rest of the mind stuff make it into something more understandable. This is the experience that the militant atheists miss out on, and which they therefore undervalue in assessing religious belief. They are intellectuals, so they cling to their own hard-won belief systems as their very identity. I hope some day they'll open the door to the larger picture that others know exists.

What If It's Not About Belief? Part III

Book Review

I finished a novel today called 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. It was just OK. I mean, there were some pretty interesting views expressed in it, but the story itself kind of sucked.

But what got me really interested in it in the first place was that the main character is an outspoken and celebrated atheist (dubbed "the atheist with a soul") who holds views very similar to my own with respect to religion, God, belief, and all that. In fact, by the ninth page the author (Rebecca Newberger Goldstein) has pretty much encapsulated what I've been trying to say (and will continue finishing to say, one of these days) in my "What If It's Not About Belief?" posts. Check this out:

"When Cass, in all the safety of his obscurity, set about writing a book that would explain how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience — so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost — and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience, he'd had no idea of the massive response his efforts would provoke.

"He would never have dubbed himself an atheist in the first place, not because he believes — he certainly doesn't — but because he believes that belief is beside the point."

The debate at the end of the book is worthwhile and exciting, as is the appendix, where the 36 arguments, and their best rebuttals are actually spelled out. Too bad more than half of the middle bits are so boring and pointless. Oh well, I guess I still enjoyed it.

Off to play a show now!

Lodge Show Tomorrow Night!