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: Frankenstein, Faust, and the Tower of Babel

I watched / the greatest miracle
Take three quarters / of a year.
To bring forth life / in a tiny breath
For all the world to hear.

There is a motion here
There is a flow
There is a tension here
like a hard bent bow.
And suddenly, you realize
That this time... it's all right.

David Crosby, "Time is the Final Currency," from CPR

I don't really know how it feels to have brought a baby into this world. I probably never will, but I can imagine it. By having a child, a man and woman have become as much like God as is possible on this Earth. They have created a life form, created a soul, a person, and by that, they have imitated the creation of Adam by the clay by the river in Eden. God has meant us to create, just as he did in Eden so long ago. He gave us free will and reason, the ability to think for ourselves, even knowing that we would partake of the Tree of Knowledge and be thrust forth from Eden into the world, where Death and Satan are forever lurking. The Unmaker... the one standing opposite of the Creator's paradise, but within it as well, as a snake. But we are capable of handling such enemies, because we can create as well as destroy, as we can pass on the wisdom that the Tree of Knowledge held (both good and bad) to the generations following us, by creating life ourselves... our own children.

We don't just create children. As I've shown in previous blogs, we imitate God by creating other things as well, from the imaginary worlds of cyberspace and literary works, to the books themselves, to statues and monuments . We move as one force on sports teams, creating joy and excitement, works of art as balls go into nets and through hoops at precise arcs and speeds. And while the ultimate reason is to imitate God, to create a world in our own image, we do it for other reasons as well. We have an underlying fear of death, a resulting desire for immortality in whatever form we can create. This could mean having kids and passing down knowledge and memories, but it could just as well mean writing blogs, like I do, or making novels, or art, or monuments like the one in Dakar. We desire fame in the present to overcome the idea of death. For fame will make the memories of our lives more widespread, so that everyone will know who we were. Maybe that is why the obituaries I see in the papers sometimes are long, too long, filled with endless nothings about their lives and euphemisms that make it painful to read. As if an obit. details the thread of that persons life by how long it is. I would rather have mine short, and mean something, than pages long, but say nothing.

But what of Frankenstein? I considered the reason why we create things, and it brought up the work by Mary Shelly. Once again I am left with standing upon the clifftops as The Traveler on a Sea of Fog is in Caspar David Friedrich's painting. What if man is not trying to imitate God, but rather trying to become God? When Dr. Frankenstein created his "modern Prometheus," he did so to pursue the unlimited possibilities of science and knowledge available to mankind. He brings the abomination to life, only to realize that he had brought death upon his family and friends. In trying to reach the miraculous feats that he eventually attained, he found that, like the Tower of Babel, he would be severely punished.

By creating life as an end to achieve knowledge, or in other words, with life not being the end result, he achieved little but despair. There were a couple of lines in Lord Byron's "Manfred," in which a character says, "the Tree of Knowledge is not the Tree of Life." This takes the idea back to that of Eden, of the Tree that Adam and Eve partook of. "Manfred" is a play that mirrors the Faust story told by Goethe and others. Faust, of course, is a scientist and doctor who, having learned all he can from the schools and practices of his time, resorts to witchcraft, and, thus having summoned a demon (Mephistopheles), makes a deal, ultimate knowledge for his soul. In the end, he has used his maligned agreement not to further his education, not to further his knowledge of life and the great unknowns that mankind has yet to penetrate, but rather to play cheap practical jokes on the Pope. His wish to fly, for instance, is one that comes from man's emotional desires, not any scientific basis. He chooses instant gratification, fame, fortune, and the glitz of the day instead of using his knowledge to create something good for the world. The road to destruction is often the easiest path. It is the most fun, the most dramatic, but it often leaves little behind but misery. This is the Unmaker's intentions. If he can unmake the world, especially with the people who have the most potential to remake it into something glorious, he has achieved twice what a normal person can do. He has knocked the traveler high from his look at paradise, and cost the world the experience and knowledge of such a splendid mind.

