Unexpected Religious Experience

Oh my god, this book I'm reading is one of those ones that are so good you wish another person were always reading it over your shoulder, just so you could look up at them and say, "Ah? Ah?" It wants to be read aloud to someone you love. I can't stop telling everyone I run into about it.

The book is A Death in the Family, the first in Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-part autobiographical novel, My Struggle. It's so intensely personal in detail and deeply relatable in unguarded psychological insight, I never want to put it down.

Yesterday evening I went to see ambient electronic musician Tim Hecker play in a church, and I brought the book with me, as I was by myself. My friend Meg showed up after awhile and sat beside me while I was in the middle of enjoying the passage below like a very rich meal, and I almost didn't want her around. Of course I was quickly happy to have her company and hear about the Low concert in the same venue the night before (both shows part of local annual weirdo music festival the Obey Convention), but when she first sat down I admit to being a little disappointed.

I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness, and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape. Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I… do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bath them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards. It is a struggle, and even though it is not heroic, I am up against a superior force, for no matter how much housework I do the rooms are littered with mess and junk, and the children, who are taken care of every waking minute, are more stubborn than I have ever known children to be; at times it is nothing less than bedlam here, perhaps we have never managed to find the necessary balance between distance and intimacy, which of course becomes increasingly important the more personality there is involved. And there is quite a bit of that here. When Vanja was around eight months old she began to have violent outbursts, like fits at times, and for a while it was impossible to reach her, she just screamed and screamed. All we could do was hold her until it had subsided. It is not easy to say what caused it, but it often occurred when she had had a great many impressions to absorb, such as when we had driven to her grandmother's in the country outside Stockholm, when she had spent too much time with other children, or we had been in town all day. Then, inconsolable and completely beside herself, she could scream at the top of her voice. Sensitivity and strength of will are not a simple combination. And matters were not made any easier when Heidi was born. I wish I could say I took everything in my stride, but sad to say such was not the case because my anger and my feelings too were aroused in these situations, which then escalated, frequently in full public view: it was not unknown for me in my fury to snatch her up from the floor in one of the Stockholm malls, sling her over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carry her through town kicking and punching and howling as if possessed. Sometimes I reacted to her howls by shouting back, throwing her down on the bed and holding her tight until it passed, whatever it was that was tormenting her. She was not very old before she found out exactly what drove me wild, namely a particular variety of scream, not crying or sobbing or hysteria but focused, aggressive screams, regardless of the situation, that could make me totally lose control, jump up and rush over to the poor girl, who was then shouted at or shaken until the screams turned to tears and her body went limp and she could at last be comforted.

Maybe I'm finding this stuff so compelling because my own grandmother died last weekend and it's got me thinking a lot about family relations and how we invent, react to, and manipulate each other's characters, for better and worse. And that's all tying in with the other book I just finished, which I quoted from a few posts ago, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men, by James Hollis. That one's a Jungian account of men's inability to guide each other or themselves from childhood into a healthy adulthood, and their subsequent hurting of each other and of course women. Fairly bleak stuff, with a nod to some proposed solutions at the very end.

In any case, when the music finally started up, I was in an extremely receptive state. Meg left the pew to watch from the balcony, so I was left on my own again. The notes and textures Tim Hecker coaxed from a variety of gadgets on a table in front of him immediately struck me as some of the most beautiful and thoughtful sounds I'd ever heard. I found myself grinning uncontrollably five minutes into his set.



It got very loud very quickly, and I let the sound affect me bodily with its intense vibrations, as well as artistically and emotionally. I soon found myself in a kind of altered state, ecstatic one minute, on the verge of vomiting the next. My body swayed uncontrollably, my mouth opened to catch more of the sound, which became really quite deafening. All the cavities in my head opened up. I started to sweat. The concept of myself as a separate entity began to lose meaning as my heart beat faster and faster, becoming a pleasantly aching hole in the middle of my chest, like the feeling of being in love.

