Tangled up in my spirituality have been a lot of symptoms which have recently been diagnosed for me as Depression.
A clinical psychiatrist described this as severe, meaning, he qualified (I think), deep-seated. Who knows how deep? Perhaps I have been depressed since my mid-teens. That might have flavoured my whole spiritual journey.
Depression can result in wrong-thinking, but wrong-thinking can result in depression too. Wilful wrong-thinking would be my fault, in a fault-finding universe.
Anyway, lots of questions, and, at point of writing, maybe a glint of light that isn't hellfire (though it might not be heaven, either). Not to waste it, I'm posting this, but ending my post here.
Showing posts with label Big Picture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big Picture. Show all posts
Friday, 15 October 2010
Monday, 19 July 2010
684 - Christian
The deepest, toughest, most demanding week of my life, the week just gone. I will draw on it for the rest of my life, and write about it honestly here from time to time.
Suffice to say, for now, that I've concluded that being a Christian means ending cycles of abuse. No more, no less. And if you have to stop being a Christian in order to do so, then stop being a Christian.
But as for me, now, I no longer feel that is necessary. So from now on, I'm happy to wear that label, and will do my utmost to wear it well.
I am a Christian.
Suffice to say, for now, that I've concluded that being a Christian means ending cycles of abuse. No more, no less. And if you have to stop being a Christian in order to do so, then stop being a Christian.
But as for me, now, I no longer feel that is necessary. So from now on, I'm happy to wear that label, and will do my utmost to wear it well.
I am a Christian.
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
688 - A Fair Deal
It seems to me a fair deal that a seer should spend half their life mad. A civilization at the birth of itself has no knowledge, certainly no medical terminology. Observation would perhaps have led to the understanding that humanity, like 'pigness' or 'oakness', is its own value, separable from the distortions it suffers through growth in a restricted (or overly rich) environment. Long before DSM IV, the American diagnostic manual for mental disorders, the seer would observe, internally as well as externally, the mechanics of consciousness, and, from their location within the community, offer testimony that others undergoing fluctuations of sanity, with all that entails, were still wholly human (neither devilish nor divine).
The seer, then, performed a vital role within a group of social animals, and if his or her watch really promoted the integrity of the herd, it is not hard to see how such qualities as 'seer-dom' might evolve naturally, in the same way that symmetrical features evolve, and strength, and other aspects of physical health.
Perhaps we are all seers to a greater or lesser extent. And perhaps civilization, if it fails to acknowledge that we are all as mad as we are sane, is blind to the possibility that it is possessed, intrinsically, of the same divide. Divide? If it is located in the ebb and flow of consciousness, as David Lewis-Williams and others suggest, this is perhaps an artificial distinction. As Daniel Everett, in Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes points out, at least one tribe in the Amazonian jungle, the Piraha, sleep a maximum of two hours at a time, and talk through the night. At a recent seminar on sleep that E attended, it was reported that one in ten of us are naturally nocturnal.
Myths arise out of our experiences in altered states of consciousness. The clarity of science allows for certainty that the twin poles of deepest sleep and wakefulness coexist but do not impose on each other. In the same way, perhaps, the experience of a myth fulfils the same function, from the opposing pole. Karen Armstrong and others divide cultural discourse into two streams, one logos, one mythos. Their work teases at the implications this division has for societies, religious and secular, as they grow and split.
The division of action, and its precursor intentions, into good and evil, is another artificial distinction. Perhaps it is relevant solely in our waking domain, and maybe not even there. In any case, if there is no useful distinction we can make (even religious texts that accept the dualism, like Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43, leave the judgement to God), perhaps it is better to abandon talk of morality for talk of mental health, and of mental health for the flow of consciousness?
In such a transition, the role of seer is as relevant as ever, be it one that we all share , or one that some undertake on behalf of others, or a bit of both. Either that, or we all act, waking, alone, and dream in silence. That might be possible, too, though whether, given an evolutionary basis for see-ing, it would achieve anything apart from a massive exercise in repackaging, is debateable, and perhaps, therefore, better left undebated?
The seer, then, performed a vital role within a group of social animals, and if his or her watch really promoted the integrity of the herd, it is not hard to see how such qualities as 'seer-dom' might evolve naturally, in the same way that symmetrical features evolve, and strength, and other aspects of physical health.
Perhaps we are all seers to a greater or lesser extent. And perhaps civilization, if it fails to acknowledge that we are all as mad as we are sane, is blind to the possibility that it is possessed, intrinsically, of the same divide. Divide? If it is located in the ebb and flow of consciousness, as David Lewis-Williams and others suggest, this is perhaps an artificial distinction. As Daniel Everett, in Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes points out, at least one tribe in the Amazonian jungle, the Piraha, sleep a maximum of two hours at a time, and talk through the night. At a recent seminar on sleep that E attended, it was reported that one in ten of us are naturally nocturnal.
Myths arise out of our experiences in altered states of consciousness. The clarity of science allows for certainty that the twin poles of deepest sleep and wakefulness coexist but do not impose on each other. In the same way, perhaps, the experience of a myth fulfils the same function, from the opposing pole. Karen Armstrong and others divide cultural discourse into two streams, one logos, one mythos. Their work teases at the implications this division has for societies, religious and secular, as they grow and split.
The division of action, and its precursor intentions, into good and evil, is another artificial distinction. Perhaps it is relevant solely in our waking domain, and maybe not even there. In any case, if there is no useful distinction we can make (even religious texts that accept the dualism, like Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43, leave the judgement to God), perhaps it is better to abandon talk of morality for talk of mental health, and of mental health for the flow of consciousness?
In such a transition, the role of seer is as relevant as ever, be it one that we all share , or one that some undertake on behalf of others, or a bit of both. Either that, or we all act, waking, alone, and dream in silence. That might be possible, too, though whether, given an evolutionary basis for see-ing, it would achieve anything apart from a massive exercise in repackaging, is debateable, and perhaps, therefore, better left undebated?
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
693 - Reluctant Shifts
Funny how words don't appeal very much any more. A bit dramatic, perhaps, and tough given the vast neurological networks I am, as well as possess, dedicated to language and its written form. Like being a typewriter of great insight, aware that it is being asked to perform like a word processor - a mix of joy that its visions can be better expressed, and despair that the job is beyond it.
The Christian vision, which I bought, then rejected, until a mystical experience convinced me there was a deeper truth beyond the words, gave me great hope that everything I wanted to do or say could find creative expression within its remit. But alongside the hope is a great despair, and as ruts form, and I physically age, and as I test the boundaries of the vision, the despair has overtaken the joy, recently, too often.
The appeal is then to revert to word-level truths, or even abandon words altogether. A spirituality that takes evolution seriously, that allows a place in heaven, or whatever might follow, if anything does, for everyone, shouldn't have a problem with choices like these. A sick animal dies, or recovers to die later. Too much pain and anyone is let off the hook. Everyone breaks down sooner or later.
But a third option is to sense oneself as part of an evolutionary shift through words to a state somewhere beyond. It would be Lanarckian to claim that exposure to the information age is inducing an evolutionary shift within a single generation. That's not what I mean. But it is possible that our societies are demanding, or inviting, new responses from us, to which some may be better suited than others. And those of us with a predeliction for words, like me, might find ourselves brutally tested, and failing, if societal shifts of too great a moment occur in our lifetimes.
That might not mean that we cannot catch the vision, and run with it as far as we are able, like the aspiring word processor that collapses in a jumble of levers and lead typeface, but has sensed, at least, the shape of things to come.
What might a post-verbal world be like? One where people communicate not just by sound and text, but by total performance? That's surely already happening. And come to think of it, maybe it's been there all the time anyway. Dance, drama, ancient ritual, being what they are. Maybe I'm chuntering on about nothing. Probably, okay definitely, am.
The Christian vision, which I bought, then rejected, until a mystical experience convinced me there was a deeper truth beyond the words, gave me great hope that everything I wanted to do or say could find creative expression within its remit. But alongside the hope is a great despair, and as ruts form, and I physically age, and as I test the boundaries of the vision, the despair has overtaken the joy, recently, too often.
The appeal is then to revert to word-level truths, or even abandon words altogether. A spirituality that takes evolution seriously, that allows a place in heaven, or whatever might follow, if anything does, for everyone, shouldn't have a problem with choices like these. A sick animal dies, or recovers to die later. Too much pain and anyone is let off the hook. Everyone breaks down sooner or later.
But a third option is to sense oneself as part of an evolutionary shift through words to a state somewhere beyond. It would be Lanarckian to claim that exposure to the information age is inducing an evolutionary shift within a single generation. That's not what I mean. But it is possible that our societies are demanding, or inviting, new responses from us, to which some may be better suited than others. And those of us with a predeliction for words, like me, might find ourselves brutally tested, and failing, if societal shifts of too great a moment occur in our lifetimes.
That might not mean that we cannot catch the vision, and run with it as far as we are able, like the aspiring word processor that collapses in a jumble of levers and lead typeface, but has sensed, at least, the shape of things to come.
What might a post-verbal world be like? One where people communicate not just by sound and text, but by total performance? That's surely already happening. And come to think of it, maybe it's been there all the time anyway. Dance, drama, ancient ritual, being what they are. Maybe I'm chuntering on about nothing. Probably, okay definitely, am.
Monday, 7 June 2010
695 - Whirred
[photo by giuss95]
Notwithstanding The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker, that we are essentially a-verbal suggests to me that we can become, perhaps already are becoming, post-verbal.