So to modern day, in real life. Dr. Craig Venter has recently created a bacteria organism from a computerized generation of DNA strands. In other words, Venter created Artificial life. See an interview with the scientist here:

Does this mean that Dr. Venter is Frankenstein, or that his creation will spell doom for all mankind, as the media is so apt to suggest? No, of course not. But the idea is a valid one. It is easy to suggest that in time, scientists will create a DNA strand that might as well have green skin and bolts for ears. They will see just how bad bad can get. Then we'll see Stephen King's The Stand come to life. If you think about that novel, the antagonist is the Unmaker. He's the same one that exists in Eyes of the Dragon, and verbally talks about raising havoc in each world he comes to.

It can very well happen here. In fact, I would call it inevitable. Like Adam, we crave knowledge. We want to be as much like God as possible, and that drive makes us want to know more and more about the unknowns. We yearn to create life, to find the particles, quarks, photons, in the tiniest parts of this universe. And we gaze upward and outward, wanting someday to reach the farthest stars. And God gave us the free will and the self-determination to do so. He gave us the faculties to create the most wonderful, and most horrific, creations ever conceived, but most importantly, he gave us the mental capacity to determine the outcome of doing so. We must strive forth, ever towards the unknown, but with a mind to the consequences of reaching those far points. Unfortunately, mankind will reach those unknowns and someone, with the Unmaker's intentions in mind, will create something that is great, but terrible (as the Sorting Hat said.). It will be up to us all to fight the Unmaker and his creations.

***
So.... I guess that's it for this series. I have no knowledge about bio-genetics, nor have I the ability to make sculptures and paintings. But I can write. I can make poems and blogs. So I will leave these things here, as my own creation. It won't give me immortality, but, I think, when I'm gone, there will need not be a Speaker for me to tell of my life. It will be on these pages. And I can also make bread. Loafs of nourishment from flour, yeast, and water. How wonderful is that? It makes me feel like I've created something, as God did at his Picnic of the multitudes. If we cannot create the monuments of this world, let us create what we can, be it bread, or blogs, or boys and girls that we can pass on our knowledge and love.

B&B: Basketball and Beelzebub

It's amazing what fits into a line of thought, so precipitous it was that game 7 of the NBA finals was played a couple of nights ago.  Lakers vs. Celtics, the classic, immortal battle of East Coast vs. West Coast.  And the Lakers won in a supposedly amazing comeback by Kobe Bryant.  As you can tell, I care nothing for basketball.  It's not my sport.  Give me the coliseum-like atmosphere of Jerry Jones' palace and a game of Football (that's American football to the people watching the linoleum peel in South Africa).  Football has so often been likened to the Ancient Roman sport of gladiatorial fighting, with two warriors fighting out to the death, or, when that got boring, watching Christians battle it out with the Lions. Real ones, not those in Detroit.  Cause the Lions usually won.  Or there have been the cases where Football has been compared to war, with terms of battle used in the game itself. Find George Carlin's comparison of baseball vs. football on youtube.  Carlin does an amazing job with this. 

There is a blog post, here, which deals with the "Tribalism" of football.  In short, football brings out the "violent tribal reservoir of the hindbrain", or the part of the sub-conscious mind that is wired toward domination, control, destruction.  John Stonger says that we attend sporting events such as football (hockey, wrestling, NASCAR) to see the destruction of another human being through the might and athletic ability of another.  There are teams to be sided on, and profit to be made by being on those teams.  It's the exaltation of mankind through the destruction of another.  And maybe this is taking it a little to extremes, but I think a comparison between tribal desires to raid other people's villages and the organized violence of football can be made.  I don't fully agree with Stonger's essay, or for those who commented below, all of which is worth reading, but I do see where winning and losing in sports can be compared with the forces that "Make" and "Unmake" our world.

