The communion of Borges and Heraclitus

I find joy in making connections, and awhile back I recognized the following link, connecting two writers who were separated by close to 2500 years. It got my mind very excited, and was about as close to a mental orgasm as I can get. The two writers that caused this great stir were Borges and Heraclitus. I was reading Borges, who reaches levels of brilliance that continue to amaze me, and he is, and has been for some time, my favorite author. In the afterword to ‘The Maker’ I found the following. Listen:

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” (J.L.B. ‘The Maker,’ Trans by Andrew Hurley)

And then what does Heraclitus, a Greek separated by thousands of years and vast cultural upheavals, say?

“A man’s character is his fate”

Heraclitus no doubt has a more simple formulation than Borges, but I’m of course partial to the poetry of Borges… “that patient labyrinth of lines” is to me a wonderfully poetic and simply beautiful image in its own right, abstract though it may be. In any case, personal opinions aside, it looks like these two are coming at the same idea from opposite directions. Heraclitus seems to be saying that a man’s character predetermines his fate. In other translations of the quote, which I can’t verify, we get “Character is destiny” and “A man’s character is his daemon.” The more I look into this, the more I am coming to question the original translation above, which I got from The Adventures of Augie March. However, I’ll put this aside and assume it’s accurate. In the 'Augie March' translation it certainly could be that Heraclitus is meaning our characters determine our fates.

Now Borges flips this ‘characters creates fate’ notion on its head. Our fates are what we have filled our lives with - the rooms and kingdoms and ships. And then, as in a mystery that finally reveals itself at the end of the movie, the character finds that the summation of all the things that have populated his life turn out to be an image of his own face. The face is identical to self in this image, thus it is our characters that we have revealed. Our fates define our characters.

However, when Heraclitus says that character is fate, I suppose it’s also quite possible that he doesn’t imply the one creates the other, but rather that they are two sides to the same coin. As with Descartes’ “Cogito ego sum,” thinking does not lead to being, but rather they both necessitate the other. Character and fate may appear discrete when written in words, but are inseparable notions when played out in real life. So, would Heraclitus accept the formulation “Destiny is Character?” Of course I have no idea, only guesses.

What impresses me most here is that there is this common theme between character and fate that both authors have picked up on. These deep themes that run through human nature must be apparent enough to inspire two writers from totally different cultures, and then to also inspire the reader, i.e. myself, to pick up on this common theme. That people have these themes running through their lives, and that art is able to pick them out, is an exciting thing indeed.

Dear Bill

Dear Mr. Clinton-

I recently received your letter regarding the qualifications of your wife for president of the United States. Thanks for the note! However, I have a few concerns that I would like to raise. First off, I have to wonder if this endorsement is freely given. As I recall, Mrs. Clinton did you a huge favor by standing by you during a certain 'Monica Lewinsky' affair, which I seem to recall involved some infidelity. This makes me suspect, my good friend, that she's got your nuts in a salad shooter, as they say. And I just can't trust the motives of a man whose cajones are compromised. Sorry.

Secondly, I note that you refer to the senator and candidate simply as 'Hillary.' Now, I have indeed read that Mrs. Clinton has decided to refer to herself in this way on the campaign trail, partly to put some distance between herself and your most dignified person. However, before writing a letter like this to multiple people (I'll be so bold as to assume it wasn't personalized for just me) I think you ought to check with the Missus on matters like this. Remember that you're walking on thin ice here, buddy and its better to be safe than sorry. You don't want to end up sleeping on the couch now do you?

Finally, I note that at the bottom of the message, it says "Paid for by Hillary Clinton for President Exploratory Committee." Now, I know you've been out of a job for about 7 1/2 years now, but it's time to start pulling your own weight (which is probably considerable) when it comes to the household finances. I know unemployment can be pleasant, but you can't just sit around on the couch all day eating fritos and getting high. It's just not dignified for a former president. Check the Classifieds for a company looking for a friendly, outgoing type who can wine and dine clients (and maybe even regale parties with a saxophone solo, yeah?). You'd be good at it, and it would get you out of the house!

I certainly don't want to offend, and I hope you will consider these comments as 'constructive criticism,' which is certainly my intention. Again, thank you for your well written, informative letter, I very much appreciated it. I hope we can continue to maintain a friendly dialog via our correspondence, and I wish your wife great success on the campaign trail. Yours truly,

-howiej

Old and New

There’s never any single moment in life when you recognize that you have ‘grown up,’ that you are officially more experienced in the ways of the world than, say, 10 years ago. But every now and then something comes along which puts those ten years in perspective, and makes you realize that you, for better or worse, are more familiar with the show that life is putting on around you.