The whole experience left me shaky and out of breath afterwards. I felt like I was seeing things differently, more clearly. Other people all seemed worthy of great sympathy in their silly, awful, relentless personal struggles. I now saw the appeal of those ecstatic worship sessions where Christian ministers whip the congregation into a frenzy of physical, prelinguistic worship. Also the danger, of course, but that has always been apparent.

Anyway, so read some Knausgaard if you get the chance, I guess is what I'm saying.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

I got something here for you but didn't get it into the mail in time. I'll have to give it to you when I see you next weekend! Hope you have a great day. Take it easy on poor Tubby.

Spring Is Finally Here

Hope it cheers me up soon...

Always Crashing in the Same Car

If daily life is a school wherein we learn how best to navigate daily life, there's something suspect about the whole setup, beyond its absurdly self-justifying nature. At least, for me there is. Why do I have to relearn the same lessons every day? When can I write the final exam and move on to the next grade? Is it like this for you too?

It often feels like I'm making progress on the big question of how one should live one's life. In, fact over the course of a day, I think I probably am. But then the next day, the very same truths will pop up again in response to new stumbling blocks, and I'll think, "Oh yeah, right!"

I guess it's a positive thing that the answers I keep bumping into are at least consistent. If they kept changing and contradicting themselves, it wouldn't be even logically possible to make any headway. So I shouldn't complain.

But why can't I just remember them, once learned, and go around directly applying them? Life would get easier and easier and I would make the world a better and better place for others. And then those others could pass the lessons on to later generations, who would be immediately ready to learn more advanced ones, and humans would fulfill their tremendous potential, and God would have to look at our species and write, "Nice job. A+" on our cosmic report card. Instead, individual life is a Groundhog Day of spiritual déja vu, as the world slowly destroys itself. Seems unfair.

I even think I may have written a blog post about this very phenomenon before.

Anyway, here are some of the simple truths I'm constantly forgetting and then remembering again. What are some of yours?

1. No one is an enemy unless you make them one.
2. Especially not yourself.
3. Stop trying so hard.
4. It's not necessary or even a good idea to believe your own thoughts.
5. The past and the future are examples of thoughts.
6. Slow down.
7. The right time to make up your mind about someone is never.
8. Judging that something is beautiful is not the same as seeing beauty.
9. Sunshine and the smell of grass will answer all important questions.
10. Life is but a dream.

Happy Mother's Day

One's mother incarnates and models the archetype of life. Though fathers contribute their chromosomal heritage, the mother is the place of origin, locus of parturition and omphalos of our world. Such "torrents of ancestry" are entrusted to the fragile vessel of a single person, a woman, who phenomenologically communicates the mystery of life itself and who, in the specific relationship between mother and child, embodies all sorts of messages about our relationship to the life force. The mother's biochemistry in utero, the treatment of the child by his mother, her affirmations or denials of his personhood, are primal messages to boys about their own being.

Just as human life emerged from the primordial seas, so we emerged from umbilical waters. How we are related to those origins and how we are to comprehend ourselves and our place in the cosmos are initially construed through the mother-child encounter. Not only do we share most of our early, formative days and years with her — the more so if fathers are distant or not there at all — but her role is replicated by teachers and other caretakers who in our culture are still primarily female. Hence the major influx of information men receive about themselves, and what life is about, comes from woman.

— James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: 

The Wounding and Healing of Men

Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit 

     of the rest,

You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

— Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric

Post #666

Desiree
My love for you is not a noble love:
It rides on sorrow — loud, distracting, real
In all but root — and takes advantage of
A loneliness too permanent to feel.

Phonetography

Spring is finally upon us. Feeling inspired by all the colour and shadows, I've been taking more pictures with my phone lately.

I've also been experimenting with an Instagram technique I thought I had invented: the double filter. I sneakily delete the photo from Instagram right after uploading it, then apply more filtering to the saved result. Of course, it turns out everybody already knows this trick, and they've in fact come up with smarter ways to do it that don't involve scrambling to delete your first post before it can be accidentally "liked."