 ***
As humans, we desire a sense of organization, of order, in our lives. Even as the world around us falls apart.  For example, take my room.  If I do nothing about my room, it will eventually become a pig sty.  This is because the natural order is for things to break down, for chaos to set in.  "The center cannot hold," as Yeats said.  Diane Duane, in her Wizard series, calls this Entropy, after the physics term in which a system breaks down given time and effects on a that system by friction, gravity, etc... It can also be termed "decay".  It makes sense, as only through decay and Entropy can new systems emerge, renewed.  If Las Vegas kept every resort and casino place ever made, those buildings would eventually crumble of their own making, because it is increasingly difficult to maintain a structure when the elements are continuously trying to break it down.  So the structures are torn down, and new buildings are made in their places.  Again, I digress...
***

Lets go back to the Laker/Celtics game.  The Lakers won, at home, and the spectators spilled out into the streets.  Revelatory (well, for those who were Laker fans), welling with pride for their city and for the athletes who had just been crowned the champions of their sport, most people went home.  Some however, decided that, in a drunken state, that the proper way to celebrate would be to destroy their own city.  Cars were burned, glass windows smashed, goods from store fronts looted.  Where is the pride from seeing those that represent your "tribe" conquer those from another?  You've just seen the best of mankind, athletically, and so now you are going to show us the worst possible behaviors as recompense? It makes no sense, that, after seeing the Creation of a champion team, people would want to spill out into the streets (most not coming from the arena, but rather from houses, bars, and back alleys) and Uncreate their city.  What force lies behind these actions? 

This happens far more often than one might think.  After important football games at the University of West Virginia, the sofas from the residential halls are routinely brought out into the campus and burned.  Most goal posts in football stadiums are now either retractable or easily removed, so that they cannot be broken down and destroyed by fans as they stampede onto the field after a game.  Granted, most of this happens with a generous amount of alcohol, but surely there has to be some underlying reason why, when a game is won, something has to be destroyed.  In a much more benign example, New York City has long had Ticker Tape parades whenever something major happens (from the Yankees winning the World Series, or the Astronauts coming back from the moon).  The symbolic throwing of paper from the windows is one of destroying records and useless files, and throwing them down upon the heads of heroes.  The same metaphoric idea takes place at Texas A&M with the lighting of the giant Bonfire prior to the Texas game. 

What is the motivation behind the riots in Los Angeles? I've been trying to figure this out. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the idea of Entropy, or "Unmaking," as an opposite force to Creation.  Do an image search for Los Angeles Laker riots, and you'll see many images of people happily acknowledging the act of destruction and mayhem throughout the city.  With their beer bottles and their cigarette lighters in one hand, and a cell phone in the other, they proudly take pictures of themselves in front of a burning car, and then post it on the Internet for the world to see (or at least, they are posing for reporters instead of hiding their faces since they did something illegal).  Is this simply a case of jealousy, a sarcastic message that says, "Wow, you made millions of dollars putting a ball into a hoop while I sit inside a miserable apartment with two kids and no money and a terrible job, and so I'll go out and make myself known to the world?"  Is it a barbaric need to pillage and burn, even your own city, after your "tribe" had conquered the neighboring one?  A misguided instinct brought on by materialism and the violence that wells up from the subconscious.  Honestly, I have no idea. 

I do know that if you look at news reports from June 2009, you'll see the exact same riots going on, since the Lakers won the NBA Championship last year, too.  You would think (and this is sidebar) that the LAPD would have expected such a thing to happen again, and brought out all of their forces to keep such a thing from happening.  If a riot is expected, at least try to stop it.  Unless it's more beneficial to have a riot take place in order to unwind pent up emotions from daily life.  Again, I don't know the answer. 

