Yes, if one of my cats misses the opening of a can I think that they
must be dead. Sometimes I over react. I know this fact about my self
but knowing it has stopped me from yelling at many an old person
for… whichever old people thing they’re all outside doing today.

The hunt for the corpse takes place on unsteady ground. My movements
are that kind of quick and not altogether steady ones that only come
from mixing fear and a forced clear-eyed calm. I counter worry with
cool headed bravado so that the search can be thorough and efficient
and not degrade into the kind of random scrambling and tossing of
clothing that one would imagine being tied up with the word
hysterics. First aid first; four fingers of courage after.

I head to my roommate’s room. Her music is loud but the door is open.
I enter. I ask after the cat. My roommate looks confused. I feel
confused. She turns off her music and the house goes quiet. Slowly my
ears, and I assume hers, adjust and the only sound in the apartment
is of my other cat busily licking up his meaty paste. Half a second
after hearing the ruinously aggressive ripping force of his tongue on
the meat in his bowl the missing cat blurs out from under a table that
has a heater under it. Everything is, in this moment, explained to me
and the emotional structure built up to keep me clear caves in and I
sag in the door.

Two barbed tongues now lap up the processed dead.

For me this is not the odd part. It seems clear that what passes for religion today is an accretion on the corpus of what passed for religion before.

What fascinates me about the study is the language, the underlying cultural assumptions, especially pertaining to gender. Given that gender and sexuality is critical to Payne’s analysis, his assumptions here seem important. For example: Discourse was published in 1786. Mary Wollstonecraft would publish A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. These were barbaric times. So it will not surprise you that the male part of procreation was considered the active part, and the female part passive. (a note: when he speaks of the “organ of generation” he means the penis)

The great characteristic attribute was represented by the organ of generation in that state of tension and rigidity which is necessary to the due performance of its functions. Many small images of this kind have been found among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, attached to the bracelets, which the chaste and pious matrons of antiquity wore round their necks and arms. In these, the organ of generation appears alone, or only accompanied with the wings of incubation,  in order to show that the devout wearer devoted herself wholly and solely to procreation, the great end for which she was ordained. So expressive a symbol, being constantly in her view, must keep her attention fixed on its natural object, and continually remind her of the gratitude she owed the Creator, for having taken her into his service, made her a partaker of his most valuable blessings, and employed her as the passive instrument in the exertion of his most beneficial power.

The female organs of generation were revered as symbols of the generative powers of nature or matter, as the male were of the generative powers of God. They are usually represented emblematically, by the Shell, or Concha Veneris, which was therefore worn by devout persons of antiquity, as it still continues to be by pilgrims, and many of the common women of Italy.

(The emphasis is mine)

Imagine suffering such an assumption. Rock on Wollstonecraft.

She said it sounded like a bunch of pink fairies who were wandering unable to complete their quest.

When I could talk again (gasp*wheeze*snort*guffaw), I said not nomad, MONAD.

She asked me to tell you that she is not in a special school.

I read, and admire, the new philosophy and research being done on embodied cognition and suspect that if we externalize how we come to have concepts, that this will have as much impact on us as externalizing our memory did when we figured out how to code words and meaning using signs, and then later when we figured out how to spread our sets of signs through the book and the printing press and, of course, much later, through the internet. Each of these profoundly impactful changes works partly because they externalize something we already do – externalizing our language, translating sound and concept into signs that can be transported over much vaster distances and time than can the simple speaking voice and memory codified like in epic or story, once told orally to those around, but now told to a vastly increased audience.

Anyway, watch this and see if the embodied character of the invention gives you the same feeling of being clairvoyant.

via Wimp

My son’s birthday today.

Reading it is quite a bit like interacting with a Vasily Kandinsky painting. I was thinking of this one. The blue bits are the essays on people, the green and orange are neighborhoods, the lines and arcs that delineate and connect are the bits on culture.

To get the painting, you have to get the relationships between the elements, which, I suppose is true of all narrative, but with Demers’ book as with art like Kandinsky’s, the way in which those elements are displayed has much more to do with space than with time. And narrative arc is almost always about time. This is, in itself, something deeply “Vancouver.” If Demers did that on purpose, I not only like his book but deeply respect his ability as a writer.

