Climb Ev'ry Large Rock

Denzil Pugh is climbing a mountain. Why is he climbing a mountain? I've been walking trails for a year or so now, through the forests, through spider webs and around snakes and across rivers. The trails have taken me towards granite boulders that sit on the sides of hills, growing moss, collecting leaves. I've climbed hills and looked out over the next horizon and seen Stone Mountain in the distance. And the roads have curved through and exited Rockdale County into Dekalb, until my next walk took me to the Davidson-Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve.  The experience I had there, at the foot of the monadnocks (large, single rocks, like Stone Mountain), was similar to the beginning of my travels at the South Rockdale Community Park.  Coming out of the forest, following the path, I saw massive power lines stretching to the horizon.  Constructs of steel, electricity, power... how awesome it was, to see what man had built to run every aspects of our lives.  Reaching the end of the forest around Bradley Mountain (I parked at the southern end of the area, near the AWARE wildlife area, and followed the rock cairns), I saw a vast expanse of rock sloping upwards, many feet high, with those cairns like pimples spotting the landscape.  In the same way that man created the power lines, so did God create these monoliths of granite, providing evidence of His power, as well as his generosity.  The rock here, called Tidal Grey, is sought after for building countertops...etc...  It becomes the rock, the clay, as it were, that man creates his own world.  In a sense, he is emulating his Creator.  

So I climbed up Bradley Mountain, following the cairns, stopping frequently to catch my breath, as I'm not in the best of shape, but eventually, I reached the last cairn, and the top of the massive rock.  Having never been on top of a mountain before, it was a totally new experience.  Out across the horizon, I could see the tops of the skyscrapers in Atlanta, and Water Towers as reservoirs for the communities hidden in the trees.  The wind blew, and high above me, hawks or buzzards circled in currents high above the rock, looking for an easy meal.  I felt much like the Traveller in Caspar David Friedrich's  "A Traveller Upon a Sea of Mist." It gave me satisfaction, confidence.  I think climbing this mountain, or one like it, is something everyone should do, just to have the experience.  I will most definitely do it again. 

I tied two references to this blog at the top.  First, Mother Superior singing "Climb Every Mountain" from The Sound of Music, which combines the actual mountains of the Alps with the metaphors of life as a mountain.  And while I could go on for pages looking at this very obvious image, used by most every author that had a mountain in their works, I won't.  Because William Shatner did it so much better.  In his interview for Star Trek V, Shatner describes the second scene of the movie, which has Captain Kirk climbing a mountain in Yosemite National Park. He attempts a rationalization of the scene, using the mountain as metaphor, and does a great job of it, no

matter what the other people commenting on the Youtube video say.  It is man conquering nature, God, if you want to go that far (which, obviously, is the theme of that movie, with Kirk going to a world that housed "God," which turns out to be a malicious alien, which the Enterprise fires upon.)

However, I don't think the idea of climbing Bradley Mountain is analogous to destroying God. Rather, I think seeing nature in its full beauty at the top, in all its fragile wonderment, along with the sharp cuts of quarry work, carving out the stone to make the buildings we live in everyday, is a fitting relationship. We both use the stone and then let it stand.  I find the paradox in what I find beautiful about the mountain.  I've seen many pictures of the area--pictures of wildflowers, of the red moss that is unique to the rocks, of the pine trees growing strong and bold from cracks in the rocks themselves--and yes, that is all wonderful.  What I find aesthetically pleasing is the rock itself and what we have done to it and with it.  The cuts, the creations, the water carving out pools and snakes of black upon

slabs of gray.  Probably what I spent most time looking at was the square slab structure made at the far north side of Bradley Mountain on my latest walk around the trails.  Next to the fence that denotes still private property, there is a square structure of granite, solid, held together by metal bolts. Atop it, people have set smaller granite rocks, and on the back, a metal door, which I did not open.  I don't know what it was for, but it was probably made for quarry storage.  What would people, some tens of thousands of years from now, think of it when they find it in a probably now barren planet?  A shrine, a religious construct, an altar? To thank God for the rocks?  Who knows?

If you want to get more information about Arabian Mountain, especially the wildlife and plants, go to Kay's blog here.   She has walked the trails for much longer than I have, and has more knowledge of the ecology there.

I tried, before I left the top of that mountain, to stand as Friedrich's Traveller did, and feel as Howard Roark did at the beginning of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, seeing the hill he was standing on as both itself, the grand beauty of it, and as potential, what he could make of this beauty with his own hands.  We've been given this world by God to construct to glorify Him, but also to make Him proud, to emulate Him, to become creators ourselves.  Let us use this world in that manner, respectfully, adding beauty while preserving it. With reverence as we cut into the stone, with wonder that we are even here to see it.  Let us climb more mountains.

The Afterlife

The songs that buzz over our heads in the grocery stores or the malls, do we ever actually listen to them?  Sure, the idiots that put in commercials always seem to interrupt the best songs.  Cut off a Crosby Stills and Nash song, but let Michael Bolton go by unscathed. Honestly, I've always listened to the music while I worked, as it made the day go by quicker.  A song can take up 3 minutes of time, or more, and while working, it makes those minutes seem less stressful.  You tend to forget about the ticking of your watch and forget about what you want to be doing.  That, of course, is the reason, as it provides pleasure into an otherwise silent room.  Allan Bloom compared music to instant ecstasy, orgasm if you will (and that's for a later blog), and there have been studies that make disciplined decisions harder to make while in a sexual mood. See the book Predictably Irrational, Chapter 3, I think, for that study.  So people, hopefully, buy more because the music is on.  But I have digressed from the intent of this post.

***

Recently, we have been playing Paul Simon's So Beautiful, So What and k.d. lang's newest album.  Both have songs on them that describe Heaven. I found it odd that two recent albums would have such descriptions of the Afterlife, given that these are not Gospel albums at all.  Further, the depictions of the hereafter are much different than that of conventional Christian belief.  Paul Simon's take turns out to be a long line where you wait to see God, after filling out a form, much as you would at a voting station. In the song, the main character starts hitting on a woman in line, who, knowing that she was dead, just shakes her head.  Reminds me (as a sidebar) of the lines in Bob Dylan's "Talking World War III Blues," where the man fins a woman, suggests they go play "Adam and Eve," and the response is "You saw what happened last time that started."  Anyway, life is mirrored in the line that Paul Simon has us wait.  And yet when we get to God, someplace high in space, we have lost the words we were going to say, as if we had any to begin with.  Instead, we have a snippet of a song.