But anyway, I think I've gotten some pretty cool stuff this way. Check out these chronologically arranged babies:

Tonight at Gus'

Now with new songs!

Happy Birthday, Duke Ellington!

A hundred and fifteen years young.

Whistle While You Work for the Weekend

I have a questionable habit of relating everything that happens in my life to some song lyric or other. Got it from my mom. Sometimes it's funny to realize that what I'm going around whistling or singing loudly is a narration of exactly what I'm doing. Other times I realize to my horror and embarrassment that I'm broadcasting an opinion that should really be kept to myself. But mostly it's just annoying as heck, for me and everybody else.

However, this weekend I ended up with some pretty great ear worms entertaining me while I took care of a few otherwise tedious chores. Maybe they'll help you if you have some tedium of your own.

First I gathered my laundry together and threw it in the wash. That didn't take much time, but long enough to think about laundromats and sing a few rounds of this.



Next, I had to run some errands around town on my bike. I could've gone forever with this tune stuck in my head.



When I got home, I finally got around to doing my income tax. I wasn't too happy in the end when it cost me $1,800 (keep up the good work, Stephen Harper!), but the phrase "tax deduction" kept this one egging me on for the full two hours it took.



Then it was time to clean the bathroom. I thought the tub and toilet would wear out my positivity for sure, but luckily there was some pink mould in the shower stall that needed taking care of. That of course brought the lovely Nick Drake to mind, who serenaded me well into the evening.



Hope your weekend's as productive and musical!

A Very Short Story

Here's a sneak preview of a story I wrote for my friend KC's monthly coffee newsletter, Concrete News. It'll show up in print in a month or two. I was given a maximum of 100 words for the "Writer's Block" section. I've cheated a little, at 101. If you see a word that can be subtracted, let me know.

Abe and Mrs. Hogg

Abraham Vigoda was nine. His teachers found his name hilarious because of some old actor or whatever. Abe’s family didn't have a TV. It wasn’t funny to him.

Once appointed superintendent of the school board, Abe closed Hemlock Elementary. The ex-teachers hated his guts.

Except one day Sobey’s cashier Mrs. Hogg called him her star pupil. Abe was surprised, then remembered her not laughing at him.

His wife didn’t understand the story's full import. How could she? They watched their kid eat the custard things Abe bought.

After she died, Abe realized Mrs. Hogg must not have had a TV either.

Vinyl Lament

Aaah! Just realized I'm going to miss Record Store Day on Saturday, as I'll be flying to Ontario to visit my family. Of course, I'll be happy to see the fam, but I do always enjoy RSD in Halifax. Seems like there's gonna be some cool stuff going on here too… Oh, well. Maybe someone will have opened a record store in Markham since I lived there in 1987. Probably not.

The Meaning of Life

Had this email exchange with an old friend last week. We hadn't talked in years, so of course there were many catching-up details to be shared, which naturally led to a general discussion about life's ultimate meaning. I swear she started it. In the middle of her last email was this paragraph:

I've realized or decided that life has no meaning. We live and we die. I have no need to make a mark or leave a legacy. We're all ephemeral, transient bags of water animated by electricity. I'm good with that. We're all part of everything, together. Why people have to fuck it up so much during the short time we're here is a sad mystery, assigning meaning where there is none feeds the ego. I assume no physicists believe in god.

That kind of stuff is like a bag of candy to me, so I jumped on the invitation to go to Philosophy Town with it. Possibly it wasn't the kind of sympathetic response she was looking for. But I felt like the process of writing it clarified some of my own "mystical atheist" thoughts on the matter. If you're interested, here's what I said. I've left it unitalicized, because it's quite long and that would be just one level of annoying too many:

As for life having no meaning... I think I know what you mean, but I think I don't exactly agree. Or, rather, there are three distinct things I think you might mean, each of which I do agree with, but maybe not in quite the same way as you:

1. Life has no intrinsic meaning, only meanings we arbitrarily assign it.

Sure. Yes. That seems obviously true to me.