This, wryly, from Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence: "'Communication' (which always means talk) is the sine qua non of 'good relationships'. 'Alone' and 'lonely' have become almost synonymous; worse, perhaps, 'silent' and 'bored' seem to be moving closer together too.' (p.3)
I was at a discussion at which Sara Maitland spoke, and one of us who had come to listen argued that we are a noisy species, that we survive because of noise - warnings and attraction calls and the like - and that not speaking is therefore unnatural. But I wonder (following Maitland) if it is not quite as simple as that.
I follow Pinker's ideas that our relationship with language, indeed the whole of culture, is sustained through our having evolved brains that can comprehend and develop it; that, to the extent that it is evolutionarily desirable to be fluent, those of us who have an optimum capacity to handle words will, over eons, have passed our capacities down, through genes and culture, so that this generation is likely to be the most fluent ever.
And yet two thoughts intrude. First, what is evolved is the capacity to handle language, rather than language itself; second, verbal communication is incredibly effective, but not necessarily in all (even, perhaps, most) evolutionary niches.
I'll take these in turn (and I know I am using words to do so). It is true that we do, by and large, all speak, but we are not born speaking. What gets us speaking is exposure to parents and peers who can teach us. So whilst there might be a thirst to learn to speak, as there is a hunger for food, what this reveals is a brain fine-tuned to apprehend and adopt words, as a mouth can suck a teat. If every word was suddenly expunged, we would continue to be born with brains to listen for words, at least until evolution had worked its winnowing magic and replacement expressions of life, taking advantage of the distress our word-thirst placed us in, started to prevail.
Therefore a question arises: if our brains' verbal apprehension, creation and distribution technologies were combined with other neural technologies, to effect new communication (or wider than that, life) tools, might we not allow these to grow in place of modern human verbosity. Because not to do so would be to restrict our humanity. This is what has happened with the spread of reading, after all, which co-opts the brain's visual system into working with its language systems. Arguably something similar is happening as text-based communication widens into virtual reality - a phenomenon that neuroscientists are engaged in documenting.
But modern life throws more at us than electronic interfaces. Not least it continues to throw big questions from past eras about our capacity, for example, to adapt to new physical environments. Speech is great, but it'll never work, unmediated, underwater or in space or, perhaps, in noisy, jam-packed cities, where we preserve our personal space only by raising walls through which conversation cannot effectively pierce. And there is always the potential for us to create new neural technologies and subsequently to identify the niches where they can take us, for the sheer joy of it.
Evolutionary niches like cityscapes or wind-swept deserts are presently on the increase. There is no guarantee that the optimum conditions under which our language instinct evolved should continue to prevail. This drives us back to consider what the essence of humanity is. Our modern culture is, certainly, word-based; our post-modern culture less so. Perhaps it becomes more important for us to read one another's emotions projected alongside and concurrent with the brands we are wearing.
Or to adopt opportunities offered by our growing genetic or environmental awareness. If understanding is defined simply as the act of engaging with information packaged and sent between each other, and if we can package that information with greater dexterity and beauty in the form of a butterfly than a word, then our future conversations might be lepidoptic, rather than auditory.
With the hum of insect wings, in future days, words may have whirred into obsolescence.
Saturday, 5 June 2010
696 - After an AUB
Certain thoughts pertaining to identity formation, to consciousness, superfluity, life-purpose, follow from the perambulations on which my reading programme has taken me.
It is important to me to try to summarise the hypothesis I am now about to entertain.
Something happened to me, going on thirty-four. Something happens to a lot of people. During my year at theological college, many of those called to be vicars were in their thirties. It was expected. My father, too, in his mid-thirties, chose a career change. If the gospel stories are just stories, that Jesus was in his mid-thirties when he died seems an apposite choice for the storytellers. If they contain accurate biographical material concerning the days leading up to his crucifixion, it would seem that his mission, a revelation of his identity, achieved its completion when he reached a similar age. At my theological college none of this went unnoticed.
At thirty four, in certain cultures, this is the age that boys finally become men, or having become young men, warriors, in their teens, now become elders. And I've noted that at twice seventeen, or thereabouts, this is also the age, biologically, that parents see their children grown to the age where they can bear children, where the focus on nurture switches from eldest child to potential grandchild. It seems natural to me that such a switch would be accompanied by a widening of perspective, a concern growing for one's community as a whole, rather than one's immediate family.
So what happened to me then? I experienced what psychologists call a moment of Absolute Unitary Being - AUB. At this point I re-engaged with the vocation to vicarhood from which I had in my twenties walked away; though not in a desperate sense, more in the sense that any choice I might make would be good - or perhaps honest, okay, are better words. In a nutshell, my perspective widened. I sensed a one-ness with everything, including my understanding of God. Indeed, my understanding of God widened to include everything I didn't know, as well as those things I did.
How to make sense of such an event? One way might be to describe it in terms of identity. This was the moment I knew myself as an individual. Jung calls it individuation. It's quite easy to see such a moment as the apotheosis of one's life. Nothing will ever feel as good. Enlightenment is pursued through one's novitiate: afterwards, the Buddhist saying goes, one returns to chopping wood and lugging water around. Recently I've found it next to impossible to shake the idea that having experienced the AUB, yet again I've returned to a sinful state. I've been given a free pass to Heaven, and even turned my back on that.
I think - and this is the hypothesis - that a more helpful conception of what is happening would be the following. The AUB was about individuation: since then, however, I've not been regressing, I've been developing. Every faculty by which I achieved my identity the first time has not been switched off: instead it is going about its business building secondary, perhaps even tertiary or further identities. Identities that finesse the one I already feel good about, extending my range, building my empathy, giving me alternatives, allowing me to venture beyond myself at just the point in time when the first intimations of mortality start whispering about my joints (think evolutionarily, rather than idealistically, pre-cod liver oil and U3A).
The difference this time round is that I already know I'm okay, and everyone else, and everyone else I could be. All I need to do, when spectres of guilt haunt me, is remind the new identity I am constructing around me, that I inhabit, that, for the duration I am, that it is every bit as okay as the AUB proved my first full identity to be.
Multiplicities; stories with new characters I have created myself to be - these take shape as I pursue the relevant and new-minted art of storying, an art which may, actually, be what evolution has hardwired us all to experience.
It is important to me to try to summarise the hypothesis I am now about to entertain.
Something happened to me, going on thirty-four. Something happens to a lot of people. During my year at theological college, many of those called to be vicars were in their thirties. It was expected. My father, too, in his mid-thirties, chose a career change. If the gospel stories are just stories, that Jesus was in his mid-thirties when he died seems an apposite choice for the storytellers. If they contain accurate biographical material concerning the days leading up to his crucifixion, it would seem that his mission, a revelation of his identity, achieved its completion when he reached a similar age. At my theological college none of this went unnoticed.
At thirty four, in certain cultures, this is the age that boys finally become men, or having become young men, warriors, in their teens, now become elders. And I've noted that at twice seventeen, or thereabouts, this is also the age, biologically, that parents see their children grown to the age where they can bear children, where the focus on nurture switches from eldest child to potential grandchild. It seems natural to me that such a switch would be accompanied by a widening of perspective, a concern growing for one's community as a whole, rather than one's immediate family.
So what happened to me then? I experienced what psychologists call a moment of Absolute Unitary Being - AUB. At this point I re-engaged with the vocation to vicarhood from which I had in my twenties walked away; though not in a desperate sense, more in the sense that any choice I might make would be good - or perhaps honest, okay, are better words. In a nutshell, my perspective widened. I sensed a one-ness with everything, including my understanding of God. Indeed, my understanding of God widened to include everything I didn't know, as well as those things I did.
How to make sense of such an event? One way might be to describe it in terms of identity. This was the moment I knew myself as an individual. Jung calls it individuation. It's quite easy to see such a moment as the apotheosis of one's life. Nothing will ever feel as good. Enlightenment is pursued through one's novitiate: afterwards, the Buddhist saying goes, one returns to chopping wood and lugging water around. Recently I've found it next to impossible to shake the idea that having experienced the AUB, yet again I've returned to a sinful state. I've been given a free pass to Heaven, and even turned my back on that.
I think - and this is the hypothesis - that a more helpful conception of what is happening would be the following. The AUB was about individuation: since then, however, I've not been regressing, I've been developing. Every faculty by which I achieved my identity the first time has not been switched off: instead it is going about its business building secondary, perhaps even tertiary or further identities. Identities that finesse the one I already feel good about, extending my range, building my empathy, giving me alternatives, allowing me to venture beyond myself at just the point in time when the first intimations of mortality start whispering about my joints (think evolutionarily, rather than idealistically, pre-cod liver oil and U3A).
The difference this time round is that I already know I'm okay, and everyone else, and everyone else I could be. All I need to do, when spectres of guilt haunt me, is remind the new identity I am constructing around me, that I inhabit, that, for the duration I am, that it is every bit as okay as the AUB proved my first full identity to be.
Multiplicities; stories with new characters I have created myself to be - these take shape as I pursue the relevant and new-minted art of storying, an art which may, actually, be what evolution has hardwired us all to experience.
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
703 - Exegesis
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Philip K Dick, the science fiction writer, underwent an experience of mental intrusion and enlightenment, in an altered state of consciousness induced while taking painkillers, which he proceeded to interrogate over the last eight years of his life. The result, a million pages of journal writing which he titled 'Exegesis', will be edited and published in two volumes next year.
