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It feels like I've been shirking my duties here. I haven't really been keeping people very up to date about what's goes on in our daily lives over here, which is ostensibly the purpose of this blog. Although, face it, if I didn't enjoy the occasional opinionated rant so much, I'd probably just get on Twitter and chirp into the void every few minutes.

Well, luckily, I've been doing this writing exercise for 32 days now where every morning I spend a few minutes writing down ten images from the day before. Anything that forces its way into my recall is fine, as long as it's vivid. So now you can enjoy some random subjective details from a month in my life all in one sitting, with no annoying alert sounds or windows popping up every few minutes.

8/18 Someone's job is to dance in a chicken costume outside the Oasis bar.

8/19 Tough looking dog lying on the sidewalk — I whispered, "Hey, cutie," before I realized there was a woman sitting on the steps beside it.

8/20 The woman's face as she pulled into the empty parking space and suddenly saw that I was standing in it

8/21 Buster ran up and down the stairs, meowing constantly when we got home.

8/22 The legless guy in a wheelchair collecting cans

8/23 Alison so mad to find the Sears Christmas Wish Book in the mail

8/24 I saw a guy I don't know very well in HMV, and he saw me, and we both pretended not to notice each other.

8/25 Indian woman sitting alone behind the counter in the dark corner store, her head covered and face expressionless

8/26 Two crows flying low together across the street

8/27 Meg and Glen sitting behind their computer monitors, facing me but not noticing I was there

8/28 Buster walked out of the kitchen and threw up.

8/29 The jade colour of the breaking waves at Clam Harbour

8/30 Two young kids were running the corner store, one telling the other what to punch in on the register.

8/31 The ribs of an old lady in a bikini trying to climb out of the water through the rocks and undertow

9/01 Alison's, Krista's, and Jesse's heads bobbing on the surface of the lake

9/02 The crossing guard looked happy to be back.

9/03 The waves at Lawrencetown were so high, but you could always just see the tops of bigger ones behind them.

9/04 About 25 small birds flying past the car as we went over the bridge

9/05 Tiny wedding party on a tiny yard in Prospect, watching our car

9/06 View from the outhouse with no roof

9/07 CBC News billboards ripped up by the storm

9/08 Crossword puzzle and Destroyer with our dinner

9/09 The mailbox spider and her web are gone.

9/10 Smashed up car in the intersection had its airbag inflated.

9/11 Chucky the squirrel was yelling at our next door neighbour because she hadn't given him any peanuts.

9/12 Guy across the street peering out his bathroom window at me

9/13 My closet looked bare after I gave a couple of shirts away to charity.

9/14 The school playground full of talking kids in the morning

9/15 The rain splatted on the leaves before it turned into a torrent.

9/16 The mailbox spider, back with a new web under the streetlight.

9/17 Girl at the rock show had a tattoo across her entire back that looked like the random doodling you do when you're talking on the phone.

9/18 A parade of nothing but Shriners stopped all traffic in the downtown core.

9/19 A high-hit ball came straight to me in right field.

And now you're all caught up!

Booker's Dozen

A few years ago I wrote about an idea I had called the Motivated Book Exchange (MBE). The gist of if was that people would agree to read books recommended to them by friends, in exchange for the friends' agreement to read any book they might recommend. Well, I could never really get it to catch on, for some reason. But I always thought there was a kernel of something really good in there, having to do with people broadening their horizons and expanding their minds by willingly reading something they might otherwise not have. Not to mention gaining insight into some aspect of a friend's point of view.

Lately, my interest in this project has been reawakened. I guess I've been reading more than I usually do, thanks to my new Kobo and plenty of beach time. And my dad has recently posted a list of the books he's currently reading or read on his blog, which gave me what I think is a pretty good idea for a variation on the admittedly unsuccessful MBE. It's called the Booker's Dozen.

Here's how it works: you make a list of the twelve books you think everyone in the world should read. These are the books that have changed your life, opened new neural pathways, made you who you are. You always wished there was some way to force others to read these books, but of course that was an unrealistic wish. Until now.

Having made your list, you now have others you know make up their own Booker's Dozens. Then you and they choose just ONE BOOK off each other's lists that you and they haven't already read and wouldn't mind reading in its entirety, and you and they do just that. Easy and fun!

I figure this cultural campaign might have more legs than the MBE did, because 1) you get to create your own highly opinionated list of twelve IMPORTANT books, which is pretty fun; and 2) you get to choose which book you'd like to read from a list of twelve, which is a lot less pressure than having to read whatever your potentially sadistic friend decides to hand you.

So, here's my Dozen. Anyone who feels like trying this out by leaving his or her own personal list as a comment, I promise I will read one of the books on that list in its entirety.

1. Alan Carr - The Only Way to Stop Smoking
Sounds like it would be kind of useless to read if you don't smoke, and I'll admit that it's not incredibly great writing, but the way he comes at the problem of addiction is unlike anyone else I've ever read in its insight and level-headedness, and I find it translates into almost any realm where you find yourself behaving in ways you wish you wouldn't. Makes you more sympathetic toward others' addictive behaviours too.

2. Daniel Dennett - Consciousness Explained
My favourite contemporary philosopher. This is the one where he lays out exactly how intentionality can arise out of a completely physical system. No one else, for my money, has ever successfully done this, and especially not in such a readable way. Mind-blowing whether you read philosophy or not.

3. Lewis Hyde - The Gift
How do gifts differ from commercial transactions? What would a culture be like that was based on gift exchange rather than trade? Why would both artists and art appreciators do better to think of the products of creativity as gifts, rather than as commercial goods or services?