However, I wouldn't then go on to say it therefore has no meaning. Because nothing has "intrinsic meaning," whatever that might be. All meaning is relative to some community that has decided upon it arbitrarily, but that doesn't make it any less valid.

The word "cookie," e.g, has been agreed to refer to a certain kind of baked good. There's nothing about the sound of the word or the way it looks written on a piece of paper that makes it inherently suitable for that purpose, but we can still use it to express hunger or generosity without necessarily feeding anyone's egos.

2. OK, but that's just a different use of the word "meaning" from what I'm saying here, which is something more like "point" or "purpose." Because we are all randomly evolved combinations of physical stuff with no designer, no one can claim knowledge of some ultimate purpose to our existence.

Again, I agree with that statement as far as it goes, but would add that the lack of an inarguable, universally valid reason for human life doesn't imply anything wrong with creating our own reasons for living.

We may be bags of water animated by electricty, but we are not JUST bags of water animated by electricity. We also happen to be the only such bags of water that have developed communicatively rich language. We're the species that makes ideas stand for things and words stand for ideas and things stand for words with next to no effort. It's in our nature to go around creating meaning and stories that make our lives make sense to us. There's no point in saying we shouldn't do that, because it's behind every decision we make, every thought we think, and every opinion we opine.

To put it another way, in order to be "good with" or "not good with" the transient and comically physical nature of human existence, you have to first believe in meaning of some kind. Otherwise, the whole judgment is a non-starter.

3. Thoughts, opinions, judgments — yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting we get away from. Our obsessive need to see meaning everywhere is precisely what makes us so neurotic, so we need to learn to cut it out when it's not appropriate. Look at this planet, for Pete's sake! We're making a giant mess of it, killing ourselves and everything else along the way, all for the sake of some stupid ideas and preferences we've dreamed up just to make our lives more interesting or sensible. Life isn't supposed to be interesting or make sense! Other species don't do that, and they seem to get along fine. Oh sure, sometimes they eat each other, and I wouldn't exactly argue that they're better artists or moralists or truth-seekers or whatever than we are. But they also don't figure out ways to short-sightedly annihilate each other and their surroundings, just so they can feel a little more comfortable and smug during their individual lifetimes. Come on!

OK, yeah, I'm pretty much with you on this one. And the whole God-as-something-you-need-to-decide-whether-you-believe-in-or-not I also can't get behind. We do need to get over ourselves and stop clinging to the beliefs and stories we identify with so strongly that we're willing to commit violence to ourselves and the beautifully balanced chaos from which we've sprung in order to protect them.

However… I feel like the letting-go and acceptance-of-reality-as-it-is that are called for here are what religion, and even the mystical concept "God," are supposed to be about. Forget about belief or disbelief in certain narratives. Those are not useful concepts. But if one can manage, at least temporarily, to take on the attitude that there are mysterious forces beyond our understanding, behind everything we think we know, including our sense of ourselves, and that those forces furthermore express themselves through each of us and in turn are witnessed by each of us in a pre-causal, atemporal kind of flow that, when we are lucky enough to tune into it, feels like nothing so much as unconditional love, well, that's a very powerful stance to be able to take.

I guess I'm saying that your "We're all part of everything, together" is not incompatible with a physicist experiencing something that she might decide to call "God." We don't need God as a concept that explains how things work — we have science for that. But science doesn't tell us anything about how to enjoy the world as given. If anything, it just makes up more and more stories about that world, till we can't look at anything directly anymore because we're too busy trying to understand and control it. What we need now to balance that perpetual discomfort is a willingness to experience complete mystery behind the complete understanding. It's not a matter of belief, but of openness to possibility.