In k.d. lang's track, Heaven is a bar. A bar everyone wants to get to. One where everyone knows your name.  Now, as much as we want Heaven to be like Cheers, Lang states in the chorus that "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." Heaven is then compared to a party, where, after everyone gets there, the same thing happens over and over, and when the "party is over, it starts again / exactly the same."  This doesn't sound like a Heaven I would want to go to, and both images are frighteningly familiar.  They have created Heaven in the image of man's world, just as the images of Mount Olympus and the jealousies and tantrums of the Greek Gods parallel the actions of man.  What Paul Simon and k.d. lang forget is that God created us in His own image, not the other way around. 


Take Stargate SG-1, for instance. The place where the Ancients go as they are ascending looks a lot like a restaurant, where the papers report on the goings on of Anubis and other bad guys.  In Star Trek: Voyager,, the Q Continuum looks like a shack on some road in a western state.  Again, nothing ever happens in these places, and it all repeats itself for all eternity. 

A couple of other examples.  In Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief,, the underworld, guarded by Cerberus, is basically a long line in which people wait in to get into the world of Hades.  How pleasant. In Pullman's The Amber Spyglass , the afterlife is a bog full of dead zombie like people, colorless, lifeless.  Of course, for Pullman, God is the bad guy, and Heaven is another dimension which is working on controlling the rest (see the episodes of South Park in which Heaven starts a war, and Kenny is the hero.

These are not the Heavens of the Christian faith, although there are other ideas that are positive.  Look at the afterlife talked about in Final Fantasy VII, where all life joins the undercurrents of power and song that flow through the Earth, giving it beauty and life.



While this has no comparison to Heaven, I believe it could be compared, given the harmonies and music that are discovered in the strings of molecular particles such as Quarks.  I talked about this before, in my blog post here. 

There are so many other images of the Afterlife that are used in modern day works of culture.  Take the waiting room in Beetlejuice, or Heaven in the movie Defending your Life. In these depictions of what comes after, it is a mirror of today's world, where waiting and defending are all that is done.  There is no enjoyment of the passage of time, which is of the utmost importance since time is eternal.  In fact, that is the main point of this blog.  When we look at Heaven, we think of eternity as a linear time model.  But the Bible depicts God as being outside of time, the Alpha and Omega, so we surely cannot expect Heaven to be in a linear time frame.  Thus the idea of a waiting line doesn't work. We would exist in a time aspect that is far different from the model we understand today.  It would be more like the Prophet's universe on Star Trek: DS9.  Past, present, and future mean nothing in this time frame, but song and vibrating emotions do. 

People spend so much time thinking about what happens after you die.  I think more time needs to be spent living.  Even for Christians, there's a whole lot of livin' goin' on (Ernie Haase song) between the Cross and Heaven.  If we accept death, which we must, then life is so much easier to deal with.  And if we see the afterlife as some gloomy bog or an endless line, then there's no point in dying, no point in living. What would living morally, toward the virtues of some loving God, what would that matter?  We should try and live by our own beliefs, our own morals, those that we have adapted from our faith, from the lessons our parents and other elders have taught us, and then, believing in what we do, when we die, whatever happens, will happen.  Jesus was assuring us life after death, but was also assuring us life before that death.  Let's not worry about what it looks like, and make this life the best we can.

Recess from the Recesses (a response)

[From my Facebook page, J. pointed out that many children still enjoy going outside, and gave examples.  She says that adults still produce playground sets (albeit "safer" ones) and create the memories that children produce for themselves.  In the end, she says, "Each generation must move on to make room for the next, yes?"  This is my response.  I agree with much of what she says, with two exceptions. That, one, I don't hold the same optimism that children will, in the future, be running around in their neighborhoods using sticks as wands or weapons or whatever. And two, that the equipment that we played on is just as good for this generation as today's "safer" replacements.]

I do hope you are correct in your evaluation of today's children. That in the areas where we live there are still kids that yearn to go outside, to play on playgrounds, to wield a stick as a sword or a staff, to find a copse of trees and turn it into a quiet hut,  a mansion of greens.  But I just don't see it happening that way.  Imagination is taken up by video games, by television screens, or transformed into competition in the form of organized sports.  When I was in middle and high school, there were few kids that "came out to play" in the summer, as they were all being bussed off to soccer camps and constant practices for organized sports (soccer in my neighborhood was the most time consuming). If they weren't into sports, they were inside playing with video games or whathaveyou.  And my neighborhood was as barren as most ghost towns. 

When I go back even farther, I look at the playgrounds as one of the few places where I actually half-way interacted with other kids. Not that I did that well, but I did have a few friends and we played our make believe games from the popular TV shows at the time.  The playground equipment became the models for our spaceships, our fortresses...etc. I realize that any brand of equipment could do that, whether it be plastic, or wood, or be it abstract, a mere shape, or constructed to look like a castle.  The importance of the specific rocketships I talk about are because of the memories that we had of those particular playsets. It is a selfish notion, really, that those metal structures could stay rooted into the ground for all eternity, for every child to experience those exact memories.  We are living our lives through them.  But it's precisely that selfish notion that makes us hold on to old things as much as we do. 