According to Bryan Appleyard, in a subtle book, Aliens: Why They Are Here, Dick came to believe the Roman Empire had never fallen, and found its current expression in rampant materialist capitalism. He also believed that a Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) orbits the Earth, using symbols such as the Christian fish sign to disinhibit people to whom it wishes to communicate. Appleyard writes:
Dick glimpsed the centrality of the alien in the postwar world. He was himself a stranger in a strange land, a troubled drifter. In his madness he lived in the third realm of aliens and angels. The world was alien to him and he was alien to it. He understood the eternal truth that we don't fit and he saw how modernity had heightened and dramatized our discomfort.
'The fish sign causes you to remember,' he wrote in his exegesis, 'Remember what?... Your celestial origins; this has to do with the DNA because the memory is located in the DNA... You remember your real nature... The Gnostic Gnosis: You are here in this world in a thrown condition, but are not of this world.'I can identify with Dick the drifter, not least because I can see my own in his experiences in altered states of consciousness. I particularly like Appleyard's suggestion that making sense of his experiences required him to move into a third realm where the supernatural, or extraterrestrial at least, was commonplace. My own experiences precipitated a similar search for explanation, which I tried to find in Evangelical Christianity, and I'm very sure I wasn't the only one there to make such a journey.
(pp.156-7)
I'm less happy with the suggestion that alienation is an eternal truth, in the sense that having realised we are here in a thrown condition, we can do no more about it than pick up the pieces and start walking. My subsequent journey has been about the discovery that if we are all aliens, then we are aliens nurtured by the world we have been born into - that has evolved us to be who we are. We are social aliens with four billion years worth of fine-tuned mutual space-suit around us.
I'd like to suggest that alienation is only half the picture: familial warmth provides the rest. The Gnostic sense of thrownness is there, but so is rootedness: my learning path, hereon in, is about using each to critique and expand my appreciation of the other.
I think this expands Appleyard's third realm to the breadth of the cosmos. That is to say, there is no third realm worth speaking of, the first (physical) and the second (mental) having always fallen away by the time we pause to analyse them. Or to put it another way, we are all of us born into the third realm, where the unknown stands side by side with the known, and as we grow we turn first to the physical and then to the mental (maybe vice versa) to make sense of it all.
I guess we all have to journey the full length of our journey. Quick fixes and permanent stop-offs in realms along the way are not an option. Dick's Exegesis, which I would like to read, will prove no more (or less) than a map of his particular path through life.
Monday, 10 May 2010
705 - Can Do
On the seat opposite me, a can of energy drink, empty. Could get stressed, but the branding grabs me. I've been thinking about the nature of humanity, and in cheap coke fashion, this captures the point.
First the name, which seems a bit overblown for a Red Bull substitute. I mean, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was sweat from the brow of Jason Statham. Carbonated. But we are a bit relentless, really. All drives: sex, hunger, status, vigour, nurture. Strangest of all, perhaps, a drive to create.
Creation is what the font says to me. It's a bit gothic, a bit spiky, somewhere between vampire and cyber punk. And it's a bit 'the force that through the green shoot drives the flower' (Dylan Thomas). Like our daily work is somehow driving a lifeforce through the aluminium can itself, causing it to curl out in fish-hook shoots and fractal serifs, a thousand memes lodging in our brains and into those we are hoping to pull.
Finally, completing the design, the logo is stamped against (into?) the anatomical drawing of a head. It's deeply corporeal, quite unsexy, unless you're catching what the drawing is hinting at: that this drink, this relentlessness, goes beyond the surface. It's non-dualistic in the same way that vampires are non-dualistic, because there's a spiritual edge to the relentless cadaverousness: the promise is that this drink, feeding your head-flesh, will directly inspire your thoughts. That's very, very now, psychologically. The curl of the aluminium, the tang of performance-boosting chemicals, joins with your body cybernetically, affording a glimpse of your transhuman future.
Which is what I've been reflecting on: the way that imagination, a tool, is also a sense, like sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, proprioception. Our vision, for instance, gives us the impression of three dimensions, but as Steven Pinker indicated in How The Mind Works, it's a bit of trickery: all we see are surfaces, and experience gives us the information to be able to round them into full and solid objects. By filling out what is insensible by other means, our imagination supplies vital information: it is the sense that senses the insensible. Because it is working with what is not directly there, it has to create - answers, perspectives, images. It reaches out of itself, to what is otherwise known, what can be supplied from sources, such as people, and sews it into new possibilities, creating technologies, art forms, cosmologies.
What is true for the rest of biology must also be true for the imagination. Just as sight has been honed by evolution, so too must image-making. And just as evolution suggests that sight contributes to our forward capacities for survival and reproduction, answering the 'where do we go from here?' questions as well as the 'where have we come from?' kind, so that we know that sight of a steep drop will induce vertigo, and a buxom or buff torso, sexual stimulation, so, we should expect, is imagination similarly directed.
In short, whatever we are able to imagine has evolutionary value, and should be treasured as such.
Something more. Imagination, reliant on shared information, has an intricate relationship with the objects we create - far closer, arguably, than the other senses with which we perceive those objects. It is imagination that puts the objects out there, or appreciates them when proferred by others. It is not, perhaps, too much of a stretch to suggest that culture, which is the combined results of human imagination, is itself a part of the imaginative sense - a collective tongue extended to taste the fall of future snows.
The minute we begin to think of our creations as a part of ourselves - and this implies a closer than conventional relationship with the tools we make, I'd argue, and a more open-ended, organic one - we are acknowledging ourselves to have evolved already into cybernetic beings. Perhaps the essence of humanity is our relentless pursuit of creative participation in the wider ecosystem. Perhaps we cannot understand fully our relationship with our ecosystem unless we appreciate that we are half-hardwired into it, and actively involved in increasing its and our diversity.
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
713 - Nature/ Nurture
I think these three quotes all say the same thing. Do you?
Now here's the pivotal point: the neurology and functioning of the brain create a mercurial type of human consciousness that is universal. And the ways in which that consciousness can be accommodated in daily life by human beings are not infinite, as world ethnography, spanning a multitude of cultures, indeed shows.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce (2005), Inside the Neolithic Mind, p.9
[Our perception of aliens] is to do with the ambivalent nature of consciousness and our uneasy sense of being both within the world and outside it. This is, in part, a commentary on modernity, but also it is about an eternal aspect of the human predicament that has been massively amplified but not created by modernity.... For now, I need simply say that I start from the undoubted reality of aliens. they may or may not exist but they are all around us and they are trying to tell us something, possibly about themselves, but certainly about us. In order to understand what they are saying it is necessary to abandon the usual barriers between fiction and reality. There are many important connections between the aliens in Star Trek, H. G. Wells' Martians, the abductors of Betty and Barney Hill, the cattle mutilators in Montana and the committee of beings known as the Nine who speak through the Florida medium Phyllis V. Schlemmer. These connections form an enormous mirror of ourselves and of our age, through which, like Alice, we can pass and find ourselves in a different world.
Bryan Appleyard (2005), Aliens: Why They Are Here, p.9
What is The Filth?
The Filth contains the active ingredient metaphor.
Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases. Metaphor combines two or more seemingly unrelated concepts in a way that stimulates lateral thought processes and creativity...
What is The Filth used for?
This comic book is used to treat all manner of disorders including Internet pornography addiction, insomnia, grief, "mid-life" crisis, schizophrenia, the ignorance of samsara and the 21st century blues, especially in patients whose millennial anxiety and general paranoia has not yet responded to normal treatments.
When must The Filth not be used?
If your doctor has advised you to avoid the use of metaphor.
If you refuse to acknowledge the mocking laughter of the Abyss.
If you cannot face the fact that your entire immediate environment is a seething battlefield of microscopic predators, prey and excreta and, simultaneously, a rich and complex metaphor.
Grant Morrison (2004), The Filth, opening pages.
I think each of these is saying that culture is by definition fiction, because we make it up. And nature is by definition reality. And to be human, we have to hold the two in tandem. We can't avoid it. It's what we do.
I think what we do, what all of us do with this tension, is make church.
Now here's the pivotal point: the neurology and functioning of the brain create a mercurial type of human consciousness that is universal. And the ways in which that consciousness can be accommodated in daily life by human beings are not infinite, as world ethnography, spanning a multitude of cultures, indeed shows.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce (2005), Inside the Neolithic Mind, p.9
[Our perception of aliens] is to do with the ambivalent nature of consciousness and our uneasy sense of being both within the world and outside it. This is, in part, a commentary on modernity, but also it is about an eternal aspect of the human predicament that has been massively amplified but not created by modernity.... For now, I need simply say that I start from the undoubted reality of aliens. they may or may not exist but they are all around us and they are trying to tell us something, possibly about themselves, but certainly about us. In order to understand what they are saying it is necessary to abandon the usual barriers between fiction and reality. There are many important connections between the aliens in Star Trek, H. G. Wells' Martians, the abductors of Betty and Barney Hill, the cattle mutilators in Montana and the committee of beings known as the Nine who speak through the Florida medium Phyllis V. Schlemmer. These connections form an enormous mirror of ourselves and of our age, through which, like Alice, we can pass and find ourselves in a different world.
Bryan Appleyard (2005), Aliens: Why They Are Here, p.9
What is The Filth?
The Filth contains the active ingredient metaphor.
Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases. Metaphor combines two or more seemingly unrelated concepts in a way that stimulates lateral thought processes and creativity...
What is The Filth used for?
This comic book is used to treat all manner of disorders including Internet pornography addiction, insomnia, grief, "mid-life" crisis, schizophrenia, the ignorance of samsara and the 21st century blues, especially in patients whose millennial anxiety and general paranoia has not yet responded to normal treatments.
When must The Filth not be used?
If your doctor has advised you to avoid the use of metaphor.
If you refuse to acknowledge the mocking laughter of the Abyss.