So, if you're saying life has no meaning and therefore is pointless and therefore it doesn't matter what people do just as long as they keep their stupid stories to themselves, I respectfully disagree. But if, by "Life has no meaning," you mean to celebrate the infinity of possibilities presented to us at every moment when we can manage to let go of our stories, fears, desires, beliefs, and preconceptions and just live, I'm with ya, sister!

Interesting Sentences from Books I'm Reading

"Music… is not simply a distraction or a pastime, but a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next."

—Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs:

How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

"Unless I can combine poetry with recorded noise, have I any right to be?"

—Morissey, Autobiography

"[T]hough we may tell ourselves that we are royally pushing analogies around from the heights of our conscious thrones, the truth is otherwise: we are really at the mercy of our own seething myriads of unconscious analogies, much as a powerful ruler is really responding to the collective will of their people, because if they were regularly going against their people, they would soon be dethroned."

—Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences:

Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

"Science can always explain, qua mathematical eccentricities, that and how a strange thing happens, but can it explain anything about the why?"

—Erik Fosnes Hansen, Tales of Protection (Nadia Christensen, transl.)

"Lionel was there, a great white shape, leaning on the open door with his brow pressed to his raised wrist, panting huskily, and giving off a faint grey steam in his purple singlet (the lift was misbehaving, and the flat was on the thirty-third floor—but then again Lionel could give off steam while dozing in bed on a quiet afternoon)."

—Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo

"And anyway I show up at that party they had for homecoming week in first year and I start making out with the poster of Van Morrison, like I've pinned poor Van against the wall and am sexually assaulting him, and you guys are like Oh my god that's the guy from the freshman mixer who chugged all the purple Jesus right out of the barrel and then vomited into the barrel and then started chugging that, who in Christ's name let him in?"

—Lynn Coady, The Antagonist

"Then they leave the area, a little sick at what they have done, especially the orange, who several times becomes so distraught it stops rolling altogether, and must be picked up and hurled down the path by Jim the penisless man, who, turns out, has a very good arm."

—George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

His world had vanished long before he entered it.

I went to see the latest Wes Anderson movie a couple of times in the last week. If you haven't seen it, you'll be happy to learn that it's the good kind of Wes Anderson movie — the kind where real adult concerns lie behind the whimsical little episodes in a whimsical little world, provoking some genuine and well-earned emotion. As in The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited, and as not so much in The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom, the quirky art direction and fast-paced witticisms in The Grand Budapest Hotel serve deeper, darker themes.

The majority of the film's action takes place between the wars in a fictional eastern European country whose historic culture is threatened by a new cynical barbarism, as represented by barely fictional Nazis called the "Zig Zag Division." Monsieur Gustave, the protagonist, is a tragicomic dandy struggling to preserve an already lost world of foppish etiquette and aristocratic kindness, à la Grand Illusion. Though it's fast-paced and zany, the story manages to feel like a Sebaldian meditation on cruelty and decay. Time marches ruthlessly, destructively forward, and if we want to imagine a better world, our best bet is to listen to the tragic stories of our elders.

Nostalgia is a theme that comes up a lot for Wes Anderson. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that most of his movies are about neurotically nostalgic people in meticulously controlled environments. They dislike the world as it is, so they create their own little worlds and maintain them according to the values of bygone days.

The feeling created is somewhere between cozy and claustrophobic, like when children make a closet into a "fort" and bring all their belongings into it. Max Fischer makes the insular life of private school bearable by starting up old-fashioned clubs that modern high school students are no longer interested in. The adult Tenenbaum children dress in their childhood clothes and each have their own room where they surround themselves with the achievements of their youth. Steve Zissou lives on (or rather, in) a Jacques-Cousteau-like exploratory ship where everything is branded in a seventies style. The Whitman brothers try to rekindle their family bonds in a train compartment. Mr. Fox lives in a tunnel under a tree and refuses to grow up. Sam Shakusky is a boy scout camping on an island.

