ForgetfulRainn's Chapters

About Stephen King

2009-05-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

May 3^rd 2009

One of the most famous living writers, possibly the one who sold the most books too, Stephen King is this chapter’s topic. But before I go any further into the matter, you have to know I haven’t read a lot of King’s writings, although the portion I read of his works far exceeds what I read of H.P. Lovecraft, and I read every single story the latter ever wrote.

My very first experience of Stephen King’s writings was a French translation of Firestarter, and it took me about 10 pages before I dropped the book. I thought it was awful. I remember feeling like it read really badly, and that’s probably due to the translation, although the plot wasn’t too interesting to me either (for the little of it I had discovered of it). For many years, this was all I knew personally of King’s writings, and judging by the movies based on his books, and what everyone seemed to say about them, I felt the underlying scorn was justified.

How wrong I was.

One day not too long ago I decided to give this author a more serious try. I picked up a copy of Different Seasons – made of four novellas – and started reading “Apt Pupil”, mostly because it had to do with Nazism, and because I had vaguely seen the movies years before, and it didn’t seem like a bad story.

I got hooked pretty quickly and read the whole thing in a few sessions. I wasn’t sure it was mind-blowingly awesome, but I damn sure knew I wanted to finish it, and that, in my humble opinion, means the story is good at least on some levels. That was my real serious first experience of King in the original text, and I had enjoyed it.

So then I thought I’d read the other novellas in that book. Having seen the Shawshank Redemption movie already, I skipped it (I would read it later) and began “The Body”. This one too has been turned into a movie – in the 80’s – but I had strictly no idea that it had at the time I read it. “The Body” is the story that made me think King was in truth a great author. There is nothing supernatural in it, but I wouldn’t say there is no horror, as a cold hard look at life can be the most horrific vision, and thus realism can be horror too. The story is about a group of friends going on an expedition to see a corpse that hasn’t yet been discovered by the authorities. The whole narrative is told by one of these kids, who since then has become a successful and famous writer. To this day, it is my favourite King’s longer piece (though I haven’t read even a quarter of his work). It’s well-written, it’s immersing, the characters have... character, without becoming stock, the narrative moves back and forth between a long since dead past (childhood) and a nostalgic present, etc. I have nothing but good things to say about this particular story. It deals with life, death, childhood, the past, writing as a job, friendship, and other important themes. It’s a very impressive story, and I can only recommend it.

After this, I read the rest of the novellas in that thick book. Good stuff too.

Then I decided to actually buy a book myself. Since I’m a huge fan of short stories (Poe, Lovecraft, Hemingway, Hawthorne, Buzzati, to name a few) and since King is something like the literary son of Lovecraft and grandson of Poe (although varying in style, they occupy a similar spot in literature, or something), I thought I’d get a book of short stories by King. That’s how I got to Night Shift. The first collection of stories by King, to my knowledge; it contains some really good ones, and some not so good ones. If you’re familiar with H.P. Lovecraft’s work, you’ll recognise the influence here and there, in some stories. That is not a bad thing at all, except when it feels like bad fanfiction, which I thought it did in “Jerusalem’s Lot”, not to be mistaken with the novel of almost the same name. I wrote an amazon review about this book, so I won’t rewrite it here, but I can’t not show you that King quote to be found in the foreword by the author:

"All my life as a writer I have been committed to the idea that in fiction the story value holds dominance over every other facet of the writer's craft; characterization, theme, mood, none of those things is anything if the story is dull. And if the story does hold you, all else can be forgiven."

My favourite story in this volume is without a doubt “The Last Rung on the Ladder”. I’d compare it to “The Body” in terms of goodness. That one, too, has no supernatural or strictly horror elements, but by God it’s a great story. To my knowledge, neither Stephen King nor J.D. Salinger appear in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, not even with a short story, and it’s a damned shame. King deserves to have at least a short in there, and I think “The Last Rung on the Ladder” is a likely candidate. I could write a whole chapter about the Norton Anthology and the general scholarly scorn of certain popular authors. I agree with King on the idea that skilled writing is nothing if the story is a bore. And now is the time when you decide whether I am a mere ignorant or an opinionated person with, perhaps, good taste. I enjoy King’s stories more than I enjoy Joyce’s. I read Dubliners, and I had to force myself to read for most of the book. I did like some of them, or parts of some of them, but on the whole, it’s not the sort of thing I’d want everyone in the world to read. It’s the sort of book that makes kids hate literature when they have to endure it as mandatory reading material for school. But enough on that issue.

After this volume, I saw that King had another collection of short stories, Skeleton Crew, and so I purchased that. At almost 800 pages, it’s one fat paperback. As of this writing, I read 440 pages. It contains “The Mist”, which has recently been turned into a movie (with a vastly different ending, from what I was told), and many others. My favourite so far is “The Jaunt”, one of the rare sci-fi stories written by King (I can only think of two, and that’s just me, I don’t know his entire body of works), and it reads like a Twilight Zone episode, which is probably no coincidence since, after inspection, that story was published in the Twilight Zone magazine. It basically deals with teleportation, and it will remind you of Portal, the Valve game that everyone thinks so much of (with reason, for all I know).

And that’s about it for my reading of King’s writings. As mentioned before, I haven’t read a whole lot, though it exceeds 1000 pages.

With this modest chapter, I wanted to say that one should not believe the general scorn towards King, because he is a good writer! Fair enough, I hear some books are really bad, and judging from the movies (which you shouldn’t do) it’s hard to be attracted to the books they’re based on (unless it’s the Shawshank Redemption). But yeah, King is worth at the very least a try. I have never read any of his novels so far, but you should try some of the short stories I recommended here; mostly “The Last Rung on the Ladder”, “The Jaunt”, and for a more classic King kind of story, “The Children of the Corn”, and for a longer piece, “The Body”, which is a classic to me now.

The Hollow Earth

2009-04-26T06:38:00.000-07:00

26^th April 2009

The previous chapter dealt with earth as being possibly flat, this one will deal with its possible hollowness, and the theories around it. In fact, it will be more about the theories around it than its potential hollowness because I’m no geologist and don’t really have any arguments either way.

Be ready for some serious unprofessionalism as I will do everything by memory here, and it will be very general, abstract, all over the place, and it won’t even cite its sources. If you need a good reason for that unprofessionalism, feel free to imagine that I’m writing this chapter on a desert island, where dinosaurs start chasing me if I dare look up Wikipedia or other links on Google. And if I plunge my nose into a book, an evil deity of said desert island steals me a limb. Otherwise you can just assume that I feel lazy about this chapter.

So where to begin? That’s indeed a problem because I could start this from any end. Let’s begin with Hitler and the Nazis, as this is always interesting. At some point, these gentlemen thought that the earth might be hollow, but not the way we think of it. Imagine an infinity of earth – the matter – and in this earth, imagine a spherical hollow. Now, Nazis thought maybe that’s what the earth is like, and we’re living on the inner sides of this hollow bubble in the earth. With this in mind, they thought that if you aimed telescopes into the sky, you could perhaps spy on Great Britain. If this sounds obscure, just draw a circle, then draw a stickman inside it, with his feet on the edge, and then another stickman 90° to the left or right, and that should illustrate my point. Yes, I’m too unprofessional to actually draw it myself. And I wouldn’t want to deprive you from some stickman fun. Nah, I’m just unprofessional.

The usual model, though, is that the earth is as we imagine it, but hollow inside. Pleonasm? Likely. Problem? No. You can’t be hollow outside exactly, or everything is already, and this is more thought than I bargained for. So back on tracks. The thing is that we really don’t know a lot about what lies beneath our feet. We know more about deep space than we do about our inner earth. What do we actually know of that? According to science, our earth is divided into 4 zones: the crust, the mantle, the outer core, and the inner core. How did they find out about that? They didn’t go there. If I remember correctly, they sent sounds and analysed how these sounds came through at the other end and deduced what the stuff of the earth was like (in this sentence, I use a different meaning of “stuff” that you might be accustomed to, meaning material, what something is made of, etc.). And that’s how they came up with this idea of the earth’s innards.

I don’t think we actually went through the crust. As said before, we explored space far more than we did the underground. This becomes really fascinating when you start thinking about the gargantuan proportions of the inside of our planet. If that place was hollow, and/or inhabited, think of the space! Entire civilisations could live in there. We only live on a surface.

And now let’s plunge into the fancy theories people have about the hollow earth. These are the good, crunchy bits. There’s this fantastic theory that the Nazis somehow escaped to Antarctica and possibly found an entrance to the inner earth. Flying saucers and aliens are often involved in these, but it would take its own chapter to go into details about that one.

Edgar Allan (not Allen) Poe wrote a story called “MS. Found in a Bottle” (and for general information, you put short stories or poems or anything that’s only part of a bigger piece between quotation marks and any stand-alone volume in italics; for instance, a song from an album would be between quotation marks, while the album would be italicised; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from Nevermind) Poe’s narrator ends up falling into some black hole of doom. Poe was inspired by old maps of the world which showed two giant black holes in lieu of the poles. In fact, I think Poe adds a note to this story, in which, perhaps, he says he didn’t know about that fact before he wrote the story and only found this out afterwards, which is interesting. And yes, I can’t go check my Poe book. Remember, the evil deity who’d steal my limbs. I like my limbs.

This idea remains in some people’s theories. Why didn’t anybody suddenly fall into one of these pole holes? Simple. The curvature of that hole would be so slight and over such a long distance that if you walked towards the hole, you’d never actually notice that you’re walking into a giant hole. The idea here is that the center of gravity of the earth does not reside in its exact core, but rather inside the earth layers, if I may call them that way. And I’ll correct myself right now, that’s not the actual center of gravity, that’d be just what pulls you “down”. We understand each other. Well, mostly you me. So you’d walk off this side of the earth and into the hollow, and you’d not even notice it because, apparently, the sky is blue there too. And they even have an inner sun. Or so say some theories.

Other theories suggest that there are giant cities underground, but that there is no giant hollow in our earth, just that it’s inhabited, massively. Who lives there? Why, aliens of course. Or “ancient astronauts”, or Reptilians. Or Nazis! Who the duck knows, I did my research on the Internet. Let’s go wild. “Ancient astronauts” is a term that originates with the phrase “the ancient astronauts theory” which is a theory that suggests humanity has been visited by superior species in the past. This was one of my first serious interests in life, when I was a kid. (And before I go on, let me emphasise that I do know that this is a digression that has little to do with the subject (NICOLAS, PLEONASM AGAIN!) – I am fully aware of that, but I, like Holden Caulfield, enjoy digressions, and so I indulge in them.) So, when I was a kid, I one day found a couple of paperbacks in the basement. One of them was entitled La Théorie des Anciens Astronautes, in French, please, because when I was a kiddo, that’s all I could speak or read. I don’t think you need a translation, thanks to the French invading England some centuries ago and injecting so much of their language into yours. Don’t feel violated, it’s all right. So, as a kid, I thought this was going to be a book about spacemen and all that cool stuff. I thought they were “ancient” in the sense that maybe they were just old spacemen. Boy, was I wrong. A whole new perspective on the world was exposed to me and I shat bricks of excitement at the idea that maybe there was such an enormous truth out there, waiting for us to discover it. I don’t remember what age I was, somewhere between 7 and 10. My interest in this never entirely faded, and it culminated when I was about 15 and gave an impressive presentation on that very topic to a mesmerised class of 8^th graders. (And I’m never sure about that American way of counting the school years, maybe I erred with this, so just think of the year when most kids are 14 or 15. That’s the year I mean.)

I read lots of Erich von Daniken – which I probably misspell, but remember the dinosaurs who’d start chasing me if I dare check it on Google – and later on found out that this author wasn’t very professional. Like me. And, like me, he’s Swiss. Hey, maybe he was writing from a desert island filled with anti-intellectual dinosaurs too. You never know. Switzerland might be quite different from what you thought it was.

Now I totally lost track of what I was saying. Ok, ancient aliens visiting us from outer space, or inner space, as some suggest. Some of you might know about Reptilians already. According to some interesting folks I heard on the radio (Art Bell’s radio show, yes), there are megapolis(es?) underground inhabited by Reptilians. If you never heard of that term – Reptilian – they’re thought to be humanoids of daunting proportions compared to us, very strong, scaly all over, and none too hot. Theorists typically link every serpent image in ancient history to that species, whether it’s the serpent of Adam and Eve, or traditional representations of dragons, demons, etc.

I stop here to say that I’m not discussing the veracity of these claims. That’s another topic entirely. I’m just disclosing this stuff to you, because stuff like that thrills me, whether it’s completely retarded, has some truth to it, or is factual. It makes the mind exercise in terms of world perception, and that’s what I’m into with this chapter and the previous chapter, about the Flat Earth Society people.

I recommend googling the “Dulce base”, provided there are no dinosaurs around you. You’d find more about Reptilians and conspiracies with this one. I don’t know if there is any truth to all this, but it sure makes for a good read.

Some people claim that we humans already have a massive network underground, made of tunnels and high tech metros and what not. In fact, and this is indeed fact, the USA have a very vast series of giant underground bases. Those bases were mostly built during the Cold War, to face the advent of a nuclear catastrophe. That’s where people would have saved their asses in case of a conflict. Supposedly, every state has at least one such underground base. Stories of people exploring underground structures and meeting weird stuff abound. But then again, what to make of them is anyone’s best wild guess. That huge underground network would be used by “those” too, meaning the aliens/Reptilians/whatever they are in any given theory.

On a more factual basis, we do know that pockets of worlds do exist inside our earth, as in Jules Vernes’s novel Voyage au Centre de la Terre, pardon my French. We didn’t find dinosaurs – dinosaurs! – exactly, but we found life that evolved on its little own for quite some time. Who knows how many such pockets exist? I heard rumors, or news, of some underground lake below the ice of Antarctica, in which there might be life, and which didn’t have any contact of any sort with anything outside its reaches for millennia, or more. Fascinating.

And I think that’s it for this unprofessional chapter about the hollow earth theory. I hope it served as a nice introduction, if anything. There are tons of information on the subject out there, including very serious books about the actual possibility of a hollow earth written by geologists (which don’t actually suggest our earth is hollow, just how a planet could be hollow).

The Flat Earth Society

2009-03-19T17:16:00.000-07:00

20^th March 2009

If you thought everyone knew that the world was a sphere, you were wrong, or rather, not everyone is convinced. The Flat Earth Society is a group of people who believe the earth to be flat – quite a self-explanatory name, I know, but as some of you may not believe it, I insist. It’s an absolutely serious organisation, and in my experience of them, a group of absolutely serious people.

I will not go into whether they are right or wrong, though feel free to do that yourself, just into what they actually think and how they make sense of such a world, which is what truly interested me in the beginning, and still does now. Many questions arise when you start thinking about our earth as a flat one, and I don’t even know where to start with those.

What of space photos? Flat earthers, as they are known, think that Nasa is simply lying to us. If you have inquired about Nasa a little or poked around the supposedly moon landing hoax and the likes, you might very easily believe that Nasa is indeed filled with liars – but that’s an entirely different subject. Flat earthers do not accept space photographs as valid evidence of the earth being a sphere because any photograph from space was taken under their control, and nobody can go to space and take pictures on their own.

Another thing you will love to know is that flat earthers don’t believe in gravity. Although, some do, but all agree that the earth itself doesn’t cause gravity, while other celestial bodies do. The argument is that other planets are round, as we can see from down here, but our own mother earth isn’t, and doesn’t have to be. This wouldn’t be the first singularity of our home planet: the tectonic plates are another one that isn’t shared by most planets, if I’m not mistaken.

So if there is no gravity, how do we stick to the ground? Simple. The earth is moving upwards. Not only is it moving, it’s also accelerating exponentially. If it was merely moving upwards, we’d be flying at the slightest jump. What makes the flat earth accelerates upwards like this? They don’t know. I think they call it “dark energy”. To be fair, and for all I know, even today we can’t quite explain how gravity actually functions.

I questioned them on many problems I had with their model. For instance, if the earth is continually accelerating upwards, wouldn’t that mean that eventually we would be moving at the speed of light? No, I was told. Answers differed from a flat earther to another. Some said the earth would eventually slow down, which, I guess, means we will one day just fly away and get lost into space, or something. What I love about all this is how it makes your mind work out on figuring stuff out with new parameters. For instance, moving at the speed of light, you would be unable to see anything directly below 90°, because the light rays wouldn’t be able to catch up with you! [Upon further reflection, I think you would see absolutely nothing unless you were looking upwards, since even light coming from the side would not have time to reach your eyes, or maybe you'd see things in front of you that in reality are much higher in space; the light from them, going horizontally would hit you in the eye as you move up. This is hard to explain, I hope you can figure it out.] In theory, nothing can top the speed of light, so I assume we would float away at this point.

So what does the earth look like for a flat earther? And how do they explain circumnavigation (sailing around the world)? I want you to visualise the UN’s flag now. That’s how they see the earth. Here’s an image so you get a better idea.

The North Pole is at the center of our world, and the South Pole does not exist as a pole. Indeed, Antarctica is not a continent, but a gigantic wall of ice surrounding our world. This explains why sailors felt like they were going around the world, and whenever they went South, they reached “Antarctica”, or that giant Ice Wall, for the magnetic poles still exist.

Giant Ice Wall you say? Yes. Flat earthers differ on this. Some say what we think of as Antarctica is the Ice Wall, while others say it just lays before it, but isn’t said Ice Wall. What happens at the end of the earth? Here again, flat earthers differ, and mostly don’t know. But they have some interesting examples of what could be.

Some think that beyond the Ice Wall is nothing but barren wastelands that expand on forever. Others think the world just drops off, and others still think there might be other worlds like ours, like so many fried eggs in an eternal frying pan, separated by vast deserts of wind-beaten icy snow.

The Ice Wall itself is in fact a chain of mountains covered with snow and ice. How deep is it? Deep enough to keep the oceans in. Flat earthers tend to believe that there is a conspiracy meant to keep us from exploring Antarctica for ourselves, and that anyone who goes there is somehow lured and never really sees things for what they are.

As to the origins of such a flat earth, I asked, expecting some kind of astronomical explanation. The only person who took the time to give me an answer simply gave me a link to an online version of the Book of Genesis. I hadn’t thought of that one. Many, though not all, flat earthers are religious people, or so I am led to believe, but don’t be fooled, if you go in there and discuss, you might find yourself unprepared to argue physics with some of them, as I did. I did not know that “c” represented light, or the speed of light, or whatever, and apparently that made me sound like a retard. Sorry, I’m no physicist.

What of the sun and moon? Easy: they just hover over our flat earth in circles. Said circles vary, and this causes seasons and the moon cycle. The sun never sets, it just goes far away and creates the illusion that it goes below the horizon, when in fact, it’s just beyond.

What of the earth’s curvature? You know, as when you see a ship in the distance somehow sinking into the horizon, and not just getting smaller. I asked about this, and was told that we need special telescopes to see truly. I did not manage to know what there was to correct, just that someone whose name I do not dare deface here invented special telescopes that restored true vision. Why such a distortion happens, I have no idea. Why we haven’t been able to build another one of these correcting devices, I have no idea either.

What of satellites? Flat earthers don’t believe in them. Instead, they think that on the edges of the world are poles or some such things that emit signals simulating satellites, or something like that. I don’t guarantee exactitude on this one. Why would Nasa and/or others fool us on this? They admit they don’t know, but suspect that a financial gain is the most likely reason. How do you make money from that? I’m not sure, but what I do know, however, is that the exploration of space is not at all where it could be. Given the obscene amounts of money they make by launching billionaires into space, they have no interest in developing technologies that would make the travel cheap and affordable to everyone. This is how greed hinders us severely. The rationale behind convincing the whole world that said world is flat is nothing too clear to me, be it for money, power, or some almighty alien warlord we know nothing of.

There are many more questions to be asked about this, and I assuredly forgot a few that I wanted to deal with here. Flat earthers themselves don’t claim to have all the answers. Feel free to question them directly on their own forum, but be warned, most people are very impolite towards them and abusive, and as a result, many flat earthers have the reflex of being harsh, giving very short answers without explanation, or downright insulting you. This doesn’t happen much if you are yourself polite and respectful, but expect animosity. That was my disappointment with the forum. I didn’t go there for a fight, and if you are a flat earther, I wouldn’t see the point in posting in a forum solely for fights. Why waste one’s time? That goes for every side of the issue.

But don’t get discouraged, there are a lot of people there who have things to say and reasons to give, and if only for those, it is worth being courteous. Often, you will ask things like “Then will the earth reach the speed of light?” and your only answer will be “No.” and I just hate that kind of answer. It’s as if they got tired of explaining stuff over and over, and just decided to give us the truth in miniature format. Feel free to insist on an explanation! Someone will always try to explain FE models to you if you are genuinely interested in an answer.

Conclusion? I was decidedly happy to find that there are people who really believe the earth is flat. Imagining my world in a new perspective was great fun, still is, and the kind of hostility these heretics of science have to face reminds you how intolerant people can be and how little credit they give anyone who doesn’t immediately accept the official paradigm without questions. I doubt most round eathers have studied the question before accepting that the earth was a sphere. You may accuse the flat earthers of being this and that, but one thing you can’t accuse them of is to not have done any research. They have a whole bunch of references ready for your eyes if you feel so inclined.

The following chapter will be about the Hollow Earth, stay tuned!

The Flat Eart Society forum.

Easy Cheese

2009-01-22T07:18:00.000-08:00

22^nd January 2009

I went to America in 1999, and one fateful evening I went to a grocery store with some friends, and that’s when we found it. “It” was a can of spray cheese.

Disbelieving my eyes, I looked closer, and closer, and closer. Once my nose was upon the dire artefact, I had nothing left to do but utterly change my vision of reality: I had found Easy Cheese.

The thing suggested it was essentially cheese in a spray can. Being European, that was a wholly new concept to me, and I couldn’t grasp it. How do you put cheese, a generally solid matter, into a can, from which you could spray the stuff? I pondered long and hard, and came to the conclusion that my friends and I had just found nothing less than the very end of civilisation.

Cheese, in Europe, is some age old tradition that moustached men in their 50’s create in rustic little wooden and stone houses up some mountain or something. That’s cheese. You can buy it at your grocery store, it comes wrapped in plastic, but it’s solid. For at least 6 or 7 years, the mystery remained. Until one day...

One day, then, a friend of mine from St. Louis, Missouri, decided to send me some fudge, which I had never tasted, and since I had mentioned time and again my encounter with the end of civilisation, she thought she’d put a can of Easy Cheese in her package, along with some crackers, which I had never eaten before either.

I tried the fudge first. Just looking at that can of spray cheese made me nauseous. I generally dislike anything in a can, really, all the more so when the stuff inside isn’t even supposed to be there in the first place. Fudge is delicious. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s chocolate something, extremely dense. You eat a handful of it and you’re stuffed for the day. I forget exactly how it tastes or feels inside one’s mouth, though. Maybe it was slightly melting on your tongue; at any rate, it was good stuff. It was fudging good.

My Missourian friend also sent a jar of peanut butter, which is available in my country, but I had never really had much of it. I had some hate/love relation to peanut butter at first, some taste you don’t really like, but you want more anyway, like a sore tooth you need to pull at. I eventually really liked the stuff, but that’s another topic entirely.

I handled the can of spray cheese as though it was some alien unhallowed item of horrendous blasphemy. I questioned the motives of the person who invented this, the person who one day thought, “Gee, cheese is good, but couldn’t we possibly put it in a can and spray it?” Why would anyone even conceive of such an evil plan? My uneducated guess is that I don’t have a clue, except that I suppose the idea wouldn’t have emerged in the brain of a European, because that’s not how we think of cheese at all. Again, for us, cheese is made by middle-aged men with moustaches that are extra long who wear white aprons and are a little bit overweight. They stir some giant pot of molten cheese – milk, in fact – and then they store big round chunks of cheese in dark caves, beside thousands of other identical big round chunks of cheese. That’s cheese in the European mind.

So there was this can, and allegedly, there was cheese in it, and according to the legend, I could spray cheese out of it. Paraphrasing Mitch Hedberg, who said it better than I ever could, crackers is a product that has, on its very wrapping, suggestions as to what you could put on them; in other words, other products; and thus, crackers are a product that has no faith in itself. Liking just crackers is probably cheap as dirt. I mention crackers because that’s what spray cheese is usually sprayed onto. That’s why my friend from St. Louis sent some along.

It took me around 20 minutes to actually mouth some of that cheese. Seriously. First I analysed the appearance of the can, its opening, etc. I thought I was going to witness a miracle if I pressed on that thing like you do a whipped cream can. I took a cracker out, and prepared myself for the impossible.

