Virtual Globalization

The BBC reports that an online role-playing game has suffered an epidemic among its game characters. Each virtual character is controlled by a real player. An obvious metaphor for biological warfare, the God of Blood, Hakkar (cough, cough) is said to have projected "corrupted blood" upon his slayers. The disease then unexpectedly spread throughout the local server and then beyond leading to what has been called the game's first "global event."

The layers are still a bit too thick for me to completely penetrate, but there is a funny thing going on here. The completely virtual game is designed to represent a fantasy world of the D&D, Lord of the Rings, and SCA kind. While the virtual, networked, and digital nature of the game is a globalized phenomenon itself, it portrays itself as a nonglobal world. This world is a one that is implied to exist before the nation-state, before capitalism, amidst early feudalism. As adventurous as the characters of this game are, the disease of corrupted blood is said to be the first moment of globalization.

Does this game mimic historical developments? Does it provide a parallel and alternative history? How is it that games seem to replicate history?

Containers 2: Yoga

I mentioned in my inaugural post (is that what this is called?) that a conversation with my yoga teacher anchored itself in the notion of a container. The short story is that I need one in my spiritual life. In parallel fashion to my intellectual/academic life, my spiritual life needs some containment.

How does one contain spirit? Isn't it antithetical to spirit to be limited and enclosed? Aren't we aiming for some kind of union with the greater mystery? Aren't we a drop of liquid aching to merge soundly with oceanic vastness? Are these goals not contradictory to containment?

Perhaps we ultimately are chasing after that union. But, in the meantime, we are stuck here on earth in bodies of flesh, blood, bone, hormones, nerves, andrenal glands, and other messy parts. What I mean by that is not something as simple as mind-body dualism in which the mind simply rides about in its Cartesian carriage.

Rather, I mean that as bodies in the world, we are individuated in a terribly physical sense. There are very few ways in which we can merge bodily with another human and experience communion at its most basic and often profound level. That degree of intimate communication is what draws us to our partners in a way that grows and reaches progressively deeper into our being.

While we are stuck in bodies (a gross overstatement of the relationship of mentality and physicality) we mostly abide as individuals. There is a social aspect at work here that I am going to bracket out, for society is a collection of these bodies and provides a completely different set of challenges. Conceptions of the nature of bodies and individual instantiations of humanity are various around the world and for that we must allow a nuanced treatment of such differences. However, common to each human experience is the location of a consciousness at/in/on/by a body. The body is a unit and so is the awareness of that body.

The body is not enough to contain spirit and, indeed, to speak of the mind as contained by the body is too coarse an analysis. Some dismiss the notion of mind and spirit as merely epiphenomenal to the physicality of the brain. I am more inclined to agree with them then not. The physicality of the body serves as a "necessary, but not sufficient" condition for mentality. This means that the physical body must be present in order for their to be qualities of mind. It also claims that the physical body is not enough to give rise to the mind.

I half agree with this claim.

I would say further that the particular physicality of humanity is directly related to the presence of mind. And so the body is not the container of spirit, rather, I would say that it is the location of spirit.

The real containment for spirit life needs be of a spiritual order. In fact, it could very well be spiritual order itself. One way of pursuing spiritual order is practice of some kind. Practice (literally practicing being/doing in some way or another) grinds out a karmic rut that stands opposed and yet embedded in our mundane, unreflective lives. Practice can be a container in which we can settle our spiritual uncertainty and questioning. The questions do not go away, however, with practice we can develop a safe means of exploring the wavering ways of spirit.

Another container for spiritual life is a goal. Goal can mean a few things. Primary among these are two meanings.
1. Goal as end point towards which we aim
2. Goal as object or focus of practice
These meanings are not coextensive nor are they mutually exclusive.

I will explore goals as containers in a later entry.

May all beings be happy, May all beings be free.

Marx, Marriage, and the Private Sphere.

In reading Jurgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, I came across a quote each from Engels and Marx. Both are to the effect: communism would eliminate marriage as the basis of the family. Moreover, having dropped the direct link between a loving, one-on-one relationship and a larger social unit, the family, marriage could be truly private. By truly private, they mean it would not be legislated and regulated by the state.

The pieces are Engels's "Principles of Communism" and Marx's "On a Proposed Divorce Law."

Implicit to the context in which I found these quotes (I have not yet read either article) is that the family unit is legislated because it is tied up in the public sphere because it is related to the ownership of property, dependence of wife on husband, and dependence of children on both.

I found this note to be especially relevant considering my state's current consideration of a marriage amendment. The notion that it is not enough to positively legislate relationships by legalizing marriage is nuts enough, itself. Additionally, Wisconsin's assembly feels drawn to negatively legislate (to exclude from legality) relationships previously unconsidered by the law: homosexual handfasting.