One gets the sense that this is Anderson's own M.O. The films themselves revel in obsessive detail and old-fashioned techniques, presenting themselves as children's stories for adults. In the lighter ones, the director allows his nostalgia free reign, and we get a comforting, sentimental adventure. The characters may lose their control to outside forces temporarily, but it is regained and order restored with no major change in outlook.

On the other hand, when the protagonists' backward-looking need for control is shown not to be a workable characteristic, some real depth is achieved. When, as in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the fastidious world-making of a character is no match for the chaotic forces of nature (either human nature or nature nature), we feel that something real has been lost, and something learned in exchange. The director turns out not to be such a naïf after all, and we leave the theatre a little wiser.

Classic Sesame Street Musical Moments

I've been unsuccessfully scouring YouTube for years now in search of a half-remembered Sesame Street segment where a kooky jazz woman teaches a bunch of kids to sing a really dissonant "Scoobity Dooby Doo" song. I feel like it was Betty Carter, just from the style of her singing, but I could be way off base on that. Anyway, had another try tonight, and came up with all these gems instead. The girl in the Paul Simon video is a particular highlight.

Fashion Patrol

Today I saw a twenty-something, otherwise fashionable young woman walking down Barrington Street in a pair of jeans that were loose enough to conceal the shape of her legs. She seemed remarkably bold in her modesty. I've been noticing wider pant legs on Project Runway: Under the Gunn too. Can the American Apparel backlash finally be upon us?

Universal Language

The fascinating principle underlying Zen stories with all their seemingly irrelevant remarks is quite simple. It is all explained in the Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, when Hui-neng says, "If somebody asks you a question about matters sacred, always answer in terms of matters profane. If they ask you about ultimate reality, answer in terms of everyday life. If they ask you about everyday life, answer in terms of ultimate reality.

—Alan Watts, What Is Zen?

I haven't written for awhile because there have been so many things going on in my poor little brain that I didn't even know where to begin. I guess I've been going through a bit of a psychospiritual crisis. Meditation has not been working for me lately as well as it used to. I'm having a hard time being in the world in a non-anxious, accepting way. Disassociating with my ego is not helping me tame it, and navigating its demands is not bringing me the spiritual freedom I crave.

I read a book recently by Thomas Moore called A Religion of One's Own that made a distinction between the spirit (transcendent, mysterious universal forces expressing themselves through and being perceived by an individual being) and the soul (contingent, idiosyncratic personality with earthly desires and fears), and argued that the point of a personal religion is to help one integrate these sometimes conflicting aspects of oneself. I decided that it would be good for me to become part of some spiritual community. Not that I want to join a group of people who believe all the same things as me, but that I could use some regular conversation about my spiritual practices, experiences, and conceptualizations thereof.

So I went to the Unitarian Universalist church last Sunday. Thought it might be a good idea, since I'd gone there as a kid. My grandparents on my mother's side were both Unitarians, and I generally have a certain respect for the UU premise that all religions have kernels of truth it behooves us to explore with open minds.

But alas, there was nothing spiritual going on in that place. It was all soul stuff: personal stories about recent joys and sorrows, reminders about upcoming lectures and debates, and a plea from a woman representing Dying with Dignity for Unitarians to come to the aid of her cause. OK, there was some singing too, which can be a spiritual exercise, but it was half-hearted and frankly pretty awful.

And no mention of God or anything mystical whatsoever. Just a bunch of really old people reminding themselves that they are nice and thoughtful when it comes to moral decisions. I thought there might be some deeper discussion to be had over coffee and cake after the service. But the couple I ended up talking to just kept telling me about their worry that the church's minister might be a "closet Christian."

I guess he showed up at some recent public panel discussion wearing a minister's collar. The others on the panel were apparently all clergymen of one sort or another, so that made sense to me. I reminded Brian and Theresa, the concerned couple, that Unitarianism is technically a Christian religion and that the minister is definitely entitled to wear the uniform of his profession. "I know," said Brian, "but the thing is, I'm not convinced it was a joke."