Take a look at one of my older blogs, from July of last year, which analyzes a conversation between Lt. Commander Data and Dr. Soong, his maker, from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's very applicable to this one, as we tend to hold on to old things, the crumbling buildings of southern towns, those like the ones in Milledgeville towering above the old Governor's mansion, with missing roof parts and piles of old psychology files stashed about.  Or to look at it another way, the loft apartments at the Mill in Porterdale. Living there would be an absolute treat, as the old factory walls would still retain the echoes of decades before, mixed in with the waterfalls of the South River.  We hold on to our ties with our pasts, yearning for them to stay eternally on, comforting us, reminding us of our semi-permanence in this world. For looking back to our past gives a sense of continuity, of a chain of humans living from one century to the next.  What if, traveling back to Oklahoma some time, and seeing my old playground at Mustang Valley, with the old rocketship monkey bars shining in the sunlight, and there on it was a child reaching up to the top of the set, and seeing his face as he reached the top.  That would be me in another life, but it would also be me now. It would be joy continuing down through the years.  So yes, it is selfish, but it is perfectly human to wish the old structures of our youth to continue existing, for us or for others, forever.  It gives us a sense of immortality. It's why I write these blogs, or why anyone creates anything, as it provides a link to the future.  After I am gone, there will still be these blogs for people to read, to know about my life.  I had hoped that there would still have been that rocketship for people to play on, to find the same excitement as I did. Let the children make the memories of their own worlds, at least I still have mine.

***
Something I think needs to be added.  When we talk about why Mustang Valley's playground was replaced with brand new sets, we have to look at the potential for lawsuits for "unsafe" playground equipment.  The large monkey bar sets at Mustang Valley were fastened into concrete, as were the teeter totters.  The swing sets were just outside on barren dirt, often which had holes underneath where kids' feet had swung, and when it rained, you got tadpoles swimming about in the holes under the swings.  The rocketship was also in the dirt.  They did not have the recycled tire clippings, or safe rubber ground to keep children from falling and skinning their knees and breaking an arm or whatever.  Truth is, the skinned knees is part of what made those sets fun.  There was danger involved.  Nowadays, if anyone is put in danger, the school system gets sued.  It's the litigious society that we have that keeps children from actually being children.  Would, in the middle ages, children have been allowed to work as apprentices for blacksmiths or become squires for knights if the people thought they might get hurt, and hence, the shop owners would get sued for negligence or something... of course not.  If, as a kid, I burnt my finger while trying to touch a hot iron, to see how hot it was, the pain afterwards was a lesson in life.  In taking away the pain, we take away the lesson involved.  I'd rather have the scars than be blemish free, and have learned nothing. 

B&B: Haley Joel Osment, Data, and DNA.

If there's any one character that is a window into the soul of an author, or of a creator, it would have to be Dr. Soong on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Gene Roddenberry speaks through that voice, using as the wise, old scientist that created Data.  I love the episode "Brothers," (Season 4, Episode 3) where Data, having commandeered the Enterprise, goes to Dr. Noonian Soong's planet (which, admittedly, looks a lot like Dagobah) and finds his creator, his tutor if you will.  They have a discussion shortly before the evil brother shows up.  He describes the passion for which people will save the old buildings of their town, and asks Data why they love old buildings.  This is to answer, of course, Data's question, "Why did you build me?"  Very few creations can ask this question, since we are either born or are not sentient.  But Data can ask, and the answer is as pivotal an answer to this blog series as it is to Data's birth:

DATA: Why did you create me?
SOONG: Why does a painter paint? Why does a boxer box? You know what Michelangelo used to say? That the sculptures he made were already there before he started, hidden in the marble. All he needed to do was remove the unneeded bits. It wasn't quite that easy with you, Data. But the need to do it, my need to do it, was no different than Michelangelo's need. Now let me ask you a question. Why are humans so fascinated by old things?
DATA: Old things?
SOONG: Old buildings, churches, walls, ancient things, antique things, tables, clocks, nick knacks. Why? Why, why?
DATA: There are many possible explanations.
SOONG: If you brought a Noophian to Earth, he'd probably look around and say, tear that old village down, it's hanging in rags. Build me something new, something efficient. But to a human, that old house, that ancient wall, it's a shrine, something to be cherished. Again, I ask you, why?
DATA: Perhaps, for humans, old things represent a tie to the past.
SOONG: What's so important about the past? People got sick, they needed money. Why tie yourself to that?
DATA: Humans are mortal. They seem to need a sense of continuity.
SOONG: Ah hah!! Why?
DATA: To give their lives meaning. A sense of purpose.
SOONG: And this continuity, does it only run one way, backwards, to the past?
DATA: I suppose it is a factor in the human desire to procreate.
SOONG: So you believe that having children gives humans a sense of immortality, do you?
DATA: It is a reasonable explanation to your query, sir.
SOONG: And to yours as well, Data.

What he did not factor into the idea of immortality were the emotions that lie behind them. Why do people value old things, or procreate, in some desire to achieve immortality?  There are several emotions that intertwine in the desire to create.  In brief, it is the fear of death, the desire for fame after death (immortality through memories), and the desire to share this world with others, through affection.  Underlying all pretenses of religion, of creation, of this thing we call life is a fear of death.  Fear of the Unmaker that we see around us all the time.  That we might cease to exist, as if blotted out from the universe.  But more importantly, that we might not exist in other's minds and memories.  I think, for most people, that if they died at any given point in their lives, that would be acceptable if they were remembered by the people around them. 

My mother looks, every night, at the Obituaries in the Daily Oklahoman, to see if anyone she knew had died.  Sometimes she finds fathers of old friends, or co-workers at the bank, or church members, or whathaveyou.  Most of the time, the people are just strangers to her, people that she never knew, their lives simply a paragraph in the middle of some newspaper.  What if, then, the name did mean something to more than just family members.  What if the name was someone that everyone knew in that town, or state, or internationally.  How long would that obituary need to be to tell the tale of your life?

I think Orson Scott Card talked a lot about this in his novel The Speaker for the Dead (the sequel to Ender's Game.  In this book, Ender becomes someone that travels to different people's homes, when called, and tries to discover the life that was led by the recently deceased.  Through loving who they loved, and feeling the pain and the joy around that person's life, he became a storyteller, as it were, that could take the emotions behind the story in the obit and make it real to everyone who heard it.  He became a bard for ordinary people.  