4. William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience
Manages to study the phenomenon of religion objectively without underestimating its value or ruining what's good about it. Atheists and theists alike could benefit from James's deep analysis.

5. J. Krishnamurti - Anything, really.
I know it seems like a copout not to list an actual title, but really all his books are pretty much the same. His simple but radically individual spiritual outlook is depicted through transcribed lectures and conversations, and occasionally personal journal entries. Let go of all your baggage, is really his only point, including your personal history, opinions, the culture you live in, and any instruction you may have been given on how to let go of all your baggage, because it's all preventing you from relating in an honest, loving way to others and yourself in the present.

6. Desmond Morris The Naked Ape
The problems and strengths of human beings explained by studying them as an evolutionary biologist would study any other animal population. Should be required reading for all politicians.

7. Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man Is Hard to Find
The best short stories ever written. This is what people mean when they talk about the Southern Gothic style. Characters cling to big ideas, usually to their detriment. Death is always in the air, along with a heavy sense of mystery. It's all funny and creepy and haunting and perfect.

8. J. D. Salinger - Franny and Zooey
Two connected stories in one book. These are the best of the stories about the Glass family. The title characters are young adult siblings, the former in the midst of a sort of breakdown. They've both been somewhat messed up by the benevolent teachings of their learned older brothers, one of whom committed suicide. But these teachings may also be what what they need to get them through their own crises. If you like The Royal Tenenbaums, check out the original inspiration.

9. W. G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn
It's technically fiction because the narrator is not exactly the writer, but it reads like the undirected rambling of a very knowledgeable and wise, if socially isolated man as he walks around the English coast. Full of fascinating history and inspired trains of thought, and you eventually come to know the heartbreaking character deeply through the ways his brilliant mind works.

10. Eckhart Tolle - A New Earth
I know, it's an Oprah book. I find it weird — but I guess also uplifting — that this guy's so popular, as his teachings are pretty radical. He's essentially in line with J. Krishnamurti (see 5, above), only maybe he manages not to sound quite so grumpy about it. The world is insane and you are an insane product of it, but it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, the way to sanity is to just notice the insanity, RIGHT NOW. Simple. Consistent with the teachings of all sorts of wise people throughout history, but you can tell that it's coming from a condition of true understanding, and not just some scholarly quoting and summing-up.

11. David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
I wish I had more fiction on this list, but I guess it's radical ideas that blow my mind more than imaginative plots or complex characters. Luckily, this novel has all of the above, and then some. It's long and complex. You need two bookmarks for it because there are lengthy and numerous footnotes. The major theme is addiction and how it has completely shaped modern American life. The main characters are a super-intelligent young man from a dysfunctional family who attends a tennis academy and an ex-addict who works in a rehab centre. There is a Québecois terrorist plot to render Americans harmless by introducing them to a videotaped movie (directed by the young tennis student's now dead father) that is so addictive people can't stop watching it and eventually starve to death in a paralyzed stupor. There are plenty of other completely messed up characters. Years are sponsored by companies and now get a product name instead of a number. Everything relates to everything else. Impeccable grammar and long-windedness are used as literary devices. The whole thing is just so FUNNY, that it would be worth slogging through for that reason alone, even if it weren't so brilliant and insightful.

12. Alan Watts - The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are
Watts, Tolle, and Krishnamurti are my holy triumvirate. This book is consistent with 5 and 10 above, but maybe a little more loose and playful in its presentation. Some of the colloquial language is a bit dated, but he gives a very down-to-earth explanation of some fairly esoteric ideas, mostly from the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. The language is mythological, almost as if it were a story being presented for children, but he continuously reminds us not to mistake the story for the truth it is pointing towards. The Book was one of my introductions to eastern, non-dualistic thought as a teenager, and I find it still always has something of value for me whenever I come back to it.

That's it. Gauntlet thrown. Anyone else got a list of her own? It needn't be annotated...

We Are Alive

Just wanted whoever to know that we made it through Tropical Storm Earl, and we have power and phone service back now. A lot of branches fell down all over the street and the power went out just as Alison was about to finish frying some eggs, but otherwise there've been no disasters. Waves at the beaches have been quite spectacular for a few days leading up to the storm, so this afternoon we're going to drive down the South Shore and see how they're stacking up. More later...

Holga Summer

Here are some of the snapshots Alison's been taking with the Holga camera I gave her. Some of them are pretty psychedelic. I must say, there certainly has been a lot of fun going on this summer, and it's not over yet!

We're Back

It was really great: hanging out with seldom-seen friends and their kids and dogs in Elysian settings. There was lots of swimming, biking, reading, chatting, eating, and drinking, as expected. Also some frisbee, chess, fireworks, spectacular meteor showers, a few UFO sightings, and I even played a 9-hole round of golf! Alison is working on photographic evidence. My nose is back in grindstoneland. Life is still sweet, just less leisurely.

Made It!

I've been working like a maniac for some time, but I finally got to the end of things, at least temporarily, and now it's time for a vacation! Yahoo! We spent all of today picking up necessary and not so necessary supplies, packing the car, and generally getting things in order. I bought a Kobo e-reader from Chapters (on sale this weekend only) and loaded it up with e-books. Actually, it came with 100 classics already on it. Pretty neat.

We're gonna do some camping and then some cottaging with friends. We've got the swimsuits. We've got the bikes. We've got a cooler full of food and an iPod full of summery tunage. No computers will be sat in front of for a full week. There's a country music festival going on in the middle of Halifax right now which we will be leaving behind early tomorrow morning. Life is sweet.

Party in the Woods

Happy long weekend, everyone. Assuming you had a long weekend. Do all parts of the country get one? I was never clear on that.