I do know that there are forces in this world that Create and Uncreate.  Orson Scott Card, in his Alvin the Maker series, has many discussions about the nature of the Unmaker.  He personifies the Unmaker as that of Satan, or as Diane Duane calls it, Death.  That most of us live our whole lives trying to promote building, creation, growth, there are some that would rather propagate destruction, decay, death.  (I looked at this before, October 22, 2007, in this post.) They not only want to destroy all that we have built, the glory of the moment, but they want us to watch them do it.  They want the attention that those who have Created something magnificent have.  They want the power that destroying something brings with it.  The terrorists of 9/11 thrive on it.  And if we forget, they will not hesitate but to send out another taped message, or send a suicide bomber to a busy marketplace in Baghdad.  And always there will be cameras to capture the carnage, and always the Unmakers will proudly claim responsibility.  "Look at us! We have Unmade what you have created!"

Next time, I want to take a look at the Unmakers more closely, at the ways that they "Unmake" a creation, from fame and fortune, to the physical manifestations of mankind.  Lets look more closely at the wind howling around the monument of Ozymandias, and see whether it was Entropy, or mankind's own desire for destruction, that made the desert swallow it whole.

B&B: The Magicians and The Mold

So to recap, God created us in His own image, so we, in turn, have this insatiable desire to Create things in our own image. The Gods themselves, those that were made by the Greek citizens in the polytheistic societies, were ones that had affairs, were greedy, lustful, and did all that mankind would do, but on a supernatural level. They were made in our own image, partially to justify our own behaviors, and also to entertain us of people much more powerful than us that control our universe. That they ultimately fall, and are consumed by those emotions, turning demigods into trees and fair maidens into spiders, those are stories made up to bring the perfect down off their pedestals and make them like us. Just as Joan Osborne did in her song.

This also applies to the rich and famous in today's world. The fall of the mighty off of the pedestals that we made for them (and consequently, tore down), is similar to the stories the ancient Greeks would have made about the Gods on Mt. Olympus. That our "Gods" live in "The White House," or play on "Pebble Beach Golf Course" is immaterial. They do the same thing, from supernatural and society-moving activities to the very human and very base actions of following their own hormones and emotions.

But I digress. Let's switch subjects.

***

Take a gander over at Google Earth, and walk down the streets on maps that are intricately carved out by satellites speeding across the sky taking pictures of every square millimeter of our planet. Everything is so precise, so final. It lacks the emotional response of the maps made back in the middle ages, where you see the edges of the maps fall off into whiteness, filled with strange creatures, sea dragons, people with one foot and one large eyeball. Those are the frontiers that we still yearn to explore. They could not know what lay beyond the cities and roads they traveled, so they made it up. Created the edges of our worlds with their imaginations, or with stories and rumors from across Europe. What excitement to extend the boundaries that are known, and drawn the coast lines farther, as if some 6 year old with a crayon were creating it from some mystical place. (Actually, there is a book like that. Pick up Harold and the Purple Crayon sometime. It'll only take a second, but it's a magnificent book that shows the idea of "Creating" so simply and elegantly.)

The authors of the present, since the real world is now shown in satellite preciseness and clarity, must create worlds of their own. The maps that you find in the beginning of books are worlds that you will be visiting in those pages. What is the town of "Bree" like on the map of Tolkien's LOTR? How would the world of Narnia look standing at the thrones of the 4 kings and queens? These worlds are as real to us as the maps of the middle ages showed those magnificent creatures swimming at the edges of the unknown. Except the authors of modern day fantasy stories have an advantage. The world is theirs to create entirely. They are the God of that universe, and they can control everything. Such is the mold of every fantasy novel. Much like the potter, spinning his clay on a wheel to make a vase (cue "Unchained Melody"), or a baker kneading the dough out to make bread (with cheese and Rosemary). They all are creating something from a mold, much as God did Adam out of the mud of the riverbank in Eden.