I pressed, and sure enough, there was cheese on my cracker. Some yellow cheese at that. The yellowest cheese. I’d never seen cheese this yellow outside of cartoons. This neon-colour-like substance was much less solid than cheese habitually is, which was to be expected, seeing as it can be sprayed out of a can, for God’s sake.

Apprehension was all the rage as I beheld this exotic amuse-gueule. I thought I might vomit. This wasn’t cheese, this was an extra long line of snot at best. But I had gone this far, I had to continue, like a brave European crossing the culture boundaries of his native nation. You can’t get Easy Cheese here unless you smuggle it in, an offence which is likely entirely legal.

Then, finally, I tasted the stuff. I was so repulsed by the appearance of this thing, from the can to the substance itself, that at first, I couldn’t even think it might taste anything but synthetic chemical crap, so when I actually had it in my mouth, my brain couldn’t neutrally analyse Easy Cheese’s cheese. It took several mouthings to get past the biases of my European brain. But eventually I managed to realise it actually tasted good. It tasted just like the cheese you find in McDonald’s cheeseburgers, which I worship.

The repugnant thing turned out to taste good. I had to deal with conflicting signals in my head about this. It took many a sprayed cracker. But then I really enjoyed it. In a couple of days I was coming to the end of the can.

The end of the can is actually quite some fun. Since it’s pressured air that propulses the yellow ooze, when the stuff runs out, it sputters out too. Concretely, this means that you’re pressing the can, and nothing comes out for a split second, and then, oh oh, miniature chunks of ooze come out at high speed, like a shrapnel explosion. Sounds fun, but by God is it messy. It also makes a little explosive sound. The image this gave me was that of a diminutive dwarf trying to shit through a painful constipation, his yellow turd breaking off into explosive segments of constelised microscopic bits of cheese. (“Constelised” doesn’t exist, but I invent it right here, so it does now, feel free to use it and spread it, one day it’ll be in the dictionary with this chapter as reference for origins, believe it!)

So there I was, eating the golden excrements of an imaginary dwarf whose sphincter was possessed with the nastiest constipation ever. And the sputtering out does sound like mini farts. This was just what you needed uh. Not only does it sound monstrous as a concept, Easy Cheese, but then it also makes fart sounds. Thing is, this did not deter me from eating more. This is revealing. It means I’m definitely crossing cultures there, I eat food that sounds like farts. And I like it! God have mercy...

Is there a moral to this story? Maybe you could say that like so many other American things, they look like ass on the outside, but if you care to try it, and I mean really try, you might find those things are good. Sure it looks like shit, sometimes, and sometimes it even farts, but at the core of what matters, it is good stuff! And don’t ask me about how healthy Easy Cheese is, I suspect it may not be the American equivalent of a salad. But hey, health matters only to a point, everybody dies eventually, and nobody needs to be a healthy corpse in the end.

Interview with Christian Oliver Cruz

2009-01-01T14:51:00.000-08:00

1) At what age did you start drawing? What drove you to it?

I really couldn’t remember at what age I started drawing, but my first memories actually involved drawings. I remember myself (I was around 4, I think) fumbling through the drawers of the office desk of my parents, looking for paper I could draw on. And I would usually end up getting the expensive linen papers that I knew my parents were reserving for important business letters. I really loved the smell and texture of those linen papers, and the effect it made on my doodles. Soon, my parents would find out I was looting the paper and would be fuming mad, and would try to hide it in other places. But I would always eventually find it. I remembered being always hungry for paper, and when there was no paper in the house anymore (or I just couldn’t find them anymore), I ended up drawing on the walls, floor and ceiling of our home. And I did cover every inch of the second story of our house with doodles… Airplanes, stars, planets on the ceiling, animals, towering trees and buildings on the walls and rivers and fishes on the floor. And they’re not just simple drawings. I knew I was creating this virtual environment that I with my brothers could play in. I was a silent kid (in fact, my mom suspected I was autistic) and really couldn’t express my thoughts and feelings straightforwardly all the time, so I guess I was trying to express myself though drawing. And the lack of paper didn’t stop me from doing so.

2) How come you work in Moleskines? And how did you find out about those things?

Well, I don’t just work in Moleskines, but it just so happens that my recent journal drawings have found their way in this nifty notebook. The first time I heard about Moleskines was when I was browsing the internet looking for sketchbooks and notebooks. And I happened upon this forum describing Moleskines as the “legendary notebook used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries.” That intrigued me a lot, and though it was expensive, I knew I just had to experience it to believe it. So I bought one, and the art that you’re seeing now, is actually on my first Moleskine. I already have another one waiting after I fill up the first one, another for my clinical notes. I know a lot of people complain that these notebooks are very expensive. But I guess it’s that knowledge that when I’m writing or drawing on something of great value that prompts me to make every entry worthwhile. I have a lot of sketchbooks but I reserve my special drawings in this notebook.

3) Your art is rather deep and very thoughtful, do you read a lot?

Thanks! I do read a lot. I love books. I actually grew up around books (as you can see in one my journal entries) of all sorts: encyclopedia, story books, textbooks… and I devoured every page of these books. I remember lingering over interesting photographs and drawings in those Time Life books. I enjoy staying in school libraries and book shops… I have a wide taste in books so I really can’t say which genre of books I enjoy reading. But among the authors I’ve read, I tend to really enjoy C.S. Lewis especially his theological treatises, and most other Christian writers (Scott Hahn, Laurie Beth Jones, etc.) I read a lot of self-help inspirational books, fantasy and even children’s books (Children’s books are the way to go when you’re stressed!). These days, I find myself reading a lot of graphic novels by independent artists.

4) Are you really a doctor?

I’m not a doctor. But I actually work as a clinical director of Quality Life Discoveries (http://www.qualitylifediscoveries.com/), an integrative rehabilitation center. By profession, I’m a physical therapist specializing in ergonomics (I have a masters degree in Ergonomics) and aquatherapeutic interventions. I wouldn’t be surprised you would ask me that, because a lot of my clients also mistake me for a doctor.

5) Tell us about your relationship with God, as I understand you are Christian, Christian.

Although most of my friends call me REV, my real nickname at home is IAN from Christian. I remember this bit of teaching one of my high school professors taught me… “What happens when you remove CHRIST from CHRISTIAN? Well IAN is left… which means I AM NOTHING” I’m a Roman Catholic and I was raised as one and studied in a Catholic school. There was a time in my life when I actually contemplated becoming a priest, actually applying to seminaries, but I guess I really wasn’t called to be really one. I have a very personal relationship with God, and just like any relationship, there are numerous times when I have turned my back on Him, lost my trust in Him and even doubted his existence. But almost every time this would happen, I would always find myself yearning for Him. In very brief terms, I can really say that without God’s presence in my life, I really would be nothing. Hehe, I really don’t want to sound so preachy here, but that is exactly how I feel.

6) Do you have artistic influences? What people inspired you to draw among visual artists and authors, and others?

I have lots of artistic influences. When I was a kid, I looked upon the drawings of the great masters (like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, etc…) and made my versions of their works. I also grew up inspired by the works of Filipino local artists (Amorsolo, Botong Francisco, Blanco, etc.) My art is quite diverse in styles, as I adjust my style depending on what I think is best for a particular project. I think it helps to be in constant awe of the skills of many artists, trying to emulate them, and finding your own “voice” through these styles.

7) Have you published any of your work so far? Do you have projects?

I haven’t published any of my work yet, but hopefully by February, the children’s book entitled “Spinning” will be published by Anvil Publishing Inc. I illustrated this wonderful story by Irene Sarmiento about a boy with autism and his family. I’m pretty excited about this because I myself through my professional work as a physical therapist am quite involved in improving the quality of life of kids with autism and helping their families cope with this. So through this book, I hope to help kids and their parents.

I have several projects ongoing. I have a bunch of ambigram and logo design commissions I have yet to finish, and other book illustrations (wink wink) and personal paintings I have yet to complete. I have many T-shirt designs in my mind that is just waiting to materialize – and I have yet to print one of my T-shirt designs. I have a project in mind which involves sculptures, but I already have the conceptual sketches ready. I have comics and a graphic novel brewing with some writers. I guess, the main issue here is TIME, TIME, TIME. Haha.

8) What materials do you use?

For my moleskine art, I use a variety of materials. I start with ordinary pencils for the sketches. Then I ink them using ordinary tech pens. I usually use from 0.2 to 0.5 for the graphics, and 0.1 to 0.2 for the texts. After inking it, I use watercolor pencils for the color.

I basically use whatever materials I could get my hands into for my other projects. I do watercolors, oil and digital stuff, so I really have to use a variety of materials for it.

9) How important is the written word in your Moleskine drawings?

You will notice that there are some entries that are stand alone illustrations without any text on it. But there are some that are heavy on the text component. I guess, it depends on the context of the particular entry. If I feel that the illustration is enough, and would want the viewer to be inspired with their own interpretation of it, I minimize the use of text. You will see this in most conceptual pages. But in some pages where I draw inspiration from a particular material (for instance books, or historical facts, or specific personal experiences), I feel the need to write. It is very important for me in these cases that the text flow from the pictures or at times the pictures flow from the text seamlessly. I hope I was able to achieve that.

10) Do you listen to music when you draw?

Now that I think about it, I am not really particular whether I listen to music or not when I draw. I don’t set up my environment in such a way that I choose what music I would have to listen to in order for me to draw. Oftentimes, I prefer to work in a silent environment as I find certain music to be distracting. But when I work on my moleskine, I tend to be in different venues (oftentimes, passing time in café shops, in my office, in the commute), so I really can’t control the auditory ambience, but if there would be music, I tend to be more “productive” in soft mood music.

11) Tell us about your country, the Philippines. How is life there? And how did living there influence your work and life?

The Philippines is a very lovely country, with a colorful history and cultural heritage. We have several natural wonders that I think people around the world should visit, see and experience. Life here is just like life in other countries - there are some things you can brag about, and there are some that you feel ashamed of talking about. The Filipinos are a very talented people and we tend to excel in any endeavor we put our hearts into. But sometimes I wonder when our country as a whole will be able to stand on its own feet again, be able to solve its problems ranging from poverty to poor governance and corruption. It’s this interplay of positive and negative emotions you feel about your country which tends to inspire you to strive for the better. And I see this in my work and life. Most of my friends have gone abroad to seek “greener pastures” and more adventures, but some of us have stayed, though not as rewarding financially, but rewarding nevertheless. I admire people who stay here to do charity and service work when you know that they could earn a lot more if they do otherwise. But you can’t otherwise judge those who have left, because they have their families in mind to support. That’s also one thing I admire… Filipinos have a deep sense of FAMILY and TOGETHERNESS… and you could feel it in our works.

12) What are your dreams?

Dreams? My mission in life is to “inspire faith, learning and creativity in others” and I hope I am able to accomplish that throughout my life through whatever means and context. Of course, I can’t help but wish that I find success in everything I do… become a published artist, a respectable physiotherapist and specialist in my own field and a successful entrepreneur in the near future. But most importantly, to be able to find peace with myself…

13) Do most people in the Philippines speak English as well as you do?

You may say that English is the 2nd language of the Philippines. It is the main language used in our government and educational system. And with the proliferation of American films and shows in our media, you wouldn’t be surprised why most Filipinos can speak English very fluently.

See more art by Christian Oliver Cruz here.

Sister Sin: The Incestuous Seed of the Insidious Satan

2008-12-27T04:42:00.000-08:00

The following is an essay from 2006, which I wrote for a class on Paradise Lost. It is about Sin and Death, from said epic poem by John Milton. Those are two very interesting characters.

Sister Sin: the Incestuous Seed of the Insidious Satan

Fallen, wretched, doomed to perpetual agony and suffering; this is the state of Sin when we first meet her in Hell. Dreadfully deformed by the birth of her first child, Death, raped by the latter, and further abused by the fruit of that rape, the Hell-Hounds, whose ordeal repeats itself in never-ending cycles. Few images in Paradise Lost are so horrifyingly striking, and one wonders whether any of the fallen angels, Satan included, were befallen by comparable torments. The lover of her own father, the mother and sexual victim of her incestuous offspring (who also happens to be her brother), the violated and cannibalised prey of her more than inbred Cerberean beastly children, Sin, the God-appointed guardian of the gates of Hell, does not have it easy. It is hard to find another character who suffers this much, the Son included, and even in her condition of guardian, she is within the very prison whose doors she keeps shut: she is, after all, still in Hell.

Sin and Death are two quite interesting characters in that they form the first order of creatures born not directly of God; indeed, Sin is the first entity that can call God her grandfather, for she is the very first being born from one of God’s creatures, namely Satan. As to Death, he is the first Hell-born character and, the Hell-Hounds excluded, the only one. Every further visitor of Hell will have been born on earth, and all those who have been sent to Hell were born in Heaven prior to their Fall. The hellish pair has that in common that their very creations were not usual and a complete first on all aspects. While Sin is the first creature made not directly by God, Death is the first to be conceived by two parents, the way Adam and Eve will procreate mortal children.

Moreover, the strictly visual aspect of the two keepers is by itself worthy of much interest. Sin is a monster in the traditional sense of being a crossing from two orders (in this case animal and angelic) much like a siren or a centaur. Death, for his part, lives in the no-man’s-land of definition; a shapeless shape, his appearance can only be guessed at. All of this contributes to make of Sin and Death special characters on more than one count; whereas the angels and our general parents have rather classical shapes and appearances, Sin and Death strike us as the first two monstrosities of the poem. They are indeed a creation of Milton, imagined from his own initiative, and the status of these two oddities has been much discussed in literary debates. Some think them mere allegories, and not good ones at that, others barely pay attention to them. Be it my own faulty research or the lack of criticism on Sin and Death, I have not found much material on them, and I did not find any work solely dedicated to their study. For all these reasons, I decided to choose them as the topic of this essay. To begin, I will focus on the aspects of each of the Hell-Gate keepers and on their possible origins and reasons of being. Although the potentially seminal line that gave Milton material to create Sin and Death is to be found in James 1, 15: “Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”,[1] I will show that Milton used other references as well.

As I explained just above, Sin is a monster. She is endowed with serpentine features (which motivated the hissiness of this essay’s title) even before Satan chooses the snake to deceive Eve and before God turns the devils into reptiles. I suppose this fact alone could provide some valuable argument to say that God had it all planned, but that is not the object of the current essay, so I will not go further into this. The serpentine features are traditionally given to evil creatures: sirens, dragons, etc. And Sin is indeed compared to Scylla, (II, 660),[2] who at once had her lower body turned into barking dogs and then preyed on sailors, the usual activity of sirens in the Hellenistic tradition. Another figure of famous snake-like creatures I can think of is the Mélusine of both Jean D’Arras and Coudrette. Whether Milton knew of these works I do not claim to know, and the following lines may be sheer digression, but I think it is worth mentioning. Mélusine is a cursed fairy who turns into a half snake every Saturday. She is the child of a human king and of a full-blooded fairy (which makes her a hybrid, a crossing of the orders just like Sin is too) and she herself marries a human to whom she will give a whole empire and countless sons of great value. Her husband triggers the fall of himself and his empire the day he calls her a serpent (there was a pact between him and Mélusine: he was to never inquire about her on Saturdays and never to seek to know why she wanted to hide away) and that brings to mind Adam’s sentence to Eve: “Out of my sight, thou serpent”, (X, 867). This alone of course does not make for a sufficient connection and I therefore will not endeavour to make much more out of the Mélusine parallel; but on the possibility that Milton knew of her, I venture a few comments. Mélusine starts off as a doomed creature too, and she ends up even more doomed, condemned to wait until Judgement Day to terminate her fairy life (she is otherwise immortal). Milton did not make Sin out of the blue, though she is among his most creative figures in Paradise Lost. There are several models he could refer to, and did refer to; among them are sirens, Scylla, and possibly Mélusine.

Much closer to the text, Sin seems to share some of Hell’s own features. Only a few lines away, Hell is said to be “thrice threefold”, (II, 645), like Dante’s Inferno, and Sin “… end[s] foul in many a scaly fold”, (II, 651). The word “fold” occurs in either line and the description of Hell is put side by side with that of Sin. Whether there is a wish to connect the two in such a way as to make us assimilate them, I am not sure since I am running short of arguments for it. But there certainly is a connection to sin as being “fair” at first sight and then “foul” on further examination; this may be far-fetched, but Sin could be said to be a representation of venereal disease and how sinful sexual behaviour leads to “foulness”, shall I say. This two-face aspect is a most important feature in Sin’s visual appearance. For one, it breaks unity, and thus steps away from God, I would argue, because the division from order to chaos comes in great part because of the uprising of a second will (and individuality), namely that of Satan. In other words, when all are one with God everything works out fine, but when a differentiation comes to be, problems begin. Sin embodies duality that way, and although she was not born like this, she is the first example of when one became two, as Satan gave birth to her by himself. So even if she did not start off as a two-natured monster, the beginning of her existence is tightly connected to duality nonetheless. I am usually wary of the use of numbers in analysis, so I hope I am not making too much of the dualities involved here. After all, the schism in Heaven was also a case of “when one became two”. And this can further be applied to Adam desiring a companion of his own kind, and the following catastrophe. Duality is always made better by the addition of a third party: Hell and Heaven are then completed by the creation of Eden, Adam and Eve are to be redeemed by the Son. If duality is intrinsically evil, trinity always saves the day.

Let us turn to Death. The aspect of Death is mostly one of absence (his evasive ontology I tried to reflect in the title of this essay, as he is the only character to whom Sin is a sister). Indeed, Milton first mentions this creature as a shape, “If shape it might be called that shape had none”, (II, 667). Death is black, or rather, he is not of any colour, since that is what black is. Fearful uncertainty characterises Death, and rightly so as it embodies one of the greatest mysteries of life. Other features of Death are his crown and his dart, to which I will come back in the following paragraph. This here paragraph is indeed quite short, but that is because Death’s aspect is a negative. Yet, there is more to say on Death’s appearance; especially his having a crown and a dart.

Death has a weapon, and not just any weapon: his is the instrument that will kill all that lives. But why did Milton choose a “dart”? My suggestion is the following: Milton may have used elements from the Book of Revelation to constitute Death. In 9, 10 of that book, we find these words: “And they [locusts] had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.” That alone would not be enough, but there is more to support my suggestion that Milton refers to the Apocalypse of John in the making of Sin and Death. According to B. Rajan, “Usually … it is a tenth, not a third, of the heavenly host which rebels.”,[3] he tells us in his comment on the hexaemeron. In Paradise Lost, a third of the angels rebel and consequently fall. This, I think, may originate in the Book of Revelation as well. See 12, 4:

And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.

These words do not refer to actual angels (at least I do not think so, though it could very well be according to one’s interpretation) but it would not be unusual to compare angels to stars. Satan is traditionally the morning star, and more to our point, he is compared to a comet in the very passage I discuss here: “Unterrified, and like a comet burned”, (II, 708). A few lines lower, “pestilence and war”, (II, 711), are mentioned in relation to the hair of the comet, and these two are half of the four horsemen to be found in Revelation. Moreover, 12, 4 also has interesting things to say about a woman and her ready to be devoured child. Should we see a connection to Death as the ready-to-be-slain son of Sin when Satan gets ready to fight him? I am aware of the rather rich images provided by the Book of Revelation, likely one could find there anything he wanted to fit his theories, but as the coincidences pile up, the case seems to be a more and more valid one. For instance, the locusts described by John are not only armed with deadly stings like Death owns, but they also have crowns too:

And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. (Revelation 9, 7, italics mine)

The only two identifiable features of Death can be found together in the locusts of the Apocalypse. Both locusts and Death have for main mission to do harm to men, to torture them or to kill them. Death’s purpose in life is a little more varied than that, but essentially they share the same common objective: to deal with humans. The fact that Death is first mentioned on line 666 of the book may not be a coincidence at all, as the infamous number is only to be found in the Apocalypse.

Still in the Book of Revelation one can find these rather interesting words:

… and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. (Revelation, 9, 1, italics mine)

In view of the passage that concerns Sin and Death, it is difficult not to think of Sin’s key, especially as her key opens onto an “illimitable Ocean without bound/ Without dimension, where length, breadth, and heighth,/ And time and places are lost” (II, 892-4). Any of these elements taken separately may be revoked as purely coincidental, but taken all together they tend to trace a coherent set of references to the Apocalypse. Given the roles attributed to Sin and Death, the references to the Apocalypse are not mismatched; Death’s similarity to the locusts sent to torture men perfectly fits with his future mission to appease his famine by feeding on human life. While the Book of Revelation looks a lot like a bad drug trip for the most part, it is not impossible, indeed arguable, that Milton used the imagery there to constitute Death in his aspect, as well as other elements in the poem, though I cannot say that there is a very strict coherent pattern in the borrowing of certain features. Possibly some of those features entered the poem half-unconsciously as Milton knew his Bible. However, coherence is achieved by the apocalyptical purpose of the hellish pair of gate-keepers, the Sin and Death squad of God.

The references to be found in Sin and Death do not stop there. There is a whole range of elements that clearly put Sin and Death in parallel with their Heavenly counterparts. B. Rajan, like many others, considers Sin, Death, and Satan, to be part of an “Infernal Trinity”.[4] Exactly what roles would the three Hell-Hosts have is not clear, but one can assume that it would be something like the Mother, the Son, and the Unholy Ghost. Unlike the set of references drawn from Revelation, the elements that call for a comparison to traditional Christian doctrine seem to have a more clearly defined purpose. Sin refers to Death as Satan’s “only son”, (II, 728), she further describes him as his “own begotten”, (II, 782); also, she tells him she will reign “At thy right hand”, (II, 869). In all of these instances, Sin definitely calls for a parallel between her own unholy family and that of Heaven. Arguably, she even lies to get to that parallel, for after all, Death is not the only child of Satan, she is herself his daughter, but one could say she is only a “daughter” and not a “son”, literally speaking. Sin is however not the only character to draw our attention towards the heavenly hosts; Satan does his share as well: “… I go/ This uncouth errand sole, and one for all/ Myself expose”, (II, 827). Throughout the poem, many are the instances where Satan can be compared to the Son, this is not something exclusively used in Book II; Satan’s very volunteering in place of all the fallen angels is mirrored by the Son’s proposal to sacrifice himself for humankind, and there are many other examples I could refer to here. What happens in this passage is that this scheme of mirroring the heavenly ones spreads out to Sin and Death so as to form the “Unholy Trinity”. Because of this, we cannot argue that Sin is individually mocking God and the Son, rather, the pattern of parody seems to come from a higher level, namely that of the author, Milton. He did not think much of the dogma of God being three, so it is possible to interpret the parallel as a potential jab against that dogma. Were I writing a longer work, I think it would be worthwhile to comment on all the other structural effects to be found in Paradise Lost, such as Hell resembling Heaven and other elements that tend to echo each other.

I propose now to take a look at what would characterise Sin, Death, and Satan, as an “Unholy Trinity”. In the context of the entities completing this unhallowed triad, Satan could be said to be a counterpart to God (I know this may sound like stating the obvious) because of his quality of creator: he made Sin out of nothing, so to speak. Sin is the parent of Death, the Son, and he is the one through whom all humans will have to pass to enter Hell, which is what Christ is to Heaven, though it is true one also has to pass through Death to enter Heaven. Sin as the infernal Mother takes the role of the procreating Father of Christian traditions, yet things are not all that simple. Their family tree looking like a stump, the relationship of each entity to another becomes relatively complex.

Incest is met at every branching of that Satanic tree. Sin is born of Satan alone, which does not exactly qualify as incestuous though it is obviously unnatural for a creature of God, Death is born of the union of Sin and Satan, and finally the Hell-Hounds are born of Death’s mating with Sin. The father mates with the daughter, who, unwillingly, becomes the lover of her son. What can be done of this rather dysfunctional family? According to my relatively humble knowledge of Greek mythology, incestuous unions are not a seldom occurrence, and as we know, Milton can heavily refer to Greek myths. Yet there certainly is more than that to it. There is a pattern of degeneration in the family of Satan; if he starts off as a beautiful angel, his daughter turns out to be a hybrid mixing humanness and reptile features. Furthermore, the child of their incestuous union is a complete figure of otherness as he cannot be distinguished perfectly even by Satan’s gaze, whose ability is thought to be much more efficient than that of mere humans. As to the fourth “member” of the family, the Hell-Hell hounds, they are mostly an unindividualised pack of beasts; they lost all angelic features, and they lost all unity too. The loss of unity, I think, is to be connected with what I said earlier about chaos and order and the structure of Hell resembling Sin. If this family went on, the descendents of the Hell-Hounds would probably be malefic maggots.

