Back in Dallas

Weird. I'm in Dallas today, back to get my truck and other stuff, which I'd left here for my hike and then afterwards when I flew direct to Florida after my dad's accident. Finally time to go back for it. And as if in proof of my previous post about the energy of a place, my left eyelid is twitching again.

It was doing this all the time last winter and spring before I left for the Pacific Crest Trail, but had stopped just a day or two into the hike, never to return. And now it's back. At first I thought it might be the caffeine: I've been off the juice for almost a week now, but stopped in to my favorite Dallas area coffeehouse for old times sake and to kill some time. Halfway into my cup of coffee, it started up. But caffeine has never affected me that way, even after a break. It's very strange, I think this place makes me jumpy or something.

And there is a different air about this city, I just can't explain it. More energetic and dynamic than retirement-ville in SW Florida, but there's also a sort of undertone of negativity, something I was feeling last winter, when I felt rather depressed and down and out, poor. Like there's some big money-focus here (though not as bad as in downtown Houston, let me tell you).

I'm really fascinated by this. I'm sure some of it is climate induced: Detroit always had a bit of a depressed feel, and it's cloudy and grey so damn often it's easy to see why, plus the 5 months of winter cold. Not to mention the depressed economy, of course. There's probably all kinds of things that go into a particular feel of a place: local economic priorities (tourism in Florida, manufacturing or the lack of it in Detroit), weather and climate, lattitude, topography, history, the cultural and racial mix, size of the town, water (lake, river) or lack of it...

I wonder what others have to say about this, about where they live in comparison to other places. Have you felt this effect?

Life and Death

Life is good

It seems, sometimes, that there much more death out there than there is than life. Most creatures, from trees to frogs, from beetles to mice, produce enormous quantities of offspring, but most die or are killed and eaten long before they mature to adulthood. All those dead sea turtles, all the seeds fallen on hard ground, the million sperm that die to make one human. How dismal, how wasteful.

But, consider a truth. Life and death are perfectly equal: every living thing dies, while that which is not alive cannot die. Nothing is added, but nothing is lost. Balance and harmony. 

This pic is here because,
well, it just cracks me up.

Then again, death is momentary, but life is prolonged. It endures, if only for a little while. A tadpole dies in an instant, but may have lived for three whole days. Who knows how long a seed may last before it is no longer dormant but truly dead. And, all that dies, every last bit, becomes food for other life.

So. There is far more life than there can ever be death.

Further, if the vast majority of organisms die before reaching maturity, then adulthood is the exception. Most living things that enter and exist in this world are, as it were, children.

So why so serious?

Entrainment

This post is third in a series, go here for the first post

I wrote once about a weird fantasy I have, of going out into the desert to meditate in solitude, to see what I'd find without distraction. Trey from The Rambling Taoists made the intelligent comment that I probably wouldn't find anything out there that I couldn't find in my own living room. I agree with that in principle, but there are two problems, or issues, to consider.

The first is the distractions. In my house, there's the TV with a couple hundred channels, there are movies on tape and DVD, books to read, I can jump on the internet, I can play with my dog, or get on the phone and call someone up, and nearby are restaurants, coffee shops, movie theaters, stores, and so on, a million different things to do should I get bored. So the level of discipline must be far higher in my house than in the desert. To get to the desert level of distraction, I'd have to become a recluse living in a room with nothing in it, like monks have always done. I currently have a hard time getting myself to meditate for 20 minutes a day.

Of course, because meditation is boring to the ego, I'd find distractions in the desert same as I do now: I can watch the ants roving over the rock and sand, can throw stones at chosen targets, stare at mountain ranges in the distance and wonder what's there, concoct all sorts of stories and fantasies involving my surroundings, or maybe totally disconnected from where I am. But of course, it would be easier to be reminded what I'm intending to do, by virtue of the fact that I've come all the way out here into these stark surroundings to do it, not to mention that those distractions and amusements themselves become boring after a while. So, while discipline would still be called for out there, it clearly would be of a less intense nature. This is one reason I believe wise men often went out into Nature, or otherwise the monestary.

The other issue is entrainment. Entrainment is what it sounds like: getting into a groove with what surrounds you. It was discovered in 1665 by Christiaan Huygen when he noticed that one of his pendulum clocks ran a minute slower than another. He placed them side by side, and found that, after a while, they now kept the same time; in fact, they ended up working out a sort of compromise, running at the same time, but 30 seconds slower than his pocket watch, which had before run in harmony with the faster pendulum clock.

This happens biologically too. I remember seeing a documentary when I was a kid which showed two heart cells in a petri dish. Each beat its own rhythm, but they slowly neared one another and finally touched. When that happened, almost immediately, they adjusted to one another and beat in one rhythm. Same thing is going on at a larger scale with circadian rhythms, and with women who live in close association, the way their menstrual cycles tend to coincide (just imagine the PMS that goes on in a sorority house. Yikes!). Or think about the way you entrain socially; if you hang out with someone a long time, you start to talk alike, picking up each other's phrases, expressions, even cadence. To say nothing of their memes.