I had one of these moments not too long ago when I heard a song by Modest Mouse on the radio. While I may have heard some of their stuff before, it was the first time I actually knew what I was listening to, and definitely the first time that I remember a radio DJ talking about them and their work. Now, about 12 years ago I met a girl in college who is one of my best friends to this day, and this girl was a huge fan of Modest Mouse. I wasn’t into the music scene, but my friend would talk of going to Modest Mouse concerts at small venues on 'the hill,' the center of off-campus life. And this band which I had never heard of, and was well out of the mainstream, epitomized the newness of college life. That time in our lives where we meet lots of new people, try out new lifestyles, run into new ideas. Simply put, so much of our college experience, or mine at least, was characterized by a feeling of newness, of doing things for the first time.

Since then the pace of new things entering my life has slowed down to a bit more of a crawl. (Or, possibly, my excitement over new events in life has greatly diminished) In any case, I have graduated, gotten a job and been in the real world for a number of years now. Concurrently, that feeling of everything being new has certainly departed from my life. Modest Mouse coming on the radio was a vivid reminder for me of those old days when everything was new. Here was a band, who was now mainstream, which I could say ‘Yep, I’ve heard of them – my friend was into them since the beginning,’ and have a feeling of familiarity and maybe ‘oldness’ about the band. It was a strange feeling, because only 12 years ago the very same band was the epitome of the ‘newness’ of the world.

I certainly felt a little sentimental when I heard Modest Mouse on the radio, no doubt due to the juxtaposition of the ‘older’ self with the ‘newer’ self. Have I given up the excitement of the new for a sort of wise, less excited, ‘been-there-done-that’ older and experienced view of the world? And isn’t this the natural progression of things? I can’t say for sure, but it was, for just those few seconds as I reflected on the passing of time, a pretty powerful and somewhat nostalgic reminder of how things change. Or, more specifically, how our perspective on the world changes, but the things that populate it stay the same.

Music

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
- Nietzsche (The Twilight of the Idols)

Surely many have heard the famous maxim above. It's one that I tend to agree with, although I would classify music and poetry as a whole new entity entirely, but (perhaps) more on that another time. In the end, sadly, life is so often a painfully crude, dull, painful experience that we need the very few saving graces that are given to us - and music is one of them in my view. What brought this philosophical turn of mind about was the rather commonplace act of downloading, from i-tunes, 'Read my Mind' by the Killers. I don't find the lyrics mind-blowing, but luckily this song has some great tunes to fall back on. And then we get to the line
I pull up to the front of your driveway
With magic soakin' my spine

And yeah, good work Killers.... I can feel the dreary commonplace world pull away, the excitement, the 'in-the-moment' aliveness of pulling up to a driveway on a first or second date, and everything is quite aware and alive, and I feel the magic soaking my spine. In this moment of feeling, life certainly doesn't feel like a mistake.
And, for those interested, the video is, or was here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Oec8RuwVVs
In any case, just one of those lines that makes you sit up and take notice. Kudos, Killers.

Paradise and the DR

Wakey Wakey! Don’t be lazy! Time for your exercise! And with that, the Caribbean music, with a bit of techno mixed in, jumps to life, and its time for aerobics on the beach. This was my first real ‘resort’ trip, to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. And who knew that paradise included a Dominican dude who ran daily aerobics classes? Not I. If it was paradise, it had a distinctly German cast of characters.

And, we even learned some German:

Zu mite
Zu tites
Zum zoch zoch zoch!

(or such is my poor recollection of the crude toast by our German friend who I’ll call Eric the great). He certainly looked like a conquering barbarian with his barrel chest and steady beady eyes, ready to raise a toast to his motherland. Or, rather, his gods.

But it was, of course, a superficial paradise, one built on the poor of the Dominican Republic. For 50 some kilometers the tourist beaches ran, and how much of this was open to the native people? Tough to say, but probably very little. And how much were the hotel workers making, the maids that cleaned the rooms? In any case, there was another level of its falsity, seen in the entertainment. At times they seemed to want to mimic the European culture, or at least one of their evening entertainment pieces did. And so, dolled up all in white, were approximately 8 native entertainers dancing what I think was the blue Danube waltz, and doing a rather poor job of it. Here were people from Germany, some of whom had probably seen the masterpiece done by expert ballet dancers back home, watching this poor reproduction, with the dancers missing some steps and butchering others. It wasn’t natural, but whoever decided on the programming must have thought those watching would like a tour of all the worlds dances. For me, I would have preferred just the local style – but then again, I didn’t stick around to watch.