Here in Halifax we had Natal Day. We went to a great annual party called Donstock, which is where a piece of land outside of New Glasgow — owned by our friend Dave's uncle Don — gets taken over for the weekend by hardcore aging partiers who camp out and play live music and drink a lot. This was the fifth year it's happened, but our first time. We'll be back for sure, 'cause it was really fun.

It's a beautiful lot on a lake, with a big field where the concert happens and a couple of spectacular waterfalls in which to frolic. Everyone was incredibly friendly, the music was great, and there was even a giant bonfire. I went to bed before the show was over, but I kept getting woken up every five minutes by the elastic "glump" of frogs and the first four bars of "Raw Power". And I didn't even mind because it sounded so good. Definitely worth the two-and-a-half hour drive each way.

Garble! Garble!

I realize I haven't been saying very much on here lately. I guess I'm kind of off words these days (see playlist at right). They just seem so cheap and insidious, the way they distort experience to fit it into their neat little packages. "Words all fail the magic prize," as Gordon Gano says. To which I reply, "When sober girls around me, they be ackin' like they drunk."

I will tell you, though, that I've been working like a maniac over here, sometimes 12 or 14 hours a day. There's one giant project for Acadia that's been going on for awhile, an historical journal that's nearly complete now, and no shortage of other smaller jobs. New clients keep coming out of the woodwork too. I actually had to send one to someone else recently.

It seems like a bad idea to complain about having too much work as a freelancer, so I won't. But just to paint a picture of how it's been lately, there are days when I can't afford 20 minutes to take a shower, and sometimes I can't even find time to eat until well into the afternoon. My back went out three weeks ago because I spend so much time hunched over in front of a computer, stressed out, and don't get any exercise. It (the back) is slowly getting better, but is still not great.

There's light at the end of the tunnel with this mountain of work, though. The Acadia project will be finishing up on Monday, and then I can get caught up on everything else. Then we're vacating to Jenny and Tom's cottage on PEI for the entire second week of August. At least that's the plan... I haven't actually emailed them to confirm that recently. That's still OK, right guys? Heh.

Meanwhile, I'll try to stay on friendly enough terms with language to let you know of any important and/or interesting developments in our lives. And sometime soon I'll get around to the third and final installment in my atheistic-empiricism-is-mistaken-to-dismiss-mystical-experience-as-meaningless rant. To keep some spark of interest going, here are some words-as-pointers from J. Krishnamurti:

"Consciously or unconsciously, surreptitiously or openly, one begins to inquire into the purpose of life, and each one receives an answer from the so-called specialists. The artist, if you ask him what is the purpose of life, will tell you that it is self-expression through painting, sculpture, music, or poetry; the economist, if you ask him, will tell you that it is work, production, cooperation, living together, functioning as a group, as a society; and if you ask the religionist he will tell you the purpose of life is to seek and realize God, to live according to the laws laid down by teachers, prophets, saviors, and that by living according to their laws and edicts you may realize that truth which is God. Each specialist gives you his answer about the purpose of life, and according to your temperament, fancies, and imagination you begin to establish these purposes, these ends, as your ideals.

"Such ideals and ends have become merely a haven of refuge because you use them to guide and protect yourself in this turmoil. So you begin to use these ideals to measure your experiences, to inquire into the conditions of your environment. You begin without the desire to understand or fulfill, merely to inquire into the purpose of environment; and in discovering that purpose, according to your conditioning, your preconceptions, you merely avoid the conflict of living without understanding."

- Being Vulnerable to Truth, 1934

RIP, Harvey

I guess comic writer Harvey Pekar died yesterday. The causes seem still to be unknown. I know he had had cancer, but the media is saying Joyce, his wife, "found" him and reported it to the police, which sounds a little suspicious... Whatever happened, I hope it wasn't too painful.

His grumpy, paranoid, thoughtful comic stories of working-class tribulations helped me through some hard times back in the 80's. I highly recommend them, as well as the biopic that was made in 2003. They're both called American Splendor. Here's one of my favourite one-pagers.

These Punks Today...

...so prudent!

WWBUTBTW 2: The Holga Edition

What We've Been up to, by the Way

There've been all sorts of photos taken of all sorts of fun times over the past few weeks, but I haven't had the chance to post any. So here's a quick slideshow for ya. Enjoy!

Just an Observation

Has anyone else noticed how much Gene Simmons is beginning to resemble an old Eskimo woman? I think, if he's done with this whole KISS thing, he might want to consider a lateral move into throat singing.

What If It's Not About Belief? Part II

All right, it's time to start digesting this can of worms I've opened, if I may mix metaphors disgustingly. I have a whole pile of notes made in preparation for this post, and a chunk of free time as I'm on vacation.

Unfortunately, I left the notes at home. So instead of a subtly winding and logically sound argument leading around and eventually to my main point, anticipating and responding to all possible objections along the way, I'm going to make this post more of an allegorical illustration of my position. Maybe that's a good thing. Long, highly theoretical rants can be pretty tiresome to read on a computer monitor, and I can only put off the pop music recommendations and Facebook-bashing for so long before my already dangerously hypothetical readership becomes a pure fiction.

Here then, is a simple statement of the main point I'm trying to make in this growing series of posts, along with an intuition pump that will hopefully draw out just what I mean by calling it "What If It's Not About Belief?" More formal argumentative details will have to wait for a later post.