It is noteworthy that incest characterises Satan’s family; not only is it considered a sin, religiously speaking, but it also marks procreation as a less perfect creation than the kind God achieves. Similar to Adam and Eve’s only way to create offspring, sexual intercourse, the two-partied making of Satan and Sin create a monstrous child (however, Adam and Eve expected to have children before they knew of the Fall, but that is not a typical feature of the Christian tradition). The idea that every human is born sinful because of the carnal union of their parents can perhaps be found in the comparison between parthenogenesis and the immaculate conception God, the Father, can perform.

The question of hate in Heaven has always been a theologically loaded one, but along with Sin as the first female being of the universe comes the question of sex in Heaven. The one reference to this comes from Sin herself when she tells Satan her story: “… such joy thou took’st/ With me in secret, that my womb conceived/ A growing burden.”, (II, 765-7). The question of joy in Heaven may be much less interesting than that of hate, but that of physical, sexual joy, can be thought of more peculiar (though Milton clearly portrays a vision of sex that is sinless with Adam and Eve and how promiscuous they get, especially considering the above mentioned future children they expect to have to help them with their daily work). Thus sex per se is not automatically a sinful thing, yet what to think of Satan and Sin’s relationship? Well, for one, she is his very daughter, and while Milton could conceive of sinless sex, I would not suppose he would consider sinless incestuous sex (given that incest is not only a religious taboo but very much so an inherently human one, even atheists do not copulate with their daughters, generally). This incestuous nature is the first clue that something is not quite right, even in Heaven. The second point I ask myself about is whether the “joy” Satan took with Sin was shared. Indeed, Sin nowhere tells that she herself enjoyed the act, or even agreed to it, and so it is not inconsiderable that she may in fact have been raped by Satan. Raped in Heaven and raped in Hell? The story of Sin being what it is, that would not be unsuited. A third point is that this relationship with Satan was lived “in secret”, (II, 766), and that too brings up some questions. First of all, can there be secrets in Heaven? Whereas we have seen that there could be hate and even sex in Heaven, whether or not there can be secrets is much less certain. God is omniscient, after all; so there can be no secrets. What is most interesting, however, is that likely Satan believed there could be secrets and that God did not know everything. That argument is of major importance for critics who argue that Satan was tricked into doing what he did and that ultimately God is responsible for everything that happened, Fall included. This notion of secret also brings the fact that there was something to hide, something possibly wrong that needed to be kept from others, something possibly sinful. If Satan felt the need to hide, then surely he must have thought that what he was doing was not all that correct. But why exactly? If he thought the joy he took with his own daughter a thing not to do, then why did he do it at all? This would mean he knowingly chose to do evil. Any reason for the hiding can only be conjectural, since neither Sin nor Satan explicitly explains the why of the secrecy. There could be several origins: Satan could have been aware of the incestuous nature of the relation, and that it was “wrong”, he may have wanted no one to know about the affair, though why exactly I do not know (except for the reason previously mentioned), perhaps he discovered a new kind of joy with Sin and that raised suspicions in him (and perhaps also he did not want any other angel to find out “sex”, maybe Satan discovered sex, since Sin is the first female being of them all; although angels are traditionally genderless, Milton refers to them as males: Satan is a “he” and so are the other angels), lastly, if Satan was indeed raping Sin repeatedly, then he would not have wanted others to find out his crime. Whatever the reason, Satan, according to Sin, decided to keep the act a secret, thus admitting that he was not entirely at ease with the relationship and that probably, he was experiencing evilness.

To go back shortly to the idea of sinless and sinful sex, it is very likely that Milton differentiated sex as an act of love and sex as an act of lust; the latter characterising the relationship between Satan and Sin (and later on Sin and Death), as well as the first intercourse of Adam and Eve after the Fall. I will now pass on to the last topic of my essay: the allegorical nature of Sin and Death.

Patrick Cullen considers Book II to be “the most openly allegorical book of the poem – a book in which virtually every event has an allegorical dimension of one sort of another”.[5] With names such as “Sin” and “Death”, the allegories to be found in them is unmistakable, obviously. However, the evident allegory may not be all that simple, after all. Did Milton really mean to make these two allegorical beings at all? One would think that there is no question about it, if only because of the names perfectly fitting the actions (although this is more easily said of Death than of Sin), yet there is potentially another kind of interpretation. The idea is to take Sin and Death literally. One of the angels who teach Adam and Eve explains that it is somewhat difficult to describe heavenly things to mere humans (unless my memory fails me); from that, it is arguable that all these things that are beyond human perception have completely incomprehensible natures. Thus, Sin and Death could be said to be entities that literally do what they are called after, Death kills and Sin leads to Hell. The highway to Hell they build can be said to be equally literal in that frame of thinking. Ironically, arguing that these are not allegories backfires with the fact that if this is not an allegorical use of Milton’s, it is one from the angels who teach the human couple (yet, that does not work with either Sin and Death or their bridge, since only the narrative voice of the poet relates them, not the angels’). I realise my argument is fairly brittle. The nature of Sin and Death tends to push our conceptions of the world in which they (and we) live so far as to make it quite confusing; which led many a critic to be heavily disappointed and displeased by and with the infamous duo. Thus Samuel Johnson wrote:

To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings for the most part suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale and Victory hovers over a general or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do no more. To give them any real employment or ascribe to them any material agency is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to nonentity.[6]

Johnson has a problem with allegories doing actual things, things that go beyond the nature of the thing which they are allegories of. He would not allow Fame to have a cup of coffee, or Victory to take a bath, God forbid Sin and Death to build a bridge from Hell to Earth. This critic probably has a point when he says they are no longer allegories, in that the two entities exist as true characters within the poem; they are not a mere figure of speech. The question is whether or not an allegory has to remain an obvious allegory to be considered one. Many are the examples where allegories have features that do not belong exclusively to that which they allegorise. All of the allegorical characters of Everyman for instance have the ability to speak, which none of the allegorised concepts actually have. Thus Beauty, Faith and Knowledge do things that Johnson would not quite like. They are indeed anthropomorphised, yet I have never heard or read anyone arguing that they were not allegories. Another important question is whether allegories can do things without turning these very things into allegories too; can allegories live in a non-allegorical world. Sin and Death build a bridge, is the bridge an allegory if the builders are? Technically speaking, sin and death, as we know them in daily life, do not build any bridges, so it must not be that part of Sin and Death that enables them to do more than sin and death can do, in Johnson’s vision. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure where this is going, the question belonging more to a linguistic essay than the present one. Are Milton’s Sin and Death allegories that are given extra possibilities or are they simply not allegories at all? Does an enlarged allegory remain one? Can Sin and Death even be non-allegories given the names they bear? The last question I tried to engage in the beginning of this paragraph, to mild results. It could be interesting to venture the idea that Sin and Death not only are monstrous characters of the poem but also monstrous entities as literary ones, that is, that they escape even critics’ comprehension in their very nature. Many critics have been somewhat shocked by the obviousness of the allegorical use made with Sin and Death, and that puzzled them quite a good deal to see those two allegories from Hell doing so many unallegorical activities. Perhaps Milton aimed for a pair of entities that would seem out of human comprehension, as was my argument earlier, or that he wanted to have them monstrous and “other” on as many sides as he could. I would not exactly support that view myself as this seems a bit far-fetched; nonetheless, this could be interesting.

Although I certainly have not covered all the topics related to Sin and Death, I hope to have dealt with the main ones, at least partly. The children of Satan prove to be worth the close inspection which I could not find in most of the criticism I read (and I repeat that this may be due to my research rather than the lack of criticism on the issue). From their origins to their aspects, both Sin and Death are challenging us in a way that is never quite reached by other characters in Paradise Lost; although this is a bold claim, and likely wrong on certain levels, the Guardians of Hell, and its subsequent feeders, have that unique trait of being original creations of Milton, a characteristic that even God cannot claim to possess. I demonstrated the amount of coincidences to be found in Book II (for the passage that concerns us) and the Book of the Apocalypse, coincidences that stop being ones as they pile up to the level of organised references. I may have failed to provide those references with a strict reason to be, unless the apocalyptic roles of Sin and Death are to be compared with the frightening fate John of Patmos warns us of. Concerning the incestuous nature of Satan’s family, I have showed that it was a rather loaded issue since it begins in Heaven with the strange birth of Sin, and is further continued with the no less strange father-daughter sexual relationship between the two. In this I demonstrated, I think, how Sin and Death can be significant elements in arguments that do not directly concern them (as literary characters in a literary study), such as God’s omniscience and Satan’s knowledge or ignorance of it (the latter is what Sin suggests). Nevertheless, as I tried to show, Sin and Death per se are worthy of much scrutiny, scrutiny which they may have gotten from critics I have not read. Taken individually, Sin strikes us as a most damned creature. The first female ever to live, she is also the first being created not directly from and by God. Her only partner in womanhood is Eve, and both possess a “Sad instrument of all our woe”, (II, 872); for one an apple, for the other a terrible key. The connection between Sin and Eve is the one topic I omitted from my essay, but it too is a relevant theme. As to Death, the first procreated being of the universe, he is a black-hole of an entity. A shadow made of darkness, lusty like a brute beast, the self-declared king of Hell sounds a lot like his rebellious father, only worse and not romantic for a second. Although he shares that weak spot for incestuous affairs, and that sense of bravery, he is more of a debased version of Satan rather than a heroic saviour, which Satan devotes himself to be. Death’s main mission, unlike his father, is to satisfy his hunger to kill; he is not here to save anyone and is endowed with the most powerful weapon of all, he can kill everyone and everything save the Almighty and the Son. In Sin and Death, suffering and pain as well as grief and agony are polarised at both ends of the line: Sin does not in effect hurt anyone, nor does she wish harm to anyone either, her only major act in the epic is to keep Satan and Death from fighting, a noble and peaceful act; as to Death, he is the complete opposite: he never seeks to protect anyone from his selfish hunger, not even his own mother from his malevolent lust, his only wish in existence is to kill as much as he can. Satan’s offspring thus combines the conditions of being the aggressor and the prey, as Satan is God’s victim and Man’s misery-maker.

Bibliography
Primary Source

- Milton, John. Paradise Lost. London: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Secondary Sources

- Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: John Milton. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
- Cullen, Patrick. Infernal Triad, The Flesh, the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1974.
- Empson, William. Milton’s God. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961.
- Forsyth, Neil. The Satanic Epic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
- Kean, Margaret. John Milton’s Paradise Lost: a Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 2005.
- Rajan, Balachandra. Paradise Lost & The Seventeenth Century Reader. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947.

[1] The Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version. Thomas Nelson Bibles, 1970, 2001. All further references are to this edition.
[2] Milton, John. Paradise Lost. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. All further references are to this edition.
[3] Rajan, Balachandra. Paradise Lost & The Seventeenth Century Reader. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947, p. 40.
[4] p. 50.
[5] Cullen, Patrick. Infernal Triad, The Flesh, the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 104.
[6] Cited in Maccaffrey, G. Isabel. “Satan’s Voyage” Modern Critical Views: John Milton. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, p. 32-33.

“Electro-Shock Blues”

2008-11-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

8^th November 2008

I would not usually devote a chapter to an album, but Electro-Shock Blues is a notable exception. This is the album by which I discovered The Eels, who still remain one of my favourite bands of all time, and certainly among the best of them. I kid you not, The Eels have remained excellent since their beginning. Each album has been different, yet uniquely their own. Sometimes experimental, sometimes traditional, sometimes simple and bare, sometimes elaborate and sharp.

Electro-Shock Blues came out in 1998. It is The Eels’ second album, after Beautiful Freak. Following their intense success, E, the leader of the band (he does most of everything in the band), would come to face some tragedies in his life. His sister, Elizabeth, eventually gave up after a life-long struggle against depression, and committed suicide. His mother slowly died to cancer, leaving him as the sole remaining member of his family, his father having died in 1982. E was the first to discover the body of his father, a famous physicist who wrote letters with Einstein, no less. Friends of E also died, and other sad things.

The result of all these tragic events is that E decided to confront it with an album based on all of it, since he knew he wouldn’t be able to avoid it. Sixteen songs are to be found on that glorious album. Death, suicide, cancer, suffering, loss, psychiatric hospitals, electro-shocks, you’ll face all this and more. Yet, as gloomy as this may sound, the record is full of hope, and the album ends on “maybe it’s time to live,” because yes, one must live though life is tough.

The album is made of bits and pieces from E’s entire family: the booklet begins with a poem written by his grand-mother, or even great-grand-mother, I forget. Some of the artwork was made by sister and/or father, I forget the details exactly. The first song “Elizabether on the Bathroom Floor” is about Elizabether’s suicide, and I read that parts of the lyrics, if not all of them, were taken from her last diary entries. Many songs are about Elizabeth in some way or another. The album is dedicated to her.

The first songs are very dark, admittedly, but it lightens up later on. It doesn’t mean the subject matter is happier, but the songs are like... imagine a song that sounds happy, but has sad lyrics. That is a bit what the cover of this album is like, it looks cute and harmless at first sight, but when you know what it means, then there’s added sadness to this apparent happiness.

Electro-Shock Blues is a masterpiece on every level: the songs are epic, the lyrics are deep and poetic, and heart-wrenching. They’re like short stories, or have the density of them, at any rate. This album is like a novel indeed.

Here is the list of those terrific songs:

1) “Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor”

2) “Going to your Funeral Part I”

3) “Cancer for the Cure”

4) “My Descent into Madness”

5) “3 Speed”

6) “Hospital Food”

7) “Electro-Shock Blues”

8) “Efils’ God”

9) “Going to your Funeral Part II”

10) “Last Stop: This Town”

11) “Baby Genius”

12) “Climbing up to the Moon”

13) “Ant Farm”

14) “Dead of Winter”

15) “The Medication Is Wearing Off”

16) “P.S. You Rock My World”

I could write enormously on each song, that’s how intense they all are, but I won’t, because I’d much rather you get your own relationship with them. And I couldn’t select pieces of lyrics to show you without showing you all of them.

If you’ve never heard The Eels before, what should I tell you? Well, before everything else, that you are missing out. Secondly, that The Eels are mostly traditional rock, except that E is not afraid to experiment with just about anything, which means some songs will be plain guitar and voice (and strings, often), or that there’ll be electro elements (but not enough to be called techno, by far not). The use of strings and other ambient instruments does add a very eerie feeling to this album. The Eels’ masterpiece will make you cry and smile and most of all it will make you feel alive.

Thank you for reading and I hope you will give Electro-Shock Blues a chance.

Here's the story of this album, from The Eels' own website.

The People who Turn to God

2008-10-26T17:57:00.000-07:00

27^th October 2008

Everyone knows the case of the repentant drug-addict or alcoholic who “found God” and improved his life. Everyone knows of that person who was lost and then was found, by God. Who are these people who turn to God?

The people I mean to write about here are usually not raised religiously, and if they were, they weren’t religious themselves. Instead, they went through a real reflection about religion and God and what it meant. This is much harder when you didn’t grow up being accustomed to the idea of God.

Now, because these people turn to God after a crisis in their lives, many imagine that they merely “found a quick solution” and that faith is easy. “They didn’t care about God until they had problems in their lives,” is often said in a contemptuous manner. A lot of people didn’t care about God before they realised life was hard.

Does it mean those people are fools who just turn to God in an act of weakness? Not in my opinion. If your life is no great trouble to you, and you enjoy living, chances are you don’t ask yourself an army of existential questions on a daily basis. Why? Because when living is fun, you need no more reasons to live. However, when each breath you take is an effort, that’s when you actually start thinking about whether this life is worth the pain. It’s easy to live on when you enjoy the ride, but when it’s taking everything you’ve got, you need a goal. Your life is no longer its own reason and justification. You need more, or you’ll give up. It’s practically impossible to struggle for nothing; it’s much easier to confront bigger obstacles if you have a goal than smaller ones if you don’t.

Contrary to popular belief, faith isn’t a quick solution to your problems. You don’t just suddenly decide one day that God exists and that you need Him. Most of us can’t do that. And we don’t, unless we get seriously damaged and broken. It’s not only because people look for help and solutions, it’s mostly because people need to be driven. A life without meaning is infinitely harder to live than a meaningful one. Believing in God doesn’t mean you’ll know exactly what the meaning of your life is – nor that of the universe – but it will mean that you have a hope there is a meaning to both your life and the universe, and that both are interrelated.

The sad thing is that this new found faith is looked at with suspicion and even scorn. On the one hand, people assume the faith is worth nothing because it was gotten in a time of distress; on the other, these new believers are thought to be hypocrites, for mostly the same reason. Often, you don’t know what you really need before you lose it. Most often, you don’t know the worth of things before they’re gone. You become aware of your mortality more easily when someone close to you dies, or when you are severely injured, or afflicted with a fatal disease, that’s only logical.

I remember my High School French teacher. She was a very intelligent woman with a strong character. One day, I discovered she was a Christian, which, to me, back then, was mutually exclusive with “intelligent”. And I remembered a story she told us once, about her daughter. Her daughter had leukemia and slowly died because of it. She was a young girl, maybe ten or twelve. Our teacher told us that for an entire year after her death, she cried every night. I don’t know whether she was a believer before this tragic event, but chances are she wasn’t, though that’s only a guess. The point is that if your own child died this way, you’d be seriously upset at life, and you would demand a reason. You would need some sort of an explanation, because you can’t live without one anymore. That’s when it becomes important that life actually make some sense.

So yes, broken people are more likely to turn to God than happy people. This isn’t because broken people are weaker, it’s because they faced the less pleasant sides of life. Demanding to understand what this whole life is about is not a sign of weakness, but of a healthy mind. You’re not a piece of wood, you have emotions and ideas, and thoughts, and you react to this world. The stronger you react doesn’t mean the weaker you are, not at all. No one is similar in the face of pain, and some of us will be enormously affected by what someone else would find easy to go through. Pain is not comparable, you’re your only standard.

Understand that sometimes you need a slap in the face to look at something in a fresh way. You need to be broken to be mended. You could compare that with minor and major depression: while a minor one will let you function like everyone else for years, it’ll slowly eat you inside, whereas a major depression will hold you down until you fix it. Sometimes a bigger crisis is better, like a full fracture is better than a partial one (or so I’m told).

I’m not suggesting that you should seek pain or anything like that. I don’t think anyone will be spared pain, it just varies in degrees. The point is to learn from it, discover needs in yourself you didn’t know existed, and solutions you never thought of.

“Vir Dolorum”

2008-10-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

23^rd October 2008

Lorenzo Monaco (circa 1370 - 1423), 1405. Tempera on wood.

I went to a museum yesterday, and saw this, and wanted a picture of it. If I were rich, I'd have bought the painting, but as it is, I bought the postcard. I realised there was no image of this online, so I scanned the postcard and here it is.

For all I know, this is a rather unusual pose of Christ, with His arms on Himself, and it intrigued me. Plus He is a beautiful Christ.

As to the title, with my little Latin knowledge, I think it may mean "man of pain" or "suffering man", or something like that. "Vir" means "man", as in "virility", but it may also mean "life", though I am unsure (I think not).

So, after this brief description of the painting and how it got to here, let’s get deeper. But before I do, let’s make sure you understand I primarily intended to just show you this painting, because I couldn’t find it anywhere else on the internet. I am no specialist of that period of time, and no art historian.

What first struck me with this painting was the fact that Christ doesn’t have His arms in a cross shape, as is usual. Then I noticed the colour of His skin, and His face. So what of all this? First question is what kind of Christ is this. If you pay attention, you’ll know it’s the dead Christ, because He does have the Holy Wounds. Look at His visible hand: there is a stigmata in it, which implies this is after His Crucifixion. Also, and equally discrete, is the spear wound in His side (our left, His right).

If you want to be a realist to the extreme, you will argue that such a tiny hand wound has been caused by a rather diminutive nail, and that no nail this size could support the body of a grown man. Many among you know that a nail in the palm like this would not be able to bear the weight of Christ. Still, many among you also know that the word for “hand” used in the Gospel included the wrist in the definition, and that a nail in the wrist could support the weight.

The deathly hue of Christ’s body suggests His being dead more than the wounds do. In the background, you can see the Cross, although it is mostly hidden by Christ’s halo. I love this painting because Christ seems so peaceful in this (and that isn’t a typical characteristic of the dead, some are, some aren’t) and I don’t know, this has what most classical paintings don’t have. A something special. His eyes look almost Asian, like some Western Buddha of sorts. And His features are at the very least rather feminine. Christ is rarely depicted as a muscular type of man. His nipples and navel are very faded-looking, perhaps a suggestion that those human attributes are further away from Him than they are for regular humans – given that a navel is the perpetual reminder that you were once a fetus, and that nipples mark you as a feeding creature, if you’re a woman, and that, if you’re a man, you have once been a female as a fetus – but it could also simply be that those elements faded because of the passage of Time.

One thing I confess I am ignorant of is this pink-looking basin at the bottom of the image. I don’t know what it could be. Perhaps it is a bathtub of the kind they used in the Renaissance, which maybe they used to wash the Body of Christ, because you obviously don’t see any blood on this corpse. It’s only a guess, other paintings depict Christ on the Cross itself and there is no blood to be seen either, so it is arguable.

Back to the arms. Usually, Christ has His arms outreached, because of the Crucifixion (even though this isn’t one) and I have never seen Christ portrayed with this pose. In this one, He seems to protect Himself. This Christ looks like a baby in his sleep. This is after His Passion, but before His Resurrection. It is a still moment of peace before the great change.

I hope you appreciated seeing this painting.

Retro-Gaming and Free Online Games

2008-10-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

17^th October 2008

Nowadays every game that comes out, on consoles and computers, has a massive plot, hordes of characters, is produced like a Hollywood movie, and takes you large amounts of time to play. Moreover, they’re always in 3D.

My own parents gave up on videogames the day they became tridimensional. Videogames used to be simple, in the 80’s and early 90’s. A few buttons were enough to play for hours, you didn’t always know what the plot was, and you didn’t always care, and the pixelised quality of the games left much room to your imagination.

Now, what you see is mind-blowing, what you hear is just as convincing as any sound from the world outside the screen. Videogames have become too real for some of us, and thus, some of us resort to retro-gaming and free online games.

A perfect example of this is me. I played the latest Mario Kart game, the Wii one, and no matter how hard I tried to convince myself it was good, it wasn’t. In fact, I didn’t even try to convince myself, I knew it was crap. My immediate reaction was to pull out the old Super Nintendo, and pop in the first of the Mario Kart games. That game is from 1992 if my memory serves me well. And you know, I think it’s a better game. It’s not only because I played it as I grew up, but also because you actually get some sensations playing this – once you get used to the weird flat land you roll over and how it spins, which at first will not look real at all, but you get used to it.

Sometimes all you want is a little fun in a videogame. I’m not always interested in reading a 200-page manual on a game just so I can play it. Even chess doesn’t require that much. Nor does poker, nor does Tetris. You get my point. (And yes, learning the rules of this game is fast, mastering them takes much longer, I know.) This is when free online games come onto the scene. What are the advantages of these? First of all, obviously, they’re free. So whatever happens, you know you won’t be tricked because the worst case scenario is that you’ll lose a minute of your precious time before you realise the game sucks. But if it doesn’t, you may have many hours of quality gaming and a lot of fun, for free. Another advantage is the amount of games available online. There are hundreds! And new ones come out daily. That way, if you get bored with them quickly, there are always new ones to get bored with. Kidding, many of them are quality games, even if they are very simple. Yet, not all are simple. And I suspect they will get more and more complex with time, but I also hope they won’t end up like the mainstream industry, which I don’t think they will because a single person can create any sort of game online now, so you’ll always have these simple yet compelling games.

As far as retro-gaming is concerned, pulling out your old consoles is not the only way to retro-game. The Wii has what it calls a “virtual console” and that allows you to purchase old games online, and download them on the Wii. I’ve played numerous old games this way, and that’s actually what I like best about the Wii. You can even buy old games from other consoles, such as the Sega Genesis, which is fantastic for my generation because back in the day, the early 90’s, every kid had to side for either Sega or Nintendo, and I, seeing through the bullshit, sided with Nintendo. Now I can look down on all my ex-classmates who worshipped Sega and Sonic and tell them how owned they are now that I can buy Sonic the Hedgehog on my Nintendo Wii. Take that, bitches. (That said, most of them probably have a job and a real life, and wouldn’t much care about it...)

