Qjapheme

 It has been over 10 years since my last entry. Texts have become explicitly frightened, literal, unrooted. Qjapheme is needed. I've never had such difficulty hearing it before. The quiet and the need are proportional.

I think doors made with careful words open onto better worlds than those made by desperation. Dreaming Cities and Nightmare Slums. Our dreams ought to be overdesigned, like bridges and towers. Our words should be those which have withstood a thousand doubt-filled arrows. We should not cling to tattered linens thrown up against the hurricane while shouting, "I am safe, you cannot hurt me" moments before we are swept away.

We must live as though we are what we are not. Immortal. Genius. Brave. Only through pretending may we be.

So I will seek to break from the confines of a dream. By treading the shattered landscape of Wonderland mirrors, windows into a billion mind palaces, I will aim to incept peace by subterfuge. First in my own dream, and then to others. Drain the ocean water until all islands are connected by at least a little common ground. 

Based On A True Story

It has been over a year since my last entry. I've sat down on a couple of different occasions in that time and tried to compose the next installment, but until now, it wouldn't come. I knew the subject, but just what I had to say about it remained cognitively ethereal, and it has taken until now for it to coalesce to the point where I'm confident that, yes, a clear, solid set of thoughts has indeed sprung into existence. I'd like to try and share the cardinal points of this year long journey with you now. This will be the last installment of Qjapheme, and something new will take its place. It has served its purpose for me these last five years, and for all my initial skepticism about keeping a blog, I've come to understand and appreciate the value of information, even terribly obscure, often esoteric ramblings in the ephemeral, electronic format.

I'd like to give trial basis to a particular definition of 'belief': the act of allowing the mind to accept a given idea or concept as true to such a degree that the physiological response to the idea or concept is indistinguishable from other truths.

Already I can see things getting tangled in semantical netting here, but fortunately I am not limited to one dictionary-esque definition to illustrate my meaning. I have not rigorously researched the topic I'm about to speak on, but I've been fortunate enough to have been exposed to the writings of some who have: Carl Sagan, Francis Collins, Michael Shermer being the latest and most lucid. I'd like to thank them for their work, and everyone else who grapples with our biggest existential mysteries with such courage and dedication.

As I have come to understand it, as human creatures we have a peculiar relationship with 'the truth'. Apprehending reality in a consistent and predictable way is essential to our well being. Being unable to reliably perceive the truth, or more commonly, facing deception, typically elicits a stress response from our bodies. Why? The simplest answer I think is obvious: If we lack true information, suffering can easily follow. If I can't find food, I'll starve. If I'm unaware of danger, it can harm me. This is true of every living thing. As complex social creatures, these most basic needs manifest in humans as networks of trust.

The most important consideration amidst all this is one I think religion and science both point out: we are fallible, but this can be overcome. In the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), this fallibility is sin, and is overcome by faith in God. In Buddhism, the fallibility is our resistance to change, and it is overcome by letting go of the self and accepting change. Science, in particular neuroscience, the study of the brain, has put forth an explanation of this fallibility to which I am partial because of its robust and harmonious explanatory power amidst so many different angles of examination.

Our brains being a product of biological evolution is central to this. Brains are not computer programs which have benefitted from concentrated debugging efforts. Instead, the brain's capabilities and its bugs arise from slow, gradual transformations which deal with challenges that are being faced at a particular point in time. The human body has many vestigial components - remnants of things that once made sense to have, but are no longer needed. The muscles that allow you to wiggle your ears are left overs from when ear directionality was important to hearing (like dogs, cats, horses, etc. all point their ears towards what they want to listen to). The nerve that connects your brain to your vocal chords curiously loops down near your heart, a result of the pathway elongating, but evolution being unable to 'unplug, detangle, and replug' the nerve back in like we do when a mess of electrical cords needs sorting out behind our electronics. Even our DNA contains ARE's or Ancient Repetitive Elements which are also found in other mammals (even mice) but aren't expressed in our genome. They were needed once, but not anymore, and evolution doesn't use a Trash or Recycle Bin like you would on your computer desktop.

Our brains have trillions of pathways which serve to code our very complex experiences and behaviors. There are even synapses that only fire when we see a particular individual's face. At its most basic though, the brain is a difference engine: pathways are either on, or off. The operation of what gets turned on and what gets turned off has also fallen under the inevitable guidance of our most basic needs: feeling of hunger indicates that it's time to acquire food; injections of adrenaline into the system indicate a time to fight or run; feelings of sexual attraction are the brain's way of using pleasure hormones to reward a behavior that propagates the species, without which no new brains ever come to exist at all.

Assessments of truth and falsity also fall under the brain's list of tasks (as do all tasks we perform, whether conscious or unconscious, our brain orchestrates everything, evidenced by the fact that if the brain is damaged in a particular area, that area's tasks are impeded, or eliminated). And this is where science explains our fallibility: here the brain makes mistakes. It can make false positives and false negatives, perceiving something as true when it is not, and also perceiving something as false when it is true. In this way, the brain believes instead of knows. And if we look back to our definition of belief, the effect of a belief that something is true is physiologically indistinguishable from something that is known to be true. Belief is just un-vetted knowledge, and it can be objectively correct or incorrect.