I'm not sure what I expected. Maybe that the unconventional parish would have discovered a new way to pray that doesn't bring problematic concepts of God into it. Or that they would have figured out a way to discuss the undiscussability of the mystical communion and revealed truths that all religions represent a yearning for.

Instead, I just found a little club where ancient atheists can pat each other on the back once a week and assert that they don't need God to be good. I suppose that's nice for them and probably has some value.

But later that night, I went to the basement of another church to hear Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (1919 version). It was being played by a small amateur orchestra in which Alison's roommate, Claire, plays oboe. I didn't have high expectations, and there were definitely inexpert moments. But there were also times when the group seemed to find some magical power beyond what their collective inexperience should be capable of, and the transcendent finale moved my heart, mind, and spirit in a way that no religious service ever has. I left feeling like I had been part of a holy congregation after all that Sunday.

Come On

You know what's not really a very funny thing to say to a stranger on an elevator when you've both just come out of the cold wind and are waiting for your respective floors to arrive? "Where's that global warming we're supposed to be getting?"

I'm sorry, random government lady on the fifth floor, if this makes me a humourless sourpuss, but global warming is not a curious little bit of local weather you and I can make funny small talk about until it has come and gone. It's a worldwide catastrophe that's going to wipe out our entire species if we don't fix it very soon.

Where is it? It's everywhere! Hence, the "global" part. And we're not "supposed to be getting" it; it has already started. We're in the middle of it. The reason it's such a problem is that people in positions of authority aren't taking it seriously enough to do something about it.

Where's that mass extinction we're supposed to be getting? Because this lady is bothering me. How's that for a conversation starter?

In Dreams

Lately I've been having a lot of dreams. I can tell I've been having them, even though it seems I remember about 10% of them. The details I do remember are so vivid, complex, and horrible that I realize they are only the loose ends of a great tangle of yarn now washed away irrevocably by the tide of consciousness.

There was a town full of strange people, for instance, all of whom had secrets from each other and themselves, and it was hard to keep track of who knew what, because they were all related in complicated ways. One woman, who had fond memories of riding her horse as a child, suddenly remembered that the horse had in fact been killed by her father, and that he had made her tie up its dead body with rope and stuff it into his station wagon so he could drive it to the dump. But it hadn't fit, so she had been forced to break its legs and neck by slamming the car's gate on them repeatedly.

Another night, I started screaming in my sleep until I woke myself up with the noise. Then I continued screaming as loud as I could, not even knowing why anymore. I only stopped when my roommate, Dave, screamed back at me from his own bedroom. In the morning, I couldn't remember anything of the dream that had been making me scream in the first place. I apologized to Dave about the crazy behaviour, and he told me nothing of the sort had happened. I'm still not sure whether the screaming was itself the dream.

I was talking with Amber about dreams and the unconscious yesterday after watching Rosemary's Baby. We were wondering what purpose dreams serve in our lives and going over some of the answers science has hypothesized over the history of psychology: bringing unconscious feelings to light, problem-solving, solidifying neural pathways, sorting memories and emotions for later retrieval, relating the events of our lives to archetypal stories for easier understanding…

Then it occurred to me that the reason no one has ever come up with a solid, satisfying answer is that the question is misguided. Dreams are just our unconscious minds doing what they always do — trying out various story lines that needn't be rational or really have any recognizable cause except that they bubble up from who knows what murky depths. Those stories become hidden when we're awake, because the job of our conscious minds is to order that raw material into a nice sensible plot and cover the alien world of unconscious thought with it.

It's only when the conscious mind is turned off for a rest that we experience the uncensored creativity that has been going on underneath the whole time. Dreams are to consciousness as skeletons to bodies — horrible monsters that we mostly manage to forget are there, underneath everything, moving us around like puppets. To ask their purpose when we sleep is to ask why the stars come out at night.