If you cannot face the fact that your entire immediate environment is a seething battlefield of microscopic predators, prey and excreta and, simultaneously, a rich and complex metaphor.
Grant Morrison (2004), The Filth, opening pages.
I think each of these is saying that culture is by definition fiction, because we make it up. And nature is by definition reality. And to be human, we have to hold the two in tandem. We can't avoid it. It's what we do.
I think what we do, what all of us do with this tension, is make church.
Monday, 22 March 2010
719 - Personality and Consciousness
Geoffrey Miller, in Spent, documents research into five key personality traits, and concludes that, together with General Intelligence (or IQ), they give us pretty much all we need to know about the inner life of the people we meet. The traits are openness, conscientiousness, agreeability, stability and extroversion. Broadly speaking, populations are distributed in a bell-curve across every trait, and also across IQ. There are few correlations between trait scores, although openness correlates fairly positively with IQ.
Miller suggests IQ is a measure of the healthy functioning of our nervous system, and the personality traits reflect survival and reproduction strategies adopted by our earliest ancestors. Daniel Nettle, in Personality, suggests that openness is a measure of the breadth of connections we make amongst concepts and sensory stimuli. Although there is no moral value attached either to high or low scores in any trait, different communities have favoured traits differently at different times.
Openness carries with it the benefits of creativity, but the risks of psychosis. Nettle argues that openness evolved as the ability to manipulate symbols became increasingly valuable in early human communities. Miller wonders whether displays of extreme openness amongst the young reflect a strategy for demonstrating the essential soundness of their minds.
Openness is linked to artistic creativity, as well as receptivity to unusual experiences, and as such, one might hypothesize, is important to any consideration of spirituality and religion, though a high score would not predict religiosity, which has frequently a conservative bias.
But David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, in Inside The Neolithic Mind, offer an alternative measure by which the religious content of a community might be explained. They locate the source of religious imagery in experiences of altered states of consciousness. Our minds function across a spectrum of consciousness, from attentiveness to waking reality, through periods of reflectivity, to daydreaming, hypnagogic states, and finally, in sleep, our normal dreamlife. The modern west, they suggest, values the wide awake, rational state, where earlier cultures favoured the various dream states. Therefore, earlier cultures developed concepts of dream wisdom and spiritual realms, which we abandon (perhaps legitimately) for logic and empiricism.
It is certainly very pleasing to correlate religious concepts of the immanence and transcendance of spiritual powers with, respectively, attentiveness to the details of reality, and dreaming swoons. It is also intriguing to ask whether measures of openness and of consciousness correlate. If they do, one might ask whether they are interdependent, or in fact facets of a single trait. If they don't, it might be fair to ask that consciousness be accorded value as a mental trait in its own right.
Perhaps the consciousness spectrum will be found to equate to IQ, instead, except that high alertness might exist in dream states as well as maths tests, but some might prefer to operate in the former, whilst others are predisposed to the latter. If you choose one rather than the other strategy for obtaining survival tips, this may fairly be described as an aspect of your personality, rather than a measure, like IQ, of general health. In any case, whatever the analysis, one might expect preferences to be distributed in a bell-curve across the human population, in much the same way as other traits.
Miller suggests IQ is a measure of the healthy functioning of our nervous system, and the personality traits reflect survival and reproduction strategies adopted by our earliest ancestors. Daniel Nettle, in Personality, suggests that openness is a measure of the breadth of connections we make amongst concepts and sensory stimuli. Although there is no moral value attached either to high or low scores in any trait, different communities have favoured traits differently at different times.
Openness carries with it the benefits of creativity, but the risks of psychosis. Nettle argues that openness evolved as the ability to manipulate symbols became increasingly valuable in early human communities. Miller wonders whether displays of extreme openness amongst the young reflect a strategy for demonstrating the essential soundness of their minds.
Openness is linked to artistic creativity, as well as receptivity to unusual experiences, and as such, one might hypothesize, is important to any consideration of spirituality and religion, though a high score would not predict religiosity, which has frequently a conservative bias.
But David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, in Inside The Neolithic Mind, offer an alternative measure by which the religious content of a community might be explained. They locate the source of religious imagery in experiences of altered states of consciousness. Our minds function across a spectrum of consciousness, from attentiveness to waking reality, through periods of reflectivity, to daydreaming, hypnagogic states, and finally, in sleep, our normal dreamlife. The modern west, they suggest, values the wide awake, rational state, where earlier cultures favoured the various dream states. Therefore, earlier cultures developed concepts of dream wisdom and spiritual realms, which we abandon (perhaps legitimately) for logic and empiricism.
It is certainly very pleasing to correlate religious concepts of the immanence and transcendance of spiritual powers with, respectively, attentiveness to the details of reality, and dreaming swoons. It is also intriguing to ask whether measures of openness and of consciousness correlate. If they do, one might ask whether they are interdependent, or in fact facets of a single trait. If they don't, it might be fair to ask that consciousness be accorded value as a mental trait in its own right.
Perhaps the consciousness spectrum will be found to equate to IQ, instead, except that high alertness might exist in dream states as well as maths tests, but some might prefer to operate in the former, whilst others are predisposed to the latter. If you choose one rather than the other strategy for obtaining survival tips, this may fairly be described as an aspect of your personality, rather than a measure, like IQ, of general health. In any case, whatever the analysis, one might expect preferences to be distributed in a bell-curve across the human population, in much the same way as other traits.
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
720 - Art; Cosmologies; Bill Thompson
All at Cafe Culture Newcastle last night.
Bill Thompson is a new media critic, a self-described early adopter and technology addict - from last night, quote, 'the way I'm addicted to breathing'. On-line he bases himself here and among other places, here.
He was talking about the digital revolution as one of only a handful of civilization-changing events in human history. It's on a par, he says, with the discoveries of fire and agriculture. As with learning to read (he plugged Proust and the Squid heavily) it is an event which requires the brain to be rewired in new ways. So it raises profound questions about the ways we perceive and structure our identity.
This resonates with controversial works by Rita Carter and Susan Greenfield, which I've blogged about here and here. Not to say that Bill Thompson would agree with them (he would find Susan Greenfield, I suspect, unnecessarily alarmist). But he would find them rather interesting.
Bill sees himself, as an early adopter of technology, as one of a small but significant group of people who define their identities, in part at least, through their life on the web. He defines identity as a loose and provisional 'make-do' response to the essentially random experience of human existence. If the building of this identity should come to include networks of friends on-line, at the expense of those off-line, and if it should include multiple or single avatars, and a growing sense of what is normative, socially, for behaviour on-line, then that's just evolution. It's exciting, anyway.
I asked him what kind of art we might expect to see created through this and other identity-shifting technologies. I've a few ideas already (storying: life-story manipulation as an artform in its own right). He had his own insights.
He could see, he said, in five years' time, interactive user-generated art displays on every surface in the cityscape. Some kind of crowd-sourced imagery, some expression of bottom-up, swarm intelligence, perhaps. He defined art as a manipulation of the technology, to see how far it might go, what beauty could be made from it. I liked that - and it chimes with ideas from evolutionary psychology about art being a demonstration of one's mastery of symbolic thinking, or a demonstration of one's personality, one's openness, for example, and one's intelligence. (More on this another time.)
This was his second answer, however. I liked his first, too, offered provocatively and not pursued. He suggested we should see the network as the artform - the shimmering artform, he called it. The technology to be the artform, and as such, appreciated, untouched, for what it is.
This resonates with me for two related reasons. First, I suspect that if by network he means not just the technology, but the identity shift that accommodating the technology requires, he is providing an image by which I can expand my thinking on storying. Having considered how one can begin to manipulate one's own identity, I now want to explore questions of shared identity. Few stories, after all, concern just one person. Bill Thompson's 'network' will include his friendship network, as well as the hard/soft ware that supports it. Perhaps it can be demonstrated that the proper way to think about networks (including even the inorganic ones) is through narrative.
Second, my ears pricked up at his use of the word shimmering. This is the language of spirit and transcendence. It is religious. Only holy things are pristine. Stars shimmer in the night sky. I remembered the way Steven Johnson started his book, Emergence:
I suspect that for Bill Thompson, the network is such a shape. And if so (and the word was used last night), perhaps he is engaged in building a network-shaped cosmology.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce are archaeologists with an interest in what ancient cultures can tell us about the generation of cosmologies. Their book Inside the Neolithic Mind argues that it is a fundamental of human consciousness that new technologies arise alongside imaginative conceptions of the world and humanity's place in it. Sometimes it appears that the cosmology drives the technological advance, in contrast to materialist theories which have argued that new cosmologies come about only as a response to environmental and technological change. If religion's supernatural accretions are separated from its basis in human consciousness, they argue, it can be harnessed by science as a cradle for technological advance. The book focuses on the Neolithic or agricultural revolution - in other words, it is about the second civilization-changing event in human history. To reiterate, Bill Thompson holds that we are witnessing in the digital revolution a third.
On a personal note, I've already expressed my wish to work within a natural world view, this despite personal experiences it is hard not to label supernatural. I'd rather be scientifically rigorous about interrogating such experiences. Any supernatural conception of Love worth supporting has, in my book, to allow us the experience of a totally natural universe, however much else could be going on. If something unscientific, unnatural, happens, then I'd rather redefine science to include it than create a second domain that science cannot touch. That statement might mean my own position is hopelessly untenable (time will tell, I guess), but it does at least allow me to advocate the conclusions of Lewis-Williams and Pearce as a scientifically-literate way forward into the digital age.