My main point is this: the way we generally think about religious belief is wrong-headed. What it really is, or at least should be, is not actually "belief" at all, in the way we usually use that word. At most, it is actually belief within a certain mode of conscious experience, and if we want to talk about it as belief we have to also specify the mode in which that belief makes sense. And adding this specification turns out to make most of the arguments we have over religious belief disappear into meaninglessness, without thereby invalidating religious experience itself. It may, however, invalidate much of organized religion, which would probably be a very good thing.

Here's an allegory about the wrong-headed way we generally think about religious belief. Imagine that human culture evolved in such a way that we no longer slept. It's not that far-fetched. We already stay up a lot later than our predecessors did before electricity was invented, keeping ourselves awake now with artificial light and stimulating entertainments like television and weblogs, and offsetting the negative side effects of mild sleep deprivation with caffeine in the morning, thereby leading arguably richer and debatably more productive lives. We still need to get a certain amount of sleep or we start acting kind of insane — at least, more insane than our culture is currently willing to accept. But what if we found a way to override the insanity-producing effects of substantial sleep deprivation through medication?

A drug that allowed people to think and behave relatively sanely without requiring sleep at all anymore would, I'm sure, catch on very quickly as a good idea. Maybe we would still have to allow our bodies and minds some rest every once in awhile by sitting down and watching some really dumb TV shows. But we know that people would generally find this preferable to getting in bed and losing conscious contact with the world for a few hours, as this is a choice they already make in the real world, where sleep is still a necessity.

And once a few people started taking this new drug — call it Soma — their extra productivity and life experience would quickly become apparent. More and more people would be attracted to the Soma way of life, and our culture would change to reflect the new lifestyle. People would be able to work longer and different hours, and would also have more time that would need filling with entertainment. Products would get consumed faster because they would be used more often. Pretty much all production and consumption (with the possible exception of beds and pillows) would get ratcheted up, and soon it would become impossible to live in the culture without taking Soma. What started out as an advantage-creator would become a necessity, as such things do, and after a few generations people would forget what sleep was even like and what purpose it ever served.

Of course, they would have references to sleep and dreams in their ancient literature and television archives, but these would seem incredibly old-fashioned. The whole concept of lying down and doing nothing for a third of the day, and especially the idea that other worlds and life stories could thereby be directly experienced, would strike them as superstitious mumbo jumbo that had thankfully been done away with through rational thinking, enterprise, and pharmaceutical technology. There would be a certain small percentage of the population, the Sleepists, who would long for those bygone days and would actually try sleeping themselves by foregoing the Soma for awhile. They would come back to this world with stories of Dreamland and the wonderful, fantastic things that went on there, but their stories would generally be regarded as nonsense and the Sleepists themselves as some kind of deluded kooks. How, after all, could one be suddenly transported to some other world where anything could happen — including the logically impossible — merely by not taking a drug? The whole story just wouldn't make any sense, especially as it would be perfectly clear that these people were not actually going anywhere except into a special room with a soft horizontal surface, where they would close their eyes for a few hours.

If Sleepism caught on with enough people, they might gather together to defend themselves against the larger populace who viewed them with suspicion and bemusement. In talking with each other about their Dreamland experiences, they might start finding common threads which could be interpreted as messages and prophecies about this world. These would then gradually be incorporated into an entire Sleepist worldview, which could be documented, added to, and handed down over generations. Sleepism would become a whole belief system about the waking world, and not just the practice of sleeping as an interesting experience. There might even eventually be Sleepists who had never even experienced sleep themselves, but still subscribed to the belief system because it had been subscribed to by their parents and grandparents.

At some point, it would become necessary for the Somists to debate the Sleepists, in order to debunk their superstitious, antirational metaphysics. The messages received from Dreamland would contradict current scientific understanding of the world and sometimes even common sense. The Somists would see that if we were to continue as an intelligent species and not fall back into the dark days of witchcraft and acausal pseudoscience, Dreamland would have to be exposed as the ludicrous fantasy that it obviously was. Of course, it couldn't be proven not to exist, but because there would be no rational reason to believe in its existence in the first place, and because belief in its existence would seem to lead one to all sorts of unintuitive and even demonstrably false conclusions, the burden of proof would fall squarely on the Sleepists. They would of course have all sorts of stories about their own experiences and those of their forefathers, and how all of their lives had been enriched by sleep and its alleged realm, Dreamland. But these stories would convince no Somists, as no hard evidence could ever be found for Dreamland's existence.

And, to complicate matters further, there would even develop different factions of Sleepists, with different stories or different ways of interpreting the stories derived from their and their lineages' Dreamland experiences, and different ideas about the best ways to access Dreamland and what it requires of us when we arrive. These stories and ideas would all contradict each other in ways that would necessitate heated intraSleepist debate. Eventually, wars would ensue. And the ridiculous tragedy of such wars would be further evidence for the Somists that the whole sleep ball of wax was just a terrible idea that we would do best to put behind us, the sooner the better.

So that's where I see us standing today with regard to religious belief. I'm sure it's obvious, but just so I can't be accused of deliberate obscurantism, here's the analogy explicitly laid out:

sleep = religious/mystical state
dream = religious experience
Dreamland = heaven/God/nirvana/etc.
Soma = science/rationalism
Sleepism = organized religion
Somism = atheism
belief = belief

Happy Birthday, Ali!

Welcome to the XL's. Forty, foxy, and feeling fine!

And a belated HB to Bennett, too. Poor Ben always gets the late birthday present in the mail. I guess that makes it more of a "birthday past." Sorry, kiddo! Hope you had a fun time on Saturday.

Love, Andrew

While You're Waiting...