Some people need more than an obituary to harbor their memories in others.  They need a physical structure.  They construct in their own image something that will stand for their lives when they pass on.  The Pyramids of Egypt, the Taj Mahal, the stadium in Dallas that houses the Cowboys, owned by Jerry Jones (which is why most people call it "Jerry's Palace.") They are all monuments to the people that constructed them, markers that said, "I was here, and I lived a magnificent life that all shall remember."  It was more than just song that they intended to inhabit, but a place as glamorous and spectacular as they foresaw themselves.  Perhaps this is one reason behind the construction of the monument in Dakar, Senegal.
 
Another example... David in A.I. (Artificial Intelligence, 2001), played by Haley Joel Osment, was an android character created by Professor Hobby, the head of a robotics corporation that made human-like automatons for human use, pleasure...etc. But David was, like Data, unique, because he had the ability to express emotions, like love.  Hobby's desire was to replace his son, who had died earlier (this plot line sounds almost exactly like Astro Boy, which I could have used as well.) It was not the Professor's own immortality that he desired, but that of his son.  The truly horrific part of this was when David finally gets to the office of his father, it is filled with prototypes of David himself, for plans for everyone to have a son identical to him, so that everyone would love his son.  A mixture of Pinocchio and Frankenstein (with an ending that happened about 30 minutes prior to the ending of the movie, but that's for another blog), the bizarre twists of devotion to a child and the intense desire to achieve the ultimate goal for man.  To create life.  To become God, or like God. 

(side note: It is interesting to note that David has the same name as Michelangelo's sculpture.  Note Soong's example above of Michelangelo's feelings about his creations.  As something that comes from within, that already exists.)

In the most imitative act we can do, we create someone in our own image, through the DNA structure that lies within our cells.  We have children (at least, most of us have children), to bring into the world a life force that we can share the joys of living with.  This is what we should try to do, but as the Unmaker can use creation for his own purposes, sometimes children are created without that desire for love.  Sometimes, they are simply the by-product of sex, unplanned and unwanted.  To unprepared adults without the self-awareness to bring up the miracle that is life.  We are, at that one moment, God-like, as we have created life just as God did Eve from Adam.  Would that we all understood this, and appreciated it more than simply a one night stand or an extra dependent on a tax form, an extra body to get welfare and social security. 

In the last blog entry of this series, I will look at one more instance of creation.  That of Dr. Craig Venter and his bacterium created in the lab, the beginning of man creating his own life forms, which is creating life to reach new levels of knowledge, new frontiers.  Like Frankenstein and the scientists in Jurassic Park, Venter is trying to reach the top of the Tower of Babel, to borrow a reference.  I want to look at whether this is a good or bad thing, morally, and what the consequences would be if the Unmaker gets a hold of it (think Stephen King's The Stand).

Movie Review: Star Trek ('09)

To Boldly Go...

It seems that Abrams was able to do what Rick Berman was inept at, namely, in reinvigorating the Star Trek franchise. It was done through superior special effects, brilliant acting, witty dialogue, and a return to the fundamental philosophy behind Star Trek that Gene Roddenberry had created so many years ago.

The remarkable part was that Abrams did this without undermining the universe as it stood prior to the movie's release. After all, what would be better in a Star Trek movie than time travel, in a spectacular reenactment of the parallel universe theory from Back to the Future II, it allows Abrams to alter the reality of the universe without altering the original line of reality (the one in which Nemesis was created and box office receipts died). But, since this is only a temporary line of reality (at the point where Spock fails to fix the supernova sun that destroys Romulus, a fleet of people from the alternate time line can fix the problem, sending the time loop back in on itself, dissolving that reality with the real one), Abrams can create more movies, a TV series, or anything that he wants without making Star Trek purists mad.

And what we wanted to see, from the beginning of Kirk's life (actually his father's death) to the end of the movie was the emergence of an individual who challenged the societal role that was placed upon him, used his brilliance to basically save Earth, and become the hero that we expect him to be. Not the wishy-washy characters from Enterprise or the noble statesman Picard was.

This is what Star Trek should be. A continuation of the philosophies that Gene Roddenberry created at the start of the series. The show that was rejected by studios, financed by Lucy, and ultimately gained fans world-wide. It did this because of the individualism that each Captain showed in maneuvering his/her ship through the vast unknown. They became Ulysses, from Tennyson's poem, "to strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield," as he stands resolutely on the deck of his ship, or tied to the mast as the sirens beckon him forth. The philosophies that they held, from the first time they stepped onto the Enterprise (Voyager...etc.) through fights with the Borg, Dominion, Klingons...etc... was what kept the ships alive and fighting. It is also what made the fans of Star Trek love the show so much. In a world where right and wrong seem blurred, where corruption seems to ooze from our leaders as readily as words, the idea of individualism that comes from Starfleet Earth is as enticing as the Siren's call.

To be on Earth in the 23rd century, where technology and human inventions have done away with many problems, where individuals can become anything or anyone they want to be, that is the ideal world. I've already said that Starfleet Earth is the most livable place in all of the literary universe, and this is why. Because on that Earth, so far into the future, you can boldly go wherever you want.

It's the phrase, "to boldly go" that stuck in my mind for the past little bit, as I have read Ayn Rand's novels, and as I have seen the events unfold around us, in the news, in the world. I wonder, is there anyone that can "boldly go" today? Can anyone stand atop the mountain as the Traveler does in Caspar David Friedrich's painting does? Or Ulysses? Abrams so wonderfully symbolizes this in Jimmy Bennett's portrayal of the Young James Kirk at the beginning of the movie. His leap out of the car as it careens off the cliff is absolutely amazing, and is an act of clarity, of skill, of brilliance. Kirk, at that moment, and in subsequent moments throughout the story, becomes the Hero that Ulysses, that Howard Roarke, that the Traveler was. He becomes the Hero we all want to be. And in our daily lives, we must take the steps to "boldly go" as Kirk did. I fear, however, that the world in which we live is far more apt to find individual skill and success a negative trait, and one that is beaten down at every step.