Besides the partying and day trips and drinking games at night, there was a more subdued and relaxed atmosphere at the resort. After dinner, with a few drinks in you, it feels like this was the most palpable. People could go down to the seashore or cobbled beach path, and truly and honestly saunter. Thoreau says of walking, “Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” And so we’d chew over the evening’s dinner as we sauntered lazily down the beach. The waves softly crashing on the shore lent a constant beat to our slow dance, which, deep down in our souls, we always felt. And the steps would come one after the other, sometimes so slowly that you would wonder if one step would be followed by the next. But, as with the waves coming in and beating out a rhythm in time, the next step would always follow, as a drop of water wells up and forms in a faucet, and then finally falls – plop! – to the sink below. It was the slow, plodding walk of the camel that felt so natural on the beach. While much of the resort was a false façade, this sauntering had the feel of authenticity to me.

In any case, the resort trip, my first, was a lot of fun. There were beautiful beaches, beautiful countrysides, lots of drinking with friends, a few evening dancing trips, sand volleyball, and lots of hanging out on the beach. Everything one might expect a resort trip to include. As far as physical pleasures and a relaxed attitude went, the resort was, indeed, paradise. I would hope, though, that real bliss includes a deeper, more spiritual depth of feeling, rather than just the numbing feeling of drinking too many rum and cokes.

My Onion entry

For anyone who enjoys the Onion, and I absolutely do, they might enjoy the following. I wrote and submitted this to the Onion a few months back - I'm pretty sure I'll never hear back from them since they have written, in very prominent type, and in a very prominent place on their contact information page, that they do not accept editorial submissions. Surely they didn't mean me.

God Cancels Reality In Favor Of Reality TV

Nov 15, 2006

Vatican City, Italy - According to a Vatican representative, speaking on behalf of the Almighty, reality will be canceled at the end of this season and will be replaced by reality TV. God, the release stated, has found that the multitude of reality TV shows being aired more than satisfied his experiment in creating mankind and then watching the ensuing trials and tribulations. “The shows created by the four major networks,” stated God, “in fact go well beyond even the most difficult vicissitudes that I could have dreamed up. Bravo Fox, NBC, CBS and ABC,” he concluded. The release further stated that the fate of mankind at the end of this season will be instant non-being, with the exception of a small percentage kept on to staff the various reality TV shows themselves. There was no word as to which network’s season end date God will adhere to.

Goodbye, Mr. Vonnegut

A sad thing happened last night. A wonderful and sensitive and funny and creative author, by the name of Kurt Vonnegut, died. In “Timequake,” Vonnegut talks about being a Humanist, that organization of people who do not believe in God or an afterlife, and who try to ‘behave decently and honorably’ as he said, in this life. He relates,

“I spoke at a Humanist Association memorial service for Dr. Asimov a few years back. I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. The room was like the court-martial scene in Trout’s “No Laughing Matter,” right before the floor of the Pacific Ocean swallowed up the third atomic bomb and Joy’s Pride and all the rest of it.
When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me, ‘He’s up in Heaven now.’” - Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake [pp 83].

Leafing through my Vonnegut books, I find a few other quotes to remember this wonderful man by….
“Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
The books of Bokonon I:5
*harmless untruths”
-Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

On the topic of why bother writing in today’s movie and TV saturated world:

“Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.’”
-K.V., Timequake [pp 221]

(See my 'Why Blog' post for similar comments from my thinking and Buddhist thought)

And I wonder Mr. Vonnegut, did you have, as Robert Frost famously said, "A lover's quarrel with the world"? Since I have only read your books I never knew you well enough to say, but that feels like it might be the case. In any case, you're in Heaven now, and I'm very sad to see you go. But, as you so famously said, so it goes.....