I know we're all champing at the bit for Part II of "What If It's Not About Belief?" in which the main argument is revealed, everyone in the world finally learns how to get along with everyone else, and this time, as Douglas Adams says, no one has to get nailed to anything. All I can tell you is I'm working on it, OK? There's a certain urgency to getting it done now that my dad has posted a rebuttal on his blog to the first, scene-setting part of this metatheological rant. I haven't actually read his post yet because I have a pretty good idea of everything I want to say on the subject, and would rather not allow the discussion to be reframed by possible anticipations or side-roads. But it is definitely in the works.

In the meantime, how about a little fun? Here's a cover of a Plumtree song I just finished recording for another one of those tribute albums that's coming up. I decided to do it in the style of video game music, drawing everything on a grid in Garageband instead of actually playing any instruments. Don't ask me why the British accent, though. Just felt appropriate somehow.

Season Opener

It's that time of year again, when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of softball. If I happen to see any young men, I'll ask them what they thought of our two games against the Eye Levelers (from the Eye Level art gallery) on Sunday, both of which we won handily. But not as handily as I'd expected. We were looking rusty, which I had expected, and they were looking focused and aggressive, which I had not. There were a lot of five-run innings on both sides in both games, so the scores were very high. Maybe that's why I looked so tired by the time it was over. I hadn't eaten anything for 10 hours, so that might also have been a contributing factor. But then we went over to Krista and Jesse's for some barbecued tofu and gourmet salads and I was pretty much in heaven.




These photos weren't taken with a Holga or cross-processed, by the way. I just made them look that way in Photoshop for something fun to do. Stole the idea from this tutorial. Pretty neat, eh?

What If It's Not About Belief? Part I

In the exercise of mystical contemplation leave behind the senses and the activities of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual... that thou mayest arrive, as far as thou mayest, by unknowing, towards union with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge.
- Dionysius, Mystical Theology

[W]hile the soul is self-recollected and forgetful of all things, it is then prepared for the inflowing and teaching of the Holy Ghost, who will withdraw Himself from thoughts that are without understanding.
- St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel

The mystic does not claim that one way of comprehending reality, of being at home in the universe, is superior to the other. He claims rather that for his fullest humanhood, a person needs both.
- Lawrence LeShan, How to Meditate

We've been watching this short BBC series called The Atheism Tapes, which is a collection of interviews conducted by Jonathan Miller with various distinguished British and American atheists. Richard Dawkins is of course on there, as well as my philosophical living hero Daniel Dennett. Arthur Miller too, interestingly enough.

It's of course fascinating, and we haven't watched all of them yet, but I find myself already wondering why these outspoken atheists never seem to have any sympathy whatsoever towards a way of looking at things that I guess I would call spiritual. Why is a rational, empirical point of view the be-all and end-all for them with regard to any sphere you can think of?

It's not that I disagree with them, exactly. I think they're perfectly right that: 1) the idea of God is redundant and inferior to other ideas as either an explanatory or a moral guide, 2) there are in fact many good reasons to disbelieve in the idea of Him, and especially 3) organized religion has been and continues to be a very dangerous element in our culture. But I also think there's a baby somewhere in there whom they're overlooking in the zeal of their bathwater disposal, filthy though the water may be.

Being both a science-loving atheist and one who has had profound, transformative spiritual experiences, I'm always looking for ways to reconcile these two aspects of myself. Is it not possible to be level-headed and logical without closing oneself off to aspects of human life that transcend rationality? Or, conversely, can I not embrace a mystical attitude without slipping necessarily and hopelessly into the realm of fuzzy thinking? I'm quite certain that the answer is yes; that reason and spirituality CAN be reconciled without watering down either one, though each may have to give up some of what it perceives as its domain.

Unfortunately, there are surprisingly few thinkers in the history of our culture who have had anything very useful to say about such a reconciliation. Certain scientists (Darwin, notably), after publishing theories that are so powerful in their explanatory powers as to be ostensible nails in God's coffin, have gone on to say that it is of course thanks to God's infinite wisdom that our universe works in such a nice, elegantly predictable way. Or other, similarly unconvincing things. No one really believes these footnotes any more than the scientists who write them do.

Then on the other side are the sort of new age spiritualists who try to incorporate scientific ideas in their kooky, acausal views of the universe. Especially quantum physics. Fair enough, I guess — the principles of quantum mechanics are famously weird and unintuitive, and no one seems ever to have come up with a good way of imagining exactly how the heck they work, even though everyone agrees that they do work. So why not hitch your particular God wagon to them in order to lend it some seemingly rational credibility? Well, it turns out that whatever affinities with their personal brand of kookiness the spiritualists find in physics are usually completely metaphorical, and usually based on a very poor understanding of what the theory of quantum mechanics does and does not actually say. It's interesting that Albert Einstein — a noted atheist, mind you, or at least agnostic — could never bring himself to believe in quantum mechanics precisely because it ran so contrary to his intuitions about how God runs the universe.

Two people I can think of who do have interesting and spiritually enlightened things to say about religion as seen from a scientific viewpoint are William James and Joseph Campbell. The former I already raved about on this very blog a little over a year ago. The latter is an American comparative mythologist who mapped out most of the world's known religions and myths, past and present, taking a sort of psycho-anthropological interest that was objective enough to be non-judgmental, without being so objective as to sterilize exactly what is interesting about the subject matter, i.e. the unscientific "truths" and mystical states of being that are to be gained by partaking in the rituals and legend systems in question. It's actually a very similar stance to that taken by James in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Campbell gained a lot of posthumous notoriety from a series of interviews with Bill Moyers that aired on PBS in the late '80's, called The Power of Myth (plus a companion book of the same name that came out a bit later). Although I was somewhat familiar with his work, I didn't see the series at the time. But Alison and I rented and watched it on DVD just before picking up The Atheism Tapes. It got me and my capricious brain all worked up, hearing someone speak so rationally about what is essentially an irrational — or maybe "pre-rational" would be a better word — aspect of human nature: the urge to commune with the infinite, unknowable mystery behind all being.