In education, children are drug down by their fellow pupils, by teachers that have to teach the same thing to everyone, for "equality" purposes. In sports, like the NFL, the word "parity" comes up as the key word for keeping things even. And while this is okay to keep dynasties from happening, it also creates the Lions and the Bengals. Man cannot reach his full potential when being pulled back by society that feels that "Equality" is preferable over "Success." And while we cheer for Kirk as he beats the Kobayashi Maru test, and find Spock irritable for playing the "status quo" part of that area, we are quick to criticize people who have become too successful in their fields. Why is it that, in Survivor and other Reality TV shows, often the most successful of any of the contestants are often voted off first, while those who are supremely mediocre win the major cash prizes? It should be the weak and corrupt that are voted off the island first.

J.J. Abrams has produced two movies (this and Cloverfield) which have shown the heroic efforts of individuals despite the drowning masses of society around them. No one on the transport (except Pike, of course) thought that Kirk would have succeeded in becoming an officer in 4 years, much less become Captain of the Enterprise. Of course, these are the stories that good movies tell. Everyone is going to support Rudy in his quest to play for Norte Dame, just as everyone hopes Harry Potter will find the Sorcerer's Stone and defeat Voldemort. It's what movies are. And maybe, just maybe, we can take a little from those heroes, and become a little more of those individuals ourselves.

Ozymandias, George Steinbrenner, and King Tut

So what happens after you die? No, I don't mean that. God can work that one out. What I mean is what happens physically and mentally after you die? To other people. You're dead, it doesn't matter about your toenails growing. I mean memories and memorials and whatnot. (There's a point to this, just go with it).

Most people have one of those grave thingees, with a marker, and a copper vase that'll get stolen and sold for drug money, and birth and death dates. (As for mine, I want a big gravestone that says, "He died as he lived with his mouth wide open." JK) Some people are famous enough to have bigger markers, or statues even. (Some people are even famous enough to have statues made of them while they are still alive...go fig.)

What I want to look at are the truly great monuments to former living people. The Indian royalty that so missed his wife that he built a palace to honor her. Most people know it as the Taj Mahal. Or the Pharoahs of Egypt, who for most of their incest-ridden lives, had slaves build giant pyramids to house their divine bodies after their souls had gone off with Osirus. So too were the temples in Palenque and Tikal in the Mayan civilization. And there are others. These kings had the wealth of the country or empire to do with whatever they wanted, and so they built giant tombs for themselves, as a monument that would stand forever after they were gone. A sign of immortality, especially during the days when life was so short.

What about modern times, though. Surely the need to be immortal didn't die out just because Christianity came along and now the saved will go to Heaven? We're just too materialistic for that. What makes us immortal here in the United States? Some timeless piece of entertainment, a song ("Imagine" by John Lennon comes to mind), a book, a movie. In a sense, those things that outlast the sands of time make those who were involved immortal in the minds of the people that live afterwards. Now, I'm not saying that people hundreds of years from now are going to be playing "Imagine," but you get the idea.

It's much like the conversation that Data had with Dr. Noonian Sung (sp?) in his lab. People cherish the past, the antiquity of their surroundings, because those people that are represented in those buildings, in those works of art and literature, have since become immortal, in a sense. This is a comfort to those of us that live today, in the thought that something of our lives would be kept to pass on to those who come after us. A book published, or a named highway, or an airport (ask kids today why it's called O'hare Airport in Chicago, or Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta. Bet you they don't know.)

I'm bringing this up because my mom was talking about how she was upset that they were tearing down Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys since the early 1970's, and building a new facility in nearby Arlington, TX. She didn't understand why, if the building was still useable and popular, why people still didn't use it. After all, Wrigley field has been used for decades. It comes down, I think, to perception. When people look at Texas Stadium, they think of the Cowboys under Tom Landry. So enter Jerry Jones, present manager of the 'Boys and TO and Romo and all the others, and while the glory of the Cowboys under Aikman and Smith and Sanders was great, it's sorta lost its luster now. And Jerry's gettin' old (although he's lost weight, and looks better now than he did a couple years ago), so now it's come down to building a new stadium to attract the Super Bowl in a year or two. It worked, and Jones has said himself that when people look at the new stadium, he wants them to think of Jerry Jones. It's a monument to himself that will stand long after he's gone (or at least until another owner comes along that wants to outdo him.)

There's something about sports stadiums that makes them the Pyramids of America. George Steinbrenner just built a new "Yankee Stadium," at the time when the Yankees are losing their luster, and the once grand empire has now dwindled to jokes on late night talk shows. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if, far below the new Yankee stadium, there's a place where the coffin of George Steinbrenner will be laid to rest, someplace under the pitcher's mound, with all his trophies and awards. Just like King Tut.

I wonder, is it just the massively rich that can create monuments for themselves? At Georgia College in Milledgeville, after the new President got settled in (I don't remember her name, o the irony), she redid Saga (the lunchroom) with a new clock tower, and also made a tower with reflecting pool outside the dorms (getting rid of a parking lot to do it). Could these be but vain attempts to build something of herself on the campus? And what of the vanity of creating something, only to have been forgotten so little time afterward. A person truly worth remembering needs no monument, it is built within, in the hearts and minds of those who knew him or her.

Shelly's poem "Ozymandias" comes to mind, finally. That after generations have gone by, the monuments will fall to dust, and the people forgotten. They will say, "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" and yet the name will be as foreign and forgettable. So let us not build monuments to ourselves, but strive to build memories and love within the people that are around us, so that we will be remembered for the love that we gave, and not the stuff that we made.

Good bye to Summer

Well, I went outside today and felt this unusual chill in the air, the kind of chill that sends the lake water to coolin' down, and the people rushing out to buy firewood (they could use the stocks they just lost, that would work too.) So good bye to summer. I wish I could have done more with it. Gotten a tan, lost some weight, made a friend or two. But it's okay... there will be other summers.

***

And with the end of summer comes football season, and last week's Monday Night Football game was the first game I'd seen of any major importance. Dallas Cowboys against the Philadelphia Eagles. Later, I heard the game was seen by more people than any other cable show had ever been. So naturally with a game that big, they had to pick some upstart pseudo-pop singer to sing the National Anthem. It was horrible, terrible, an offense to the American Flag and the citizens of the US. And after she was done, you could distinctly hear boos in the crowd. Here they are, in Texas Stadium, in the middle of the country, the heart of conservatism and patriotism, and they pick someone who mangled and tortured the national anthem. It would have been much better to have picked someone with a few years singing experience. A country group, perhaps. Everyone should stop trying to outdo Whitney Houston and just sing the song with pride in their heart.