Bill Thompson is a new media critic, a self-described early adopter and technology addict - from last night, quote, 'the way I'm addicted to breathing'. On-line he bases himself here and among other places, here.
He was talking about the digital revolution as one of only a handful of civilization-changing events in human history. It's on a par, he says, with the discoveries of fire and agriculture. As with learning to read (he plugged Proust and the Squid heavily) it is an event which requires the brain to be rewired in new ways. So it raises profound questions about the ways we perceive and structure our identity.
This resonates with controversial works by Rita Carter and Susan Greenfield, which I've blogged about here and here. Not to say that Bill Thompson would agree with them (he would find Susan Greenfield, I suspect, unnecessarily alarmist). But he would find them rather interesting.
Bill sees himself, as an early adopter of technology, as one of a small but significant group of people who define their identities, in part at least, through their life on the web. He defines identity as a loose and provisional 'make-do' response to the essentially random experience of human existence. If the building of this identity should come to include networks of friends on-line, at the expense of those off-line, and if it should include multiple or single avatars, and a growing sense of what is normative, socially, for behaviour on-line, then that's just evolution. It's exciting, anyway.
I asked him what kind of art we might expect to see created through this and other identity-shifting technologies. I've a few ideas already (storying: life-story manipulation as an artform in its own right). He had his own insights.
He could see, he said, in five years' time, interactive user-generated art displays on every surface in the cityscape. Some kind of crowd-sourced imagery, some expression of bottom-up, swarm intelligence, perhaps. He defined art as a manipulation of the technology, to see how far it might go, what beauty could be made from it. I liked that - and it chimes with ideas from evolutionary psychology about art being a demonstration of one's mastery of symbolic thinking, or a demonstration of one's personality, one's openness, for example, and one's intelligence. (More on this another time.)
This was his second answer, however. I liked his first, too, offered provocatively and not pursued. He suggested we should see the network as the artform - the shimmering artform, he called it. The technology to be the artform, and as such, appreciated, untouched, for what it is.
This resonates with me for two related reasons. First, I suspect that if by network he means not just the technology, but the identity shift that accommodating the technology requires, he is providing an image by which I can expand my thinking on storying. Having considered how one can begin to manipulate one's own identity, I now want to explore questions of shared identity. Few stories, after all, concern just one person. Bill Thompson's 'network' will include his friendship network, as well as the hard/soft ware that supports it. Perhaps it can be demonstrated that the proper way to think about networks (including even the inorganic ones) is through narrative.
Second, my ears pricked up at his use of the word shimmering. This is the language of spirit and transcendence. It is religious. Only holy things are pristine. Stars shimmer in the night sky. I remembered the way Steven Johnson started his book, Emergence:
Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods.... These shapes are... a way of evoking an era and its peculiar obsessions. For individuals living within these periods, the shapes are cognitive building blocks, tools for thought.
(p.22)
I suspect that for Bill Thompson, the network is such a shape. And if so (and the word was used last night), perhaps he is engaged in building a network-shaped cosmology.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce are archaeologists with an interest in what ancient cultures can tell us about the generation of cosmologies. Their book Inside the Neolithic Mind argues that it is a fundamental of human consciousness that new technologies arise alongside imaginative conceptions of the world and humanity's place in it. Sometimes it appears that the cosmology drives the technological advance, in contrast to materialist theories which have argued that new cosmologies come about only as a response to environmental and technological change. If religion's supernatural accretions are separated from its basis in human consciousness, they argue, it can be harnessed by science as a cradle for technological advance. The book focuses on the Neolithic or agricultural revolution - in other words, it is about the second civilization-changing event in human history. To reiterate, Bill Thompson holds that we are witnessing in the digital revolution a third.
On a personal note, I've already expressed my wish to work within a natural world view, this despite personal experiences it is hard not to label supernatural. I'd rather be scientifically rigorous about interrogating such experiences. Any supernatural conception of Love worth supporting has, in my book, to allow us the experience of a totally natural universe, however much else could be going on. If something unscientific, unnatural, happens, then I'd rather redefine science to include it than create a second domain that science cannot touch. That statement might mean my own position is hopelessly untenable (time will tell, I guess), but it does at least allow me to advocate the conclusions of Lewis-Williams and Pearce as a scientifically-literate way forward into the digital age.
Thursday, 25 February 2010
726 - Story Nations
Another day, another dispiriting prognostication from the evangelical church people I left fifteen years ago. I won't link to it: it's on Facebook. But apparently we're all going to hell in a handcart.
Why do I bother? Because it's not the world, it's not even the Christianity I recognise, that's why. I love these people. I want to shake them out of their isolationism. I don't think Christianity is about the nailing of one's life to a single story - or if it is, it's the story that there are as many stories open to us as there are, well, us. So no probs if part of the story you want for yourself is the traditional evangelical one. But equally, you might choose something completely different.
And this is where the excitement starts. Because there is a universe of stories open to us. An old Jewish proverb says God created people because he loves stories. The Gospels say there are so many stories about Jesus all the books in the world couldn't contain them. See, Jesus gets it. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, especially now that the technologies are burgeoning where we can rehearse and test those stories in safe places (any such place is a church), can manipulate our identities, can recognise our common humanity in law, to stop us creating those stories real life, real time.
That, my dear, dear religious friends, is the Kingdom of God.
And kingdom is an interesting word. Nowadays, as we've experimented beyond monarchy, nation might be a better choice. Also a interesting choice, because nation-states are the means by which, in a modernist secular society, we identify our public allegiance acceptably. But we're no longer modernist, we're postmodernist, and the nation-states are crumbling. At the very least, in the developed world, we could do with finding new ways to express our identity, to replace the over-consumption of resources by which we've maintained and projected our own lifestyles, but depleted the lives of others. That's one way of putting the argument in Geoffrey Miller's book, Spent, by the way.
(And what's with the word lifestyle anyway? Like we only ever select one, to which we are then bound, till we can sustain it no longer. No character development, no plot twists: what successful story ever paces monotonously along in the same style from start to finish?)
So my proposition is that we recognise our new great resource to be the stuff of our identity, the stories we choose to inhabit, and that from now on, those nations that are richest in the world are the nations where the most various stories are told, and where the freedom to tell them is greatest.
By tell, of course, I mean live.
Here's a daydream, by way of jottings in the margins of my copy of Volume I of Christopher Partridge's great book, The Re-Enchantment of the West:
The birth of Story Nations... nations whose peoples are informed by a voluntary delight in stories and story creation; where from the abstraction of a page in a closeable book, the story is drawn into oneself - like the book people of Fahrenheit 451, but into one's very lived self and the actions therefore that one performs....
Was it ever really possible before? The sheer interaction of such stories, the possibilities inherent...? The lightness of such footfall on the Earth?
The only metanarrative one will ever need is provided by one's innate being. But it's a truism that what one needs and wants are not always the same. Why not, then, as one builds a beautiful home to live in, rather than live under canvas, or clothes oneself in the fashion of one's choice and reach, rather than drabbery, create as fulfilling a story life for oneself and yes, one's nation, as one possibly can?
Why do I bother? Because it's not the world, it's not even the Christianity I recognise, that's why. I love these people. I want to shake them out of their isolationism. I don't think Christianity is about the nailing of one's life to a single story - or if it is, it's the story that there are as many stories open to us as there are, well, us. So no probs if part of the story you want for yourself is the traditional evangelical one. But equally, you might choose something completely different.
And this is where the excitement starts. Because there is a universe of stories open to us. An old Jewish proverb says God created people because he loves stories. The Gospels say there are so many stories about Jesus all the books in the world couldn't contain them. See, Jesus gets it. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, especially now that the technologies are burgeoning where we can rehearse and test those stories in safe places (any such place is a church), can manipulate our identities, can recognise our common humanity in law, to stop us creating those stories real life, real time.
That, my dear, dear religious friends, is the Kingdom of God.
And kingdom is an interesting word. Nowadays, as we've experimented beyond monarchy, nation might be a better choice. Also a interesting choice, because nation-states are the means by which, in a modernist secular society, we identify our public allegiance acceptably. But we're no longer modernist, we're postmodernist, and the nation-states are crumbling. At the very least, in the developed world, we could do with finding new ways to express our identity, to replace the over-consumption of resources by which we've maintained and projected our own lifestyles, but depleted the lives of others. That's one way of putting the argument in Geoffrey Miller's book, Spent, by the way.
(And what's with the word lifestyle anyway? Like we only ever select one, to which we are then bound, till we can sustain it no longer. No character development, no plot twists: what successful story ever paces monotonously along in the same style from start to finish?)
So my proposition is that we recognise our new great resource to be the stuff of our identity, the stories we choose to inhabit, and that from now on, those nations that are richest in the world are the nations where the most various stories are told, and where the freedom to tell them is greatest.
By tell, of course, I mean live.
Here's a daydream, by way of jottings in the margins of my copy of Volume I of Christopher Partridge's great book, The Re-Enchantment of the West:
The birth of Story Nations... nations whose peoples are informed by a voluntary delight in stories and story creation; where from the abstraction of a page in a closeable book, the story is drawn into oneself - like the book people of Fahrenheit 451, but into one's very lived self and the actions therefore that one performs....
Was it ever really possible before? The sheer interaction of such stories, the possibilities inherent...? The lightness of such footfall on the Earth?
The only metanarrative one will ever need is provided by one's innate being. But it's a truism that what one needs and wants are not always the same. Why not, then, as one builds a beautiful home to live in, rather than live under canvas, or clothes oneself in the fashion of one's choice and reach, rather than drabbery, create as fulfilling a story life for oneself and yes, one's nation, as one possibly can?