It's an urge the militant atheists would classify simply as "curiosity." They would also say about it that although it can never be completely quenched, it's a fortunate result of evolution because it causes our species to engage in such noble pursuits as logic and philosophy and, of course, science. They would be wrong, as any theist will tell you, but why can't they see how simplistic and uncharitable a portrait they're painting of religious belief? If you want to attack what you see as a dangerous and widespread element of society, shouldn't you follow Sun Tzu's advice and "know thy enemy" as deeply and accurately as possible, especially if you have a super-intelligent brain capable of understanding and utilizing complex, subtle scientific and philosophical concepts?

I actually think the atheist brigade misunderstands this aspect of theism — which I am inclined to see as the most important and universal of all its various and mostly insane aspects — only because they themselves have never had anything resembling a deeply spiritual experience. I think they think they have, when they've marveled at the size of the universe or the complexity of an ant colony. But I doubt that they have ever had the feeling thrust upon them that "we are all part of one another and a part of the cosmos and that our separation, our alienation from each other, is illusion." [Lawrence LeShan, How to Meditate] If they had, how could they so seriously undervalue the urge to see things that way more often?

Here's how the 13th century nun, Angela of Foligno expresses the type of experience I'm talking about:

The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld the plenitude of God, whereby I did comprehend the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the abyss and all things else; and therein I beheld naught save the divine Power in a manner assuredly indescribable, so that through excess of marveling the soul cried with a loud voice, saying: "This world is full of God!"

Plotinus, in the First Ennead, says,

One that shall know this vision, with what passion of love shall he be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This! ... This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute and the primal, fashions its lovers to beauty, and makes them also worthy of love.

This is no mere satisfaction of curiosity these people are talking about. It's more like direct apprehension of some kind of profound and previously unseen Truth, although we have to be really careful with that word, because it leads to the same impasse I'm trying to work my way around or through here. If someone says they have discovered a truth, then it's reasonable for another person to ask what exactly has been discovered and how it can be proven true. For the first person to then claim that this particular truth is personal and incommunicable seems like a cheat in the game of truth and knowledge, and you end up with two people who don't understand each other, each thinking the other is a complete fool.

But there is definitely some kind of very important experience that these people and countless others in human history have been fortunate enough to have — one which we can't just chuck out as invalid because we haven't had it ourselves and so don't understand what it could be like. The immediacy, inexpressibility, and personal quality of such an experience make it akin to an aesthetic one, or to that of falling in love, but with the work of art or lover in this case being the entire universe.

I'll revisit the analogy between religion and aesthetics a little later, because I think it's a particularly rich one, but for now let me just point out that the possibility of a relationship with God being something like this is actually admitted by Richard Dawkins. He brings it up towards the end of his Atheism Tapes interview, and it's the closest in the series that any of the titular atheists gets to real sympathy for their enemies, the theists. Unfortunately, he then says that theism of a sophisticated variety like this does not truly count as religion, in the usual sense of the term, and that anyone trying to smuggle God in through the door of mystical wonder is merely "playing with words." In fact, he would argue that the type of wonder scientists feel when contemplating the complexity of their subject matter is probably more profound than any that can be gotten through traditional methods of mysticism.

Why are these hard-nosed scientists so, well, hard-nosed? Why does their innate curiosity suddenly dry up when they approach anything resembling a subtle, personal understanding of the world that may not be completely expressible, but is nonetheless intensely gratifying and possibly invaluable to its owner? Why are they driven to categorize such an understanding in scientifically arguable terms, and to dismiss it as meaningless when it resists such categorization?

I think I might know...

(To be continued.)

HMD

And a big cheers to everyone else out there doing the world's most important job.

Late Entry

I have an addition to that list of undervalued '80's pop over on the right: ANYTHING from Aztec Camera's first two albums.

Fair Warning

I realize it's been awhile since there's been a new post. Just so you know, there's a big one coming. It's in everyone's favourite format — the rant — and it's going to be dense. A lot of different ideas have been suddenly converging for me and I'm all excited about them, so practise sitting up straight and get out some toothpicks to prop your eyelids open.

Meanwhile, everything's good here. I recently completed a long book and a logo design, and am in the process of developing the general look for a classical concert series's upcoming season. Alison is taking on more work with the commercial photographer she often assists. Assuming I can finish plodding through the snow-covered hedge maze that is this year's tax return before Jack Nicholson comes after me wielding a freshly sharpened audit, we'll be doing all right for money.

I'm reading a really good book on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, called The Meaning of Everything. My friend Charles and I are going to play a set of as-yet-unwritten instrumental music in early June, as Lac Secret. There are Lodge shows coming up too. And then a trip to Toronto to see Pavement for Alison's birthday! Time continues to overwrite its current state, refusing to settle into any kind of stable pattern. What a joker.

Easter Pics

Here, as promised, are some photos from our Easter weekend south shore visit. I guess I was kind of excited to be out of doors. As usual, no one took any pictures of Ali. Who watches the Watchmen?

My Life in the Ghosts of Bush

Last weekend we went to our friend Johanna's parents' cottage on the South Shore and had a real nice time being in nature, conserving water, and playing Careers. We also rode on the LaHave ferry and explored a few beaches not too far away. Soon I hope to have pictures to show you. I know you Facebook people have already seen some (grrr), but there's some others that I'll be posting when they become available.