***

I subjected myself to Star Trek Nemesis recently. A horrible plot with enough holes to drive starships through. The characters are hollow, the lines forced, and it looked like Data was hemorrhaging through each scene. Perfectly awful. I only watched it so that if any of the books that take place after it reference happenings inside of it, I'll know about them. Hopefully JJ Abrams can breathe some life into that wonderful universe.

Passions and Self-control: the Rock in the Storm.

If you ask me my favorite poem, or what poem I think is the best ever written, I will tell you without hesitation that it is T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I say this not only because of the endless references to cultural and literary events and works (which Eliot took to it's logical extreme in "The Waste Land), but also because it signifies a change in human thought. It is as important to the philosophical world as Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man" or the early works of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Basically, it tells of a man in a mid-life crisis, of a person who, while socializing with women, would be thinking of grandiose phrases and philosophical ideas after "the taking of toast and tea," only for the woman to say, "that is not what I meant at all," meaning some trivial aspect of the world. But on the other hand, the same man would be walking down the stairs, with nothing but the bald spot on his mind, while the women "come and go, talking of Michelangelo." There is a definite lack of communication here, and that is precisely what from World War I to the present can be typified as. Even in this world of mass communication devices, where the world wide web has made the world flat (Friedman) and cell phones has made the distances between us unimportant. But yet there is a certain communication breakdown that makes conveying of meanings and emotions very hard to do in these times. And for that discussion, we would have to go back to Neil Postman's ideas of the Medium and the Message. But I want to go in another direction.

Prufrock and the ladies he courted had a major flaw. Not only was there a lack of communication, there was a lack of emotion as well. Prufrock dared not disturb the universe, and fretted over whether to eat a peach. The women would rather talk about idle academic subjects or hold hollow conversations than looking into the grandiose ideas (of insidious intent) that Prufrock dared to think of. In the 20th century, and even into the present, the idea of emotional thought, anything past the artificial acts of outrage and commercially caused tears from movies on Lifetime, is hard to locate. Especially with guys, and children (especially boys) are taught that emotions are a sign of weakness. Even women, when given to emotional states, is looked down upon. I have been astounded to see family members whose son or daughter had been shot, and to see very little crying, and more outrage, more anger, coming from the surface, easy to express and quick to dissipate. And afterward, trips to the psychiatrist are taken, where powerful prescriptions are given to stabilize any emotional swings, effectively zombiefying the person until such time has passed that the emotions no longer well up, like some waves on a shore before a storm.

I would assert that the control of emotions, with certain exceptions throughout history, has been of the utmost priority. Religions have been created solely around the ideas of meditation and the control of emotions, striving toward a higher plain of existence. Even in the literary world, characters such as Jane Eyre, are constantly striving to hide any emotional outbursts and subdue their passions. It is this that makes Charlotte Bronte's novel so appealing. Contemporary cultural icons also exemplify the struggle between control and passion. Gene Roddenberry used Spock (wanting to be less human) and Data (wanting to be more so) as a way to experiment with the ideas surrounding emotional expression and control. It's what makes these characters so powerful, that the passions that lie within them have to be repressed, to be replaced by discipline and conformity to society. And it's so wrong, that people are considered weak if they cannot control their emotions. We are taught from when we are children that men do not cry. They must stand firm, stolid, like a rock in a storm. And while it will offer shelter, it will not offer support. It will not keep someone warm and safe while the storm rages overhead. It is one of the biggest failures of our society, to use our emotional strength to bring love and support to those that need it.

It's also wrong to have emotions controlled by religion, or prescription medication. It's the latter I want to look at, because the first would take so many volumes of useless rhetoric. As a culture, we have taken to the idea that medication, that science, will solve the problems of our inner selves. As we battle against our own consciousness, no longer is religion the rock by which we cling. We are weak, as a society, because we cannot face our own futures. We cannot face them alone. We wind up going to psychiatrists, who, for their own benefit, will prescribe medications that will mask the effects of our weakness, keeping us stable, but still struggling, against the problems that we have. And while I am not advocating being off our medications, because I will defend to the death the effectiveness and the necessity of Prozac in my life, I understand the disadvantages to hiding behind medication instead of facing our fears and weaknesses head on.

A hundred indecisions, And a hundred visions and revisions... ((sigh)) I guess what I'm saying is that we are all trying to find that support in the storm, and medication isn't going to help that. An umbrella will only keep so much rain off, and soon you'll be as drenched as if it were not there. A truly strong person will be able to shed tears, to hug and hold someone through the hardest of times, as well as be that rock that will weather all problems, and be there when the sun comes back out again.

I only hope that I will be able to be that person for someone, and that the people that I love will be able to do the same.

[This blog didn't go as I had planned it. It started out academic, cold, as a professor in a classroom, but melted as I understood what I was actually saying.]

Faust, Picard, and the Pursuit of Knowledge

What a paradoxical world we live in today. And I say this because the airways above us are filled with whizzing streams of wireless information. Aside the highways are lined cables where voices and rivers of data are flowing endlessly from one corner of the world to another. Our bookstores are filled with novels and volumes of endless trivia enough to fill our minds many times over. The books contradict themselves and each other, but yet we still have the time and patience to peruse through them. The internet and the media tell us what we want to hear, and what they want us to hear, although it is largely one and the same. We have become a society that is saturated with knowledge. One could even come close to say that we are drowning in an ocean of information.

Yet with all the news, sports, media coverage of X baby missing or Y being pregnant and Z bombing A because they don't like how they worship...etc..., I find myself wondering... are we really drowning, or are we simply searching for the information that we need... are we simply parched, adrift on some ocean where there is enough information to fill up the ocean, and yet none to satisfy us.