The pictures in the book, black and white photographs by Emmanuel Buenviaje, can be “read” right along beside the text. I mean, if you can imagine text structured as a complex image, then it shouldn’t be so hard to connect the pictures into meaningful series using the rules of narrative. But I’ll leave that up to you. You’d have to spend time with the book, with its elements and its arrangement.

This is not one of his but it (very vaguely) gives you the feel of the ‘graphs. If you want a better idea, you can click on this link and it will take you to his Flickr account. There are a number of black and white Vancouver shots there plus plenty of colour. One that caught my eye is here. I like it for a number of reasons but partly at least because I happen to occasionally catch the bus on that corner.

The book was published last year and opens by talking about the social, historical and political implications of the 1986 Expo and the 2010 Winter Olympics. This is not just a planar tourist book. It has depth: achieved by both political and historical knowledge and awareness. Vancouver, for all its wonders and beauty, suffers from the general North American dis-ease with its history and its past and, therefore, present choices. I was here during Expo and now the Olympics and the same battles for and with the homeless population have occurred both times, as an example. It’s a bit like a woman so obsessed with her aging face that she goes in for a lift and then there, as she turns grinning at herself in front of a mirror, on top of her completely ignored and clearly aging 50 year old neck and shoulders is the face that befits a 25 year old.

The thing about a person (or city) like that is that what this means has everything to do with the eyes of the beholder.  In this case Demers looks on with honesty, but also with love, more like compassion than pity or disrespect. Because of all these things, Vancouver Special really is a very good introduction to what it’s like to live here. If you’re interested.

I think it’s something with the way the two genres affect my mind, but when I read them together it’s as if they start a feed-back loop and my mind starts making weird connections, not static exactly, but definately off-the-wall cognitive shots. So for example, I am re-reading Woolf’s The Waves, and there is Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury along with Sherman Alexie’s books. Add to that a book called The End of Illusion: the end of literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, one called Proust and the Squid (great title), one on the philosophy of mind. There’s another on religion and the american mind and one by Foss that’s become a bit of an obsession (can’t seem to let it go, it’s just such a wonderful idea).

So I started dreaming about moths. My son, who sends me random topics to write about, sent me one about moths and their propensity to immolate themselves in candle flame and haunt floodlights. He sent me the topic some weeks ago, but I haven’t done anything about it because I could feel that whatever I thought of moths wasn’t ready to come out through the fingers. I suppose reading Woolf was bound to trigger a connection there. And the other books, those too – like somehow they are growing toward each other, sparking against each other, but only, it seems, when I turn my head, when I am not looking directly, but as Dickinson said, looking aslant.

So I have moths in my head.

Did you know that there is a theory that the reason male moths dive into candle flame is that the light emits a frequency also emitted by female moths ready to mate? Then there’s the moon theory, the idea that moths (normally nocturnal) are guided by the need to keep bright lights at a certain spatial location, and of course floodlights and probably modernity generally, muck up that previously perfectly functional instinct. (Something to consider with respect to human instincts and post-modernity, and probably the connection my mental moths are making to Proust and the Squid and maybe to The Empire of Illusion.)

So I dreamt about moths with wings made of water and white flowers, growing, a great white bell of a flower hung down toward the earth, and out of its mouth fell, fertilized by the moth, its joint seed, a great white moon.

For me this all has something to do with how the mind works. I have absolutely no clarity about this, but if my past processes hold, if I keep reading, keep calm in the storm of confusion, one day the bazillion moths fluttering in the great cavity that is my head, will begin to dance together, and then the emerging pattern will start to make sense. I will be able to interpret the bits and their relationships and some new understanding will come of it.

I’m going to leave this post here. I suspect, however, the moths will show up again as the weeks proceed.

Litlove has a post called Reading Dangeroulsy that speaks to the question of a person’s choice about whether to continue reading a book that he or she finds disturbing. Some time ago I posted on my decision making process about whether to watch the new movie Precious; the two things are related for me.  I still haven’t decided whether to watch Precious or not, but I do know that I will not go to watch it in the theatres — way too traumatic having to react not only to what’s on the screen but to other people’s reactions as well.