We all dream, and we all know dreams can seem indistinguishable from reality. A friend of mine actually told me about a dream he had which seemed to span an entire day, and because of events that happened in the dream, he was angry with his mother for a week for something that never actually happened. Similarly, schizophrenia is characterized partially by the brain accepting as true things which objectively aren't, usually resulting in symptoms of hallucinations, paranoia and conspiracy theorizing. The difference between dreams and schizophrenia is not that one is 'normal' and the other 'abnormal', but instead that when you wake up, dreams are usually recognized as not real, whereas a brain suffering from schizophrenia fails to properly vet the patterns that are being made. If my friend had dreams all the time that made him mad at people for things that never happened, we might say he was mentally ill, but because this is infrequent, we say he's alright. But, the potential lies inside all of us, and false positives are far more common than I ever really considered. As scary as the thought may be, this leads me to imagine that the experience of our own lives are actually based on true stories instead of simply being objectively true stories. And for the same reason that multiple witnesses make a stronger case, that we have two eyes instead of just one, and that multiple lines of evidence are required to suss out the best explanation, we need to consider as many of those lives, based on true stories, as we can when searching for answers in life.

This Giant Space Cactus

I come here to remember, so I know where to go.

In my travels, the word 'eschatological' has been somewhat twisted to what I consider a wonderful new use for me. Typically (and semantically) associated with 'Ends' I have come to understand it as being a great word for talking about 'Divisions' and, even better, 'Begins'.

I have recently been living in a personally eschatological time. Significant change has broken in and altered my world forever - not in a sweeping and total way, but undeniably, in a way that is impossible to ignore. One fork in the crossroads has been taken, and not others.

I love you, and,

I have a need to speak truths.

These are the things all of this has ever been about, and continues to be. My understanding of how this is done is what changes, not the fundamental endeavour itself.

There is a finch in the Galapagos Islands which is extremely adapted to a local type of cactus. These birds, called scandens, or just simply 'cactus finches', use cacti in a way that is analogous to how Aboriginal inhabitants of North America used the buffalo - they do almost everything with it. They eat the seeds, they nest and hatch in it, they even mate in it. They use the spines as very simple tools to help them with tasks. The birds are so adapted to using these plants that if the plants disappeared, so would the birds.

Now, in a population sometimes numbering in the hundreds, there have been roughly a dozen birds who have done something unthinkable to the cacti: Before the next generation germinates, the finches clip the stigma to get at a bit of sweet nectar inside; a nice, easy little treat which thereafter means that plant will have no descendants. Every time one of these birds, a strong minority among the population, reaps a temporary boon from a cactus in this way, it brings its species one step closer to extinction.

Utter foolishness with resources is not solely a human behavior. I am tempted to say that the difference between us and scandens is that we know better, but the truth is, most of us don't. How can we? 'Knowing' has become such a complicated affair, and very few people are making it easier. What you know affects what you do, which can affect everyone, so guiding, curbing, or even controlling what people know is something we are very concerned about.

Scandens probably doesn't understand that no stigma = no food and no homes in the future. They don't understand how their world works on that level. Similarly, most of us have a limited understanding of our own world. We know enough to get by in current circumstances, and some of us even have a little extra here and there, but largely, we don't really know how worlds actually work. And, most of us don't really care. Caring is often rationed like water in a desert; we only care about the really important things, after all, there's only so much time in a day.

But what's really important is often determined not by knowing, but believing, by taking someone else's word for it, and then often running with it like it was our own. But if we look at what we know about believing, we might rethink some things. This will be the topic of my next entry.

The Magnificence Still Comes Through

And now I continue my walking, recalling a writing from five years ago, which was also brought about because of thoughts related to... unimaginable suffering, and the paths that can follow from them.

"Babi Yar

I'm thinking. Yesterday, I was watching a television program about the Holocaust in Russia. They showed footage of women being stripped naked, forced to run down a ravine, then being shot in the back. Today, I'm reading a book, Grace Notes, by Bernard MacLaverty. It's about an Irish woman from a Catholic family. A clinically depressed pianist. Anatoli is telling her about Babi Yar, where thirty-five thousand men, women and children were shot and buried in a ravine.

There's a black smudge obscuring the last word in this sentence on page 127. I move it. 'kill-' becomes 'killed.' Upon closer inspection, the black smudge is really a small, dead fly.

I close the book, and I'm thinking about someone else. I remember the way her voice sounds in my head as I go to check my laundry. She's Catholic, and not Irish. Loves music. We talk about God, and life, and death, and politics, and hate, and love. We could talk about the sad, transposable irony of the phrase, "German liberation of Russia" that I heard in that television program. Then about the poem by Evtushenko, about the bodies in the ravine.

About the people in the ravine.