If you don’t have an antique console to dig up from your attic, and if you don’t have a Wii either, you still have the opportunity to get free vintage games; a category known as “abandonware”. These are games whose rights have expired, and which you can get for absolutely free. Typing “abandonware” on Google will lead you to countless sites offering those free games. Games that you had to pay for 80 dollars ten years ago can now be had for nothing! All the classics of the past decade and more can be gotten for nothing more than a rather fast dowloading. Well, except the Lucasart games, whose rights are maintained.

Most of my gaming time is now spent on free online games because they’re usually more creative than mainstream games, and much more free. You can afford goofiness in such games, and more creative experiences, which you can’t when you work on a game that costs millions to produce and which is expected to bring millions back home. I still play mainstream games, though, it’s just that they have very different things to offer, and sadly, no one would release a simple game on one of these leviathanesque consoles. People would laugh to have a 2D game on the Playstation 3 or 360 X-Box. They still create those games for portable consoles, though. Why don’t they release a game which would be a collection of hundreds of small games? It may happen in the future. So many of those free online games are pure genius that I just can see the day when anthologies begin to unfold. I’m very happy about that because it is a true renaissance of the art. Back to basics, with a twist.

Now I will shut up and list games that I really enjoy and wish to share with you. I’m going to post this chapter right now, so at first there won’t be anything, and then the list will casually grow. Enjoy!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bike Mania

This is a very simple yet difficult game. Only 4 keys to use: move forward, backward, lean forward, lean backward. There are two sequels to this game, which you can find easily through Google.

Bloons Tower Defence

Probably the series of games I played most. There are three episodes, so far, for all I know, and I've loved everyone of them. That game is a "Tower Defence" type of game, and I really adore those. Basically, you have to keep enemies from reaching a certain point, by placing sentries about the path that leads to that certain point. Bloons uses monkeys with darts, and other devices. Hours and hours of fun to be had.

Fancy Pants Adventure

This is probably one of the best, if not the best, plaftorm game I have played for free online. It's wonderfully well made, a ton of fun, and charming.

Dino Run

This game has a pixelised esthetic to it which I totally dig, and it's a good game too. You're basically a little dinosaur who must escape the apocalypse. It's a gripping game, very simple to play, but damn gripping. You won't stop playing before you're safe.

Is There a Point to Literary Criticism ?

2008-10-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

14^th October 2008

I’ve studied literature for a good number of years, in a university, and I have often wondered if there was a real point to it. What is the use of literary criticism?

When you study computers, physics, and the likes, or intend to be a doctor, a psychologist, and all those things, you know what you’ll do later on. And you know it will be useful and serve a purpose. When you’re a literature student, you think maybe you’ll be a teacher and teach literature to people. People who will then... become teachers too, perhaps. On and on. But why?

When you write books of literary criticism, your only audience is students and teachers, and the occasional insane fan of whoever author you discuss. It feels like feeding a self-eating snake to me. There seems to be no direct purpose except perpetuating itself. Don’t get me wrong, I love studying literature, I’m just wondering about the point of it beyond being an interesting thing to do.

I do believe teachers should have gone to university before teaching the mandatory classes (pre-High School and all), in that case it would make a lot of sense, but I’m more focused on people in the academy staying in the academy and writing for the academy. Is there really a point in dissecting novels and poems?

I always love discussing things, so my initial impression is that it’s cool to do so. But then you see the sort of criticism people come out with, and you wonder if it adds anything to those novels and poems. Most of the time, you don’t really want to know what academics have to say about your favourite novel because your personal experience of it is more important to you. And that’s something the academy disregards: your personal experience of a work of art. They almost forget that a book is an experience in your life, not just a text that you can analyse. I’m all for analysing, but we have to go all the way, and analyse analysis.

I don’t think any serious author writes and assumes that his work will not be complete before a horde of academics write about his books. That’s preposterous. Moreover, people who read, say, Hemingway, don’t really go on to read literary criticism about his stories. You read the stories. Then if you’re curious, you may check some of the criticism, but I don’t think most people will do that. I typically don’t, I’d rather read the primary work of another author. So basically, we read criticism if we are either students or teachers. That’s alright, most people don’t read specialised literature in any field unless they study it, or unless they have a crazy interest in it.

The problem I have is about what you do with this education. The reason why I studied literature was so that I would learn about literature, in order to be a writer. In my case, I have a specific goal and I know where I’m going. If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have studied literature, I think.

It seems to me that studying literature only has indirect effects on your life. When you study psychology, you can become a psychologist and help people. When you study science, you can become a researcher and make things evolve. When you study literature, you can help others to study literature. But to what end? I would say: to enhance people’s critical sense, open their minds to subtleties they may not have been aware of, and so on. But that’s hardly comparable to solving someone’s neurosis, or broken leg, or inventing a new motor for spacecrafts. Creating art and touching people with it, however, is definitely comparable. I am more thankful to Salinger for having written what he wrote than I am to the man who invented zippers. Zippers are cool, but if I had buttons instead of them, it wouldn’t have made a huge difference in my life. Removing The Catcher in the Rye and Salinger’s other books would have made a much bigger impact on me (or lack thereof, if you want to be picky).

This reminds me of a passage from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, in which she and her boyfriend discuss their respective vocations. He studies to be a doctor, she wants to be a poet. He says poetry is just paper, is just dust. She says, to herself, later on, that people are just dust too, if you want to see it that way, and that making someone’s body feel better through medicine is not more important than making someone’s soul feel better through poetry, and more generally art. I of course agree with that. There is a very real need for art, and art definitely has a purpose. And I find it sad that in our age, having a purpose is sometimes perceived as a negative thing. Art being meaningful and making sense, and touching you, doesn’t make it bad art. Some of you have to get off your high horses of stupidity and get some common sense. See my chapters on Post-Modernism and Remodernism for more on art.

Back to literary criticism. I wrote a ton of essays throughout my academic career, and I don’t feel like they were much of use to anything or anyone. No matter how good they are, who is going to read them except the teachers whose classes I attended? And suppose I somehow get chosen for an anthology of essays, who’s gonna read that? Teachers and students specialising in whatever topic or subject I wrote about, and nobody else, and even those won’t be very thrilled, it’d just be work.

I am aware that in other countries, studying literature implies more things than it does here; things like creative writing, journalism, and many other fields which actually are more obviously useful and pragmatically more satisfying.

I’m just scared that academics spend their time masturbating their brains and being paid for it, while not bringing anything substantial to the rest of us. And self-perpetuation is not a valid reason to exist. Studying to become a teacher to then teach students who will become teachers too, I don’t see the point.

All in all, I know it’s useful, as it has been to my life, but it’s rather nebulous, and hard to focus on practical endeavours, unless, like me, you write, in which case my studies were very useful to me. I would have taken creative writing, but we don’t have this option in my country. Studying literature was the next best thing.

On Writing Horror

2008-10-13T07:51:00.000-07:00

13^th October 2008

Most of what I will say here will also be applicable to horror in movies, but more on this more specifically later on. So, what is the core of horror? I would imagine it is fear. And what is fear? I would imagine it is tension.

Tension is what you want to have in a horror story. I’ll give you an example of what not to do. In a horror story involving the supernatural, you usually have one supernatural entity, or capacity. Perhaps some demon from Hell was summoned accidentally, or someone with bad intentions obtains special powers. That’s one thing, and tension happens between our regular realistic world and this new element. That’s a different type of tension than strictly the fear-tension, but it’s related. Now, if you’re Stephen King and you want to screw that tension up, here’s what you do: you introduce other such entities or capacities that should be unique. Suppose we have a story in which a demon from Hell is summoned, then a group of people team up to fight it. So far, so good. But then, being King, you decide that your group of heroes suddenly have telepathic powers, and, since you suck, you don’t root that special capacity to the same origin the demon has, thus making two specific supernatural entities/capacities and stretching the tension between your realistic world and something wholly other beyond its strength. The tension breaks, and you got nothing left.

Another better example is this: suppose one of the band dies in a fight with the demon from Hell. Now, out of the blue, that character is resurrected out of some group capacity the team has. That would be a third special capacity thing within our realistic world thing, and that too would kill the tension. Why? Because if a character that dies can be revived, then what could not happen? At this point, you expect anything and everything, which means you are no longer under tension, because your story is limitless. Whatever problem our main characters face, you know the author can pull out any insane trick out of his sleeves and solve it. Thus, you don’t feel tension, and you don’t much care about the plot either because anything can happen, at any point.

This is why I recommend you stick to one very specific entity or capacity that would be endowed with the “wholly other” and such numinous qualities. That is, if your setting is “our” world, our realistic world, our usual reality. If your setting is fantastic and all, you will yourself decide what is usual and what isn’t, but it won’t be obvious to readers before you delineate it yourself.

It’s easier to create tension in a written story than in a movie, because in a story, you give out the information exactly how you want, and you can have such scenes as having your character face the creature (or any numinous entity) and yet not give out what the creature looks like. In a movie, they would show you the character from the point of view of the monster or something along those lines. The point is, it’s easier not to show in a narrative than it is in a movie. An image speaks a thousand words, they say, and in the case of horror, it’s not always an asset.

To create tension, you have to have limits. These limits are what will give a sense of reality to your story, even if there are insane creatures in it. If you have children, you know that babies find limits comforting and reassuring because where they come from, the womb, all was limits, and once out of there, their insecure limbs can waver to every direction and not find any. (And I don’t have children.) This is why it is recommended to wrap your new born baby in a blanket that somehow recreates what the baby is used to. Similarly, some animals feel more secure in the darkness of a blanket than otherwise, when captured. True story.

How do you create limits? You make it clear what is possible and what isn’t, and you stick to it. Once the rules are established, you don’t fuck it all up with some new super power coming out of nowhere, because that will change all the rules, and it will in essence destroy the tension of your story because the reader will have to rearrange everything, and the reader will also know that you may again destroy that structure in later pages, because if you did it once, you can do it twice. There’s no guarantee, and that too will be the hallmark of a bad story.

This is a fault I find in Stephen King and Philip K. Dick, even though I never read an actual novel by King. I did see many of the films, and I know the basic plots, which is all I need now. (And please keep in mind I’m not attacking King, I’m only using what I know of his work to illustrate my point, so if you’re a fan and you hate me for dissing your hero, please forgive me and recommend a book of his for me to read; we can be friends.) For instance, if you have seen this most impressive movie Blade Runner (1982), and you then read the Dick novel it’s based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? well you know what I mean. In the novel, there’s a whole series of such “capacities” that don’t appear in the movie, thankfully, because that’s too much. If there’s an android theme in your movie, you will not want to add some mystico-religious pseudo paranormal virtual reality experience. Have one big theme and explore it to the full, that is much better than a gazillion half-assed themes. For Dick, it’s never enough to have drugs that make you live in a virtual reality, and have a man back from the limits of our universe, you also have to have people with special brain gifts such as divining the future and other medium-like abilities. Too much causes your tension to break.

A perfect example of this is Alien and Aliens. Respectively by Ridley Scott and James Cameron. In the first movie, you have one alien in one spaceship. In the second movie, you have thousands of aliens over an entire planet. Don’t get me wrong, both are good movies; they just are different. Cameron went for an action movie, and it worked great. Scott was going for something else, and he understood what I mean by having limits: one single numinous entity, one single location which you can’t escape. That’s how you create tension: you give clear and indestructible limits (and you do NOT destroy them later in the story!).

I am reminded of a horror thought I had when I was a child, by which I mean, when I was a child, I had a traumatic imaginary life. I’d be terrified of nightmares, and when I had them, they were the stuff of Hell. This one thought I had was about being chased around my house by some evil old man, looking somewhat like a zombie. I don’t recall exactly what this person looked like, but the focus of my thought was about speed. And the strange thing was that it seemed scarier if the evil person was slower. Why? I think it might be because if the evil entity is slower, it gives you more opportunity to escape, thus creating more tension because it becomes your responsibility to effectively flee, or fail to flee. A faster creature would get to you in an instant, and there wouldn’t be much tension in that, and on top of that, there wouldn’t be much time to feel this tension. Thus, a weaker creature is not necessarily less scary. Think of zombies! The slowness of zombies is usually counter-parted by their number. If you had just one slow zombie, it’d make for a pretty ridiculous story, but when you have hundreds, it works. If those hordes of zombies were extra fast and efficient, you’d have your characters killed in about twelve seconds. Not recommended, unless your characters have some weapons or situation that counter-balances that. It’s all about balance and tension.

Imagine another example: you’re in a huge hotel that’s entirely empty except for you... and a psychopathic killer, somewhere. Now that’s tension. To screw this up, let’s add 200 psychopathic killers to this hotel. You get the idea right away. You should be in a far worse situation, yet it’s not as scary. The fact is that, as Andy Warhol pointed out and demonstrated, repetition lessens whatever is being repeated. Instead of one numinous killer, you got 200 non-scary killers, and they become one abstract mass which itself might be scary, but in a very different way. You lose focus by having so many bees in your hive.

To conclude, remember to create and maintain tension by imposing limits on your characters and story. There must not be some silly deux ex machina trick to save your characters, they must pull themselves out of it. With a clearly limited character or situation, you create suspense and tension, because you know what can and what cannot be done, and should you be surprised, it should only be because of the ingenuity of the author, not by his giving his characters out of the blue new special powers.

I hope this was interesting to you.

Reflections on the Past

2008-10-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

10^th October 2008

Directly related to the previous chapter – The Retrospective Age – this present chapter will be about how we deal with our own past, on an individual basis. And since I am only one individual, myself, this will be about how I consider my own past. Nothing too personal though, at least, nothing you can’t relate to.

When you feel your past was mostly wasted, and that you didn’t live as much as you wish you had, you feel rather bad, like you have lost something that you will never get back. But let’s see how that goes with a great past. You regret that it’s gone, because you’ll never get it back either. Different pasts, similar results. So basically, whatever kind of past you have, it makes you sad. Although, you can see it from a different angle: my past sucked, and I am glad it’s over with. Does that work? You tell me. Personally, I find that everything in my past makes me sad, whether it was sad, because it was sad, or good, because it’s over. There seems to be no escape from being sad about the past. Except maybe to simply look ahead.

Sometimes I live with the illusion that one’s past condenses into something, and that if I had had a great past, it would solidify into a solid block of happiness which would sustain me on a daily basis. But as I said before, if someone had such a block of happiness, in sad times, they could look back on it and feel extremely depressed that they have no such happiness right then. The present moment is all, the past is only remembered.

So what matters is right now, yes? It doesn’t do to try to live your entire past in this moment, because it can’t be done, and whichever way you go about it, you end up being sad. Which brings me to this puzzling question: how long is the present moment? How much time between it being present and then passed? I don’t have a clue. So anyway, next.

If looking back always makes us sad, we might as well look ahead, correct? But then that too can have its problems. You may worry about your future, rather than look forward to it. So we should really stick about the present moment. But I digress.

I don’t know where to go from here.

The Retrospective Age

2008-10-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

9^th October 2008

I began reading Nature by Emerson, and here is the first paragraph of the book:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Pretty cool uh? I haven’t read a whole lot of Emerson, but every time I read something of his, he kicks massive amounts of ass. The sun shines today also! This passage could still be said today, because we still are a retrospective age, more so than ever before. I don’t think any generation was more aware of the past than we are. Back in the 19^th century, they didn’t have all the technology we have today to be exposed to the past. Now we have movies, documentaries, videos on YouTube, countless books, countless websites, etc. And if you look around you, you will notice how the past is regarded with almost sanctified respect.

For instance, I can easily picture the 50’s, and the 60’s, the 70’s, and especially the 80’s. The 90’s, I still sort of can, but way less easily. The 00’s, I wouldn’t know. I mean it’s definitely not as obvious as the 80’s, for example. That said, I think I already wrote about this in some other chapter.

The idea that we live through traditions rather than an “original relation to the universe” is very true. Today we have more knowledge about the universe than we ever had before, how many us look at the stars at night regularly? We think we know so much, and we forget to simply look. Our big knowledge only helped us think we had it figured out, and that some scientists could explain it all if we just asked them to, but the truth is that there isn’t a point where you “know” for real, because every new discovery brings new questions, and I don’t feel like reality has an end. And knowing parts of something infinite is the equivalent of knowing nothing at all, so we know nothing at all. We just live with the illusion that we know. Can anyone explain gravity?

Someone famous said we were dwarves on the shoulders of giants. I wrote before that this was not true, and that we were dwarves on the shoulders of other dwarves, who also were sitting on the shoulders of other dwarves, and so on and so forth. Now we’re sitting so high, we don’t even remember what the ground looks like. Why should you look at the night sky in wonder when some army of unknown astronomers already have mapped it all out?

Another example is this: if someone has a vision of Jesus or Mary, or God, and tells their priest or pastor, or else, they won’t be given any credit. A lot of Christians believe that time’s up for miracles, that it only happened in biblical times, and now it’s over. We seem to have more faith in a past we never lived in than in our own time.

And it’s true! When the war in Iraq began, in 2003, all I could see in my fellow students, who were going on strike and marching inside the hallways of our university (likely the stupidest place to protest, since 99% of the students were already against the war), was an intense desire to be the rebellious youth of the 60’s protesting against the Vietnam War. A lot of people in my generation seem to live in the 60’s in their heads, and this was a occasion not to miss: a war to revolt again. That’s why I didn’t protest at all, because for one I didn’t think it’d have any effect (I don’t live in America, and my country isn’t mighty, so even if we managed to convince our government, which is highly unlikely, they would have a hard time convincing the USA) and to see the pleasure my fellows had in re-enacting the 60’s just made me want to puke. Everything they did was mostly about telling each other jokes about Bush and then smoking pot, with Jimi Hendrix in the background. I’d have gone for Hendrix, though, but my fellows probably didn’t know Hendrix was for the war in Vietnam. And maybe you didn’t know that either, but now you do.

Another symptom of our age being retrospective is that we count on others for a lot. For instance, most of us, if not all of us, can’t build their own home and produce their own food. Not so long ago, people knew how to do all that. They built their own homes and produced their own food. If you dropped the average Western family in some place with nobody else, they’d have a very hard time, and would probably be dead in a week. You know how to use a hammer, but can you produce a hammer? You can use a computer, can you build one? You eat meat, have you ever killed an animal and would you know how to prepare it?

We use so many things we know almost nothing about, it should scare the crap out of us. None of us is independent anymore, and that could be a good thing. On the other hand, it’s not. Reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, I learned that a single man could produce his own food, and build his own house, all on his own, and have enough to live on. On top of that, he had far more holidays than we have. This means that if you’re a homeless person, you can start growing your own food and build your own house and you’ll be doing fine. Thoreau did it, so it can be done. I’m very impressed at Thoreau for all that. If you dropped me in Walden with nothing at all, I don’t guarantee I’d be able to build a house and grow my own food. But that should be taught to us, don’t you think? Why doesn’t school teach us useful basics? They teach us crap we’ll never use, but they don’t teach us about the laws and the many, many ways in which we can get screwed during our lifetime. Maybe they don’t want us to know how things work, nor do they want us to be independent and not need them. Thoreau was thrown into jail because he refused to pay his taxes, because he didn’t see why he should have to pay taxes since he took nothing from the country.

Let’s take an example from my delightsome country, Switzerland. When you withdraw money from your bank, they charge you a very small fee if your withdrawal is under 100 dollars of worth. Someone figured this out, and every time they wanted to withdraw money, they did the following: they withdrew 200, took what they needed, and put everything back in the bank, to the surprise of the banker. If you want 10 dollars, you’d better take 120, and give back 110, that way you don’t get charged. Now, isn’t that a vicious trick to take money from people? It is. In my world, doing that should be criminal. It’s nothing more than a vulgar trick.

Naturally, I never learned that banks did that sort of thing in school. They do nothing to arm you against society. And this is one reason why most governments would rather take the people’s guns away from them. I’m no member of the NRA, but I see the point of letting people keep their weapons. If one day you have to storm the White House, you won’t want to go there with a shovel or a kitchen knife. And I seriously think some governments deserve to have their asses kicked. The thing is, we have level of living that doesn’t make us go crazy enough for us to storm our governments. It’s both good and bad. It’s tolerable, I guess. They do us in the butt, but they use vaseline, so we let them.

Instead of revolting, we look back and worship past revolutions, and past revolutionaries, even when they were absolute assholes. We need to get some faith in our own age, people.

Pedophile Priests: Suffer the Little Children

2008-10-09T10:57:00.000-07:00

9^th October 2008

Nowadays, the Catholic Church is mostly known for its eerie tendency to molest children. This is a very sad fact, and it raises some questions, which I will attempt to address here.

That priests have molested children is a fact we cannot ignore, nor can we ignore that they seem to be legion amongst the Church. (And yes, I chose my words intentionally, for those of you who remember the Gospel.) So what is it about the Catholic Church and pedophilia?

One theory I regularly hear is that priests become pedophiles through sexual frustration due to their mandatory celibate. I can speak on that count, personally, because I have gone through over 14 years of intense sexual frustration, and I have not become the least bit of a pedophile for so much. Therefore, I don’t think this would be the explanation. You never know, though, but that’s not the first thing I think of when it comes to explaining this problem.

Here’s my take on it. Suppose you are a pedophile, and you intend to molest children. How will you go about it? My guess is that you would try to secure a position where people trust you, and one where you can be with children. A priest obviously has high respect because of the religious nature of the job, and you are in contact with children. Besides, if you’re a pedophile and don’t feel attracted to women or other adults, being a priest will “explain” why you never date and never have a partner. People will think you’re a good priest, when in fact, you just don’t lust after adults. No one will ask you nosey questions about your personal life because everyone will assume you don’t have a relationship of any kind, and that if you had, being a priest, you’d not talk of it. Thus, the position of a priest seems ideal for a pedophile.

Now we need to address something. Often, people have a very sympathising view of the pedophile. They think of him or her as a poor person who deserves pity and understanding. The truth is that, simply, most of these pedophiles who molest children just want to fuck kids. And they don’t care. Most of you didn’t have the sinister opportunity to talk with pedophiles who molest children, but the fact is there: they just want to fuck children and enjoy it. No concern for the child. None whatsoever. And let’s be honest, if they had any concern for the child, they’d not molest kids, simple as that. I don’t doubt that there are pedophiles out there who never molest anyone and never would. I’m addressing those who do. They know what they’re doing, they just don’t care about their victims. They want sexual gratification and pleasure, and nothing else matters. Don’t be fooled by our age’s tendency to explain everything away with psychology and other rationalisations: these people know what they are doing, they’re not insane.

All pedophiles intending to molest children will attempt to find a job which brings them close to them, that’s only logical, and it’s backed up by statistics. That is the reason why you find so many of them in the Catholic Church. I don’t think priestly life turns anyone into a pedophile, it just attracts pedophiles.

As to the Catholic Church, it erred when it decided to deal with those things on its own terms, and not disclose it to the police of any of the countries in which these horrors happened. For this, the Catholic Church should be held responsible. Here is what typically happens: a priest is caught in the act, the Church sends him away to some monastery or else where he no longer is in contact with children (in the best of cases), but no police is called, nothing happens. That’s the problem, the Church isn’t outside the laws of the country in which its members live.

Thanks to the infamy of those scandals, I don’t think any parent will tranquilly let their child alone with a priest any more. For those who weren’t so lucky, we can only wish them the best (and perhaps sue the Church and get something for their pain).

I don’t blame Catholicism for these evil people, but it’s absolutely certain that this is a massive blow to our trust (for those of us who had any to begin with, that is) and after all those horrors, it’s understandable that we cannot easily look upon a priest and not wonder. I wouldn’t blame anyone for that.

The Factory, Nick, Nietzsche, and Defecation

2008-10-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

7^th October 2008

During the Summer of 2000, I worked in a factory for three weeks, and lived alone for two. My family was away on vacation, and I stayed. In that factory, I did the same job that people who had been there for 25 years did. It took about an hour to learn all of it. This factory produced very long blades – usually longer than a human’s length – and throughout my work there, I could never figure how they were used, nor did any of the workers there had any clue. All we knew was that these blades were used as parts of a printer, but of the industrial type, I imagine.

Back then I was 17. I here mean to show you a little portrait of me at that age, so I won’t show more of the factory stuff, even though there’s a lot to say in that area.

Not being very social, when the midday break came about, instead of going where all the workers go and eat, I spirited myself away. Where to? The “restroom” of the factory. I figured nobody would find me there. I’d lock myself up in one of the stalls, and pretend to be taking the longest crap humanity has ever known. The other workers had already pegged me down as a “student” and I had no intention of feeding their fire, so I wouldn’t read a book in front of them. That’s all I wanted to do during my break, read. So I’d hid in a stall and read Nietzsche. I was 17.