Friday, 19 February 2010
728 - Word Up
After reading Jay Griffiths on the essential wildness of all things, it sure is hard to resist putting her thesis into action.
So, if time is wild, and time is money, then money can be wild; money can be, say, words. And words, in turn, can be wild.
Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid sets the thought going. She's talking about the brain areas that inter-wire themselves as we learn to read: visual areas; visual association; auditory and language centres; centres for analytical and forward planning. Her suggestion is that as these link up, our cognitive abilities change, and our ways of relating to the world and to our culture with them.
In her book this is pretty much unequivocally a good thing. Hugh Brody and Jay Griffiths, who both champion the intelligence of preliterate peoples, might want to suggest that the potential that we direct towards reading is, amongst those who don't read, directed towards other, equally meaningful, ends.
I'd like to suggest that, by interrogating the nature of words and text to discover just exactly what they are, we might begin to find surprising word-forms in many places. Taking Wolf's point that our brains have changed neurologically in response to exposure to text-based cultures, there are perhaps other ways that we could encourage them to develop as we become fluent in forms championed by newer cultures.
Perhaps the essence of a word is that it is a meaningful communication. The call across a clearing from one to another, using the medium of sound-waves, explains the link between the auditory sense and our language centres. The weighting we give to our visual sense as a means of interacting with the world explains why most, but not all writing, is visible. But the question of how many senses are involved in word formation and comprehension grows rapidly more complicated.
Early texts, Wolf says, include cuneiform scratches on clay tablets, and hieroglyphs on papyrus, but also knots on Mayan rope (quipus), and script on tortoiseshell oracles. The cuneiform, knots and tortoiseshells are tactile - indeed, writing is itself a movement of the wrist. These actions, like Braille, extend the senses involved to touch and proprioception (body-sense). The same senses form the basis of sign-language, and the language of dance. Up is an orientation of the body, so up-ness can be a word. Body pressure, the application of which stills some people with autism, such that weighted blankets are common in therapy centres, is surely key to the communication of a hug. And where would meaningful communication be without the kiss, stirring visual, auditory, pressure, temperature, taste and olfactory senses? A kiss is surely a word.
If language is seen in its widest sense as an interplay of meaning, which is not limited to words on a page (or screen), then the nature of words is set free. This video challenges, and is fascinating, about the insight into language that one person's experience of autism has given her (and us). Surely there is nothing to stop a culture, and cognitive develop among the people within it, centring upon and elevating, if they choose, any given word form. Might that not take the culture into hitherto unsuspected realms of human experience, as the book has done? Might that not be the true legacy of virtual reality technologies?
And seeing every sense-meaning combination as part of a flow of communication illuminates the world of inner as well as outer experience. Dream language, with its powerful imagery and sensory stimulation, does not seem quite so alien if it is understood to be of a piece with the exchange of information we can engage in between ourselves and others during waking hours. Perhaps, latterly, these literate millenia, we've just been ignoring this daylight exchange.
Perhaps as our fluency in such exchange increases, our dream life will begin to blossom into daily activity. That might help explain why altered states of consciousness are more easily achieved in dance and music, or sports, where such language flow is already prevalent. To repeat, it may not be so much that these are exceptional states, but our natural state, which has been utterly narrowed by our focus on oral and textual exchange as the only legitimate means of information transfer. That would turn our thinking about the relative values of preliterate and modern civilisation on its head. It could give a genuine scientific basis for admitting magical thinking back into the public arena, alongside, and in engagement with, the discourse modern thought has given us.
So, if time is wild, and time is money, then money can be wild; money can be, say, words. And words, in turn, can be wild.
Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid sets the thought going. She's talking about the brain areas that inter-wire themselves as we learn to read: visual areas; visual association; auditory and language centres; centres for analytical and forward planning. Her suggestion is that as these link up, our cognitive abilities change, and our ways of relating to the world and to our culture with them.
In her book this is pretty much unequivocally a good thing. Hugh Brody and Jay Griffiths, who both champion the intelligence of preliterate peoples, might want to suggest that the potential that we direct towards reading is, amongst those who don't read, directed towards other, equally meaningful, ends.
I'd like to suggest that, by interrogating the nature of words and text to discover just exactly what they are, we might begin to find surprising word-forms in many places. Taking Wolf's point that our brains have changed neurologically in response to exposure to text-based cultures, there are perhaps other ways that we could encourage them to develop as we become fluent in forms championed by newer cultures.
Perhaps the essence of a word is that it is a meaningful communication. The call across a clearing from one to another, using the medium of sound-waves, explains the link between the auditory sense and our language centres. The weighting we give to our visual sense as a means of interacting with the world explains why most, but not all writing, is visible. But the question of how many senses are involved in word formation and comprehension grows rapidly more complicated.
Early texts, Wolf says, include cuneiform scratches on clay tablets, and hieroglyphs on papyrus, but also knots on Mayan rope (quipus), and script on tortoiseshell oracles. The cuneiform, knots and tortoiseshells are tactile - indeed, writing is itself a movement of the wrist. These actions, like Braille, extend the senses involved to touch and proprioception (body-sense). The same senses form the basis of sign-language, and the language of dance. Up is an orientation of the body, so up-ness can be a word. Body pressure, the application of which stills some people with autism, such that weighted blankets are common in therapy centres, is surely key to the communication of a hug. And where would meaningful communication be without the kiss, stirring visual, auditory, pressure, temperature, taste and olfactory senses? A kiss is surely a word.
If language is seen in its widest sense as an interplay of meaning, which is not limited to words on a page (or screen), then the nature of words is set free. This video challenges, and is fascinating, about the insight into language that one person's experience of autism has given her (and us). Surely there is nothing to stop a culture, and cognitive develop among the people within it, centring upon and elevating, if they choose, any given word form. Might that not take the culture into hitherto unsuspected realms of human experience, as the book has done? Might that not be the true legacy of virtual reality technologies?
And seeing every sense-meaning combination as part of a flow of communication illuminates the world of inner as well as outer experience. Dream language, with its powerful imagery and sensory stimulation, does not seem quite so alien if it is understood to be of a piece with the exchange of information we can engage in between ourselves and others during waking hours. Perhaps, latterly, these literate millenia, we've just been ignoring this daylight exchange.
Perhaps as our fluency in such exchange increases, our dream life will begin to blossom into daily activity. That might help explain why altered states of consciousness are more easily achieved in dance and music, or sports, where such language flow is already prevalent. To repeat, it may not be so much that these are exceptional states, but our natural state, which has been utterly narrowed by our focus on oral and textual exchange as the only legitimate means of information transfer. That would turn our thinking about the relative values of preliterate and modern civilisation on its head. It could give a genuine scientific basis for admitting magical thinking back into the public arena, alongside, and in engagement with, the discourse modern thought has given us.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
729 - Perfect?
There may have been a perfect life - someone who grew up without hurting his or her parents, siblings, friends, others - but the signs were never promising. Even Jesus, who, they say, self-conceived in Mary, to avoid the physicality of a conventional conception, burst out of her the usual way, which no doubt, like the more esoteric messages that came with him in the envelope, she'd held in her heart and pondered.
Say there were more like him - men and women who have been allowed to grow tall, full and unstinted, like oaks in good ground. Still, for most of us, life is about learning that isn't so. Most trees, it seems to me, grow as well as those materials they have been given allow them to be. What unfurls from the acorn takes shape in the soil and grows in wrenching disorder as much as in the order of the world it finds around it.
That, come maturity, we learn is beauty, and enough.
But what after maturity? After enlightenment, which I take to be the same thing, a zen proverb says, chop wood, carry water - just as you did before. I know this is true, but I also know that as I grew up, I hurt people. I punched my mother as I sat on her knee. I scared a young woman older than myself as I sought, self-absorbed, to define for myself the limits of what I felt might be love. A friend of hers gave me the chance to stop before the police were involved. That was the beginning of company. I am grateful to him and to her.
I suppose one has learned that, as a tree in a copse is bowed down by one tree, but supported by another, which in time, daisy-chained around the line, draws support from the wounding first, one is soothing even as one tears open; one is wheat, to quote Matthew 13, even as one is a wild weed. Therefore, in the new wood-chopping and water-carrying, I might hope to build good things alone, but at least I know I build good as I build bad.
It is time to build.
Friday, 12 February 2010
731 - Tough Questions
I'm returning to a book I started a year or more ago. Proust and the Squid, by Maryanne Wolf, is, in the words of its subtitle, "the story and science of the reading brain". It explores the evolutionary and educational changes our brains have undergone in order that we may be able to read text. It is a polemic too, in that it argues passionately that reading as a technology should not be undervalued or taken for granted. Not only does it allow culture to be recorded and passed on, but also explored and manipulated, which stimulates further neuronal development in the brain. It suggests that the shift to digital and image-based technology might cause the brain to develop in new and perhaps not entirely predictable ways.
That got me thinking. I'm fascinated by the process of writing, which seems to me the essence of technology, the tiniest impact someone can make on his or her environment at any given time, using the latest tools available, in order to convey the most precise meaning. Once we nudged pigment onto cave-walls; then ink onto parchment, and lead type and paper; then light onto film-stock; digital information onto computer screens, and now, even, ears onto the backs of mice, and flourescence into rabbits. I wondered, given the radical transformation reading has had on society over thousands of years, whether a similar transformation, driven by ICT, Molecular Biology, Genetics, Nanotechnology, Quantum Physics, Relativity might be starting now, and to take the thought further, just as writing and reading gave birth to great literature, these marks we make in the present might result in a whole new artform, an art, as well as a science perhaps, of identity at its most fundamental level.