I wonder if Marx and Engels would have valorized the current unnamed status of gay love as truly private, while dismissing straight marriages as overly public by virtue of their legality.

I can't help but think how far away this is from public opinion (attack of the Habermasians) here in "the northwoods." Considering the works of Marx and Engels relevant to a discussion of gay marriage in a state that, without reasonable intervention, will ban love may make this blog one weak candle in a dark, dark night.

Ah, alienation...

The University Club

Herr Professor Doctor Father Yi-Fu Tuan took me to lunch today at the University Club on library mall. It was a delicious meal during which the flesh of many a being moistened and eventually yielded to the persistent mastication of two mouths and two minds.

Yi-Fu (as I address him, appropriately or not) commented on containers. He mentioned that in our professional, nay academic, sphere we speak of frames, framing, and reframing when we want to think of containers. Our ideas must be framed, they must be shaped in order to provide some kind of linearity to the argumentation, discussion, or story. Without a frame we could not be understood by our readers. Without a frame, he said, our thinking would shoot out into the world in a disorganized shower.

This is exactly how I have been feeling in my spiritual and intellectual lives.

Can I really tell the two lives apart?

So, containers are still going on in my mind and conversation. The containment seems to be something of a trap. It is an encoding of raw thought, feeling, and experience into disciplined, legible work. The container and the frame enslave the beauty of primary experience to serve the needs of communication. While some claim that language shapes experience, I cannot help but object that experience is often inexpressible. Such an objection does not prove, but seems to indicate, that language is not fully determining of experience. Language, then, is one of the containers I confront these days. How do I write about an idea? How shall I express this thought?

I must contain them in language. The container of language encodes the thought in such a way that it can be decoded by others in the name of understanding, sympathy, and society.

Beyond language, containment of ideas, especially in academic work, must incorporate into its walls the bricks of other ideas. It is not enough to simply write the ideas into words and sentences. I must also write them into the wall. I must sweeten the edges (perhaps only the edges) of my brick-idea with a framing complementary to its adjacent bricks. Beyond that, the idea must also reference a discipline, or in my case, several disciplines. Thus the edges of the idea must not only align with adjacent thinking, but must also weave in the threads dominant in that neighborhood of intellectual life.

The container thickens beyond the thin world of grammar and meaning: it must engage with pre-existing knowledge sets.

The container thickens. If you begin to feel claustrophobic, look out the window at the fluffy clouds.

The Isthmus

The Isthmus. This is the rare landform that I call home. It is a strip of land between two bodies of water. In this case, they are Lake Mendota to the northwest and Lake Monona to the southeast. It is a common misperception in Madison, especially among those new to town, that the isthmus runs East-West. This is roughly true and perpetuated by the cultural distinctions drawn by locals along those line. However, the isthmus runs southwest to northeast. This makes it possible for there to be a south side of town (associated and closer to the west side) and a north side of town (associated and closer to the east side). This photo is incomplete and I will search for another one. It focuses particularly on the Capitol and the University. These two institutions dominate life in Madison for better and for worse. The isthmus proper runs further into the northeast corner of this photo and beyond. Strictly speaking, the University is not on the isthmus, but just off to the west side of it. Ironically, the most visible landmark of the University is the horseshoe shaped football stadium that marks the southwest corner of campus. The rest of campus is north and east of it running along Lake Mendota.

Containers

Containers have come up frequently in my social circulation recently. My minister at church speaks of containers everytime he does a service. He says that those doing the worship service create a container that holds the congregants in what we hope is an hour of spiritual reflection, growth, or transformation. Thus the preacher, the musician, and the worship associate are all charged with being present in a very particular and intentional way.

In the case of a religious service at our UU church, a container holds and bounds very sensitive modes of human being. The container of the service is created by the shut doors of the room, the tone of voice in which the sermon is delivered, the meaning of those words, the shape of the musical selections among other issues. In a way, the container we create is deep placemaking that not only considers the material presence of the building and the people therein, but also the spiritual presence of the parishioners. Perhaps more pointedly, the container we create is the spiritual analog for the physical plant of the church. The building holds bodies and the container of the service holds the spirit there with the bodies.

I suppose this thesis begs the question of mind-body dualism. I am not sure what to do with that. I think of it in Mahayana terms: two levels of truth. The conventional truth of the situation is that there are drastically different ways of being, two of which are mentally and physically. Ultimately, they are of one taste, so to speak.

Anyway, containers: they are everywhere and they serve to ground, bound, focus, embody, and imprison the world of spirit. They are a fact of human, embodied life and we are stuck with them, as painful and cumbersome as they may be.

The other moment at which the notion of containers inserted itself into my life was during a conversation with my yoga teacher. This mention was more concerned with an individual's, my individual, presence as a spiritual practitioner. I will come back to that later.

Peace,