Packing and craft

Here’s a hint to continuity of time and space as we try to trace it with our lives.

We snag a glimpse of meaning on the periphery, and attribute meaning widely – stretch it out to cover everything, bestow our forms and principles upon all we encounter. We look into history for patterns, into literature for universals, into religion for order. It’s a kind of spiritual insurance. We want to believe the forces in our lives are meant to align, and if not in the direct path of our lives, well then, at least on the edges. Much of the harmony we seek’s there to grab if we’ll have it. Words, people, even objects become weighed down by our additions.

Making a packing list now since I catch my flight to Cairo tomorrow. The great 17th-century English poet John Milton is joining me. Expect photos, thoughts, lots of sand.

Mental medlies.

Human consciousness itself may operate in a pastiche of modes and interests; don’t be deterred from pursuing all of your interests for as long as they call you. From an interview with the renowned polymath Umberto Eco on that point,

I was fascinated with Stendhal at 13 and with Thomas Mann at 15 and, at 16, I loved Chopin. Then I spent my life getting to know the rest. Right now, Chopin is at the very top once again. If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing.

Countdown to Cairo

In just over a week, I’ll be on a plane to Cairo to visit friends.

I am excited to be traveling again, at long last. Though my home has always been DC, my life has been marked by strong bouts of wanderlust. I am only going for a week since, you know – I need to graduate university and yield to the academic calendar, but I’ll be posting reactions and photos right here on the blog. I also welcome any advice, readings, history, or personal experiences that you have to share about Cairo!

The friends I’m visiting in Egypt both keep blogs: Abi in the Middle East and Every History Professor’s Nightmare. (My travel companion, alas, is the only one of the bunch who does not currently blog.)

What’s necessary

Forget writers – few people are even earnest readers of literature. Serious readers are relatively scarce, which might explain why I get excited about meeting and talking to people who share my love for books. There are people who go their entire lives without picking up a novel for pleasure. Maybe we are a postliterature society – sure, we all know how to read, but we opt not to do it. The majority of Americans love the news filtered through the IV-drip of television, which can accompany any activity they find more stimulating than reading the newspaper. Immediate gratification through image, sound, action, flash.

Look at Wikipedia’s predominance. Many turn to it as if it were the source of information, rather than the collectivized and simplified online encyclopaedia that it is. It’s certainly a valuable resource (re-source) but we should not be satisfied, after reading a Wikipedia article, that we really understand anything. There’s added understanding to seek through conversation with someone who has a passion for the topic or a first-hand encounter to share. Read an entire book on the subject. Don’t shy away from thoroughness.

What’s necessary is for someone who can see clearly to draw your attention to your inattentions. (I am ignoring the dotted red line that does not accept “inattentions” as a word.) This is where the literary writer steps in. Reading, the act of sitting with a book in hand, does temporarily remove you from the multitasking march of days. We read when we have time to devote to the act, for instance when we’re waiting for something that cannot be sped up. It’s a recognition that we can go places purely through language. Storytelling’s not dead.

Storytelling has been used throughout human history to narrate life, to give it an order and bestow a moral sensitivity that is necessary to live in a conscious manner. Verbal creation tales are included when I discuss narratives, of course. This is not a question of gods, but it is spiritual. It is the understanding that perhaps meaning can’t be found in a definitive manner; instead, consider that life can be lived meaningfully.

I think my new goal is to restore sincerity to all who have lost it. Didn’t we start off as children, each one of us? When did we get to be so fleeting, sarcastic, vague, distracted?

Oh, and this why I write, why I think writing’s so important.

Mao II, Don DeLillo

It’s been rather hectic, as it usually seems to get around this time of year, so since school’s started up again I’ve been doing my reading in the little snippets I can snag between work and classes. I do a disproportionate amount of my reading through Google Reader and Twitter links. O Internet how you so facilitate acts of low commitment. I probably need to kick my mind back into a state of concentration with a giant novel. War and Peace is still largely untouched I’m sad to say. Or at least write more blog posts, because like essays, they’re at least a concentrated meditation on a topic.

Recently finished reading Don DeLillo’s Mao II and even as it drags in places, there are some harrowing scenes of the very real cult of Sun Myung Moon, of fictional terrorist cells, and of characters constantly battling these forces. DeLillo’s anxiety about individualism’s fate in the Western world is pronounced, especially in this novel. It’s the kind of crowd mentality which is attractive to so many that signals a danger to independent consciousness, to free will, and to the mind itself. Sects rely on programming minds.