In the meantime, since there's nothing else going on around here but lots of work, let me share another piece of pop culture that has no connection to my own life except insofar as I like it. Which is quite sofar, actually, in this case.

It's the latest Joanna Newsom album. I received it in the mail last week and haven't been able to stop listening to it. I don't know what you guys think of her (though I'm pretty sure there's at least some of you who think she has the most irritating voice imaginable and I'd have to be some kind of masochist to listen to more than 10 seconds of her singing in a sitting), but I'm a pretty big fan. I know she sounds like Lisa Simpson. Maybe that's part of the appeal — that despite such a weird idiosyncrasy she manages to make something so beautiful and compelling.

But anyway, on this album, Have One on Me, which, by the way, is three CDs long, there's an element of maturity to her voice that I don't think was there before. It's a little less brittle, a little sweeter. I also hear some Kate Bush and even Joni Mitchell influences creeping in, the former especially on this song right here.



I was never a huge Kate Bush fan back in the 'eighties, but lately she keeps popping up in contemporary music as an influence (Björk, M83, Bat for Lashes, Fever Ray) and I find myself consistently gaga over the hopelessly romantic results. So maybe it's time to revisit that missing link in the evolution of my personal taste. Any recommendations of where to start?

Help, My Retinas Are Burned.

I don't watch music videos very much, but I just had to share this one, as it has completely captivated me. Not being very "with it," I can't tell you much about the artist, but I'm sure you can read all about him in the latest issue of Tiger Beat magazine.

The video's only two minutes and 42 seconds long, but there's just so much packed into it, it feels more like 20 minutes! At least, I think that's the reason... If you can make it to the part where he starts laughing and pointing, congratulations and hang in there — you're into the home stretch.



You're welcome. If you still need more entertainment, about the only thing I've ever seen that could possibly beat this is the remix.

Thanks to WFMU for bringing these to my rapt attention.

Strange Loops

So this is pretty weird. I'm reading this book about Gödel's kooky denial of time's existence (which, by the way, I thought might somehow tie in with Eckhart Tolle's kooky denial of time's existence, only in a more scientifically rigorous way, but that turns out not to be the case; whereas for Eckhart time doesn't exist because there is only ever the now, Gödel says that actually it's precisely the now that doesn't exist — there is no objective moment which is THIS moment independent of frame of reference, according to Einsteinian relativity — and, in fact, it's possible to invent universes in which one can travel to a past moment, using a really fast but sub-light-speed spaceship, thereby creating a closed time loop; hence, the concept we mean when we talk about time [moves in one direction, can be divided at any given moment into past and future, ...] doesn't actually exist), and I come across an interesting bit of trivia. It turns out that Gödel's favourite movie was Snow White! He used to rave about it to all his friends and try to convince them of its greatness!

I guess his friend Alan Turing, who developed the precise account of recursive functions contained in G's 1931 first incompleteness theorem into a deep analysis of computability, thereby making the modern computer on which I am writing this blog post possible, must have been at least partially listening, because when he decided that his (at the time criminal) homosexuality was not curable, he decided to take his own life... by eating an apple that he had injected with cyanide! Gödel, by contrast, was morbidly afraid that others were trying to poison his food, and starved himself to death.

Grumpy

They showed Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in its entirety on Walt Disney last night. That is one great cartoon, despite its child-manipulating gothic/romantic themes. The painted backgrounds and the animation are just beautiful in their gauzy imperfection. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm being a nostalgic old curmudgeon by finding the sheen and precision of computer animation nauseating; other people seem to like it just fine. But no — it really IS better to feel the hands of the artists in there, and this movie proves it. Did you see when she was singing to her own reflection in that wishing well? That's all I'm going to say about it.

My Deal This Morning

We got up late today and listened to Brent Bambury's less-than-superb Go radio show on CBC with our coffee. He was talking to an audience of teenage-to-twenty-something kids, who were eating up his every word, about what makes the perfect pop song. It was a celebration of blandness. Is it just me, or have we not seen a generation so accepting of the status quo since the invention of pop culture after WWII? I can't remember when was the last time I heard about any youth-generated phenomenon that snowballed into a loud buzz by telling us old farts we're doing it all wrong and have made a mess of everything.

Which we definitely are, and have, so why are all these kids just sitting around happily consuming whatever garbage music and clothing and video games and iPacifiers we hand them and tell them they should like? I realize my generation — fittingly labeled with an inexpressive 'x' thanks to faux-punk Billy Idol — wasn't exactly an earth-shattering bunch of political revolutionaries. We definitely disappointed our hippy forebears, who had hoped we'd carry the man-sticking torch for them by the time they'd grown fat and nostalgic. But at least we hated everything. Y'know? Now I'm fat and nostalgic, and the kids are alright with that.

I used to listen to Brent Bambury on Brave New Waves in the 'eighties, when he was a young man, educating me and all my unseen comrades about weird, alien, excitingly anti-establishment music that we never would have found out about otherwise. Record labels hadn't invented the term "alternative" for it yet. He and others made me realize that there was another, oblique-looking possible world out there beyond our immediate bleak-looking one, and even if we might all destroy ourselves tomorrow, we could at least live in that world today simply by believing in it. Now he's an old man telling our youth about the history of popular music by playing Phil Collins and Taylor Swift songs, and instead of throwing eggs at him or at least giving him the finger, they're cheering him on. What gives?

My Deal Tonight

It's late at night and I should be asleep. We'll be helping our friends Meg and KC move into a new apartment tomorrow, a little closer to our neighbourhood. I'm drinking a cup of tea and trying not to drift off before I get into the bed, but I just wanted to say that I'm super busy with work, having been blessed with THREE new clients this week, one of whom was not even referred to me, but found me on the internet on their own. Great stuff, as long as I can actually get all the work done.