The following are related thoughts I jotted in the margins of Proust and the Squid this morning. They don't flow - just a straight copy of thoughts, some wilder than others, as they arose. They widen the thoughts above further, but I don't have time to expand them tonight, so I risk sounding potty. Ce la vie. The references to washing machines and dreaming the future refer to incidents I've written about here, here, here, and here, and are what I wanted to interrogate yesterday, but have yet to do:
1. Beyond reading: that it might be possible to 'mark' oneself mentally, deliberately. To read oneself and others, and this mark to be a symbol (or symbol of a symbol? a chaotic system balanced on a chaotic system?).
2. What might such a mark look like? Must be beyond a dot on paper, though a dot could be the mark in one instance.
3. The science and art of infinite possibility, not simply an idea, but a technology. What virtuality gives us that books didn't - a gateway (the whole of virtuality is the gateway - it's not just that there are gateways in and into virtuality, but that virtuality is an arrangement of quanta which can itself begin to affect quanta, in and outside its obvious current realm).
4. If there is a beyond beyond this, I cannot imagine it (but interrogate the 'I', in case).
5. The drawing together of stars.
6. Somewhat scarily, the figure (story myth) that most embodies this technological capability for me is Doctor Who.
7. One must have a sense (sensitivity too) of multiplicity (even if one chooses a single identity) to develop this technology.
8. A technology that has no force unless it is democratic - an expression of life in all its fullness. The Kingdom of God. Moving the washing machine door. Dreaming out of time and space.
9. What does all this mean for human interaction?
10. Cancer as a signal from, eg., the future. Healing as a reply. The closer we reach the technology needed to heal/control the cancer, the closer we reach the technology needed to send it.
That got me thinking. I'm fascinated by the process of writing, which seems to me the essence of technology, the tiniest impact someone can make on his or her environment at any given time, using the latest tools available, in order to convey the most precise meaning. Once we nudged pigment onto cave-walls; then ink onto parchment, and lead type and paper; then light onto film-stock; digital information onto computer screens, and now, even, ears onto the backs of mice, and flourescence into rabbits. I wondered, given the radical transformation reading has had on society over thousands of years, whether a similar transformation, driven by ICT, Molecular Biology, Genetics, Nanotechnology, Quantum Physics, Relativity might be starting now, and to take the thought further, just as writing and reading gave birth to great literature, these marks we make in the present might result in a whole new artform, an art, as well as a science perhaps, of identity at its most fundamental level.
The following are related thoughts I jotted in the margins of Proust and the Squid this morning. They don't flow - just a straight copy of thoughts, some wilder than others, as they arose. They widen the thoughts above further, but I don't have time to expand them tonight, so I risk sounding potty. Ce la vie. The references to washing machines and dreaming the future refer to incidents I've written about here, here, here, and here, and are what I wanted to interrogate yesterday, but have yet to do:
1. Beyond reading: that it might be possible to 'mark' oneself mentally, deliberately. To read oneself and others, and this mark to be a symbol (or symbol of a symbol? a chaotic system balanced on a chaotic system?).
2. What might such a mark look like? Must be beyond a dot on paper, though a dot could be the mark in one instance.
3. The science and art of infinite possibility, not simply an idea, but a technology. What virtuality gives us that books didn't - a gateway (the whole of virtuality is the gateway - it's not just that there are gateways in and into virtuality, but that virtuality is an arrangement of quanta which can itself begin to affect quanta, in and outside its obvious current realm).
4. If there is a beyond beyond this, I cannot imagine it (but interrogate the 'I', in case).
5. The drawing together of stars.
6. Somewhat scarily, the figure (story myth) that most embodies this technological capability for me is Doctor Who.
7. One must have a sense (sensitivity too) of multiplicity (even if one chooses a single identity) to develop this technology.
8. A technology that has no force unless it is democratic - an expression of life in all its fullness. The Kingdom of God. Moving the washing machine door. Dreaming out of time and space.
9. What does all this mean for human interaction?
10. Cancer as a signal from, eg., the future. Healing as a reply. The closer we reach the technology needed to heal/control the cancer, the closer we reach the technology needed to send it.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
732 - The Natural-Living Test
This is an exercise at the back of Geoffrey Miller's book, Spent, which I heartily recommend. I suspect the exercise has been developed by Miller, but it draws on ideas I've found in other articles and books, so much of the knowledge will be in the public domain. It's not easily traceable on Google (I've not managed, anyway). All of which, and because Miller seems a thoroughly decent chap, and because he's motivated by a desire to get the knowledge out there, and because I'm happy to remove the test if he and/or other authors wish, and because it's a brilliant tool for meditating on, and because this blog's as much an aide memoire for me as anything I expect anyone else to read, and because I want to raise a question at the end, means I'm going to stick it up here in full. Here on in, till indicated, the text is as in Spent (pp.331-2):
This quantifies how closely your life matches that of our happier ancestors. Write down honestly how many times in the past month you have had each of the experiences below:
[End of text]
My only quibble with this checklist is that whilst all these experiences do, I can see, amount to a very happy life, I'd want to see something about the experience of encountering pain, incomprehension, or the thwarting of a plan or desire. I can accept that we've evolved to cope in such situations, and even thrive, and I can also interpret some of the items on the list as if they addressed such a situation - the repair of something broken; the improvement of a skill through practice; the changing of one's mind, for example. I do, however, feel that peace in the face of rejection is a state one experiences throughout life - ultimate comfort in the face of death - and it isn't referred to here.
As I understand it, it's related to the role of the shaman, who may have had a psychotic episode precipitated by excessive openness, as suggested in Spent (pp.219-221), or who may have experienced at the limits of his or her being a light indistinguishable from eternity, or both, but who is certainly present in early hunter-gatherer communities, with something to offer. Is this simply the sense of oneness with the cosmos referred to on the list? I've experienced that, I think, but I've not yet interrogated my experiences fully. So this is where I must ask myself some tough questions, which I'll do in my next post.
And it certainly is not to detract from the great value of the Natural-Living Test as it stands.
This quantifies how closely your life matches that of our happier ancestors. Write down honestly how many times in the past month you have had each of the experiences below:
- Rocked a newborn baby to sleep
- Made up a story and told it to a child
- Felt the sunrise warm your face
- Satisfied a genuine hunger by eating ripe fruit
- Satisfied a genuine thirst by drinking cool water
- Shown courage in protecting a child from danger
- Shown leadership and resourcefulness in an emergency
- Shared a meal with parents, siblings, or other close relatives
- Gossiped with an old friend
- Made a new friend
- Made something beautiful and gave it to someone
- Repaired something that was broken
- Improved a skill through diligent practice
- Learned something new about a plant or animal that lives near you
- Changed your mind about something important on the basis of new evidence
- Followed good advice from someone older
- Taught a useful skill, charming art, or interesting fact to someone younger
- Petted a furry animal such as a dog, cat or monkey
- Worked with earth, clay, stone, wood or fiber
- Comforted someone dying
- Walked over a hill and across a stream
- Identified a bird by its song
- Played a significant role in a local ritual, festival, drama or party
- Played a team sport
- Made a physical effort to achieve a collective goal with others
- Sustained silent eye contact with someone to show affection
- Shamed someone who was behaving badly, for the greater good
- Resolved a serious argument using humour, emotional self-control, and social empathy
- Sang, danced, or played instruments with a group of friends
- Made friends laugh out loud
- Reached a world-melting mutual orgasm with a sexual partner
- Experienced sublime beauty that made your hair stand on end
- Experienced an oceanic sense of oneness with the cosmos that made you think, This is how church should feel
- Applied the Golden Rule by helping someone in need
- Warmed yourself by an open fire under stars
[End of text]
My only quibble with this checklist is that whilst all these experiences do, I can see, amount to a very happy life, I'd want to see something about the experience of encountering pain, incomprehension, or the thwarting of a plan or desire. I can accept that we've evolved to cope in such situations, and even thrive, and I can also interpret some of the items on the list as if they addressed such a situation - the repair of something broken; the improvement of a skill through practice; the changing of one's mind, for example. I do, however, feel that peace in the face of rejection is a state one experiences throughout life - ultimate comfort in the face of death - and it isn't referred to here.
As I understand it, it's related to the role of the shaman, who may have had a psychotic episode precipitated by excessive openness, as suggested in Spent (pp.219-221), or who may have experienced at the limits of his or her being a light indistinguishable from eternity, or both, but who is certainly present in early hunter-gatherer communities, with something to offer. Is this simply the sense of oneness with the cosmos referred to on the list? I've experienced that, I think, but I've not yet interrogated my experiences fully. So this is where I must ask myself some tough questions, which I'll do in my next post.
And it certainly is not to detract from the great value of the Natural-Living Test as it stands.
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
740 - Clive James on Real Adventure
A lovely, long, inspiring quote about what makes a fine life, from his book, Cultural Amnesia (but what to do when every other sentence is worth quoting?):
The usual division [in social life] is to treat our daily job as the adventure and our cultural diversions as a mere mechanism of renewal and repose. But the adventurous jobs are becoming more predictable all the time, even at the level of celebrity and conspicuous material success. Could there be anything less astonishing than to work day and night on Wall Street to make the millions that will buy the Picasso that will hang on the wall of our Upper East Side apartment to help convince us and our guests that we are lucky to know each other? I have been in that apartment, and admired the Picasso, and envied its owner: I especially envied him his third wife, who had the same eyes as Picasso's second mistress, although they were on different sides of her nose. But I didn't envy the man his job. In the same week, I was filming in Greenwich Village, and spent an hour of down-time sitting in a cafe making my first acquaintance with the poetry of Anthony Hecht. I couldn't imagine living better. The real adventure is no longer in the job. In the job we can have a profile written about us, and be summed up: all the profiles will be the same, and all the summaries add up to the same thing. The real adventure is in what we do to entertain ourselves, a truth which the profile writers concede by trying to draw us out on our supposed addictions to shark fishing, fast cars, extreme skiing and expensive young women. But even the entertainment can no longer be adventurous if it serves a purpose. It will be adventurous only if it serves itself. In other words, it will not be utilitarian. It has always been a part of the definition of humanism that true learning has no end in view except its own furtherance.