This is what I was talking about in my posts (first, second) about the echoes of the mind. There is a very noticable shift in one's mindset when one goes out to Nature, be it the woods, the mountains, the sea, or the desert. This isn't anything mysterious or unknown, this is the major draw towards the outdoors and especially the back country. People go fishing not just to catch fish, perhaps not even primarily to catch fish; but because it is inherently relaxing. People camp not to sleep uncomfortably on the cold, hard ground, but because there is a rhythm out there that they want to entrain with, at least (usually) on a subconscious level. People just know they feel more relaxed out there, so they go, not really thinking much about why. And of course, that's fine, it works the same.

So even if I'm a recluse in a bare house, with no mass media devices, no books, no phones, no other person around, I believe I'll still be caught up in the rhythm of the city. It's not about interaction as much as it is proximity. The clocks in the experiment never touch or interact directly, but the effect is there. Likewise, if you travel much and are sensitive and paying attention, when you arrive in a new city you notice that it often "feels" markedly different from others.

This is probably even more true with international travel, but as someone who has mainly traveled in the US, I can say that Dallas feels very different from Detroit, and Logan UT differs greatly from Wichita KS, and even from St George, UT. Even the West Coast cities of San Francisco and Portland feel quite different from one another. Mountain towns feel different from seaside towns, and desert towns from farm towns from forest towns. This effect is being deadened somewhat by the spread of national and transnational corporations, the McDonaldization of the world. Still, each place has its own energy, and this can be felt right away. It is all around you, and staying in your house won't escape you from that energy.

So heading out to the "desert" or Nature is partly about leaving distraction behind. But another, bigger part of it is about entraining to a larger, older, more natural rhythm or energy. Where the big energy is the rise and fall of the sun, the breath of the wind, the deep vibration of the landscape in which you find yourself, be it desert or forest, by the sea or in the mountains. This is taking my point about letting the echoes fade to another level, something deeper than a mere shift in conscious thought.

The process starts quickly. I've found on past camping trips that as soon as I get out of the car, take a deep breath of the forest air, I'm already "unwinding," which is a rather telling term. I am loosening the mind from the forms and content of the city, finding myself immediately speaking quieter. Given more time, this can get really deep. On long treks I've taken, such as on the Pacific Crest Trail and especially the Appalachian Trail, I get almost spacy. Staring at the trees was a common pasttime for many on the AT, and when we'd finally get an exposed ledge or open summit, I for one could stare for hours if allowed (sadly, on thru-hikes you have to make miles). That was part of why I loved the PCT so much-- it's vastly more open for long views. There's a quietness of mind, an openness that isn't quite emptiness. I think this is entrainment. I'm becoming a part of the greater whole.

Entrainment (physics)

Entrainment (biomusicology)

Philosophy

The longer you think about things, the less and less everything seems to make sense. Nothing makes sense anymore. Is there a meaning to life? What caused the Big Bang? Where did consciousness come from? Is there a physical world or is it all mere perception, all in the mind? Most of the "big questions" are unanswerable. You read through all the various philosophies, science, religions-- and there are so many-- you become enthusiastic time after time, only to find that in each one exists some fatal flaw, some unproven assumption, some fudge factor constant in the equation, some ungodly leap of faith. Did it all start from an uncaused Cause, or is it an infinite regress? Both are unfathomable, one of them is right. You have to choose, but you cannot choose. You are afloat in an endless sea of mystery, there's nowhere to stand, it's all floating away from you, the flat, empty horizon receding in every direction.
And there's no going back, no forgetting, no turning your back to the Question and quietly going about your day, back to the formula, marriage, children, work, placid retirement and grandchildren, the whole world in its proper place. You're circling a black hole, a swirling vortex from which you cannot excape. You think you must be going insane, you begin to understand madness. You are afraid on an atavistic level.

You would latch onto anything, believe anything; you would spend years in study in universities, monestaries, libraries. You would lay on any bed of nails, fast for weeks, measure whole continents with the length of your body on your road to the Holy Place; you woud meditate until your legs rotted where you sat, hide in caves in the desert, sit in trees, become an activist, go door to door, rave from streetcorners, believe in any damn thing-- if only it would fill the cracks, if only it would last. But always it falls apart under scrutiny. Your cognitive house is built not on rock, not on sand, even--but on nothing at all, you are way over the edge of the world, fallen over into the oblivion of pure agnosticism. You have decided you exist, but you are trapped on that tiny rock of truth, able to trust neither the senses nor the faculty of reason.