The Zen of the road trip

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” –Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ‘Where I lived, and what I lived for’

This past January I headed out from Colorado, in order to escape a monstrously long stretch of bad winter weather, to the desert southwest. I toured through Albuquerque, Flagstaff, down to Tucson, through San Diego, back up through Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, and finally home via Zion National Park and Utah. Without trying to define how much the ‘road trip’ is a uniquely American experience, and I suspect it is very much so, I’ll simply comment that it was a definite part of my college experience, and that my friends especially loved a good road trip. And why did we love The Road Trip so much? I would say that there are many reasons. I can’t speak for my friends, but I have to believe that excitement and adventure are a big element of the joys of a good road trip. I’m not going to delve into this reason, though, partly because I don’t feel that I can do it justice. If you want a great description of the energy and excitement of a road trip, there’s no finer account that I’ve read, than Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road.' So there is a second, and for me, a deeper reason that I’ve come to appreciate these trips.

An especially vivid example of this second reason occurred when I was about an hour west of Gallup New Mexico, on I-40, headed towards the Arizona border. It was 9:00 at night, I had been on the road for about 10 hours, and I was pretty beat. Furthermore, I had been listening to music all day long, and simply couldn’t stomach any more noise, so I had shut off my stereo. I was now left with the soft green glow of my car’s console, the pitch darkness surrounding me, and the combined hum of the wind and the tires on the road. White pinpoints of light would appear, grow larger, and then wink out of my vision as cars would go past on the opposite side of the two lane divided highway. I knew I had another few hours before I reached my destination for the night and, tired and bored, I remember sighing a bit and shifting in my seat. I resigned myself to more driving and it was about then that it came over me; or, more accurately, that I settled into ‘it.’

I can’t say exactly what ‘it’ was, but I felt that the road and the noises and the passing median became such a constant regularity, that I almost seemed to float in space, as if I wasn’t going anywhere at all. I was simply just sitting in my car as the grass at the side of the road floated by me. Time seemed to become so very unimportant; the clock on the dash would continue in its inexorable march forward, but I no longer felt attached to it anymore. I had no worries about where I would spend the night, no thoughts of when I would need to fill up next, or what CD I would play next. I simply drove, and nothing more. And this, I think, is the essence that I love about the road trip. The feeling of just sitting and being. I had settled into something of a Zen-like state; while I hadn't entirely lost my sense of self, I had lost much of my attachments to the world around me, or 'Trishna' as the Buddhists call this attachment. I felt as if time and causality, those bedrock concepts of western thought, were things that I was aware of, but not attached to. As Thoreau so eloquently said, I could step back from everything, and just watch the ‘thin current of time’ slide by. It’s somewhat paradoxical that I had to be moving, going somewhere, to feel like I could just sit and not worry about getting anywhere.

I can’t speak for all people who take road trips, but I suspect that, at some point in our trips, we all have this feeling. Would it be so unbelievable that, for a society always on the go, the only place we can feel true peace of mind is on the road? In any case, this is what I felt that night. For me, the beautiful essence of the road trip was, in a sense, that of a wonderful little fishing trip.

The curse of thought

Being a lover of philosophy, I find that I love to think (and being unemployed, I find that I have the time to do it). But, one should beware of the lethargic effects of contemplation and thought. Some thoughts that people have had on this topic:

"Self-contemplation is a curse
That makes an old confusion worse."
-Theodore Roethke

"How can you know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Hunger is the foremost illness;
Sankharas* the foremost suffering.
For one who knows this as it really is,
Nirvana is the foremost happiness."
- The Dhammapada, verse 203, Ch 15, Trans. by Gil Fronsdal
* "Sankharas refers either to all compounded, fabricated things or, more specifically, to the mental world of dispositions, intentions, memories, and thought." - Gil Fronsdal, pg. 129 "The Dhammapada".

People of the slower, more thoughtful ilk find themselves contemplating ideas, thinking about their character, thinking about fate, and a million other subjects offered up by the world. But these contemplations give rise to confusions, sadness, and a lethargy of spirit oh so easily. There comes a point at which thought becomes too encompassing, and we find ourselves sliding into the make-believe world of ideas, a slide which happens so easily that one doesn't know it is happening at all. Thoughts and ideas are wonderful blessings, but all wonderful things in this world have a dark side as well, at least in my view of the world. In any case I find the curse of thought brings both great and terrible things, to be dramatic about it. On the more practical and less dramatic side - stop reading this silly blog (which is all just a bunch of bologna anyway) and get moving along. Maybe I'll even take my own advice and get moving along towards a job.

Thought of the day

My random thought for today:

“I like the vivid possibilities of questions over the stale finality of answers.”

-jbh

On fear...