Friday, 18 December 2009
750 - Loving Cancer
Four and a half years ago I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. So now when I walk a tightrope I carry a marble in my right hand.
There's cancer in my family history too. More serious stuff. Sometimes I mull, on both accounts, because it makes good sense to mull. I don't think that's hyperchondria, just provisional planning.
Given my spirituality, which is that everything is interconnected, and everything is love, I've been wondering how to love cancer. Mine, and the stuff in general. What works, I think, is this.
I know it's usual to think of myself as a discrete (meaning separate) being. We speciate, over millenia, become unique and unmingleable creatures. We also speciate within ourselves: stem-cells become bone-cells or neurons or blood-cells, which occupy a particular niche in the body, and no other. Geoffrey Miller, in Spent, introduces this thought eloquently. He's far less than convinced that we speciate psychologically, developing personality traits that equip us for particular roles, which are not, then, readily transferable to other cultural or biological situations. However, insofar as it doesn't make sense to be a wise man at fifteen, or a flirt at a funeral, and insofar as there are distinct personality dimensions which vary, admittedly on a bell-curve, from person to person, I think that a case could be made for this, too.
Cancer is about cells mutating to do what they are not equipped to do (chiefly to grow, unstoppably). Cancer cells breakdance when they should be brokering deals. They offend our sense that we are sacrosanct, every cell with a purpose, every intrusion guarded against.
But there's enough biology out here to argue the opposite. Endosymbiotic theory, for example, argues that our cells contain fragments of viruses and other living matter: our mitochondria existed as creatures in their own right before our distant ancestor cells absorbed or were invaded by them. Now they power our cells. As fast as we consolidate our uniqueness from other creatures by breeding amongst ourselves, random mutation and other environmental factors acting upon us compel new variations of form. These have resulted in our present appearance, but biologists say our present appearance is far from perfect, inevitable, or 'finished'. Psychologically, culturally, our world shifts and blends, sharing words and ideas: that's what culture means.
I feel my spirituality has to embrace this, and if it does, I can no longer make the blanket declaration that I, in pristine form, am unintrudable upon, or that mutation is, by definition, bad. If it's all natural, in a loving world, then it's all loving.
There is a force to this, to drive me from complacency. But in this sense it is the drive from innocence to experience to, as mystics call it, second innocence. I am forced beyond the limits of my body to consider greater permeability, greater interconnectedness. Physically, I lose a part of myself, perhaps, but that part feeds a bacterium that feeds, or acts upon, the environment near it, and the food-chain is recharged (my ball entering a food-chain is admittedly a bit icky). Or psychologically, my surgeon gains self-esteem, a lift which augurs well for his or her family's well-being. Why not consider this a result of the cancer? If it is not accounted for, of course all that remains to be said is bad press. It depends where you draw your lines, and I draw wider lines now than I did before.
The interconnectedness feeds in the other direction, too. If illness can raise a medical institution (I've been well-served by the Northern Cancer Care Trust), it is also true that an institution can raise an illness, as builders and engineers with asbestosis testify. And finally, that institutions can become cancerous (mentioning, in one instance, no financial names, and, by implication, demanding of myself that perhaps the bankers are not morally reprehensible, and doing no more than their brief part in our vast cosmological interconnection.)
I've rambled. Better get back on the tightrope.
There's cancer in my family history too. More serious stuff. Sometimes I mull, on both accounts, because it makes good sense to mull. I don't think that's hyperchondria, just provisional planning.
Given my spirituality, which is that everything is interconnected, and everything is love, I've been wondering how to love cancer. Mine, and the stuff in general. What works, I think, is this.
I know it's usual to think of myself as a discrete (meaning separate) being. We speciate, over millenia, become unique and unmingleable creatures. We also speciate within ourselves: stem-cells become bone-cells or neurons or blood-cells, which occupy a particular niche in the body, and no other. Geoffrey Miller, in Spent, introduces this thought eloquently. He's far less than convinced that we speciate psychologically, developing personality traits that equip us for particular roles, which are not, then, readily transferable to other cultural or biological situations. However, insofar as it doesn't make sense to be a wise man at fifteen, or a flirt at a funeral, and insofar as there are distinct personality dimensions which vary, admittedly on a bell-curve, from person to person, I think that a case could be made for this, too.
Cancer is about cells mutating to do what they are not equipped to do (chiefly to grow, unstoppably). Cancer cells breakdance when they should be brokering deals. They offend our sense that we are sacrosanct, every cell with a purpose, every intrusion guarded against.
But there's enough biology out here to argue the opposite. Endosymbiotic theory, for example, argues that our cells contain fragments of viruses and other living matter: our mitochondria existed as creatures in their own right before our distant ancestor cells absorbed or were invaded by them. Now they power our cells. As fast as we consolidate our uniqueness from other creatures by breeding amongst ourselves, random mutation and other environmental factors acting upon us compel new variations of form. These have resulted in our present appearance, but biologists say our present appearance is far from perfect, inevitable, or 'finished'. Psychologically, culturally, our world shifts and blends, sharing words and ideas: that's what culture means.
I feel my spirituality has to embrace this, and if it does, I can no longer make the blanket declaration that I, in pristine form, am unintrudable upon, or that mutation is, by definition, bad. If it's all natural, in a loving world, then it's all loving.
There is a force to this, to drive me from complacency. But in this sense it is the drive from innocence to experience to, as mystics call it, second innocence. I am forced beyond the limits of my body to consider greater permeability, greater interconnectedness. Physically, I lose a part of myself, perhaps, but that part feeds a bacterium that feeds, or acts upon, the environment near it, and the food-chain is recharged (my ball entering a food-chain is admittedly a bit icky). Or psychologically, my surgeon gains self-esteem, a lift which augurs well for his or her family's well-being. Why not consider this a result of the cancer? If it is not accounted for, of course all that remains to be said is bad press. It depends where you draw your lines, and I draw wider lines now than I did before.
The interconnectedness feeds in the other direction, too. If illness can raise a medical institution (I've been well-served by the Northern Cancer Care Trust), it is also true that an institution can raise an illness, as builders and engineers with asbestosis testify. And finally, that institutions can become cancerous (mentioning, in one instance, no financial names, and, by implication, demanding of myself that perhaps the bankers are not morally reprehensible, and doing no more than their brief part in our vast cosmological interconnection.)
I've rambled. Better get back on the tightrope.
Thursday, 10 December 2009
751 - Quote From 'Spent' Supportive Of Storying
Spent by Geoffrey Miller is providing me with some valuable insight into the evolutionary psychology behind pop culture and consumerism. The quote that follows sums up, in a flourish, our long history of role-playing: where, evolutionarily, it comes from, and where, technologically, it may be going.
This is just the kind of scientific perspective my arguments about the art of storying need to build on if they are to amount to anything, so it is encouraging to catch in Miller's writing such joie de vivre, such engagement with the imagination. The paragraph follows a discussion of avatars in the role-playing game World of Warcraft:
I particularly note the mixing of fact and fiction, literary allusions, and reference to idealized self-images. The Storying argument is that the opportunities laid before us in virtual-reality function because they are already radically present in true-reality. Storying is about winkling out and expanding these opportunities in first as well as second life. It is music played on the strings Geoffrey Miller and others have analyzed.
This is just the kind of scientific perspective my arguments about the art of storying need to build on if they are to amount to anything, so it is encouraging to catch in Miller's writing such joie de vivre, such engagement with the imagination. The paragraph follows a discussion of avatars in the role-playing game World of Warcraft:
Most animals have very little behavioral control over their physical appearance. They can groom themselves to keep feathers or fur clean, but they cannot select a different species, sex, age, shape, color, or body texture. Ever since humans invented body ornamentation at least a hundred thousand years ago, however, we have been able to transform our bodies in ever more dramatic ways. Tribal peoples wear animal masks; British civil servants cross-dress; children play dress-up; the Florida elderly don toddler-bright colors. As people do more of their socializing through virtual-reality worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, their visual appearance is becoming less constrained by their true physical characteristics, and more constrained by their psychological traits, such as aesthetic preferences and idealized self-images. Virtual-reality users will soon be able to create avatars that resemble a mini-Mao, a Botox syringe, a mantis-legged cantaloupe, a pearl necklace, Nigella Lawson, or the evil Archimandrite Luseferous from the Iain M. Banks novel The Algebraist. Such customized avatars will reveal nothing about the physical appearance of the users, but a lot about their psychology. They will demonstrate more forcefully than ever before that consumerism is not about owning material objects, but about displaying [the "Central Six" individual differences that distinguish human minds from one another]. [pp. 142-3]
I particularly note the mixing of fact and fiction, literary allusions, and reference to idealized self-images. The Storying argument is that the opportunities laid before us in virtual-reality function because they are already radically present in true-reality. Storying is about winkling out and expanding these opportunities in first as well as second life. It is music played on the strings Geoffrey Miller and others have analyzed.
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