Mostly you get on okay, you act the part well enough, but the terror seeps in sometimes, like light through the cracks in your current system; but too uncomfortable, you are soon on to the next book, the next theory, the next really interesting idea. Confusion cannot reign, it just can't; but in the end it must, and so you run, run, like the mouse from the white wings of the owl who would tear you from your life and turn you into pure flight.

Halloween

My pumpkin can eat your pumpkin's face off.

Halloween is my favorite holiday, though I'll admit I don't get too jazzed up over holidays much anymore. Why Halloween? Well, it's a fun holiday, and fell during my favorite time of year, autumn. Also, I always kinda liked the pagan aspects, given my sympathies with that belief system, partly stemming from my environmentalist attitudes, and maybe also from a strange attempt to identify with my Irish roots). I especially like that it's a purely pagan holiday, and totally unChristianized, which makes it unique. Yeah, All Saints Day comes the next day, but Halloween is still just Halloween. But let's face it; my love of Halloween probably has most to do with childhood conditioning wherein I got a huge bag full of free candy just for dressing up in a costume, which was fun anyways, and walking around the spookified neighborhood after dark.

You might think that Christmas would take first place, if the conditioning thing holds true, because toys and other cool stuff are better than candy, but Christmas was ruined for me by working for years in retail. Mainly, being forced to listen to a month and a half of that horrible Christmas music, the same fifteen or twenty old songs on endless repeat, most of them on the down side of good. Also, the general consumerism, to say nothing of the syrupy sentimentality, of Christmas turns me off, and, no longer a Christian, the Jesus stuff is largely lost on me. Plus, again, the month and a half or more of hype, which leaves me with the feeling of just wishing it was over, because it's never so amazing as to deserve that kind of run-up.   /tangent

One cool aspect of Halloween is the notion that the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead disappears or at least becomes permeable. This resonates with the notion of "thin places," which were areas the Irish of old considered special in that there, more than in other places, the connection to the spirits, or to God, was stronger. I don't have any Halloween poems on hand, nor am I feeling particularly inspired to write one, but here's a link to my favorite spooky poem, Poe's The Raven (or watch The Simpson's version); and then there is this from my archives, on the related topic of thin places:

Thin Places

Some say they built the standing stones just so,
to mark the places they had come to know
as holy land, as where the veil was torn
between the world of dead and of the born,
and where a quiet minded man could feel,
just barely touch, a bit of more-than-real.
The spirits there could now and then be heard,
by those with ears to hear, a holy word,
and time would pause, eternity be known
in falling raindrops, waterfalls, and stone

Those days are yet these days, today is then--
for still those stones can speak to humble men
and still they stand as markers on a land
where spirit walks with matter hand in hand.

Orality and Literacy

I briefly mentioned in my previous post the differences between the desert religions that came out of the Middle East and the religions of lush, fertile India. Thanks to a book I'm reading currently, Orality And Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, by Walter J Ong, here's another instance of such a split. This split in cosmologies depends on writing, which is what the book is about: how moving from oral culture to a culture that uses and progressively interiorizes writing has also progressively changed how we experience the world.

A major idea in the book is that sound, unlike other senses, exists only as it is going out of existence. His example is, as I say the word existence, by the time I get to "-tence" the "exist-" is gone-- sound is an event. Writing turns a word into an object, visible and immobile on the page, while the original spoken word is a happening, a movement of air, uniquely ephemeral. You can see a violin, touch it, smell it, taste it (weird), and it will always be there for you to do so; but to hear it, it has to be played, and you can't play all the notes at once. Sound is not static, ever; it is always linked to movement and change.

The author gives another example, about how primitives consider that words have power; they are magical in that way. This makes sense since sound, being an event, requires power: you can look at a buffalo, dead or alive, but if you hear a buffalo, you know it's alive and you'd better look out. Sound is sounding, he says, requires energy to occur: power. So far he hasn't talked much about religious views and how they have been affected by this shift, but they would seemingly run quite deep. It's hard for us who are deep in a writing culture to understand the world as a nonliterate oral culture sees it. You'd really need to read the book, he gives so many instances and areas that are different; I really should be taking notes. But when you consider the differences between animist, shamanistic "religions" and your text-based religions (which includes the Judeo-Christain-Islamic, as well as Hindu-Buddhist, and to a degree Chinese religions), and apply some of the points Ong is making in this book, it's mind blowing.

Language is central to humanity. It is probably the most important basis for our lives, personally and socially, it's how we understand the world, and possibly the thing that most separates us from the animals. Obviously sight is a vital sense, but words (and thus thoughts) are sound-based originally. Even today, we speak years before we read and write. So think of how sound places you in your universe. Sound comes from all directions, sight only in front, and a bit from the sides, fuzzily. As Ong says, vision is divisive, in its ultimate it is clear and distinct. Sound, however, in its ultimate is harmony, unifying. Ong writes that sound was thus centering, and oral man knew himself as the center of the world, umbilicus mundi, and only after we became used to visual representations of language, and came to think of the world not as all around us but as laid out before us, as on a map, did we begin to become divorced from the world.