Besides work work work, I've been reading a very interesting book about Kurt Gödel's and Albert Einstein's friendship at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in the 'forties. Specifically, it's about a very surprising physical fact that Gödel was able to prove during that time: that in any universe described by the Theory of Relativity (which of course includes our own), time cannot exist. Einstein himself admitted that he could find no refutation to this proof, and it should have left any minds which hadn't already been blown by G's Incompleteness Theorem of 1931 somewhere in the stratosphere. But instead, it was completely forgotten. Pretty fascinating.

I've also been listening to Elliott Smith a lot. Have you heard of this guy? Kidding, of course, but I don't know why it's taken me till now to get around to giving him a fair shake. I really love it — like Nick Drake and John Lennon and Neil Young all rolled into one guy. What the heck was wrong with me in the 'nineties? I didn't have time for anything that wasn't Beck or Radiohead?

Anyways, that's my deal tonight.

R.I.P. Alex Chilton

"Shakin' the World" - Alex Chilton


"Alex Chilton" - The Replacements

Shop Talk

I just remembered today that I never did show you the other bit of branding I did, for my friends Jen and Aidan's gluten-free baked goods. Here's the front of their business card. The URL on the card redirects to their current website, as the new brand doesn't launch until early next month. If you were wondering.


Vistaprint produced a whole whack of these, along with fridge magnets, for a really good price, and I have to say I'm very impressed with the product. Usually digitally printed business cards are kind of flimsy and crap, but these are virtually indistinguishable from offset printed ones, which would have been multiple times more expensive.

Besides that, there's been plenty of business coming through the old shop these days, with no end in sight so far. Right now there's a couple of posters, a government educational kit for schoolkids, and a whole new look for a classical concert series's marketing in the works, among other things. Today, though, I forced myself to get outside for awhile because it was absolutely gorgeous out. You know that first day that actually feels like spring, and everyone goes around smiling and congratulating each other on getting through the winter, willfully ignoring the fact that there will probably be at least two more rounds of snow before the weather turns dependably like this? That was today.

I met a guy at a party a couple of weekends ago who does silkscreening really cheap just because he likes doing it, so I'm also working on some T-shirt designs now in my spare time. Just for fun. I'll be sure to run them by you when they're done.

Oh yeah, and happy St. Patrick's Day to all my Irish and/or alcoholic friends!

A Mystical Poem

I dreamed I looked through a keyhole
And saw a beautiful tree,
And sitting on the grass below
Was a man who looked like me.

But could he really be myself
While I observed his soul
And even the eye that saw such things
Was less real than the hole?

OK, it's no "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," but then again, what is?

A Song and a Story Before Bed

Here's a song I just finished recording for a compilation that'll be coming out on Gooseberry Records. The album will comprise recent recordings by people who were involved in the Halifax indie rock boom of the '90's. I think it's to be called Aftermath. I hadn't recorded anything for quite awhile, and had recently written this thematically apt song about people who were prominent in that scene but then just kind of dropped out unexpectedly, so this was a perfect excuse to get back on the Garageband horse. It's somewhat scrappy, but I'm happy with it.



There's been a lot of movie-and-TV-watching around here, but that's all about to change as the winter weather breaks and our enthusiam explodes. Can't happen too soon, either, I say. Last weekend we watched the entire Academy Awards ceremony. Why? I have no good answer for that. We hadn't even seen any of the movies that were up for prizes.

Alison had an inspiring spring experience on the bus home today. I guess this kid of around 20 got on, and he had one of those haircuts that's all sticking up in the back, so she reckoned him to be a hipster scene guy. But then she realized his hair was just really messy and he was actually incredibly nerdy. She says he looked exactly like the "McLovin" guy in Superbad. And talked kind of like him too.

The bus was crowded, so he stood up and held onto the overhead bar. He had a plastic bag with something in it in the same hand he was holding on with, and it kept swinging back and forth, hitting the girl beside him in the head. He said to her loudly, "I'm sorry my bag is hitting you repeatedly in the head." She smiled and said it was OK. Taking the smile as a good sign, he continued, "I can't wait to get home so I can put this bag down."

Then some more people got on and he said, "They'll have to use a shoehorn if they want to get any more people on here." The girl didn't really react to that one, so he reiterated, "I can't wait to get home." This time, he elaborated that he had a paper to write for Monday.

"Good luck with that," the girl sympathized.

"Yeah, and I also have to study for a midterm," he said, "which is also on Monday." Another sympathetic look. Further encouraged, he continued, "And I have to make some cold calls related to this private detective case I'm trying to wrap up."

The girl ignored this last admission.

"Long story," he rolled his eyes.

And then... he started singing! Quietly, at first, but no one was complaining, so he continued a little louder. Alison didn't recognize the song, but it was something complicated and prog-rock-y about the nativity scene. He sang it in its entirety, and when he was finished, the bus was very silent. Finally, the girl said, "That was pretty good."

"Oh yeah?" he beamed. "In that case, for my next number, a little Genesis." And this time, there was no holding back as he began to belt out a Gabriel-era crowd-disperser. Alison couldn't even look at him, she was trying so hard not to either hug him or burst out laughing. People were grumbling and looking mad. The bus driver eventually told him to shut up, and he did.

"I didn't realize singing was considered offensive in these parts," he mumbled to the girl.

She looked genuinely sympathetic and said, "Well, everyone in this section was enjoying it, and that's no joke."

And that's how two people's days were made. Three, if you count me.