These molds, drawn in intricate detail by each author, are now just as real to us as an atlas of our own Earth. We know what Middle Earth looks like, or Narnia. We know where Hagrid's house is, off to the side of Hogwarts School of Wizardry. And when we read a new book, with a familiar map on the inside of it's cover, we know that we are in for adventures with dragons and elves and dwarfs and whatever else that the creator, the author, has thrown in.

The key to this is our Suspension of Disbelief. We cannot descend into this other world until we have put on pause the belief that this reality is the only one that exists. We have to replace God with "Author" and our universe with another. One good example of this, in story form, is C.S. Lewis' book The Silver Chair, part of the Narnia series. The underground world is one that the witch created, but there are other worlds that we only get a glimpse at, which are farther down and even more strange.
***

Book Review: The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

Lev Grossman took the mold that Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling had kneaded into their universes, and threw them at the real world. He is very aware that, seeing the map on the inside cover of the book, that we are expecting something along the lines of the Narnia series. He knows that, by suggesting a school of wizardry, we are expecting a Harry Potter knock off that will ultimately end in the main character, Quentin Coldwater, saving the universe and blah blah blah... But this is not what happens at all. Because along with the molds of those lands, he throws in the gritty reality of our world. There is no disbelief to suspend at the beginning since Quentin is more interested in sleeping with Julia than studying Potions with Professor Snape. He reads the same pseudo-Narnian stories that we have, and his continued wish for that world to be true is somewhat pitiful. We pity this brilliant outcast, this boy full of teenage angst and self-loathing. We see too much of ourselves in this child.

There is no "Happily Ever After" in this book. Mainly because there is no happily ever after in real life. Things happen. People die. Hearts are broken. And very rarely is everything tied up into neat little packets like the endings of Full House episodes. It's much like the end of Law & Order, where very little is resolved and you're left feeling like you've run into a brick wall. But unlike L&O, this book does have a sequel, coming out Summer of 2011.

The section of the book where Quentin is in Brakebills School is my favorite part, if nothing else than because it is filled with such potential. The mold at this point is raw, unfashioned. The characters could be much more filled out by this time; they are mere shadows of what they could be. And while some people will not like this, it's the potential for what they could become that fascinates me. It leaves the imagination open to what this school would really be like, if I lived in it and became a part of it. It's the calm before the chaos that I see so much in books recently. The place where you most want to live, the place where you reluctantly leave because, if you didn't, there wouldn't be a story. It's this section of a book that gives the author a chance to shine. Grossman doesn't fulfill this need as well as someone like Orson Scott Card would, with brilliant dialogue and conversation. He is learning, however. Even at the end of the story there is much more depth in each soul.

Like many of the books Borders has promoted recently, this book is not perfect. It has its flaws and its moments of shining glory. Lev Grossman has done what many authors have done previously, what God did so many eons ago. He created a world with so much potential, but also with the imperfections that make it unique, make it interesting, almost human. If the twists of the normal fantasy world is of interest, try Stephen R. Donaldson's Mirror of Her Dreams and John Connolly's Book of Lost Things.
***
The next in this series will talk about the need to Make (create) versus the desire to Unmake (destroy). As for now, I'm gonna enjoy my new AC unit I have in my room.

Bread and Blogs: Creation and the Creator

"Habalo..." It's Sim-language for "Hello." A person creates a person to live in an artificial world, with an artificial job, doing artificial things (with built in masks to cover nekkidity.) Anyone old enough to remember Bonanza will shake their head and groan, not understanding the metaphysical needs behind being endlessly addicted to a game like The Sims. Honestly, it never really did anything for me, as I found it to be too restrictive. Why only simulate part of your life, when you can live your life to the fullest in the real world? Course, that is rhetorical. I fell much more in love with Spore, where I could build creatures from the cellular level. See my blogs: Spore Blog 1 and Spore Blog 2 for the reviews on that game. Actually, I'll wait while you read those, because they are central to my line of thought. Go ahead...