I feel more or less the same way about books as I do about movies. I so deeply admire an artist’s ability to render what it means to be human and to do it in ways that allow another to enter the world and experience it for a while. I admire this regardless of how delightful or horrifying the world thus created may be, but I also admire a person’s ability to actively choose the world in which he or she lives.

Of course this last choice has limits. If one chooses a world that has no bearing on the world in which the rest of us live, then, although it is a choice that many people make, it is a poor choice since other human beings are somewhat significant to the overall quality of life on the earth today. I also think people who choose to live in a world that has no empirical truth to it also make a poor choice. I mean it’s one thing to believe in the tooth fairy as a child or to believe that some human beings are not really human beings because they do something you don’t like, but it’s another to conscribe an adult life on the lines of such fantasies. I think these things because choosing to live as if other people don’t matter, or that the way the world actually is doesn’t matter, these choices touch us all, change us all.

To explain this further: it’s a bit like living with a family member who is crazy. They carry a disproportionate weight in the family. If you are the healthy one, what do you do in a situation where your mother (for example) is the crazy one?  You can’t escape the effects upon you, of course, but if you are to thrive in your own life you must make choices about how much caretaking you do.  If you don’t, you will be swamped under the weight of it. There are people so desperately needy that no amount of care will ever be enough, so emptying yourself out into their black well of agony will not suffice.

This is not to say one must abandon those who need help to survive, although there are occasions, I think, when this is actually the only real solution if one wants to survive. Most of the time, help can be given, succor provided, another’s life saved from the desolation of continuous suffering. But there must be limits set. There must be time set aside to save oneself from the fate of being sucked to death by the need of another.

This all goes to say that books, movies and people are all much the same. The same choices one must make about helping others, one must make with regard to entering the world of books and movies, in fact art in general. The mind reacts the same regardless of whether the input is coming from a dream, a mother, or an artist’s world, thus, we must make the same decisions.  

Some disruption in a day, some emotional disturbance is necessary for growth and change. Too much disturbance and the whole system crashes. This is the basic decision that must be made: where does the book/movie fit?  Is it helping me grow as a human being or is it going to make me crash?

Horror of all kinds tends to simply crash my various systems: I dream about the images; I cannot let the fear go and so it turns to rage. Because of this I choose not to do that to myself.  Importantly, it doesn’t seem to matter whether it is the slasher kind of horror, or the true horror of various on-going genocidal wars around the world. Having said that,  I see no redeeming qualities in the slasher kind of book or movie, although it is true that such killers exist. But really, what do people like this say about what it means to be human that a good book about mental illness does not say?  Movies and books about genocide, however, they tend to present history and actual social fact of great human import. How we deal with each other, how we come to do so brutally and cruelly, this is something we do need to understand, so there is some reason to see such a movie, read such a book. I think this is especially true if historical knowledge is not a person’s strength. This kind of exposure to the discomfiting, I would argue, does make one a better person. It is important to understand the world in which one actually lives; knowing about the world as it really is, that makes a person larger, bigger in mind and heart.

Even so, how much knowledge about a topic is necessary before more becomes wallowing? While horror is a truth about human life, so is humor, so is compassion. My favourite kinds of stories/art are the kinds that blend these things. They are the ones that teach me the most about what it means to be human. Of course they are harder for artists to create, and harder for readers to find. Nevertheless, even small forays into blending, as this little video exemplifies, can delight as well as enliven. 

There have been lots of satirical slasher movies, of course, but this one, this one is made by the Ronald McDonald suit. What it says about the human world that is the industrial/civilized world is thus made more than just a facile comment within a fictive genre. For this reason, this horror movie has quieted the censor and made it, in its entirety, into the annals that are Mary’s mind.

Anyway, whether to read or not, to watch or not, the decision should depend upon what you are trying to do and upon what you have already done. Is it an upset you need to help you hold more of the world? Or is it one that will make you less able to open up to what is actually present? Am I wallowing by watching yet another movie (reading another book) of this kind, or am I still able to learn something here? These are the questions I ask myself. If I can’t say it is going to help me, then I put it down. If I feel that I have been tricked by the artists and also don’t feel that it is going to help me, the book hits the wall or I walk out of the movie.