I liked it in the stall, on my own, without anyone able to see me. There was a not so amazing smell though. It didn’t smell like shit, but you could tell the place needed more ventilation. So I’m reading Nietzsche, getting his wisdom into my brain, when all of a sudden, someone enters the restroom. I stop moving, I don’t turn a page, I just freeze and reread the same page until the guy goes away. He does his little things, and goes away. I turn the page.

Later, another guy comes, and this one enters a stall. The stall right beside mine. My door is closed and locked, but my feet aren’t down. I meant to hide, which is stupid because if your door is both closed and locked, everyone knows there must be someone in there, and if there appears to be no one, it’s more likely that they’ll get the janitor to break that door open. Maybe it was just the position I was in that needed my feet to be hidden. I’d sit cross-legged on the closed lid of the toilet, so I could rest my elbows on my knees and hold the book before me more easily.

The guy doesn’t know he’s not alone in the restroom. Other doors are closed even when there’s no one in the stall, typically. So he starts whistling, as he unbuckles his pants and unzips his stuff. There I am, literally inches away from him, and he has no clue I’m so damn close. Then I hear his little brook flowing. I feel like I’m some spy and that no matter what comes next, I shall not laugh or giggle. And what comes next is a series of energetic little farts and tumbling sounds. I’m not reading philosophy anymore at this point. I’m holding my mouth firmly closed with all the strength of my hand. Breathing is optional, and I don’t use it for now, which I figure is a good idea because those sounds usually don’t come alone.

I think God made shitting so comical and ridiculous to humble us. It’s hard to think yourself something majestic when your ass is a trumpet and your insides a stinkbomb. And if you’re already humble, it makes you giggle, like it did me. Dude keeps shitting a riot as I exercise masterful control over my breathing. And I hear every single movement he makes. I can almost see the exact shape of the turds he donates to oblivion. The way they splash in the yellow water gives me an idea of their very texture, and I can even tell if they fell straight, or made a loop. Of course I can’t. I’m no shitologist.

Then the guy wipes his ass. I hear the wiping, it’s only a few inches away from me, after all. Then he goes away. I’m left alone, but that man’s presence will be made vivid to me as the token of his defecation will linger in my nostrils for quite some time. If you’d rather stay in a shit-smelling restroom than go out and risk being seen by people, you might have some kind of social anxiety issue going on. I preferred the bad smell.

So that’s it for this little episode in my life. Reading Nietzsche in factory toilets. A typical teenage activity, right?

Questioning Darwinism

2008-09-17T12:53:00.001-07:00

17^th September 2008

Yes, it’s legal. These days, Darwinism is no longer an ism, but a truth we’re all supposed to accept without questioning, lest we should be thought of as retards. My problem with this, beside the obvious, is that most defenders of Darwinism don’t even really know what it’s about. If you can’t explain some of your core beliefs, something is very wrong.

In spite of Charles Darwin being a Christian, Darwinism has come to be used as a weapon against God, and to establish science as something firmly against religions – indeed, science began and evolved as religion’s evil twin brother, for it found things that religion couldn’t deal with. Unfortunately, scientists today have kept this tradition, even though it is not uncalled for, as most people’s religion is now science.

I’m tackling with this as a laymen, and I believe most of you will be laymen too. Take a simple enough example: the origin of life. If I asked you to tell me what that is, I bet you’d not be very vocal. The best I could do myself is something like this: “Well, it’s an original mix of certain elements put together, and then lightning, maybe, comes and lights up the mix into a living thing.” And I’m not even kidding. I’m not even sure about the lightning thing.

Basically, for evolutionists and current scientists, life came from minerals, or, a rock. According to my sources, the experience they once did with those same minerals gave some form of life, but it was infinitely inferior to what the event should have been to make it possible for life to evolve into what we are now. I am no scientist, and I am certainly not an expert in that domain, so I can only report what I read or heard, and leave it at that.

That said, if life comes from minerals boosted up by some lightening, or without it, shouldn’t life be created every so often? If life can just happen like that, why doesn’t it happen nowadays? Surely somewhere the right mix is ready to get its ass electrified by Zeus, and life may happen again! Maybe it does, but is eaten up immediately by other organic beings around it, that would make sense.

Someone whose name I forget used the “Peanut Butter Jar Argument”, in which he explains that should life just happen from basic elements, at near random, every now and then, you should be able to open a jar of peanut butter... and find life. But it never happens, you never find anything other than peanut butter in a peanut butter jar. And yes, peanut butter is not a mineral, but it is assumed that if minerals combined together can generate life, an already organic element, necessarily having the required mix for “life”, should also be able to create the miracle. Shouldn’t it?

From my point of view, I am rather skeptic as to life happening like that. I mean, random minerals combined together generating all the life we know? Only McGyver could pull this off, and he’s not real. And he had a mullet.

But let’s assume that’s how life began. Then what? Can you explain to me why that first living organism would actually evolve into anything else? Why wouldn’t it remain what it is? According to evolutionism, it changes because the environment changes, and thus, it must adapt, or die.

And that’s the next complication. The first bacteria were perfectly adapted to their environment, and now I will quote from John P. Briggs and F. David Peat’s awesome book Looking Glass Universe:

First, bacteria did not need to make this transformation in order to adapt to the oxygenless environment they lived in at the time. They were already well adapted to that environment (even today some strains can survive only in oxygenless places such as mud or our intestinal tracts). The primary advantage seems to have been that the presence of free oxygen makes bacteria fifteen times more efficient in metabolizing glucose. However, that efficiency can only be achieved after the oxygen is freely available. That’s a problem. How could the bacteria “know” they would be more efficient if they all worked together to produce enough free oxygen so that large numbers of them could later take advantage of it (by changing one step in their metabolism)? This is only the beginning of the mystery.

If you’re interested in the shortcomings of evolutionism, and modern science, I really recommend the book, as it gives a very interesting panorama of where science is at right now, as well as explains very well where science was in the beginning of the 20^th century. But back to our bacteria.

So what happens here is that those bacteria seem to have a plan. They do something entirely useless for themselves, but which will be most useful later on. Doesn’t that make you ask some questions about the assumed randomness of evolutionist theories? It certainly makes me wonder.

From the evolutionist’s side, the only way to sum up the origin of life up to then is to say this: random minerals put together caused life out of sheer luck and for no reason. Then the first living organisms decided, for no reason, those bacteria start producing oxygen that is of absolute no use for them, for now, and it is another lucky accident that once these bacteria have evolved one step, the oxygen they produced will become very useful. That’s lucky.

If you had this in court, and pointed out all the “lucky” coincidences, whoever the accused was, he would be found guilty. Coincidences happen, but when they happen all the time, and in patterns, they no longer are mere coincidences. Moving on.

Our bacteria keep evolving, for no reason, into some really complicated species, out of pure randomness. So how does that happen? According to Darwinism, and I’ll try to sum this up as best I can, random mutations happen, and are then accepted or rejected by the environment, and/or other members of the species. This is known as “natural selection”, which, I remind you, does not imply there is any will behind the process. It just happens.

Let’s take an example to clarify things a little. Giraffes. Our giraffes, for now, have very short necks, and that’s alright because the trees they eat from are not tall. One day, the trees grow (don’t ask me why those would decide to change without reason) and our giraffes face a problem. The fruits are becoming out of reach!

Thanks to that wonderful qualify of mutating that I never saw in my entire life, some giraffe is born with a longer neck. That’s the Darwinian random mutation, which, as always, is damn lucky. That long-necked giraffe can feed and the others cannot. Consequently, short-necked giraffes die, and the long-necked one survives and has many offspring. Lamarck believed that animals evolved because their attempts shaped them – the giraffe would have gotten a longer neck by actually extending it to the fruits, which, eventually, led to the neck elongating itself. Darwin’s theory is based on the lucky random mutation.

That’s what I learned in school. Now, I got some questions.

The random mutation. Does that even exist? The only mutations I know of which happen to humans are really bad things. Down syndrome and other things like that are considered mutations. I could not name a single species that has actually mutated that way.

Is it hereditary? In case of mutations, such as a two-headed goat (which, again, is not a Darwinian mutation exactly), the mutated feature does not get passed to the offspring.

Doesn’t it take two to make babies? Suppose the long-necked giraffe survives where every other giraffe dies, shouldn’t we have two randomly mutated giraffes to ensure survival? And yes, you could argue that things don’t happen this fast, that giraffes mutate slowly, as trees grow slowly, and etc, and it could work, it just sounds very, very weird. If it’s all based on sudden, random mutations, and then it also happens slowly and gradually, then the odds are getting so damn slim you can’t possibly argue it’s random!

I have more questions about the mutating principle, though. If these are random, wouldn’t we occasionally get stuff we don’t need? How lucky is it that every species has stuff it actually uses? And yes, I am aware of moles having eyes they don’t use and the lost bone in sperm whales. The thing is, those were of use at some point in the evolution of that species. I’m talking of random stuff without use.

Shouldn’t at least one species develop something utterly useless, like eyelids on the back, for no eyes? I mean if it’s random, that stuff should happen! Suppose our giraffes randomly developed a long neck, and a blue patch on their asses, would there be any reason for the blue-patched giraffes to die? No, they could survive just as well. Yes, you can argue it makes them ugly and giraffes of the opposite sex will refuse to mate, but that’s not very convincing. If Stephen Hawking can marry twice, a long-necked giraffe with a blue patch on its ass can mate too. (And I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Hawking, make no mistake.)

Camels have conveniently placed callous skin on their knees, right where the skin touches the ground when they kneel. So let me get this straight: those four bits of calloused skin placed exactly where they’re needed are the fruit of pure luck? Shouldn’t some camels have bits of calloused skin on their backs or somewhere really random and useless? Why is it that everything random in the theory also happens to be extremely useful and exist exactly where it has maximum efficiency? Besides, I doubt that not having calloused skin on your knees would make you a sure candidate for extinction, yet all camels have that. And for those who wonder if those calloused bits of skin aren’t the result of simply kneeling on the sand all the time, well I honestly don’t know. It’s a possibility, it’d make perfect sense, but it’s not my example, I saw it used by others before, and I assume, perhaps wrongly, that they checked that option before using this as an illustration.

Looking at animals and nature, I have a hard time with the idea that randomness is the cause of all this. As humans, we can’t even create life! We can’t. And the primitive life forms they say they created, well, still according to my sources, it wasn’t viable stuff at all. If scientists are as good with this as they were with cloning a sheep, I wouldn’t be surprised; yet cloning is a lot easier than creating life from scratch, which we still haven’t done.

Now, if random mutations are the stuff, why do they actually exist? What makes it so that such allegedly random mutations can even happen? If you keep the random element of it, it’s hard to make sense of it, but if you, for a second, consider the possibility that it’s not random at all, then it makes perfect sense. The trees are too high, giraffes grow a longer neck. Of all the random stuff giraffes could have grown, it had to be a long neck. And you’re going to say: “Well, if they had grown a fifth leg, it would have been useless and they would have died.” Right enough, but in that case we would have found those skeletons of badly failed random mutations. Thing is, we don’t! And when we do find odd mutations, they’re mutations of the kind that the two-headed goat had. A fifth leg would not have changed the giraffes’ situation much, but it would have survived long enough to procreate somewhat, and would have left us a good number of five-legged specimens. They haven’t, because this particular mutation never took place. It was only the really useful mutation that took place.

Now to humans! And I will again quote from Looking Glass Universe:

As Gould and Eldredge point out, however, the fossil evidence doesn’t actually show a picture of gradual evolution. The geological record shows, instead, that when a species dies out it looks pretty much the same as when it appeared. There are missing links between species. The inability to find these missing links is something of an embarrassment to palaeontologists. Gould calls it the “trade secret”. The picture the geological record does show is a picture of species appearing “suddenly” in a few thousand years (which is sudden in geological time), emerging into reality fully formed. Our own species, the large-brained Homo sapiens, virtually popped into existence amid several other hominids. Efforts to arrange the skeletal evidence of these hominids in a gradual sequence have not proved successful.

And while I’m at it, let me quote another passage not far away from the first:

No single feature by itself would offer any survival advantage. For organisms to change their nature and function, many features have to evolve together. This means fantastic genetic coordination. Random mutation of a gene here and there couldn’t accomplish such a transformation.

The first quote hints towards what is referred to as “punctuational” evolution. This is the evidence we have, and the fact that no Darwinist ever solved the “missing link” problem is most likely because there is no missing link at all. If there were, we’d have found it by now.

Obviously, there is evolution, I don’t deny that, I merely question Darwinism here, and it seems to me that Darwinism is wrong and even preposterous in some cases. But things like the sperm whale’s lost bone seems to me to be solid proof that species do evolve. That whale once had legs, or back flippers, or something, and it gradually lost it. That bone did not disappear all of a sudden, and it is a good question whether or not that bone will continue to disappear.

What is at stake with this topic is the randomness of everything. The Church of Science has always tried to make it so that the universe had no meaning and was solely made of coincidences and that there was no God, or that the question of God shouldn’t even be approached by science. This was the mindset for most of the 20^th century. We’re beginning to see that it most likely isn’t so random, and that there are principles at work which we ignore still.

According to the skeletal evidence we have, our species just sort of came out of nowhere, and since then we haven’t evolved one bit. In the entire biological history of the homo sapiens, I know no known mutation that lasted. And racial features aren’t mutations of the same kind, if they are mutations at all; I guess you could say they are, but they’re extremely minor: most of these racial differences are either skin colour or skin shape, and that mostly in the facial area. No human ever mutated a new limb, a new internal organ, or anything of the sort which they then passed on to their children. That has never happened, not once. And I wouldn’t argue that humans developed darker and paler skin because of the sun based on natural selection: what would a lighter shade of skin or a darker one change in the individual life of one human? It’s such a gradual thing, we are told, that you couldn’t even tell the difference. Something else is at work on those changes, and it’s not randomness.

Holocaust Denial

2008-09-17T12:53:00.000-07:00

17^th September 2008

In some countries, denying the Holocaust is a criminal offence. I believe it is illegal in France, for example. In this chapter I will argue that denying the Holocaust should be legal. Now, don’t get all excited on me: I do not support Holocaust denial.

Here is my logic: if you believe that the Holocaust is a true historic event (which I do), then you shouldn’t need a law to reinforce this truth. The earth is not flat, we don’t have a law punishing people who argue that it is (and these people exist, they are called “flatearthers” and they’re interesting).

Suppose someone wants to tell everyone else that the earth is flat, or that the Holocaust never happened, let them! If someone writes a book about how the Holocaust never happened, let them, and then take them to court for lies and have a real debate over the actual arguments put forward by the author. That’s how it should be done, in credibility’s name. If you ban such people from speaking or writing at face value, you rob everyone of a debate that would prove where the truth lies, and you fuel some people’s ideas of conspiracy and injustice. Remember, justice is blind, and it is blind to stupidity too, but it concerns itself with facts, and that’s what should be focused on.

Backing up the truth with a law is in fact weakening said truth. Making a fool of yourself should be the only consequence of denying the Holocaust, and anyone who seeks to ridicule Holocaust deniers should do so based on facts, not with insults or comments about the mental status of the deniers.

I know there’s a difference between claiming that the earth is flat and denying the Holocaust. That difference is about the emotional side of the Holocaust. The problem is this: if you think the deniers are concerned about that emotional side of things, and try to purposely hurt people, then you tacitly admit that they are not concerned with historical facts, but have an agenda of their own which cares little about the truth. That sort of thing is punishable by law, and should be punished by law, too, but until you can prove that said deniers are in it for the hurt, they should be free to expose whatever facts they have.

Sex & Death: Your New Gods

2008-09-16T19:18:00.001-07:00

17^th September 2008

I already pointed out in a previous chapter that many live under very religious beliefs, but fail to see the religious nature of their mindset. Science, for instance, has dogmas, and don’t you miss that. Interestingly enough, when a religion has dogmas, you know it’s admitting “weakness”, in that there would be no need for dogmas was the truth available. Science never claims to have dogmas, thus the question of its objectivity isn’t even raised. True science should be non-dogmatic, and shouldn’t behave with a prejudiced mindset. However, in our days, science is dogmatic. Because of this, when so called “anomalous objects” are found, rather than challenge the paradigm, those objects are spirited away. Not very scientific. But enough on that topic.

This to say that God does not die, He changes. I mean of course people’s idea of God, not the entity Itself. In what way are Eros and Thanatos your new Gods? I’ll tell you. “You” being people who either stopped or never started believing in God.

Suppose you’re an atheist, which is not possible unless you combine serious lack of knowledge and curiosity with an impressive arrogance and a very short-sighted mind, then why would you live? Like most people, you would not question this before your life becomes difficult. Any happy person with a happy life can live on without asking questions, because life’s fun justifies itself. It gets complicated when life is a struggle.

From the point of view of an atheist, why live? If there is no meaning to life except the one we give it, why live? Pleasure. Pleasure is usually the atheist’s reason to live, and what sustains the atheist, usually, is simply that life is enjoyable. Naturally, this applies to far more people than atheists alone.

In this pretty picture of life without consequences, one comes to think of death. Death is the one thing that will make you stop and ponder, and stare in wonder. Something without meaning having an end, that may sound a little bit odd. If there’s no meaning to anything, why should it even end? (Not to mention: why should it even begin?)

Still supposing you’re an atheist, and believe there is no driving principle in the universe, no plan, no will other than ours, and no all-encompassing meaning, what will you live for? For yourself, obviously. Now, this will not apply to all people, but to most. In terms of pleasure, sex is the summit we can reach in our earthly lives, therefore, to someone who has no better reasons to live than pleasure, sex will become a God of its own kind, just as death stands as another God of sorts, putting a massive stop sign to our meaningless lives of self-centered pleasure-seeking in the name of nothingness.

If everything you do serves no higher purpose, no greater good, you can limit your life to pleasuring your personal self, because that’s all that your faith will provide for (yes, I said “faith”, because that’s all we can have, short of perfect and omniscient knowledge, which we will never have).

In our days, everything focuses on us as individuals, not as a community of any kind. Everything that is advertised for is done on an individual basis: it’s always about what you, as a single person, can buy. It makes sense from a marketing perspective, but it’s more than just commercials that focus on the individual. From every side, you’re evaluated in what you are as an individual person, more so than ever before in our history.

And all these things are tied to materialism, because people generally do not care much about your spirituality as an achievement, they’ll be more impressed by your material possessions.

Virginity these days has become a laughing matter, sadly, and that’s yet another example of Sex being your new God. “One day you’re gonna die, why wait? Have sex now!”

It all makes sense once you understand the paradigm: meaningless lives in a meaningless universe, we might as well enjoy our short time here. If that’s enough for you to live on, I’m impressed. Personally I would require a lot more than that to make my life worth living.

With Gods like sex and death, to have faith, you have to have pleasure. If you do, and if you maintain a happy life, then I guess you can run on that sort of faith for quite some time. It all depends on the questions you ask, or don’t.

But what’s the point of this chapter exactly? If you believe that sex is the best thing that can happen to you in this life, and that death is the worst, and last, thing that can happen to you, then yes, these two are your new Gods. From that fact, you can conclude many things. Maybe you’re happy with the situation as it is, and maybe you need more. Maybe the idea that your life is just a big heap of nonsense which you can enjoy (or not) for around 75 years, and then you die, and then everything you ever lived, thought, felt, is forgotten, and then everyone who knew you dies too, and nothing remains of you, absolutely nothing – well if this idea seems to you a little wrong, and that it can’t possibly be that way, maybe you should not give up on the idea that there might be a higher purpose, a greater good, and that what you do does matter in a transcendental way which may never be obvious to us.

My 9/11

2008-09-10T15:01:00.000-07:00

11^th September 2008

People of my generation – I was born in 1982 – didn’t really have one major historic date in their lives. That is, until September 11^th 2001. I assume everyone of us remembers exactly what they were doing that day, how they discovered the news, and their reaction to it.

On the 11^th of September 2001, I was about to begin university. I was enjoying several months of holidays, which I spent reading Dostoyevsky, playing Megaman Legends 2 on the old Playstation, and discovering Sigur Ròs as well. I probably played some Driver too.

That day, in the afternoon, around 2 p.m. local time, I turned on the TV to see the weirdest sight: one of the World Trade Center towers was smoking with a seemingly huge hole in its bosom. Commentators were not totally sure what happened, but they said a plane crashed in it. I thought that was rather strange, but what a breaking news! Keep in mind that at this moment, nobody thought of a terrorist attack. I thought it was the queerest accident ever, but I certainly didn’t think it was an attack.

From that point on, I remained glued to the TV screen. I sent a few phone texts to friends: “Watch CNN! Some plane crashed in the WTC!” And as I watched this surreal image of the tower smoking, another explosion occurred. Even weirder, I actually saw the second plane live, crash into the other tower. Of course, at first I thought I had hallucinated, there could not possibly be a second plane crashing by accident in those towers.

The commentators said the explosion heard and felt was probably from the engine of the (first) plane, which would have exploded after the initial crash. I wondered about the plane I had seen myself. Then CNN found out that the engine exploding after the crash was not a very good explanation for the new explosion because it was located on the other tower. At this point it became really crazy. Nobody mentioned an attack, I still thought it was an accident. But now, with two planes crashing in two towers, that was unreal. My first thought was that some diabolical automatic piloting was the culprit, and that for some reason, planes were now forced to take this deadly course and crash into New York’s highest skyscrapers.

I thought, with disbelief, that maybe a third plane would come, that they would keep on coming. Then news of the Pentagon being attacked came on, and at that point, I don’t remember how I felt and what I thought. Except this: “Well, maybe this day will be referred to as a historical day, and I was there.” Not an especially noble thought, but for once in my life, I felt the entire world was together in this, and this was true.

The towers hadn’t collapsed yet, I think, and so I wasn’t aware of what was really going on. I thought the planes had crashed, there was smoke, but everything was so calm yet (from my far away point of view, no CNN journalist that I could see was on the ground per se). And then as this commentator from several miles away, atop another building, was commentating on the situation, one tower collapsed. As with the second plane, this made the whole thing take another dimension. I didn’t expect the tower to collapse. I couldn’t believe it when it happened.

Later on, the second tower collapsed, and I couldn’t believe it either.

That day I watched TV from 2 p.m. to around 3 a.m. in the night, maybe more. The following two weeks, every TV channel I received showed the towers collapsing repeatedly, over and over, again and again. I saw the planes crash over 200 times, and the same amount of times did I see the towers collapse.

The horror of it wasn’t made clear to me until afterwards, when we started seeing what people on the ground had filmed themselves. People jumping off the towers, plummeting downwards to certain death. People so small, and so hopeless that they chose to jump rather than to stay inside, in a hell I cannot imagine. To this day I get goose-bump thinking about that situation: between fire and a terrible fall. And to this day, this event – 9/11 – remains the most surrealist thing I have witnessed.

Doing some research on it recently, I saw footage of falling people. Footage of that woman waving from a smoky hole in the façade of the building. Footage of those two persons who jumped hand in hand, and fell together, still hand in hand, until the fatal crash ensued. That too gives me goose-bump as I write those very words.

9/11 marked the beginning of a new era, and the end of another. In my life, it ended my teenage years, and marked the beginning of my adult life. I was 19 when this happened, I am 26 now.

7 years later, I am about to terminate my studies, as I was about to begin them when 9/11 happened. What happened in between? Lots. I have been more hurt in that period than ever before in my life, and I’m not out of it. And yes, you are right, I could have been in those towers too.

Given that this chapter is public, I would like to address my most sincere condolences to anyone directly affected by this tragedy. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love, and I have suffered tremendously because of it, and I would like to tell you that you are not alone, that you have my sympathy, and that I love you. I don’t know you, but you are a human, and I believe all humans have this something in common which makes us able to love each other, and to know each other. We have more in common than it sometimes feels like, and I rely on this to offer you my sympathy, my faith, my trust, and my love.

Nicolas

Traditions & Remodernism

2008-09-06T18:06:00.000-07:00

20^th October 2007

The way traditions are perceived with Remodernism is probably a very important difference from the way Post-Modernism perceives them. While I am relatively unsure of what I am about to say, I’ll let you be judge on the accuracy of my statements. It seems to me that Post-Modernism focused on traditions as something to deconstruct, to undo, to challenge. Remodernism, I believe, sees them as useful structures to build upon.