Anyway, if we go back to Genesis, to the sixth day, God created us in his own image. I wonder how far that goes, how exactly like God we actually are? And to a further extent, how much is God like us? (cue Joan Osborne). He must have known (actually He did know) that Adam would have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge (and Eve, too), and thus become cast out. He must have known that our curiosity about everything would propel us to evolving into what we are today, and even farther. It seems ironic, but if you think it, God created us in His own image, but made us flawed. Of course, the reason being, since He made us with self-awareness and free will (in His image), we have the ability to freely err from perfection. If we didn't have this, and we stayed perfectly in Paradise this whole time, there wouldn't be anything for God to be proud of. He would have a whole army of Robots, without any thoughts of greatness or progression. It's simply not the way things go.

So, as we are created in God's image, we become ourselves, Creators. The basic drive for raising families, raising cats, building houses and writing books. The need to create is a powerful emotion, one that overshadows the Devil's need to destroy (but more on that later). We have the same basic desire to be proud of what we create, living or non living. Just as God would be proud of us.

It's this emotion that drives us, in our daily rituals at the computer, to devote so much time to the characters we have online. We build up an elf on World of Warcraft, level after level, adorning him or her with ornate armor, magnificent weapons, and adept skills, only to have it sit on some server for all eternity while we try out the latest edition of Everquest. It seems useless, that we would spend so much of our lives on creating a character that is not real, but as we slay the dragon in the deepest dungeon of WOW, we experience the pride that God would feel about His followers. It matters little how transitory the pride or the character is. It is, of course, a shadow of God's emotions, but, as Plato would point out, we are but shadows of the real thing.

Bread and Blogs: Introduction

I ate a loaf of bread recently. Not one that you would buy at a grocery store, rows upon rows of white, wheat, or other tastes confections of some giant factory in another state somewhere. This was a loaf made by one of my associates, Andrew (who has the house I mentioned some blogs ago), hand made and baked in his own kitchen. The loaf had a row of cheese baked into the middle, and was infused with Rosemary, a spice I cannot get enough of. The aroma is enough to make me warm and comfortable, content with the world. Makes me wonder if it is not Prozac the world needs, but a good diet of Rosemary each morning. The thought occurred to me, "Why would someone make bread like this?" Certainly, because of its exquisite taste and superior quality to anything made in today's supermarkets. But there has to be something more than that. It surely would cost more to make it yourself, unless you grew the herbs and the wheat...etc... , than to simply go buy a loaf of bread, stick some spices and cheese onto a sandwich, and bingo.

The answer, I think, lies in the making of the bread. But of course, it is much more than just the bread itself, but of the creation of it. A good baker creates the bread, from ingredients that are totally "unbreadlike". Similarly, an architect builds a house out of wood, or stone, glass, any other natural ingredients, creating a structure out of Nature's resources to stand tall and firm in the sunshine. Imagine the feeling that a person would have, when, having pulled the bread out of the oven, or after driving the last nail, he stands back and marvels at what he created. What pride in his work! Or, take holding a book in the hands of one who wrote it for the first time, with the slick, illustrated cover, the words of pages flowing one to another from beginning to end. These are our creations, and it's this feeling I want to take a look at. This will take more than one blog, so I'll split it up as I have done before. Briefly, here are the questions I want to look at:

• What are the origins of "creation?" Or more specifically, what feelings make up the whole idea, and where do they come from?

• How do our religious beliefs encourage our need to create?

• Why do some people feel the need to "unmake," or destroy, while others are driven to create and to "make?"

• How does Creating drive our daily activities, the aspects of our lives, from birth to death?

• How can we create things in today's society? Or does society today encourage or dissuade Creating things?

I'll want to look at creating everyday items, such as the bread, as well as Literary works (especially Fantasy worlds such as Tolkien's or C.S. Lewis' worlds), and then the colossal creations of mankind, from Jerry Jones' stadium in Dallas, Texas to the Statue created recently in Senegal, Africa. So follow me, if you want to, and we'll see where this leads.