We spend the first 18 years of our lives going to school (and some of us considerably longer, in college), and learning from teachers and reading books made by the world's most renown thinkers, and then we graduate and go to our workplaces and learn very little more. The information that we receive outside of the academic world is little more than commercial nonsense, or information we need to carry on our jobs, forwarding the causes of society, earning our monies and paying our bills. But there should be something more to it than that. Recently there have been quite a few books come out dealing with general knowledge, and they have been big sellers. Perhaps it is because the publishers realize that common citizens see the few people that continue their educations, and still retain the knowledge in their heads, and then are shown in public on shows like Jeopardy!, and they yearn for that same knowledge. Perhaps they see people much like themselves on shows like Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? and they find themselves ashamed, deep down, and try to regain that learning that has sunken into their unconscious filing cabinets.

Perhaps this is a nostalgic yearning back to the times when academic learning was the primary goal of my life, back to the college days when the philosopher kings gave of their knowledge and I soaked it up like a sponge. I start to feel this way whenever I listen to college lectures that I've downloaded onto my computer and burned them onto CDs. Philosophy, history, literature... and the connections that link thought and reason and emotions together, like neurons firing in the brain... I guess the river metaphor is still applicable here, because neurons form river like systems in the brain that transfer electric currents that contain information, and with continuing education, those neurons form new connections, fire signals from one end of the pathways to another, ceaselessly learning and processing and connecting... it's all quite amazing, and absolutely satisfying.

So how do we get that education throughout our lives? Certainly, in this society, it is impossible to go to college the whole time. Because in this capitalist world, education costs money. Everything costs money. Lots of it. It would be more pleasing to the people who yearn for academic growth to have the philosophers and thinkers be able to give us their knowledge without the hassle of renumeration. Shouldn't the world endevor to give every man, woman, and child on Earth the education that they need to benefit the world, forward the progress of the human race, and make it a better place to live? What would happen if that ability to have a free education, all our lives, were to become a reality? What diseases would be cured? What marvelous works of literature and poetry would come out of the minds of the now uneducated? But maybe this illusion is more meant for the world of Star Trek than real life, for the reality is that an advantage like this is given only to those who can afford it. That the repressed are uneducated and poor because they have nothing to offer the free and rich in the way of recompense when it comes to getting an education.

But is it possible to get a free college education anyway? Certainly there must be a way to learn the knowledge of all humanity without spending lots of money to listen to professors that may or may not know what they are talking about. Thoreau's answer to this was to spend many hours at the public library, providing himself with the education he desired. There was no need to go to Harvard just to get an education, and for those that did, the rows of books at the library housed more knowledge than in the professors tiny brains. So indeed, it is possible to get a college education, through the public and college libraries, without the time and money of going directly to college.

There is, however, one problem. Often the time that it takes to go to the library (especially if it's a college one, the closest good college library is close to an hour away), and actually read the books and do the research is much more than what we have, living in the hectic world that we live in. If you looked at the life that Thoreau lived, he didn't have that problem. Sure there was work to be done, but there wasn't the hectic break-neck speed lifestyle that is so often experienced today. Don't get me wrong, I would do the full educational process with any subject given the resources and the time, but often I have neither. The one point in my daily activities in which I have time to devote to learning something is in my car driving to and from work. This only works with people who are audio learners, and only for people who don't take notes (which is very few people, actually.), but it is the best way I have found to process educational material in my daily routine. And this is done through the miracles of modern technology.

Plato's heirarchy in The Republic gives the highest position to philosopher-kings, whose job it was to rule and to teach, to not own property or marry, but rather to devote their time to both ruling and learning. Now while I'm not saying that is the best way for teachers to be, I do think that now, with the miracles of technology of the 21st century, it is time for college professors and teachers to begin making the plethora of knowledge that they have so painstakingly amassed available to the masses. The Internet is the most democratic device to have ever existed. Not since the days of the Academy in ancient Greece have professors been able to freely discuss ideas with students, educating the masses, and giving the individual the ability to learn and explore his or her own world. The current education system in America, where everyone is supposed to receive the same education, is obsolete and must be redone. Through the technology of today, professors can provide material on any subject at all to anyone in the world that is willing to take the time to understand it. Online assignments, quizzes, and tests, make the grading processes easy, at least as far as the understanding of the knowledge. And when it comes to applying that knowledge by writing essays or contributing to forums or chat rooms, this is when the Internet truly shines. I was fortunate enough to get into the developing stages of the WebCT program at GC&SU, and I can see such potential in the future development of this.

Also at GC&SU, Dr. Viau is among the first professors to use ipods and iTunes to provide material to his interdisciplinary courses. The use of MP3 technology to provide lectures instantly to anyone in the world is the main component of what I think would be a grand university that would rival Wikipedia in scope and stature. An "Open Source University" where professors and teachers would provide lessons and courses on every subject imaginable. It could be done while having normal classes, provided it was prepared well enough. The lectures could then be stored on University servers and linked to the Web. Modern broadband technology makes this possible.

As amazing as this sounds, I have serious doubts about it's implementation. There are already some colleges and programs that have started some of this. I can provide links at a later time, as I explore them. But the old regimes of universities, textbook companies, and state based schools would balk at the loss of revenue from tuition and the total annihilation of the educational system as we know it. Professors would at first resist, wanting to know where their paychecks would come from. But universities would still exist, and be just as wonderful a place as they always have been. They could still charge tuition and have brick and mortar buildings. But the main source of pay for professors would come from the state, whose job it would be to insure the intellectual property of the professors be upheld, as well as see that the needs of those professors be tended to. They should be some of the highest paid employees, much like that of entertainers. Because the results of free education for all citizens world wide would outweigh all investments that were put into revamping and maintaining such an amazing program. There is no reason, given the technology that we now have, why Moon landings should not have already happened. There is no reason why diseases should still linger when the potential knowledge of all the human beings on Earth could be used toward solving the problems that exist currently. And this is done by giving each and every person on this globe the chance to have a free education, to strengthen the natural talents and abilities that every person has, and to become the best individual that any one person could be. You see how idealistic this sounds. And yet how wonderful the rewards would be if it could actually happen.