I have already discussed in length the problem of focusing on the traditions for themselves. You spend more time challenging things that aren’t really interesting in themselves. Indeed, while I believe that traditions are the result of something that worked for a long time and whose efficiency has sustained the test of time, I also believe that they are good only insofar as they are used to make something, and it is that something which truly matters. In other words, the art. No one really cares about traditions per se, unless you’re an analyst and study structures, patterns, and the history or mechanics thereof. As art-appreciators, the traditions are tools to make good art, not entities in their own right that deserve worshipping.

To take a concrete example, let’s think of the portrait; that is the kind of tradition I am talking about. A portrait is the tradition of painting, or else, faces, to put it in the simplest way I can think of. Of itself, it’s not much. It becomes something when applied, not before. Of course it would be interesting to explore the limits of that tradition, to play with its old rules and such, to create art (and that’s the thing that matters) but if the art you create is only here to discuss the tradition of the portrait without further aims, then it’s not all that interesting. That is what I have always disliked about Post-Modernism as I understand it and contemporary art: it focuses on art instead of on life. No wonder the larger audience doesn’t care about art if the only art that’s being produced during their time is art that is like a dog chasing its own tail. Not everyone is an artist, but everyone lives. Never forget that.

Here’s a lousy example of a tradition challenged with measly results. Imagine a canvas folded about the middle, making the painting take a right angle. Well, obviously your painting has crossed the realm of bi-dimensional art into tri-dimensional art such as sculpture. While that may sound great, if you think about it for more than 5 minutes, it becomes rather dull, especially if there’s nothing else to the piece. Transdimensional art sure sounds good but what then? You’re not doing anything that wall-painters haven’t done all their lives.

I guess you see the point: it’s up to anyone to look at a painted building and think about how those walls exist in three dimensions and so does the paint on them. This is more like a thought-experiment, and less like art. I am not suggesting it’s inherently evil, just that this doesn’t make good art for me. I judge it for what it’s worth: it’s not bad, but I can’t say it evokes much emotion in me or makes me stand still and look at life differently.

Some branches of art haven’t been so badly attacked by Post-Modernism as others. Think of music, while you did have people doing strange things like recording a pianist coming on stage, sit down at the piano, wait 5 minutes and leave, that type of things rarely gets the popular seal of approval, and, it shall be said, nor does contemporary art in general (museum art). Music especially proves the usefulness of traditions. Can you think of any song on the radio that doesn’t use a chorus-verse-bridge structure? I can’t quite, but I am also aware that many people explore those structures and make very creative music with them. Please note I said with them, not against them. That, perhaps, is the difference between Post-Modernism and Remodernism; we do not fight against traditions, rather, we get along with them and don’t see them as important enough in themselves to deserve to be fought, undone, torn to nothingness.

(In the precedent paragraph, I did not talk of classical music, as there certainly is a lot more structural discussion that could be done there, but as I am not classical music expert, I chose not to enter the topic.)

I will end this article on something I once again noticed no later than last night. Post-Modernists, and the larger population, have a tendency to hate clichés. I hate certain clichés too, but a difference between hollow clichés and eternal things must be made. Good things are always good to say again, and it doesn’t matter that it’s not new. Traditions are by definition not new, but that is not a reason to dismiss them. So, last night I took a peek at a discussion about the Remodernism manifesto, and when spirituality in art was defined, the clever critique commented “no shit Sherlock”. This absolutely proves my point that Post-Modernists (whether they know they are or not) can’t stand things that aren’t new, no matter how right on they are. You know, Post-Modernists, it is allowed to say things that were true 1000 years ago, are true today, and will be true in 1000 years. We are not all treating life at face-value; most often, the better truths aren’t screaming at you, but softly murmuring to anyone who takes the time to take a look at what has always been there, and isn’t new.

Defining the Identity of Remodernism

2008-09-06T17:41:00.000-07:00

20^th October 2007

Before I say anything on the matter of Remodernist identity, let me make it understood that I don’t regard myself as any authority on the subject, merely a person trying to figure it out. So basically this text will be me talking to myself. Come on in and enjoy.

In my understanding, what makes Remodernism different from a lot of artistic movements is the fact that it is not defined so much by the art created as by the mindset of the creator. Should I be wrong on this, please feel free to correct me. However, I think I got that one down pretty well.

This implies that you can be a Remodernist no matter what your artistic style is, abstract, realistic, dark, impressionist, etc. It also means the media used can be anything. It can be digital art, sculpture, film, music, anything.

For those who only see the good side of this, I suggest you think about the risk. The risk is that such a vast disposition may loosen the identity of the movement. You can’t quite recognise a Remodernist painting from non-Remodernistic art, can you? I think not. You can recognise Cubist art because Cubism is based on elements that have to do directly with the art in question, whereas Remodernism – in my understanding – focuses more on the mind of the artist, regardless of what the artist does. Naturally, however, the ideas and beliefs and opinions of an artist do have an influence on his or her work, but it is a much less conspicuous influence than Cubism would be, for instance.

And the question is, is that enough to form a solid identity? I tend to think that yes, that is enough. It certainly is general and on a higher scale than Cubism, in that it’s not on the same level, I’m not suggesting it’s better or worse, just on a different scale, and because of its loftier nature (still scale-wise), it encompasses more, but less directly and less obviously.

Post-Modernism and Relativism

2008-09-06T17:31:00.000-07:00

12^th August 2007

You all know Relativism first-hand because you certainly faced it and even practiced it. I can't blame anyone for it, not even myself, because some Relativism is expected today, however, it may go too far. Let's take an example.

The classic illustration of Relativism is the question of Good and Evil, and yes, I capitalised those words. In today's world, 5 times out of 6, you're perceived as an uneducated idiot if you say you believe there's a Good and an Evil. What you have to say in order to sound endowed with a functional brain is the following words: it depends. Well does it really?

Let's now take an extreme example: crushing a baby's head underfoot. Even the most educated and learned will - usually - say that it's "bad" or "evil". But then they will add: "But it depends. If by this act you save the world (suppose an extraordinary circumstance makes this possible and that without a doubt as to the positive outcome of said skull-crushing), then it's not so bad or evil." Good point smarty, but you will agree that this is not the same as merely crushing a baby's head underfoot. Of course "it depends" if you add something else to it. Now take this example and add nothing to it: can it ever be deemed anything else but bad and evil? No. There is no question about it, there is no relativity here.

Smarty person then moves on to say that "perhaps a serial-killer or some other psychopath would derive pleasure from that kind of act; therefore it would be considered good." But smarty person forgets what I said just above: add nothing to it. A deranged mind functions on other standards; I'm talking about normal average humans. Those rarely even consider the crushing underfoot of an infant's skull. Why? Because it is Evil.

I know many of you may have some itching allergic reaction to admitting how much we rely on those archaic notions - Good and Evil - and yet, if you are honest with yourself, and if you are introspective enough, you will realise that most of your actions are based on whether what you do is Good or Evil. Typically, people don't obey laws merely because they are afraid of the possible punishment of committing a crime, but because they believe that the crimes in questions are Evil in the first place. Most people who feel a law is unfair or unnecessary will simply not obey it. May anyone who smoked pot in a country where it was illegal raise his or her hand. There you go. We obey the law insofar as we agree with it, and the fear of punishment never kept anyone from committing any crime, simply because whatever major crimes happen, they are never committed out of mere cold rational reasoning. No one does anything Evil for Evil's sake; even the worst atrocities are done in the name of Good, albeit a perverted Good. Sadists will derive pleasure from inflicting pain, but the point is that they enjoy this, and it makes them happy, and being happy is a good thing, just in this case it is only so for the sadist. Happiness and pleasure are good things, and they can be caused by evil acts, but it doesn't make the acts any less evil.

Another key element in Relativism is the Truth question. Can things be right or wrong? The "it depends" here again counts a lot for Relativists. You may also be scorned with the following words: "Do you still believe in objective truth?" And that's when you just throw the question back at the questioner. And they say "there is no objective truth." And then you got them, but they won't notice, so you have to explain. If there is no objective truth, then on what basis do you make such a statement? If there is no objective truth, you cannot say anything that would be "true", much less would you be able to say that there is no truth. Consider the following:

A) People who believe the truth exists, and that they have it.
B) People who think the truth does not exist.
C) People who don't know whether A or B are right, but keep looking.

What B usually don't realise is that they too believe that truth exists. If you state that the truth does not exist, you shoot yourself in the foot, because you're stating what you think is a truth. Smarty person may now suggest that I am toying around with paradoxes, and that, therefore, my argument is invalid. For one, I am not toying around with anything; for two, I don't see how this being a paradox would make the argument any less valid; for three, you brought this paradox up, I merely made it explicit.

When Relativists claim that everything is relative, they are making a very non-relative statement. It's dogmatic if anything.

Post-Modernists share this Relativism as a value, and so do a large part of people. This ideology isn't perceived as one since it is so widely shared. In most instances, it will be perceived as mere common sense, the kind that doesn't require backup. Don't let yourself be defeated or silenced by that. Demand arguments.

It's one thing to feel that everything is relative and everything "depends" and that you can do one thing and another and it will be the same. It's quite another to leave it at that and not question the veracity of this idea. I think it's too easy.

Don't take it for granted that everything is meaningless, and if you do, then live up to your ideas. I've never seen a Relativist suddenly truly act on his or her ideas. The idea that all is relative works well in the abstract, but as soon as you demand it to be applied, then "Relativists" just won't do it.

One of the problems with Relativism is that a large amount of people resent the simplicity of some things, things that sound "stupid" and not intricate enough for their ego and intellect. The notions of Good and Evil as explained above are simple enough, indeed, "too" simple for some. Simple is not a bad thing, stupid, however, is. The idea that something isn't "complicated" enough for our egos and intellects is a very arrogant and dumb idea. Indeed, some things are very simple, and very wisely so: excrements smell bad, that means "don't eat that", and good food smells good, that means "yummy". Cheese is a hybrid, I'll grant you that, but only because I'm biased about cheese.

Relativists will often tell you that you're "anthropocentric" or "ethnocentric". What they mean is that you see things from the point of view of a human, and of a human in a particular cultural setting. Relativists will often wallow in the mud of fallacy because they think that being able to point out anthropocentrism and ethnocentrism actually rids them of being a human in a given cultural setting. It doesn't.

Thus you have people who make fun of other people, arguing that it is hilariously stupid to think that you can say "God" is generous, loving, hating, etc, when all those attributes are human things. Right enough, doing so anthropomorphises "God" and it should not be taken for granted that "God" fits those human standards. However, it should not be taken for granted either that "God" does not share those features. We don't know either way, and merely because one side of the issue seems too simple, it doesn't mean the other side is any the righter.

I heard a Relativist talk about aliens. He said: "You shouldn't be so sure that aliens would want our best interest; you should not think they are like us." Right enough again, we shouldn't assume too much about what we don't know, but that goes both ways, smarty person. Just as much as you shouldn't assume aliens would behave like we would, you shouldn't assume either that they wouldn't. Some things might be universal, and until you can prove that there can't be (which itself would be universal, and thus a self-defeating find), you should suspend your judgement.

Relativism is one of the main pillars of Post-Modernism, both artistically and culturally. It is one of the main reasons why trying to undermine any belief we may have has become a reflex nowadays. I'm not suggesting that it's a bad reflex, I'm only saying that you should know how to use doubt. Relativism itself doesn't survive doubt very long; there's a difference between questioning and blindly sticking to a view which proves to be a lot more unstable than commonly believed.

There are more alternatives to Relativism than Fundamentalism, and in fact, Relativism is a kind of Fundamentalism. Most of those Post-Modern isms pass themselves as open-minded and educated when in fact they are both narrow-minded in the extreme, and poorly tested by doubt. You need to use doubt and questioning heavily, but you must not stop using it as soon as it undid something. Post-Modernists, it seems, merely stopped there. I do not condone giving up, and much less do I condone enjoying the apparent meaninglessness and chaos thus discovered. We can do better.

Spirituality, Religion, and Remodernism

2008-09-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

11th August 2007

Someone somewhere raised the question of whether Remodernism could be "spiritual" without being "religious". For this reason, I will attempt to explain the situation.

In order to do so, we need to define "religion" and then "spirituality". All of this in view of the manifesto of Remodernism as written by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson. Here is what I understand from the manifesto: the difference between religion and spirituality - since the manifesto claims that Remodernism is the latter but not the first - is that a "religion" is somehow more strict and more defined that "spirituality" which is perceived as an inherently human quest that every person is liable to undertake.

In this Post-Modern age, many of us are quite cynical about things that were considered sacred in the past. Many even laugh at the word "soul". It could be this that made the authors of the manifesto fear at the word "religion", which they see as different from spirituality, and I cannot blame them for it. Too many religious people are not truly spiritual, but that is another question.

Thus, by spirituality, we mean an existential quest of the human soul, call it "consciousness" if you are afraid of the word "soul". True spirituality is defined by an intransigent quest for the Truth, and by "Truth", I mean "what is". In other words, an honest and genuine desire from the individual to look for the Truth, regardless of how hard, or even impossible, that may be. That, I think, is the spirituality referred to in the manifesto.

The emphasis on saying that Remodernism is not a religious movement may come from two things: either the word "religion" is of itself something too scorned in Post-Modern times, or merely that the authors wanted to define Remodernism in broader terms than a "religion" would seem to imply. I believe the latter is the one. And I do understand why some people can question whether you can be spiritual without being religious. It depends on your own definitions of those things, and all I will say here is that, to me, a truly religious person is de facto a spiritual one. But that only post-pones the question at "truly". What is a truly religious person? Well, a person who is truly spiritual. And on, and on.

The role of God, or "God" if the word scares you, is important in the manifesto. Bringing back God/"God" into the arts is stated as one of the goals of the movement. Yet it specifies that this God/"God" is not as was before, by which I understand that it is a broader version of God/"God" than the masses are used to. In other words, and in my own, a God that is not owned or copyrighted by the main organised religions of this world. Trust me, if there is such a God, He certainly does not belong to anyone and certainly is not copyrighted by any group either. (Let it be said, however, that not belonging to does not mean that said group is wrong in its belief; all I am saying here is that no one owns God.)

One thing I wanted to do with this article is show that there is a strong connection between materialism, scientific arrogance, and atheism, as well as with the general disenchantment of the world and the feeling of superiority too many of our fellow humans seem to share. Do not misunderstand me, however. I do not suggest that Remodernism should become a religiously affiliated movement; what I say, instead, is that Remodernism ties back with the spirit of Truth that made humans want to understand the world in which they live, who they are, and God (and you can call this entity with any name you want). I think all of this is stated in the manifesto.

Another important point is the notion of a "higher purpose" which I myself described as "Greater Good" in another chapter. Having your eyes on a Greater Good is what keeps you aware that what you do is not just about you, or at least that it shouldn't be. Art allows us to communicate on a different level, and that should never be lost from sight. And for those of you who feel that likening art to communication is cheapening, you need to do some re-thinking about the act of communication, because believe me, if it weren't for communication, most of us would have committed suicide. As humans, the burden of loneliness and the sheer awareness of our being a single person forever secluded from others in some ways, the weight of all this is quite heavy and communication saves us from unimaginable torments. Therefore, do not underestimate communication, and do not underestimate art's communicative powers.

Now, we need to highlight why spirituality matters in an artistic endeavour. Spirituality - as the existential quest for meaning and understanding of both oneself and the outside world - represents a lot of work and a lot of questioning and of research. Likewise, art is demanding. And likewise, art can be very fruitful. Unlike philosophy, the theoretical kind, both spirituality and art request you to act on your ideas. Thinking about painting will not make you a painter, and true spirituality has effects in your daily life (so would true religious behaviour, I'd argue, but that is another topic).

What is common to spirituality and art is devotion. I could name countless artists who devoted themselves with the most grandiose faith and will. Take someone like Vincent Van Gogh. Here is a man who believed in what he was doing, even though no one else, or so very few, did. This man was not only a painter, but a spiritual person. Yes, he was a Christian, but what made him spiritual was that he believed in the worth of a human life, and in the potential of art. To this he devoted his life. And I believe no one is an artist without this devotion, by which I mean that no one gets to practice an art if this person has no faith in it. Most artists aren't paid for their art, but they don't need to have money as a motivation. Their art itself is worth it.

Art is one of the few things that give your soul/consciousness its real importance. If food is important to keep us alive, humans weren't meant to live "by bread alone", and if you doubt this, imagine a life without music. I love music, and a lifetime without any of it sounds like a nightmare. Dying of starvation is certainly not pleasant, but no more would a lifetime without music be. Art is useful and if you think that "useful" is demeaning, think again. Nothing exists that has no use. Supposed "useless" art in the past still had the use of being useless, which itself was useful. Being beautiful, arresting, fascinating, etc, may not seem very useful in the short-run, but you will realise that the usefulness of things aren't all of the same nature, that they're all equally useful to you. We tend to place the needs of the body higher than those of the soul/consciousness; don't you forget that a desperate soul will still commit suicide despite having food at hand. And yes to your question, I believe art saves.

To conclude, I want to state that Remodernism is inclusive, not exclusive, as you can read in the manifesto, and that because of this, any religious person is most welcome, as is any non-religious person. Is an atheist person capable of spirituality? I don't know, but I certainly would not mind seeing that at work. Once again, and I can't stress this enough, spirituality is about wanting to know the Truth, whatever it may happen to be. Total devotion to the Truth, what is, is what spirituality means. Being spiritual means that you undertake this difficult and tricky quest; whether you do so as a Buddhist, a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu, or as an atheist does not really matter as far as Remodernism is concerned. What matters is that you search for the Truth.

Why Remodernism?

2008-09-06T16:58:00.000-07:00

2007, this was written in the tone of a manifesto.

Because we are not the children of the Second World War. Or of the First. The trauma of this war was a major part of why movements like Dadaism and Surrealism were ever born. Dadaists were basically nihilists and challengers of conventions. In that challenging, I condone the movement and I understand and perceive the worthiness of such an endeavour. Challenging conventions makes sense when there are conventions to challenge. It made sense when Marcel Duchamp exposed a urinal on its back and called it a "fountain". Why did it make sense? Because back then, and mark my words - back then - it was worthwhile to ask oneself what art was, and what wasn't. You can discuss the worth of Duchamp's urinal forever, but the point is that at least he was doing something new, and if for no other reason, that was sufficient to deserve attention. Doing that nowadays, a century after, makes little sense to me. Thanks to the ambient mindset, anything is art, and thus, nothing is art anymore.

If a ready-made object is as much art as a painting, then there is no difference between a work of art and anything at all. While I too believe that everything has the potential to be art, just having this potential is not enough. Meaning: if you find a beautiful leaf, just taking the leaf and putting it in a museum won't make it more art than if you met said leaf in the forest; while if you take a photograph of said leaf, or paint it, or write a poem about it, then you use that potential of the leaf to create art. Never forget that art is intrinsically connected to your consciousness as a human being and that weren't it for this mysterious faculty, there would be no art. Leaves are beautiful to a conscious mind, without that, they just are.

I believe there is a difference between a mere idea and a work of art. Conceptual art, for all I know of it, thinks it's the same thing. Exposing ideas in a gallery isn't what art is about; naturally, I'm not suggesting that art never conveys ideas, far from that, but art isn't only about ideas. I will take the now famed example of the dead shark in a museum. Is this art? I guess you can call it art provided you write "God" as the author of the piece, or "Nature" or anything you want. Otherwise it's just a dead shark. The idea that anyone waited on whoever put that shark in the museum to consider that sharks had some beauty is a very pretentious idea, not to say a silly one. I liked it when Duchamp put his urinal in a museum because back then it hadn't been done, and it raised questions. Given the stuff artists do today, I wouldn't be surprised by anything at all, except maybe to see an art work which actually touched me deep inside and made me think. A dead shark doesn't do that because I have seen live sharks, and I have seen them in their own environment, and it beats a dead shark surrounded by cynical humans masturbating their egos with hollow praise of self-recognition of intelligence.

Why Remodernism today? Nowadays we have the impression that history is over, that all movements are done for and that everything has been done and there's nothing else to create. Because of the mostly scientifical approach we have towards the universe, we tend to think we know a lot more than we actually do, and most of us safely rely on scientists to know the things the average person is not aware of. That is, much like Medieval people who could not read, let alone read Latin, and who could not have access to the Bible, the paradigm maker of that time, people simply trusted the educated ones, those who could read, and read Latin. Nowadays, we cannot all study physics for 7 years and we likewise rely on scientists. Science is the true Church of our day, and its dogma is all the stronger as it is ever hardly perceived as such. No one thinks Science is dogmatic, thus it isn't seen as such. Yet, in a very dogmatic way, scientists unobjectively prefer to fund research on volcanoes rather than on UFO's, on viruses rather than on the existence of a God, on this theory rather than that one, etc. To name but one concrete example, examine how impossible it was, and is, to fund research projects on the origin of the universe that aren't in line with the Big Bang theory. While it is not a direct interdiction, and while no one actually takes the responsibility of it, such a research cannot be made, no more can you genuinely fund research on other alternative theories or subjects that seem "paranormal" or else. But enough on this.

The point of all this is that we are currently living in a cynical age. We think we know when we don't - thus sharing the idiotic and arrogant opinion of every century that the century just past was wrong and that we are right (when every century was always wrong) - and we look down on the universe as something to be merely decoded but that has nothing transcendental or worthy beyond being a riddle or a puzzle. During the 20^th century, empires fell, institutions declined, beliefs and dogmas were proved wrong, and we realised we were on shaky grounds, and some of us decided that since this ground was shaky, no ground was safe to trust and that therefore we should never trust again. In other words, World War I put an end to the empires of Europe, World War II and Nazism put an end to our optimism in humanity, Auschwitz became the name of God's death as heralded by Nietzsche, JFK's assassination put an end to the people's trust in their leaders (which trust had only been abused just the same before, but things got public), the Vietnam War further hit on the nail's head, and by the time I was born, we had nothing but big hair bands to undo, which was done away with in the early 90's. Thanks to Nirvana and Kurt Cobain - whom I adore - whose obvious self-bashing and loss of faith in life and the world is typical of the first generation of the aftermaths of the death of all ideals after World War II, i.e. the X Generation, or the children of the hippies, who failed to change the world to a better one.

Now that we have witnessed the crumbling of it all, it is no longer needed to either testify of it, and no longer required to undo anymore. There is nothing left to destroy, deconstruct, or dissect. To do so in our day and age amounts to take a massive piss in the face of us all. This is no time for cynicism. This generation was born among ruins, and we must rebuild. Also, we must not remain faithless to ideals. Just because Nazis happened does not mean humans are worthless. Humans can be pretty bad, we all know this, but that is not a reason to give up on them, or yourself. Organised religions have failed us, do not let their failure taint your faith, and do not let them stop you in your quest for the Greater Good. So why Remodernism? Because when everything lays in ruins, someone must take responsibility to reconstruct, to rebuild. As Remodernists, it is our role and duty to prove to the world that art can be more than a pseudo-intellectual sorry little joke for the elitists to enjoy at the expense of the bulk of us. Therefore stop contemplating the ruins of this past century, and start to envision the monuments we will build together in the next one.

See the official Remodernist Manifesto.

Against Post-Modernism

2008-09-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

2007, I think.

If you're not familiar with all those fancy names that we use to describe artistic movements of all kinds, here's a quick sum up of the ones you'll need here. Classicism is just what it says, being classic, as in usual, regular, etc. Then there is Modernism (Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, etc.) which was essentially a way to experience new things by using new means and things not traditional in Classicism. Keep in mind that these lines are blurry and that it's not always possible to categorise artists so easily, of course. But let's keep things easy here. Then there was Post-Modernism, as its name implies, a movement with little ambition.

To caricature the whole deal, say that if a Classicist book is just what you'd expect of a book, a Modernist book will challenge some of the standards, and a Post-Modern book will either be entirely made of blank pages or there will be shit plastered on every other page. In painting, that means you move from a Da Vinci, to a Monet, to a Picasso, to a Pollock, to just a monochrome made by some anonymous moron who somehow thought a monochrome was still interesting in the early days of the 21^st century.

Art used to be substantial. Art used to say something. Now, my impression is that Post-Modernist art, which is just a failure to maintain the goals of the original Modernism, is merely a cynical act. Visit any contemporary art museum you want, you won't find anything very fascinating. But what I dislike most about it is that it's art that no longer deals with life and us as humans, but art that deals with itself, as art. What I mean by this is that it's not art that has a subject other than itself; you're no longer thinking about anything else than what it means to be in a museum looking at "art". Those Post-Modernist pieces just "question" themselves. You're looking at some piece of shit and it makes you wonder why you are doing so, what art is, etc. Often, that is the very goal of the artist, to make you wonder about those things. That would be perfectly fine for me if we were living in the early days of the 20^th century.