On fear: when making the career change, how much do we acknowledge fear before putting it on the back burner, and letting it go? Certainly acknowledge it enough to give one a healthy sense of caution, but not enough to paralyze our actions. Where is that balance? It seems like where we put that balance is very much informed by our childhoods... where else do we really learn, firsthand, where our pain thresholds are when our caution doesn't hold us back enough from getting hurt? Or the joys we obtain when our risk ends up in a successful outcome. Or, yet a third option, when we learn what we can get away with and achieve, without getting caught? What we learn in our childhoods, then, heavily informs how much weight we give to our fears as adults. How much weight, honor, respect, and possibly fear, we should give to our fears. Or at least so it seems... I would need to get a good psychology text to really dig into the matter 'officially.' Of course, how much weight do we put on that official explanation of our lives? The more textbook abstractions we get, the farther from truth we go, or so it feels to me. Textbook abstractions are a good framework for understanding our lives, but a poor substitute for understanding our selves. (whatever those selves may be). Again, though, just ramblings off the top of my head which seem to be the state of things as I see them this evening. All thoughts subject to change without prior warning. Void where prohibited. Contact local Balogna Factory for details.

Stars, novas and fireworks

(ok, so I actually wrote this a week ago, and meant to start my blog at that point, but I got busy. Being unemployed is a 24-7 job)

“That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.” - Calvin / Bill Watterson

I just finished reading about our Milky way, and its 'satellite' galaxies (satellite galaxies being my term – the more technical expression would be the dwarf galaxies, large and small Magellanic clouds, and globular clusters that are held by its gravitational pull.) The site I read said that a globular cluster of stars had a mere 100,000 member stars. A mere 100,000 stars I think to myself? Then I look up the number of stars in the Milky Way, and find that it boasts somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion stars. Sigh. 100,000 just ain't what it used to be.

In a somewhat related story, I read today of a new nova that has just appeared in the sky, in the constellation of the scorpion. A nova is the result of a thermonuclear explosion, a fusion process whereby atoms are mashed together to form new elements in unfathomably high temperatures. Or, fathomable now, if you take the scientific view of things, which years ago I would have. Now I think of the explosion itself, and am struck with awe at the amazingly colorful and powerful phenomena running loose in our galaxy. What a colorful term, thermonuclear explosion (if, that is, one divorces it of any association with our nuclear weapons, which would give it a rather negative connotation). The scientific viewpoint of the whole thing is that the fireworks are a side show, a small and irrelevant emotional side effect of a rational, physical process. A process that can be described with equations and quantified with numbers. Well. Ok then, that's fine. But I'm no longer riding on that merry go round, as Mr. Lennon would say. I just had to let it go. I think the scientist is missing out on a wonderful fireworks show.

Oh, and by the way – Calvin would have named the big bang “The horrendous space kablooie”

-jbh

Why blog?

As my first post, I'd like to try to answer the question, why am I blogging? I think any honest writer must at least address that question at some point in their creations, and as a first time blogger I'll do the same. On the surface one might say they blog to say something about their world, themselves, politics, music, and other topics, and to have a 'dialog' of sorts with others. Ok then, I plan to write about things that interest me in the world, but mainly they will revolve around science, ideas/philosophy, spirituality, and writing itself. So, the superficial reason taken care of, what are the deeper reasons?

The next answer that comes to mind is because I feel a need to write, because it's part of who I am, almost because I have to. Is that all of it? No, one also suspects ego, that great driver of so much that we do in our lives – thus, I want to be read, to be noticed, and to be appreciated. But this answer falls short as well. A week ago I read an essay by the Zen priest Norman Fischer, published in the Shambhala Sun. He related the following:

“Years ago I went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and did what all tourists do: wrote some words on a scrap of paper that I tucked into a crevice in the wall. When I closed my eyes and touched my head to the warm stone, it came to me: 'All language is prayer.' This must be so. Who is it we are speaking to when we speak to anyone? To that person, and also past him or her to Out There. If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, being loved. And reaching out to be heard, met, or loved is a holy act. Language is holy.”

My personal religion, and thus the sense in which I see that word 'holy', will be a bit different from Fischer's, but in general I agree with him – language is holy.

And finally, when I think about writing, I am reminded of the grace and beauty that puts my mind (and dare I say soul?) at peace when I finish a well wrought piece. Now, my view on things is that there is no single reason for any of our actions, and so the reasons above are all valid, and all parts of why I write. Or, rather, they are the reasons why I will attempt to maintain this blog. So that's why I feel I'm writing... you might ask yourself why you're reading ;)