What it would take now, for starters, is just a few professors starting a web site, much like Wikipedia, to store lectures and courses online for free. It could start in Milledgeville, with the wonderful professors that I miss hearing and talking to on a daily basis. GC&SU has the forward thinking and the ability to start something like this, and has the professors with the knowledge to give every person on this Earth a drink of knowledge. And once people have tasted that, it will become a need for people to expand their horizons.

I can already hear the people exclaiming that I have either proclaimed knowledge much as Faust would have done before making a deal with Mephistopheles, or Manfred, who was warned that the Tree of Knowledge is not the Tree of Life. Some would even warn that I should be careful, that knowledge is a sin that Eve partook of, and that is should be some religious undertaking I should be writing about. And it's true that moderation and balance is key to living any person's life. If we are all parched for knowledge, and our brains have grown weak from disuse, shouldn't we exercise our brains daily by giving it knowledge to process. And what better way to exercise our minds than to use that small portion of dormant time while driving to enhance and better our lives? Our body is our temple, so should not be our minds a temple as well? We cannot focus on exercise and diet and bettering ourselves physically without the exercise of our minds. And if personal growth is the core of living life, bettering one self, one's community, one's world, than isn't what I'm suggesting the best way to start this?

So until the time of Starfleet arrives, until the main goal of life is to better your own life and that of the world around you, rather than just making money, it is enough just to learn a little each day. To use time as wisely as possible to better you own self, mentally, physically...whatever. I'm not the best person to say this, but at least, if my physical life isn't the best in the world, I will still be able to learn and to process information. I hope I am not too egotistic to believe that, in the end, my writings, such as this blog, will allow me to pass on whatever I have learned and thought of to the people out there, so that they might benefit from my learning, from my thoughts and feelings. If that is all I can do, then that is enough.

Borg Perfection

Okay, so I'm gonna be geeky, and do a blog on the Borg, and the Voyager episodes that were on yesterday. I got to thinking, about the whole Borg storyline, and trying to connect it all together. And sure, this is the way to justify television programs with plot holes and seemingly unconnected events, but in this case, it makes sense. the Voyager episodes deals with 7of9's encounter with the Borg Queen. The social heirarchy of the Borg is one of an extreme pyramid. At the top, the Borg Queen rules everything, working the entire minds of the collective. Below this is the collective itself. This heirarchy is much like ants or bees on Earth.

What makes the episode interesting is the reasons that the Borg Queen contacted and persuaded 7 to meet with her. It was, she said, an experiment to see how a Borg drone would survive if cut off from the collective, and then was re-attached. Of course, it is every bad guys' intention to make everyone think it was his/her idea to make the good guys think he/she let them win. But if you think of it as a science-fiction geek would... it makes perfect sense.

The whole idea of individualism as a disease first occurred in the TNG episode with Hugh, the Borg. Go to Star Trek's Web Site to read about the episode. When Hugh was reconnected into the collective, the idea of individualism spread throughout the hive as a virus and ended up on a planet, seduced by Lore. Now, while the obvious plot hole is that before the drones were assimilated, they were individuals, but we won't concern ourselves with this. Memories can be erased, covered up.

The Borg Queen then decided to add to the race's perfection and eliminate the threat of individualism by seeing what effects it would have on a drone that was reassembled into the hive and then carefully controlled and examined. That is what 7 was supposed to accomplish. The ironic thing is that the Queen herself is an individual. It is this "fault" of hers that causes her to take such an active stance toward the destruction of the human race. She has been thwarted so many times by humans that she takes extraordinary steps to try and take over Earth. (That, and since we live here, it makes for better TV ratings.)

We can take this a step further (and you know I would), in seeing how Roddenberry's vision of the future fits in with the Romantic philosophy. In the Star Trek universe, society has been consistently viewed as a source of deception (thus the intelligence agencies of the Romulans, the Cardassians..etc), while the individual has been held in the highest regard. To the Borg, the individual was considered a great threat. And ultimately, it was the individual that was the Borg's undoing (either the Queen or Janeway.) Similarly, Star Wars had the same plot line, in that the Death Star was a weapon from an evil government, the Empire, but it was an individual, Luke Skywalker, that destroyed it.

I think that this, more than anything, is what makes science fiction so appealing, in that it is the individual that truly makes the difference (Fantasy, too, i.e. The Hobbit). The individual grows, learns, becomes more than what they ever thought they could be. Would that we could do the same, and grow beyond the society that we live in. It's a lesson that governments should learn as well: that individuals make more of a difference than numbers and demographics and the majority ever could.

It was just a brief thought, but one worth examining. In the Borg mindset, Society must be perfect, while it is the flawed individual that truly takes a race forward. This is why the Borg, for all their enhancements with technology (another topic to compare Star Wars, Star Trek, and the real world), and all their desire for efficiency and perfection, missed the evolutionary steps that only could come with one person making a flawed leap of faith. Without taking risks, they make no steps forward. This is why the Borg were ultimately doomed, because a society concerned with perfection and the grinding wheels of the majority, cannot anticipate the risks taken by the individual with the need to take a risk, the faith to try the unknown.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast...

I'm sitting here, watching the news.... it's 5:30, and I'm watching the news... so what's the big deal? Because I'm supposed to be watching Star Trek! Spike TV has been running Star Trek TNG and DS9 all afternoon long (yeah, they took off one hour of DS9 so they could put an extra hour of watching police videos, and I'm ticked about that, but...), but now they decide to have these marathons during the holidays so that people can watch James Bond or police videos, when I want to see Cardassians and starships!!! I have my days all planned out, and when Spike TV decides they're going to change things, then I actually have to do something else, like work, or chores or something. Talk about insensitive!

And while we're on the subject... how come the President has to always schedule his Press Conferences at 11:00am? Is there some written law that the Price is Right is perfectly expendable just because the leader of our country wants to get himself humiliated in front of a bunch of vultures? There is nothing more important than a game of Plinko while I'm eating lunch. I've been watching TPIR since I was born, and there were times when I was a kid that if they broke in with something important (plane crash, police chase, the Governor wipes his nose) I would get SO MAD!!! And it's still true today. I almost expect it. With Bob Barker retiring next year, lets let him get all the air time he can, and let's have Bush do his press conference after lunch.