Let's take a concrete example. Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades were basically just objects he picked up somewhere and placed in a museum and called it art. Doing that in the early 20^th century had some relevance to it. It made you question what art really is, and etc. But today, when everyone shares the opinion that most modern art isn't art, that question is no longer up. We have spent a century destroying things and questioning what art was until eventually no one knows what art is anymore. Once you've questioned it all, for a century, and explored every possible silliness, maybe it's time to get back on track. Post-Modernism wasn't the next step in the evolution of art, it was a loop. And it's about to get back where it strayed.

The thing with Post-Modernism is that it doesn't have anything to offer; it just looks at something else and deconstructs it. So once that deconstruction is done, there's nothing else to run on, there's no more fuel. Once you've asked all the questions there are to ask about what a "painting" is, you can't ask anything anymore, and more importantly, you can't make art anymore. Questioning is fine, but that isn't the primary goal of art, if any of its goals should be primary. Art is creative, not inquisitive. Art is about making things, not merely criticising the things that came before. That's the "post" in Post-Modernism. And it's only sending dead letters.

I don't like the idea that art should be something reserved for an elite. Please don't make art some stupid private joke between a small group of learned artists. Seriously, if, as an artist, that is your only ambition, then you suck. Hopefully, new movements have emerged. I know of two: Stuckism and Remodernism. These two movements share a lot of common ideas, and I like them all. Stuckism believes that "art that needs to be in a museum to be art is not art" and that "a dead shark is not art". Remodernists are tired of the unsubstantial contemporary art and the lack of spirituality in artistic endeavours.

It's easy to see how Post-Modernism affected art in the popular area. If you ask anyone about the famous painters they know, most people will give you names of artists who lived in the first half of the 20^th century. They'll say Picasso, Dalì, and then a bunch of other painters from the 19^th century, like Van Gogh or Monet. Hardly ever will you get someone to give you the name of a painter that's actually living and successful. Why? Probably because after Modernism artists became tedious and cynically annoying, and that is not interesting to the large audience. No wonder we made people leave the museums for good if all we have to show them are stupid monochromes and other obscure pieces of shit whose meaning always seem a mere statement of the mental condition of its author. "Are you kidding me" is the title of most of these works of art. At least that is how the public in general views it, and the public isn't wrong. Sure, you can make any piece of art and have a ready explanation for it, but it won't make it interesting for so much.

I am not saying that we should forbid monochromes and pieces of shit, not at all, I'm just saying that we should not neglect other types of artists. There's nothing wrong with a realist and figurative painter who simply paints a beautiful painting; that should be enough. Contemporary artists shouldn't be ashamed of simply painting pictures, without an army of pseudo-intellectual concepts behind it.

I've visited a contemporary art museum recently, and I don't think I've seen a single realist painting. I like abstract art, don't get me wrong, but I find it hard to believe that there are no realist painters on earth today. If art reflects its epoch, what does ours reflect? What will people think of us in the future when they see our apparent fascination for yellow monochromes and video performances you'd never wish to ever see? They'll think we were fucked up, and we are.

Video performances. I've mentioned that. That's the summit if anything. Ok, I get the idea, and in a way it could be interesting because it forces you to look closely at something for some time, which in itself is always a good exercise. Now, I'm not suggesting you should stay throughout the 30 minutes of that video where someone smacks someone else. I understand the idea of focusing on details and getting something out of it (insofar as there's anything to get). But come on, that stuff should be done once and then that's it. It's not interesting or thrilling. They call that "performances" or "happenings". Let's face it, when I wake up in the morning and move about in my bed, I make better performances.

All of this Post-Modernism stuff has to do with our current ideology. And that has to do with Relativism. Everything's worth the same, everything depends, art is anything you call art. That's how you end up with a guy pissing in a glass and calling it art. I'm not against exploration at all, in fact I find that quite funny. I just see it for what it is. You're never going to change someone's life or even add anything to it by pissing in a glass. There's no emotional affect to the act of pissing in a glass. When you look at the art produced by the centuries before us, I feel like we are just kids playing around. Surely we're worth better than this, and having seen a lot of contemporary artists at work, I know we are.

I'm not against any type of art, or movement, I'm against a mindset of cynicism and all-encompassing relativism. Shitting on canvas and presenting that as art in a museum is cynical. Sure, you can call it art if you want, I'm not so concerned about the label as I am with the art itself. I think such artists are more concerned about the labels and concepts than the art itself. Call it art if you want, but then let's see what your art is about. Obviously, your art is a stain of shit on canvas... I don't want art to be a fancy discussion about concepts, notions, etc, it should be art, not a substitute of it. Contemporary artists might be too concerned with those things which aren't the core of art. I think we drifted a bit too far away from the basics. And now we all realise that this is going nowhere, and slowly so. The only living painter with success that I can name today is H.R. Giger. I think he's one of the few classic painters that actually walks the earth still. He's not cynical, he doesn't indulge and wallow into easy concepts and bullshit pseudo-intellectual babble. Instead, he creates. And that's what art is all about. He makes you think, yes, but that is because of his creation. Contemporary artists just try to make you think because of the absence of creation. They make a yellow monochrome, and you just wonder what the fuck that's about. Playing with obscurity to fake the semblance of worthiness is not what I call an interesting device. If your art is only interesting if it deals with concepts and notions (which, for the most part, the viewer has to think for him or herself) then it's not much interesting.

"Antarctica Asylum"

2008-08-24T14:26:00.000-07:00

First published here.

-
Somewhere here, Gwen is commited to the Antarctica Asylum.

This was never finished.

Against Romanticism

2008-08-22T14:39:00.000-07:00

20^th August 2008

It has been a long time since I wanted to write on this topic, but I guess I did not get upset enough, or often enough, to really get down to it. But now I am. Upset, that is. Before I hack and slash into Romanticism, let us define what I refer to exactly.

To most of you, Romanticism is about giving girls flowers and knowing how to prepare a dinner which comprises candles. Know it now, this will not be the Romanticism dealt with in this chapter. To others, Romanticism calls to mind the date 1780-1820 and a few names like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysseh Shelley (what’s up with that middle name?), Lord Byron, John Keats, and others. While the Romanticism whose bung-hole will be enlarged is related to that classic Romanticism, it isn’t exactly that either.

Romanticism, the classic kind, was based on the individual, his or her emotions, feelings, nature, etc. Poets thought of themselves as “translators” of sorts, who tried to put into words emotions and feelings and nature. It is what any teen naturally does when they try to write poetry, and I am not exempt from the dire attempt. In many ways, classic Romanticism built itself upon bases that all of us can share, I guess, but that are pretty stupid, I think. Why? Because the wind passing through the leaves of a tree is not an emotion, and neither of these are words. What I mean is that your poem is a poem, your creation, and not some translation of another entity. There is no poem, or painting for that matter, to “naturally” derive from anything out there. You have to create it.

Let’s take the case of an imaginary young poet. He is full of emotions, who isn’t, and he writes poems. Now, his first mistakes is to believe that his emotions actually have a connection to what he writes. In other words, he believes that the more he feels, the better his poem is. That young poet then shows his poetry to others, who are not familiar with the poet’s emotions, and thus, all they can see is a shitty poem. They say so as politely as can be, and the poet takes offence, and that not because of what the poem really is, but because he does not separate what he feels with what he writes. There’s one major mistake. If you happen to commit this mistake, give it ten years, then read your old poetry again. By that time, I hope, you will have lost the “emotion” of it and will be able to read the actual poetry you wrote. And that’s when it strikes you that this sucks horribly. And I speak from experience.

In these days of glorified individuality, we all have to disenchant the self and actually get to work. What makes a poem is you writing it, not you feeling anything. You could feel a lot, and be a crappy poet; you could have a stone in lieu of a heart, and be a great poet. Those things do not have to be mutually dependent.

The “muse” and other inspirational nonsense have a lot to do with this kind of Romanticism. People expect the “something” to write a poem, paint an image, for them. People share the same sort of nonsense about the “gift”. If you want to paint a great painting, it will take practice, lots of it, not a muse, not inspiration. It’s work, not magic. Of course, people who know nothing about painting and see awesome works of art don’t know that it’s actually work and practice, and they can’t figure out how anyone could possibly paint so well, and that’s how you get the “gift” thing. You could argue the same for “inspiration”.

I will now relate the little event that made me want to write this chapter. I was looking for information on how to buy liquid white, an important ingredient of wet-on-wet oil painting, when I stumbled upon a forum in which some artist was explaining why watching painting lessons on TV was horrible. The artist explained that if you “want a real connection with Nature, you must paint in it. Painting in front of your TV is just really lame, and pathetic.” Nature is another thing to place beside the muse in this affair. And by “Nature”, I mean the human concept, not anything concrete, because as far as I am concerned, it’s all “Nature”. How arrogant do we have to be to think ourselves all that separate from those things we don’t create? We didn’t create ourselves, for all I know, so we’re just as much “Nature” as a squirrel or a goddam bush.

Now, out of curiosity, I decide to look at what that artist actually paints. This guy was spitting on Bob Ross’ method and paintings, and his own work looks like utter shit. Utter shit. But he paints outside, like the Impressionists, and that makes all the difference, except Monet rocks, and that guy doesn’t.

That’s where I put together the Romanticist bullshit: emotions don’t write poems, and painting is about painting, not “Nature” or anything else. I watch TV lessons on painting not because I want a connection with “Nature”, but because I want to learn to paint. If I wanted a connection with nature, I’d go outside for a walk. You don’t need a palette or canvas for that, that’s for painting. All of this seems very obvious to me, but there are assholes out there who need some talkin’.

Moreover, you can’t disrespect Bob Ross, and certainly not in front of me. That other guy, the artist, which I’ll refer to as the Romanticist from now on, well that guy is a moron. That guy seems to believe that if you learn to paint a tree, you will get to know how a tree feels or thinks or whatever. Here’s how I see it: if you learn to paint a tree, it’ll make you good at painting trees, nothing else. And guess what, that’s just what I am going for when I watch a painting lesson on TV or elsewhere. The fact that Bob Ross can paint skies, mountains, lakes, snowy prairies, grass, happy little clouds and bushes without any need for actual references, that doesn’t make him any less an artist than any of you Romanticists. I’m tired of those people wallowing in pseudo-spiritualities which don’t do much except give them some sort of security coat about the fact that they’re not good. Seriously, if you’re more interested about connecting with nature, when you’re painting, then you’re not all that into painting. These aren’t the same things, to me, and they aren’t the same things, period. Of course, you may adore nature and paint it, but these are less related than the Romanticist would like it to be.

Another typical Romanticist is the treatment of pain as food. Here’s how it works for them: you got pain, work it artistically, and out comes a poem, painting, etc. It’s like eating food, and having a natural intestinal process going on. Interestingly enough, the product of both of these processes is shit.

Suffering per say does not add to your artistic talent. If it did, we’d all be amazing artists. A lot of people learn nothing from their pain, it only makes them bitter and worse. Others deal with it differently, and it makes them grow and mature and learn. But that reaction is up to you. Anyway, as for the poem above-mentioned, the more you suffer will not make your painting any better, because pain is not a colour or a shape, and it’s not applicable on canvas. The process is far more complicated, and while pain can be at the origin of your wanting to paint a specific painting, or poem, that’s as far as it goes: you still do the work.

I believe a serious artist, no matter what art, must focus on the art itself, and leave alone those phoney ideas. A connection with nature will not make you a better painter, but painting lessons will help. I could spend ten hours in a forest, I would not come out of it knowing how to paint any better, unless I spent that time observing the trees from a painter’s perspective, but notice that, from a painter’s perspective, not from the perspective of someone who tries to connect with nature, whatever that means. And yes, you can learn to paint, it’s not a gift, it’s a skill that you can practice, and it has techniques that you can learn. It’s not magic. As Bob Ross said, you didn’t jump in your car the first time and knew how to drive: you had to practice. It’s the same with painting, and most things, really.

So don’t be a Romanticist, but please use the term because I think it’s pretty nice, and will not be confused with Romantics, which we’ll reserve for the classic poets and others.

Generation Y & False Rebels

2008-08-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

30^th September 2007

To make sure everybody knows what I’ll be dealing with here, I’ll begin by a quick summary of some terms. And a little bit of history as well. Right after the end of World War II, people made lots of babies, who would later become hippies. Those people had dreams, and mostly, everything failed. Those people also had children, the next generation, who would later be called the X Generation, or Generation X. Roughly, these are people born in the 60’s and 70’s. One of the most famous Generation X people is Kurt Cobain. The ideals of the hippies having all failed, these kids grew up in an atmosphere of failure, and in what historians call the 20 gloomies (it shall be said that I’m perhaps utterly wrong on that term), meaning the 70’s and 80’s, in reference to the 30 glorious years between 1940 and 1970.

The Generation X people also had kids. That would be my generation, even though my parents never were hippies; this doesn’t work on a case by case scenario, more of a global rendering of ideologies shared by many. The Generation Y – people born between the late 70’s and early 80’s, roughly – is us, even though the name isn’t yet official nor clear. It takes a lot of distance to be sure about history, and a lot of retrospect, which we don’t have yet. There are other names going around for this generation: The Digital Generation, kids growing up with internet and videogames, and many others I forget. It all depends on what significant events you select to categorise a generation.

I like “Generation Y” for two reasons; first, there’s a cool pun; second, it makes us serial; as if we were just the next generation of nobodies without dreams and hopes. The Generation X was the first nameless generation, and now we don’t even have that, we’re just the next nameless generation. But that is likely to change. Some historians close the Generation Y at the year 2001, because of 9/11, and so it’d go from 1980 to 2001, roughly; but this is much debated. Making up generations is of course a matter of abstract thought and structural ideals, never absolutes. No one will ever entirely fit a given profile for any generation, but, overall, some things are shared by most, if not all, even though the said things may not have reached everyone individually. Suffices that it changes the world in which you live, and you’re in.

What I notice to be pretty unique in this generation is that, I think, we are the first to look back so much. Never before did people pay so much attention to the past, to the literal exclusion of the future. Many young people dress like hippies and listen to bands of the 60’s and 70’s, and while I understand one can appreciate music from any given period in time, I think there’s more there than just musical taste. I think there is a strong sense among us that “history is over” and that basically we just look back, feel nostalgic, and try to get some of it. Think of all the bands which dress like it’s the 70’s and play like they’re the Velvet Underground. I’m not here to condemn or condone that, it doesn’t matter, but I think it’s interesting to note. Other bands went even further into the past, with the use of those round hats from the 19^th century. The past is always more clear and more structured than the present, and its distance from us gives it an air of inaccessible sanctity. Indeed, since we can’t affect the past in any way, it is invincible, it won’t change, it can be trusted. If you worship Bob Marley, you have no reason to be worried that he’d suddenly start making crap music and sell out to Pepsi. People who worship Britney Spears know what I’m talking about. Distance creates sanctity of time.

And now to the false rebels. The biggest way to conform today is to be a “rebel”. People who are rebels, are rebels according to 19^th century standards: they hate Christianity and the idea of God, they’re sexually libertines, they scorn institutions and nations like it’s 1914, (different century, I know), and they think they’re romantic marginals, some kind of modern day Baudelaire with a Che Guevara T-shirt. The point these people are missing is that being a rebel means you’re going against the grain of the current paradigm, and our current paradigm and mainstream dominant thought and ideology is exactly what “rebelism” is about. Religion-less, unless it’s a watered-down version of Buddhism, freely sexual (as long as you’re not too involved with the people you fuck), materialists to the point that they no longer know what materialism is. And meanwhile, the true rebels are perceived as if they were the safe-keepers of traditions. Being a rebel is not cool, by definition. Thing is, nowadays, it is commonly believed that rebels are cool, when in fact it’s the direct opposite. Being cool means you fit in with what is popularly thought to be the best standards, and that, of course, is the direct opposite of being a rebel.

The current paradigm draws a lot from Darwin. And that doesn’t affect, or infect, evolutionist theories alone. Up to Darwin, there was a sense that life had some meaning, that there was a sense to things, and that we just didn’t know it. With Darwin, it became possible to envision a world where randomness and accidents were the driving principles. If you truly understand the implications of this, you know how frightening that is. That ideology pervaded every other domain of thought. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Darwin was wrong to do what he did, but I don’t believe in Darwinism entirely, though I believe in evolution.

To give a quick portrait of the current situation, let’s say that most people are atheists (which really means they either never gave much thought about God or think the issue utterly useless) and yet, each atheist thinks he’s somehow a rebel and that the main structures are religious, even though there is no reason to think so. This applies to many European countries, and I’m aware it doesn’t apply to America. Some even force it, trying to see Christian conspiracies where there’s really nothing: it wouldn’t be quite as cool to be a rebel against nothing, so they blow up Christian dolls to shoot at. See Dan Brown for further information.

It can’t be this hard to understand that a true rebel goes against the majority. A true rebel, today, is someone who believes in God, in many cases. When the majority doesn’t, or doesn’t care to, the rebel is the one who does; it’s mere mathematics. Being a rebel on standards that belong to another time than ours is not being a rebel, but a drama queen.

Take the Pope for instance. Is there anyone who actually cares to see what the man has to say before bashing him? I don’t condone or condemn him because I don’t know enough, but at least I’ll suspend my judgement until I can sort out a thing or two about him. Not everyone is as cautious as I am. As a symbol, the Pope is an easy target; he does stand for Christianity, albeit the Catholic version, and so he’s available for every joke and attack you want to apply to him. That’s ok with me, just don’t think you’re being a rebel for doing so, when the large majority does too. Maybe you are not aware of this, but Christians are not the majority of people, and long gone are the times when the Church had real executive power over the people and the laws. You’d be a fool to keep pretending that things are the same as they were during the inquisition and the conquest of the New World. Things have changed, there is a very real separation of Church and state, which doesn’t mean religious people can’t work in the state, don’t be stupid.

The falseness of coolness is most obvious when you realise that being cool is its own reward, not the ideas you fight for, or simply have. In times when death penalty was used (in Europe), you were a rebel to be against it; today, you’re just conforming to the paradigm, regardless of whether the death penalty is a good or a bad thing. Being a rebel, per se, or a conformist, isn’t a bad thing of itself, or a good thing; it all depends on what you believe in, but my point here is that the status of being a rebel shouldn’t be abused or misconceived, which it is, and allows many to fight for the mainstream thought with the validation of the (false) minority. It’s like all those people going on plastic crusades against racism. Believe it or not, but most people aren’t racists, and you’re preaching to the choir 95% percent of the time. Proof of this is that when you listen to what anti-racists say, you realise that no true racist would ever change his mind because of what they say. People have a tendency not to listen to those who insult them. So it’s just masturbation.

Like it or not, Neo-Nazis are rebels. And as I pointed out before, being a rebel, per se, isn’t de facto a good thing, as in this case, but they’re rebels nevertheless. A paradigm is never as strong as when people think there isn’t any. No one, in Europe, thinks that there is any influence of the higher structures about the idea of the non-existence of God. Everyone thinks they reached that conclusion of themselves, and that they weren’t influenced by anything, no matter that no true religious education was given or any religion truly explained to them. Whenever someone strays from the main path, they get seriously scorned, almost deprived of their human status, as Neo-Nazis are. If it makes you itch that I seem to defend Neo-Nazis, then you’re right at the heart of the problem. True rebels cause itching. Just because I don’t agree with them doesn’t mean I must think they are pieces of shit, and even if I did think of them as such, it wouldn’t mean they are. I’m not concerned about my opinion of them, just the status they are given within the current paradigm. They wouldn’t have been rebels under Hitler, I think we all understand this, but they are under the contemporary situation.

True rebels are shunned like the pest nowadays. Everyone hates them, as rebels tend to be hated. Religious people knocking on your door to save your soul, those are your contemporary rebels. And I know most people think of them as sheep, in some cases that’s what they are, but not every time. Everyone is somebody else’s sheep. Which leads me to my next point.

Under our current paradigm, we tend to think that we’re entirely free of imposed opinions and thoughts. The idea that most take for granted is that there’s such a thing as a neutral zone, and that things like the idea of God doesn’t belong there, for instance. This being said, though, the problem is not so much about what is thought to belong or not with the neutral zone, but the very fact that such a zone is thought to exist. It’s never neutral; you live under beliefs at any time. Belief in God is a belief, but atheism is also a belief. In either case you just believe in a worldview, with more or less doubt. It becomes dangerous when you are not aware that you’re under a paradigm, and not in some neutral zone free of premade beliefs and ideologies. As for the “rebels” who think they belong to the minority when in fact they’re pure conformists, people under paradigms whose existence they are unaware of are more likely to show a ferocity rarely seen from people who are aware of being under a paradigm. They have the fury of the self-righteous, because they genuinely believe they’re not promoting or fighting for any ideology.

The important point here is to realise that educating a child under the paradigm of Christianity, for instance, is no worse, or better, than educating a child under what is thought to be no paradigm, the neutral zone, when in fact, it has every bit of a paradigm too. You’re forced to have opinions on things, and more importantly, beliefs. I insist on the term because nowadays, with the arrogance of science, a lot of people allow themselves to be sure of many things. Science is the Church of the day, make no mistake. It’s all the more dogmatic as it doesn’t claim to have dogmas, but it has. That is why I say that atheism is a belief, and until someone comes up with a proof of the non-existence of God, it will remain a mere belief. Proving God is an entirely other subject which would deserve its own chapter, so I won’t talk of it here. There is no safe way to go about paradigms, in the example of educating a child, except that of offering several worldviews and making it clear that it’s unsure for most of us and for various reasons.

Abrupt transition now. Back to our generation and why it looks backwards. I heard a critic say that our generation failed to invent its own revolt, and thus fell back on past ones, because we didn’t have the cultural background, due to bad school, that would allow us to overthrow the values of our parents. I personally don’t give this much credit, because the critic who uttered it was French, and his analysis and interpretation were about the situation in France, and he misses the point that the same thing happens in many other countries, regardless of the quality of the education. Besides, I tend to think that these days the kids have more culture than they ever had, if only because they have a lot more access to it.

My own interpretation, for what it’s worth, is different. I tend to think that, perhaps, the reason why people fall back to past icons and references is that there’s a shortage of them in our own era. And that would be due to the poor quality of our cultural stars. It’s hard to feel flattered looking at Britney Spears; I mean, she’s alright for what she does, but for someone to take the iconic place of cultural reference, a cannonic place, it has to be a little tighter. So, maybe, in reaction to this, people fall back on safe values, such as dead people who, like saints, can’t do wrong anymore because their time is up. Hence Elvis, hence Cobain, hence Marley. And I am by no means implying that the above mentioned had no merit of their own; of course not; what I am saying is merely that the reflex, in the face of cheap plastic icons, is to fall back on safe values.

So the media would be the ones to blame. Perhaps. The thing that one cannot deny is that there is more room for Britney Spears and the likes than there is for the Pixies and Sigur Ròs. To be an icon, a solid one, you need to have the talent and the exposure. If you’re a tremendously talented person, but only your walls see you, you won’t be an icon. If Ani Difranco had played for her cat only, she’d not have become the icon she is now, but she would have had the same exceptional talent and genius either way, that’s understood.

But to be honest, I’m not very sure of all this. It’s hard to tell. Perhaps the fact that the media are so numerous today has diminished the power of the mediatic beam and as a result, the same people who would have gotten all the spotlight back in 1973 just get a show or two now and that isn’t enough to cause a hype.

Another critic suggested that the forced conformity of rebellion was caused by the media recycling any subversive movement into a buyable product. I’m not too sure of this version either. Whoever owns the rights of that Che Guevara picture must surely makes a lot of dough, but I don’t think half, if that, the people who’d buy them would actually know so much about Communism and Guevara in details. It’s not really the fault of the media or of the market if people don’t look up something in details before buying into it. I don’t think this comes from the market or media world at all, and, in general, the market only recuperates you if you let them.

I don’t know when I’ll end this chapter, but I want to quickly mention this slogan: think for yourself. If you don’t have a smile on your face at that, please read it again and focus somewhat. Think for myself... because you tell me to? In psychology, this is called a double-bind, because if you actually follow the order – it is, after all, an imperative – then you are in effect not thinking for yourself, but merely following somebody else’s thought. And then again, truly thinking for yourself will make you follow that order too, even if you were already thinking for yourself before it. Pretty silly eh.