I posit that this is the basis of the salvation-orientation in our text based religions, be it salvation from evil, the Devil, Hell, samsara, or disharmony. Animistic religions are not concerned with that and often don't seem understand the friendly missionaries' concern.

A sound-dominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative (harmonizing) tendencies rather than with analytic, dissective tendencies (which would come with the inscribed, visualized world: vision is a dissecting sense). It is consonant also with the conservative holism (the homeostatic present that must be kept intact), with situational thinking (again holistic, with human action at the center), rather than abstract thinking, with a certain humanistic organization of knowledge around the actions of human and anthromorphic beings, interiorized persons, rather than around impersonal things. (p. 73-4)

If there is no division away from the whole, from the "spirits," then there is no need for salvation, for religion, a word with means basically "to retie" in the sense of reunion. An animist lives in the center of a world that is fundamentally alive. It's also interesting to think about how shamans and animist societies use drumming and chanting to inspire trances or soul flights, and even in the Bible, where it says "in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God... Read from the perspective of a still largely oral culture, only superficially influenced by writing, that can take on a new meaning (actually, reading the Gospel of John from a mystical or Eastern, rather than literal, perspective gives huge depth to it). You see this even in the major meditation techniques; one is "watching" the breath, but another huge one is sound, simply hearing without comment or analysis of what is heard. Chanting, gongs and bells still remain, and liturgical music in many religions is vital.

In a way, this book is sort of the flip-side to One Square Inch Of Silence, in that it is giving me a whole new way of thinking about the world, again through sound, in this case not the pure lack of it, but the way it was pushed into a sort of second-class citizenship compared to vision. I'm only half done with this book but can't recommend it enough; it's very scholarly and almost text-book like, with lots of citations and references and scholastic phrasing, and it starts a bit slow;but stick with it, it's worth it, at least if you are into widening your perspectives and understanding. It's a lot of fun to ponder the implications, what life would be like if writing wasn't in the picture.

Time in the Tropics

Well it's getting towards Halloween here in the subtropics of Florida. Driving around you see a few people who have decorated their houses with Halloween paraphanalia; the pumpkins, hay bales, chinsy ghosts and witches hung from the palm trees. It's too weird. What meaning can a fall holiday that marked the final harvests mean in a place that has no real autumn, no real harvests (Florida is for cows and citrus, and little else, and what other crops are planted, they're still being planted now), and a bunch of suburbanites that don't have any real connection to the seasons anyway? We get the same food in winter that we get in summer, only the prices change some. I figure most of the people decorating for the holiday are transplants from up north.

Which got me to thinking. Holidays like this are how we mark the year and its seasonal changes. Here in the subtropics, there isn't much of that kind of change: it cools down in the "winter," maybe even getting some frosts for a few weeks in December and January, but it's sandals-and-shorts weather most of the time, and the seasons are more about rainy season and dry season than anything else. So the old holidays, while observed out of tradition, mean even less down here than they did in the northern cities, where people are still divorced from the land but at least still have the seasons.

I was wondering how people in the tropics proper mark the year-- do the tribes in the Amazon or the South Pacific have holidays in any way reminiscent of those of northern Europe? I wonder if they don't mark the year at all, and whether their sense of time is moreso one of constancy than change. I can't even get my head around it. And could this be why paradise is so often associated with the tropics, a place of seemingly no change? The prefect weather the same every day, the sun always high in the sky, never seeming to "die" or leave for the south.

If this is the case, that they don't see the world as going through a life and a death or dormancy, than it must greatly affect their cosmology. A people who know winter will end up with a cosmology of salvation, a sun god who dies and returns. Such a cosmology would probably be largely unintelligible to a tropical people, who don't see the world in this life and death struggle that needs saving.

I say this because you can look at the religions of the Middle East, clearly shaped by the empty desert and it's single, austere, harsh god, and compare it to the lush and fertile India, with its endless count of gods, its cyclical, constantly returning cosmos of no end, Brahman's dream. And then to China, a temperate land of seasons, summer and winter, with a strongly dual concept of yin and yang. Where people live can really affect their understanding of the world. Not that it's the only thing, and let's not get carried away here, but it's an interesting thing to think about. I don't know much about tropical peoples and their basic beliefs, I wonder if this is true.

Is this why I'm so uncomfortable here in Florida? I mean besides the awful heat and oppressively strong sun, of course. I keep expecting, subconsciously, a shift that never comes, a cool down, a time of rest and silence that is winter, and it never arrives. I'm a man of the North, so that makes sense. But I wonder what it'd be like to be a man of the South, or more precisely and less Northern-Hemispherecentric, a man of the Equator.