Shostakovich put it in a symphony, says Anatoli, the guy speaking in this novel. I open the book again. The smudge has moved. The dead fly has moved. Now, it's under the sentence: "But the magnificence still came through."

I think about the Blues. Choirs and Coventry carols. Swing Low Sweet Chariot. The pianist from a Catholic family has a baby. A beautiful little girl. When she was a little girl herself, she loved Protestant drums, and when she grew up, she put them in a symphony.

I'm thinking: I'm not Catholic. Not Protestant. Not Nazi or Jew. Not Russian, not Irish. Not black.

Not a smudge. Not dead.

I'm thinking about someone else, and me and you, and about the music, and how the magnificence can still come through."

Now I've promenaded through present and past.

Next,

I'll feel for the future

Reflecting (just for a moment)

On why this is all relevant again to me now.

Paths

I wasn't sure how to write this. I roughly knew what I wanted to say, in terms of content, but just how to illustrate the notion eluded me, until now. I think I've stumbled on an enjoyable way to make my point.

My point is about paths.

I love Battlestar Galactica (the 21st century remake, that is). It's so well done. That's not my main drive here, but it's worth noting. This entry also consequently contains spoilers, so don't say you weren't warned.

There is an episode in the second season where we find out a Cylon agent (a Six, for those who that will mean anything to) has been captured, abused, tortured and raped for months aboard the Battlestar Pegasus. Despite being an artificial life form, we're informed that the Cylon mind has a vulnerable psychology like human beings do. These experiences have traumatized this Six to the point where she years for death.

Now, this is usually a problem for Cylons, as they don't actually die, but have the technology to have their consciousness resurrected in a new body. But if that mind is broken, how great of a thing is that, really?

Dr. Gaius Baltar is given the task of getting intel about a large, unknown Cylon ship that the Pegasus came across in its travels. The ship is actually the Resurrection Ship, the very thing that allows Cylons to reincarnate into new bodies when they die in deep space. The Six tells Dr. Baltar this, because she wants to die, really die, and this can only be achieved if that ship is destroyed, so she gives up the information willingly.

One of the take home messages is that the Six's fate is truly horrible, and shouldn't be wished on anyone, not even the genocidal robot Cylons. That is not a path we should hope anyone has to walk.

The destruction of the Resurrection Ship is arguably the event with some of the most significant ramifications in the whole of the series. It changes everything. Cylon life is altered so fundamentally in that moment that the paths they take as a race of beings is irreversibly altered from then on. This event is what allows the series' end, at the end of season four, to be what it ultimately is.

And it happened in part because of unimaginable suffering.

There is such a conflict here that it's very hard to sort out. But there's something important to distill here, I believe, and this I will endeavour to do in my next entry. For now, sleep calls me, but I have started walking a path towards this point, which I will finishing walking soon.

Rest well.

Strength and Distance

"Let go, Let go
Just get in
Oh it's so amazing here
It's alright
'Cause there's beauty in the breakdown"

~'Let Go' by Frou Frou

Recent changes in the patterns of my life have led me to someplace I am enjoying so deeply at the moment, I very much needed to share some of it. Ironically, I tried to capture the thoughts in an audio recording due to the immediacy of the need, but there was a technical malfunction, and exactly 0.0 seconds of a fourteen minute monologue made it through. I've now come here to salvage through some sort of summary.

As I said at the beginning of the recording, this experience has been built by a number of things over the last couple of weeks, the most obvious of which (to my mind currently) was having a podcast recommended to me for consumption (KeithCourage.com). The episode I took in tonight had a section that talked about how what is normally considered 'strength', socially and mentally I guess, is very often just disconnectedness, distance from caring about things. He said something along the lines of pushing so far back from everything that it becomes like a tiny image on a screen, and that at that distance, the slightest turning of our heads can put those things out of sight, out of mind. This sent neurons firing in some humble and extraordinary parts of my brain. It's... a sober feeling. Not jarring, but still eye-opening. Like stepping out of the dark, into unapologetic light, but not having to wait for your eyes to adjust to a harsh change. I think the comfort with the realization just means it was overdue.

I decided I needed to reflect on this. What I thought was that strength necessarily leads to distance, at some point, but going back in the other direction is more difficult for us. When life gets tough, we need to be strong, but you can't be strong forever. You need to rest sometime, and in order to rest, you need some distance from the things that require your strength. They are opposite activities, both equally needed. But, having to be strong again is tough, but we don't like the idea of not being strong. So, we keep that distance, that disconnection in place, and call our efforts to stay disconnected 'being strong'.

I've done this. I'm ready to stop. I'm really glad I heard this articulated, because I get what's felt weird for the last while now.

It's bloody, ridiculously late and I have to work tomorrow... today, technically. That covers the first half of what I talked about, and I think it'll do for now. I don't think I'll have trouble coming back to the other half later, because it has more to do with where I'm going than where I've been.

Thanks.

Death & Transfiguration

They say that over the course of seven years every cell in your body is replaced by new ones.

I am not the same person that loved you.

But this one does,

Too.