The thing I dislike most about those cheap slogans is that somewhere behind them someone thinks they’re saying something that’s actually original, or that needs to be said. As if there were people among us who believed that we shouldn’t think for ourselves and just follow what anyone else says. I’ll fall back on the Pope now, to just let you know that any Catholic follows the Pope because he or she has decided to; if you don’t want to follow the Pope, well, you don’t; it’s as easy as that. Other cheap slogans like be free suppose that we don’t already want to be “free”, whatever that means, and that some of us would rather be slaves; which, it shall be said, if it was their true desire, then they would be free to make that choice, wouldn’t they.

Albeit for a loose connection, I am reminded of advertising against AIDS and unprotected sex. Interestingly enough, invariably, the models posing on those advertisings are hot. I know “sex sells” as they say (or rather, suggested sex sells) but perhaps, just perhaps, trying to arouse the viewer with an advertising about AIDS is bad taste. I already think that selling milk products shouldn’t have any reference to sex in commercials, because the connection is so inexistent that they have to make a semi-porno exposure of the milk-products, and let’s face it, I don’t want to think of sperm when I’m drinking milk. Sperm is fantastic, but come on, don’t put sex into everything, my glass of milk included. And you know I’m not lying! How many times did I see a hot model wipe off milk from her lips? And yeah, I know the usual defence line: you have a perverted mind to see such things in our advertising. My educated response to this is the following: fuck you. I’m tired of them taking us for idiots. How many more ejaculating bottles of champagne will it take? Anyway, I’m off topic for the most part, but I enjoy digressions and I will always stand up for it. I’m also pro-looser essay structures as you can see by my way of writing those things.

How to conclude this. Strictly no idea. See, when I write academic essays, whose structure has to be tighter than a sewed shut asshole, you got to write the introduction, the development, and then the conclusion. That’s the trinity of essay writing in the academic world, and arguably enough, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end to everything. But I think there is room for something looser, more wild and free. I think of Montaigne for instance, whose essays had titles that rarely matched the actual subject of the essay. [That’s an exaggeration.] I don’t like the idea that an essay which doesn’t fit a given pattern has no worth. There is more than one way to express ideas, and, this is important, structures shouldn’t be used as a password between elite people to recognise one another and one another’s worth. Structures are there to help express ideas, they’re not secret handshakes.

Kurt Cobain’s Suicide

2008-08-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

19th January 2008

Probably the most well-known icon of what is called the X Generation, Kurt Cobain remains an artist devoutly adored, if not worshipped, by many. Like many other iconic artists, like Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, he too died at the age of 27 at the height of his career and fame, although all, arguably, sell more music today than they ever did. The one difference, generational, if you wish, is that Cobain committed suicide, while the others, for all we know, merely overdosed. Also, compared to the rather peaceful means of dying used by those 60’s folks, Kurt’s shotgun blow to the head is in drastic contrast. Kurt Cobain was no hippie, and for a reminder, the early punk movement was a reaction against the hippies; and as Kurt was a child of that generation whose ideals and dreams all failed, he was, like most of us I suppose, a child of a global failure and grew up in the shadow of that dead dream.

Did Cobain really kill himself? The question remains open, though its official judiciary file does not. Many believe that the leader of Nirvana was in fact murdered, and most point towards his widow – Courtney Love – as the most likely culprit. Some of you might have seen this documentary called Kurt & Courtney if my memory works well, and it is known that she did all she could to keep the movie from being viewed, which naturally failed, and forbade the director to use Nirvana’s music, whose rights she owns.

I think that was not such a good move, because, until I saw that film, I believed that Kurt had been assassinated. One of the main “facts” that made me think so was that, according to Tom Grant, the level of heroin Kurt had in his body at the moment of his death was so high that even a heavy heroin-addict couldn’t have been standing on one leg, let alone shoot a gun. In Kurt & Courtney, it is proved that a regular person, of average weight, no heroin-addict, was able to stand on one leg for over 20 seconds (or something) with the exact dosage of the illicit substance Cobain had in his system, if not twice as much.

Who to believe? And if Cobain was wanting to kill himself, why not peacefully overdose like those ancient Rock’n’Roll heroes? That’s an interesting question, and I saw it before. The reason, I think, is this: people don’t always just want to die or kill themselves when they commit suicide. Sometimes they want to utterly destroy themselves. Otherwise everyone would use overdosing as the means to die. Now, let’s have a quick overview of the weirdest suicides I know of.

The most striking suicide of all is this case where a man tried to kill himself by... introducing pebbles into his rectum. I am not kidding. What makes a man considering death by anal pebbles? What makes a man consider death? If the latter was always a mysterious question, the former was rarely even asked. Certainly, pebbles aren’t the first thing I think of when I consider dying. But know this: the man did eventually die. His odd plan functioned. How do you die from inserting pebbles into your butt? He literally exploded. After a good many pebbles, something broke, and he got internal hemorrhage.

Another odd suicide is this case of a man thoughtful of his friends and family, who wanted to die, but did not want to shock them. Thus, he refused to disfigure himself or any part of his body with a gunshot, and so he resorted to shooting himself where Nature had already endowed him with a hole: the anus. That’s right, the man shot himself in the ass so it’d leave no trace. It worked, insofar as leaving no trace was concerned. As to death, the poor fellow did not die, and his doctor told him kindly not to force that much when introducing suppositories in his dark regions. [There is a lame joke.]

But let’s not get you all cheery about the misery of some of our fellow humans. Know that suicide can be committed in the most fearful ways. To wit, the case of people who kill themselves by ingesting sharp objects. Imagine this: a woman swallows 14 forks and 7 knives, causing her stomach and throat severe injuries; all of which eventually end in death, through internal hemorrhage, I presume. Surely, there are easier ways to go.

Other destructive suicides include death by fire, self-immolation, crashing from heights, etc. And of course, shooting oneself. Suppose Kurt Cobain did want to die and his death is the result of his suicide; then maybe it would not be so surprising that, having lived his life as a “punk”, by which I mean the older punk philosophy with its anti-hippie nature, he did not want to die like a hippie, or let anyone wonder whether he really committed suicide or overdosed by accident. A gunshot to the head is a pretty radical and direct testimony.

Maybe Kurt didn’t want to have his dead face all over the news and decided to destroy that iconic feature of his, which maybe he felt was stolen from him as it became the poster face for a whole generation and more. And indeed, I am not aware of any post mortem photograph of Kurt Cobain. [The only photo I know of is the one where you can see his dead foot, but that hardly counts. Also, Cobain's face was entirely destroyed due to the gunshot.]

Either way, we will assume here that Kurt killed himself, even though there still are things I’d like to know about in that case. Why did Kurt wish to die? This question I will try to answer, though it is not something I think can be easily explained, even for well-known cases.

Moreover, I am definitely not going to say that Kurt was depressed and sad and a sensitive person and all. He was definitely a sensitive person, and had considered suicide before (in Rome, but also in his childhood, if his Journals are to be trusted). One thing I never read anywhere else but in his Journals was his stomach condition.

Cobain was against heavy drugs and specifically condemns heroin in the before-mentioned Journals of his. That much is true; but it is also true that he did use heroin, and when he wrote that, he had tried heroin already. So why did he keep using heroin? The stomach condition. Apparently, he suffered extremely horribly from that stomach pain, and no doctor ever found a reason or a treatment for that. They all gave up on his case, and short of any other resort, Cobain used heroin because it was the only thing that eased his awful pain. Those of ill will may consider this an excuse, but I don’t think Kurt would have needed an excuse to do heroin if he had wanted to do heroin. I don’t recall verbatim how he describes his stomach pain, but I think he compares it to having a Hell inside, or that it burns; at any rate, it was a pain of the incapacitating kind, and obviously intolerable.

Of all the theories, no one mentioned this stomach pain as the possible reason – or rather, one of the reasons – for Cobain’s untimely death. Do you kill yourself because of a tummy ache? I can hear you, people. My answer to this is definitely yes. I’ve had some overwhelming inner pains and however short they were, the idea of dying to avoid such atrocious feelings was already there, not as a plan, but as a sure exit. I also know of someone who was afflicted with terrible stomach aches that no doctor could explain and solve. This kept the person awake at night, continuously suffering, never having a break from it, for years. This person seriously considered suicide. The person was a child when this happened, and so he could not resort to heroin like Cobain did. Eventually, however, this person found a solution and his pain went away before it was too late.

I am sorry that a stomach ache for cause of suicide is way less romantic than a general and existential torment, but I am not sorry at all. Suicide is not cool, it is not beautiful, and it is not something to make you dream or make Cobain look like the icon he became in spite of himself. And yes, reasons to die are often a lot more “trivial” than you may like. But if you had those insane stomach pains constantly and ceaselessly, you’d quickly understand how your life would be seriously ruined.

I did read somewhere that “Cobain sanctified his music through his suicide”, as if Kurt had killed himself to give his art some special aura. In effect, it might have, though Led Zeppelin still live, and are no less of a legend because of it. Nevertheless, the idea that Cobain killed himself for that reason is preposterous: that is no reason to die. Nobody kills themselves for a reason like that. Least of all Cobain. He didn’t seem very concerned about being famous, in the sense that he could very easily live without fame, and so I doubt that robbing himself of so many years of life to “immortalise” his music for who knows how long would have been a reason. The case remains open.

Rest in peace, Mister Cobain!

Gay Marriage

2008-08-20T15:14:00.000-07:00

29^th September 2007

I am currently being quite ill, and thus, it provides me with a sufficient excuse to tackle this much debated issue. If this sucks, it’ll be entirely because I’m ill.

I will begin with my own opinion. My opinion is that, for instance, when two beings have spent years living together and being intimately related, they have a right to be considered family. That is, if one of them has to be hospitalised, the other should have the right to be considered family by the hospital staff, and that for every other issue, such as death, taxes, etc, they should have access to the status of a partner. You don’t have to believe in homosexuality to understand the need for this measure. So I’m pro-civil union or whatever they call it. It’s the least that can be done, and I believe that even George W. Bush is for the civil union. Get back to me on this if that be not the case.

Now, another thing you may have to get back to me about. When people talk about gay marriage, what are they talking about exactly? I see two sides to marriage nowadays: the civil side, at the courthouse, and the religious/cultural side, at the church or some other place convenient for a crowd. That’s what I see. Politics only deals with the first of these. If you’re a Catholic, the country and its president have absolutely no say in your situation because there’s separation of Church and state, and so these are two entirely different things. If as a Catholic you want to marry someone of the same gender, you will have to talk to the Pope about it, the president can’t do anything, and moreover, he is not allowed or entitled to.

Perhaps there is a difference between a legal marriage and a civil union – and quite frankly I wouldn’t know about it – but it seems to me to be fairly the same thing. It’s a legal document, binding two people together which offers them both new rights and duties. It’s a contract. Depending on where you live, it can open doors to lower taxes, specific options, new rights, etc. But it’s basically merely a change of status according to the law. I believe that should be an option to every couple, homosexual or not.

The important fact here is that politicians are not entitled to talk about marriage in its religious aspect. I mean, they can, as people, but they have no specific authority about it in their roles of politicians. No politicians is a relevant actor of the Catholic faith, for instance, unless he also happens to be a priest or some other member of the clergy.

That is where I wonder about why all the fuss. If homosexuals are allowed civil union, what more do you want? Religious marriage? Well that’s all fine with me, but you will have to address actual members of your given religion for that, provided you’re actually religious.

It certainly offends some people that the Catholic Church forbids gay marriage. But let’s be serious for a second: the Catholic Church forbids its followers to marry someone of the same sex, and if you’re part of the Catholic Church, then you must share their beliefs (otherwise you would not be a Catholic) and if you do share its beliefs, then you don’t want to marry someone of the same sex because you know why the Catholic Church is against gay marriage! For those of you who don’t know, the Catholic Church believes that sex should only be used to procreate, not for fun or any other reason. An orgasm that doesn’t find its end in creating a baby is inherently sinful, from the Catholic point of view. If you don’t agree with this, then you’re not a Catholic, and therefore you don’t much care what the Pope has to say or thinks about gay marriage. Right? So there’s no problem and no reason to bitch. The Pope can’t force anyone to believe in Catholicism, and, it shall be remembered, he has no political power of that kind. Being Catholic is a free choice you make, or not. Otherwise you can be a disagreeing Catholic and then you just make-do however you can with your clerical authority, but that’s quite another topic.

Back to some more fundamentals about gay marriage. Nearly every argument I heard against gay marriage was ridiculous. I’ll try to list a few from off the top of my mind (which is all nebulous with flu-esque fog):

It’s a danger to humanity in that it will decrease the number of humans being born.

It’s sick.

It’s a danger to children in that an education given by homosexuals may turn them into homosexuals too.

It’s disgusting.

They take it in the ass! It’s sick!

And many others I naturally forget. Let’s tackle with those. The first one is just lame; we are not living in a world where decrease of our number is a real danger. Quite the contrary, and everyone knows this. Secondly, just because homosexuals can’t marry doesn’t mean they will fall back on a woman (or man) and make babies. As an aside, if homosexual couples were allowed to adopt children, they would do the job of any parents. Which leads me to my second point.

If homosexuals are allowed to educate children, then people are worried about the impact on the kids. It here must be said that a homosexual is a homosexual person and that this defines only his or her sexuality. You don’t define yourself by your sexuality, or so I hope, and whatever you happen to prefer sexually doesn’t bear much of an impact on how you’d educate a child. Would you say loving big boobs has any influence on how you’d educate your son or daughter? I would not. It doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t matter a single moment what I like sexually with regards to my skills as an educator of children. This is the problem of homosexuals today: their homosexuality is perceived as more than just a sexuality; and to be fair, many gays play along. I don’t think it helps the homosexual cause to try to put more to homosexuality than there is. Many think it’s a lifestyle and everything, but no, homosexuality is just a sexuality; if you turn it into a lifestyle, that’s your choice and responsibility, but being homosexual, essentially, is just a sexuality. You’re attracted to people of your gender, and that’s all there is to it. I wouldn’t think it’s important in raising a child, and if anyone disagrees, then let me know what part of your sexual life you think would influence your children with regards to the education you give them.

The idea that homosexual parents would raise kids who’d become homosexual is preposterous. Most homosexuals had heterosexual parents. Secondly, to make a remark like this you’d have to assume that being homosexual is bad, and perhaps it is, I don’t even discuss that point here. I don’t believe that children need to have exactly two parents of exactly two genders and whatever. I think a child adapts to whatever his or her family happens to be. If we lived in societies where we have 3 fathers and 5 mothers, we’d get along fine. If we lived in societies where there’s one nominal mother for the kids and every male in the tribe is a father to them, we’d get along fine as well. There can only be a difference if, in a given society, you have either less or more parents than others; but it’s only comparative and so, in reality, it doesn’t affect the children very much. There are other factors which would affect a child a lot more. Say having abusive parents, or unloving parents. Best to have one good parent than two bad ones. Best to have two homosexual loving parents than two unloving heterosexual ones. So the deal is this: if you want to forbid parenthood to a certain category of people, homosexuals, then I want my own categories not to be allowed parenthood too. That would include idiots and unloving motherfuckers. I think an idiot would do a lot of damage to a child trying to raise him/her, and so that is ample reason not to allow that person to be a parent. Sounds unfair? Well, perhaps, but no more than forbidding a homosexual person to be a parent.

Where the thing becomes a total joke is here: homosexual couples can’t adopt a child, but a homosexual individual can. You are allowed to adopt a child as a single person, regardless of your sexual preferences, but not if you happen to have a partner. In reality, what every homosexual wanting to adopt a child does is to adopt it on behalf of just one of the two. So it comes down to the same, except that only one of the two gets to have legal rights over the child, and that’s not an optimal situation for the child, or the other partner.

By the way, if paragraphs don’t quite link, I don’t care. They surely do on some level or other, even if just loosely. Bear with me, I’m ill. So, what now. Should homosexuals be allowed to marry? Let’s see what happens if they are: instead of living together as concubines, they live together as married people. Big deal.

I understand that most anti-gay marriage people are so because they believe homosexuality to be wrong, unnatural, sick, perverted, etc. But even if homosexuality was all this, would that be a sufficient reason to forbid homosexual marriage? The question is worth asking. I don’t have a problem with saying that homosexuality is abnormal, and don’t you get all shocked and call me a Nazi. Abnormal means not normal, and normal means within the norm, and the norm is just a mathematical thing, it’s a number. It’s all just a comparison of numbers, there’s no moral judgement in that statement of mine. If 6% of the population is homosexual (that’s the number I hear most often), then it is definitely not the norm. That’s all I’m saying. There are many more things with even less people and it doesn’t make it intrinsically perverted, make no mistake. I’m just saying it’s counter-productive to try to pass something abnormal as normal, because it just isn’t. Call a cat a cat and down with political correctness. I’ve used the word homosexual more often than the word gay because I see no demeaning aspect to the word homosexual. Things go wrong when we start to assume that everyone means more than the words they use.

See, even if homosexuality was a problem, something to be cured, well I would still not condone a ban on homosexual marriage. Mental illness is a problem, and if homosexuality truly is a problem, it’s definitely a mental one, and people who suffer from mental illnesses aren’t forbidden to marry. Maybe that’s too far-fetched, I’ll concede that to you, but you get my point.

I don’t believe that homosexuality is a choice because I can’t recall choosing to be heterosexual. It never seemed an option to me, and so, instead of believing that homosexuals make the choice of being homosexual, which is, to heterosexual, a choice against their liking, I’d rather believe that homosexuals and me just don’t have the same original tastes. Disgusted heterosexuals are so because they think that homosexuals feel the same as they (the disgusted heterosexuals) do about sex with someone of the same gender. Mistake! You guys aren’t given the same bases. I wasn’t given what it takes to sexually desire another man, so I can’t relate to a male homosexual, but I know enough to know that there’s a basic difference and that the different taste comes from there, and not from choice, which would be just absurd. Besides, why would anyone choose to be homosexual? I don’t see anything that would make that condition so appealing.

I agree to the idea that perhaps we are all mostly bisexual and define our sexual preferences because of the environment we live in, but with caution. I don’t think that the environment can be so influential, as proven by homosexuals who grew up in heterosexual contexts. In most civilised countries, it’s relatively ok to be homosexual, and it’s not like you have to tell the whole world about it, and so there’s little trouble about being homosexual; which means that if societial pressure was the only reason not to choose to become homosexual, then a lot more people would make this choice. Thing is, they don’t, because it’s not a choice. You’re either gay or you’re not, and people who came back from homosexuality are just bisexual. This is a lot more gradual and graduated than commonly perceived.

Now a word for Christians and non-Christians alike. Generally, Christians are supposed to be against homosexuality, but I would like to stress out that Jesus Christ never spoke against homosexuals, and talked very little about sexual matters, because, I believe, it’s just details really. I do not appreciate Christian beliefs being used and abused to excuse psycho-rigidity and other farts of the mind. So that’s for Christians and non-Christians alike.

If homosexuality is a problem, then it must have a solution. But it hasn’t a solution, meaning that you can’t change someone’s sexual orientation. I don’t see how I would be made into a homosexual, for instance. I don’t think I’m solvable like that, nor do I believe homosexuals are. So what can we do? Force homosexuals to live a fake heterosexual life and be sad? That doesn’t sound like a good plan to me, on every level of it. Whether you think it’s a sin, a mental disease, or anything, the fact remains that it wouldn’t help to force homosexuals to be deprived of the love they need. And don’t you tell me that love has nothing to do with sex, otherwise I demand you start dating people of your own gender (if you’re heterosexual) and tell me later on that it doesn’t matter what body your date had. But then again, love has nothing to do with sex, too, and so it doesn’t matter what genders loving people have. Right?

That’s the thing with marriage, I see it as the union of two souls, if those exist, and I hope they do, and for all I know, souls don’t have bodies, and thus don’t have genders. I readily admit I could be wrong about the angel-like state of souls as being genderless, but let’s keep it that way for this here paragraph. If souls aren’t gendered, then it’s just your body that is, and so it doesn’t really matter intrinsically what bodies you’re attracted to physically as long as you love correctly.

Meditate on the following: if we had no sexual desires, we would be neither homosexual nor heterosexual.

Then what else to say... Oh yeah, back to why gay marriage is so dangerous. That’s something I hear often, that homosexual marriage is a threat to marriage, nation, and everything. How is homosexual marriage a threat to the values of marriage? Do they change? The values of marriage, I think, are about devotion to the other in love and respect. Whether there are two penises or just one [or none] doesn’t seem to make a difference in that deal. So which values are under attack?

Generally, the idea is that the homosexual couple is a threat to marriage, nation, society, etc., because they cannot procreate. But see, that’s where it’s stupid: sterile couples would then be a threat to marriage, nation, and society too, which is just equally ridiculous. And as I pointed out earlier, homosexuals couples can’t raise children because they are not allowed to do so as a married couple, or just a couple. If you don’t allow them to raise kids, don’t blame them of that too! Dammit. Being a parent means a lot more than just shooting sperm down a woman’s sex, right? In fact, that alone is not being a parent, just a fucker. Being a parent means being there for a child and educating him or her and providing for his/her well-being. That’s a parent, and your sexuality has little to do with it.

Do you think heterosexual married couples who enjoy butt-sex are worse parents because of it? If yes, I am dying of curiosity to know how and why.

I think I said most of what I wanted to say. I’ll conclude on reminding you that homosexuality does not define people, but people’s sexualities. Don’t let someone’s homosexuality pervade throughout that whole person and define everything about them. You’re only homosexual in your sexuality. Collecting tea-cups is not homosexual, it’s just collecting tea-cups (and I use that example because I’ve seen it on TV in some silly show). Even butt-sexing someone isn’t per se homosexual. Take me for instance, I could butt-fuck 20 males in a row, I’d still not be homosexual. Know why? Because I don’t desire males! No matter how many I’d do in the butt, it won’t change how I don’t feel about them. Being homosexuals is only about that: desiring people of the same sex. Being a man and doing another man in the ass is a homosexual act, but that doesn’t mean you are as a person (although, granted, you’d have to be pretty weird to do a man in the butt if you’re not homosexual, but I’m talking theoretically to get my point across).

I’ll end this in those beautiful words of mine: you’re only homosexual in your sexuality.

On Painting

2008-08-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

Circa 2005

I was never naturally gifted at either drawing or painting. And this is true and you have to believe me; many don't in view of my recent work but I assure you I had no more gift than any balls-scratching monkey out there.

I first started with watercolours. Since I was sadly hopeless at drawing anything that looked like reality, I decided to play around with water and watercolours. This would be most of the watercolours paintings you can find in my gallery. I started that in 2001. I wanted to paint but I wasn't naive as to my actual skills, I had none. So that was the result of a will without the skills. But I'm still quite happy about these, I knew what I wanted to do and it mostly worked out fine, I think.

The real trigger to improvement was when I started trying to draw faces. That was very hard because I knew I had no skills, and like most people who "can't" draw, I thought I didn't have the necessary "gift" for it and that trying was merely pretentious and pathetic. But I'm stubborn. So I tried. And the result was horrible. I had tried to draw a most beautiful woman's face, and the result looked like some horrible tiger-looking mongoloid alien from Mars. I was gutted and felt like utter shite, but I'm stubborn. So I tried again. New results were still horrible, but slightly better. And I kept trying and trying, seeing a little spark of progress.

Then one day, Hallelujah, something looked like something. The real trigger was to realise that it's not in the hand, but in the eye, and that the real one true way to learn how to draw/paint is to LOOK. Look closer, then things appear. And that's when it becomes really fascinating: you start to see more in your every day life. For instance, when I tried to draw portraits, I paid high attention to shadows and stuff; consequently, I started to be much more aware of those shadows on people's faces in my daily life. And I swear that's more impressive than it sounds. I'd look at teachers and then I'd see how the shadows were shaped on their skin. And that's like some sort of mind-expansion sort of thing. Quite trippy in a way. Really fascinating because it's something I never expected to learn from drawing/painting.

So that's basically when I realised that probably everyone can draw and paint. And since then I pushed everyone I knew to give it a try, and I explain how it worked for me and how it could work for them. I can be quite a pusher. Remember, it's in the eye not in the hand. That's the most important thing I learned. Technically you all can manipulate a pen and a brush, there's nothing magic about it; the real trick is to look at something and see more deeply than you would in an every day life context. In your every day life you don't need to see exactly how shadows are shaped on people's faces, so you don't pay attention. That's how our brains work, there's so much information that it needs to select stuff in the raw material of vision and dispatch it into bigger baskets just so your mind won't explode into an LSD trip from hell. Using your eye to look closer is the opposite process; you try to see what's out there in its infinity and all its details. And that's a fascinating journey, believe me.