On the cult of Moon (you may know them as Moonies), I’m no expert. The “new religious movement” of the Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon is perhaps most visible through mass marriages that he leads. Moon is the one who makes the matches – often the members of his church being married do not see their chosen partner until the day of the ceremony – and these events are huge. Thousands are joined at once, wedding vows conferred in a stadium or other public space.
I do remember a friend pointing out to me a Moonie church – the Unification Church near Adams Morgan on 16th Street – so there is a definite presence here in Washington, D.C. Here’s an article on the Unification wedding that took place at RFK Stadium in 1997 – right in D.C., not that long ago.

Since I’ve not touched much on DeLillo’s Mao II – named after the Warhol prints of Mao Zedong – I’ll at least leave you with a passage, to peak your interest. This is the experience of a father watching his daughter getting married at Yankee Stadium, among a countless throng of others:

When the Old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith? He looks at each sweet face, round face, long, wrong, darkish, plain. They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief… All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and memorized and passed on. And here is the drama of mechanical routine played out with living figures. It knocks him back with awe, the loss of scale and intimacy, the way love and sex are multiplied out, the numbers and shaped crowd.

Mural by Karla ‘Karlisima’ Rodas

Here’s a recent DC snap I took. This mural is on the side of the restaurant Mama Ayesha, near Adams Morgan. It caught my eye because the lineup includes President Barack Obama with the other ten presidents pictured, meaning either the mural itself was painted after the inauguration, or Obama was painted in later.

Football party idea

Inspired by a discussion with a few visiting German friends, I came up with an idea for what could potentially be a very fun party: live-blogging / crowd-sourcing the rules of American football by people who don’t know the game’s rules. Ideally, this would occur as they get together to watch their first full game of football.

Supplies:

• 3-8 people who are clueless about American football
• typical Super Bowl party snacks (tortilla chips and salsa, pizza, buffalo wings, etc. – the greasier the better)
• lots of cheap beer
• big couch and big TV (may be left out if held in a sports bar)
• big game (may be substituted with an unimportant or off-season game as this will probably not matter to participants)

Mix all of the above and don’t forget to have your party guests arbitrarily choose sides. It’s much more fun to root for “your team!”

Someone please make this happen.

Brainstreaming

What may be seen as overrated in certain primary-school settings – “free writing” time, stream of consciousness writing, free-association, whatever you call it – may be undervalued as a personal act.

I spill some ink on a few blank sheets… and emerge with a haphazardly-organized set of ideas (okay, more like idea seeds) and a better-organized collection of the week’s input, those jumbled thought-bits that are compacted and wedged into classes. The sounds I gather walking through the city. The tangible transitions from cold A/C’d offices into warm, humid masses of moving air.

It is raw, surely, but it’s usable with reshaping. The ordering’s required because we need to see them placed once those parts have surfaced into our consciousness. They need an organization in the world, whereas before they’re experienced in unconscious immediacy – swirled into an indiscernible mass of being. Once the sensed is made cerebral it takes on form, a psychological mass and so a requisite settling. It’s there and maybe it’s ready to be allowed words.

Started reading through Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage on/off as time dictates and the book comes with my recommendation, especially for aesthetic inspiration or a well-needed conceptual nudge now and then.

Research how books make us think?

Here’s psychological research into our brains’ reactions to absurdist literature à la Franz Kafka. It basically shows a correlation between reading an absurd story and identifying patterns. The researchers suggest that we prime our minds to impose order on our surroundings, especially after experiencing the prevailing sense of confusion and despair brimming in Kafka.

To Prolux and Heine, these finds suggest we have an innate tendency to impose order upon our experiences and create what they call “meaning frameworks.” Any threat to this process will “activate a meaning-maintenance motivation that may call upon any other available associations to restore a sense of meaning,” they write.

I’m a little torn on the actual value of the study. Although there is much needless research – and many skewed studies conducted by self-serving groups – conducted every day, why the need to measure the value of literature in a scientific way? It’s obvious that reading a work of absurdist lit will predictably cause certain neurological effects, but there’s more going on. Most of Kafka is not quantifiable. More generally, literature’s value cannot be quantified or neatly studied, measured in a lab and published purposefully in a psychological journal.

Selected poem by Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell.
Rilke links between music, feeling, and language. In music, it’s necessary to consider the negative spaces as well, which combine to serve near-spiritual elements which can lift a person out of life itself.

To Music

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what? —: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out, —
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.