Science Fiction Trailhead: 4 Chuckles

In an alternate universe, one with sharp cheddar cheese that costs one dollar per pound, there is a small city on a small lake with small waves. Those small waves often entrap the visual sensory organs of a small species called....uh....Zorons. Zorons seem to love the methodical and ever shifting waves of lakes. Especially small ones. The smaller the wave, and the lake, for that matter, the more Zorons' visual sensory organs are massaged into easy pacification.

Pacification for Zorons, however, is more like what we would call dancing. The more calm and steady a Zoron's mind becomes, the more her feet can't avoid tapping. The tapping grows calmer and more excited until the Zoron is gyrating her hips rhythmically (and sometimes arhythmically) to the beat of the pacifying waves.

On this particularly wavey day, a particular Zoron named Katchub is gyrating with a special sauce of calm wave induced gyration. His hips are swinging and his mind is falling deeper into a relaxation unknown to the species we know as 'Merican. Katchub, you see, is looking straight into the miniscule depths of Lake Minnehooter and is just tickled chillaxed. He giggles with profound calm as his hips move more excitedly.

Halloween: Post

Uh, so I missed this part. The part with the pepper spray and stuff. I went to bed at what I thought was 2:30, right when the poop was supposed to hit the fan. But, in actuality, it was only 1:30, I think. So, I missed the good stuff.

What I did see, however, indicated to me that there was not going to be major police action. The police were using interesting new tactics with horses riding swiftly through crowds of people in order to constantly maintain space (moving space, at that) in a crowd that would otherwise have been so tight, one would shuffle more than walk.

Oddly, a cop is shining his spot through the back window of a fly he caught in his web of detection. This is happening right below my office window on Langdon street.

My Spatial Flows

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Africa and South America and that place in the East, you know, the one in the middle.

Halloween

Dear readers,

Excuse my absence. I have been writing my thesis. I am going to try to write a few shorter blog posts in the interest of writing more frequently and probably with less depth. Chuckles suggested that he would read the blog when I started writing satirical Sci-Fi. Any thoughts on that?

This post is a note on the celebration cum carnival cum melee that is Halloween in Madison. I will continue my tradition of going to State Street at around 2AM to witness the systematic enactment of coercive force by the state on the mob. It is a classic moment where the drunks are too drunk. Both the revelers on alcohol and mischief and the police on power and their spiffy riot outfits.

Last year I was surprised to see that the tactics used by the police were to entrap those refusing to leave by surrounding them and limiting their ability to escape. I would expect that since the point is dispersal that they would try to start in the middle and push out. But, hey, I am just a silly pacifist. What would I know about coercive force?

In the interest of interactivity, I pose a question: What is the role of coercive force in the state, in society, and in culture? And, more interestingly, what experience have you had with coercive force? Any heads knocked out there? Tear gas?

I will certainly taste a bit of that during my witnessing mission this weekend. Wish me luck.

Containers 7: Music 2

Music: Michael Franti's Love Kamikaze.

(Reflexive Preface: The numbering system is getting out of hand, no? I wonder at the proliferation of numbers and the flattening effect of naming things in broad categories with numbers. It is almost as if I am indexing this blog as I go along. I also wonder if the material may not be consistent enough to justify such an index.)

I saw Michael Franti last night at his stop here in Madison at the Union Theatre on Lake Mendota. The tour is called I Know I'm Not Alone. He is touring with his sound guy, Versace, in a minivan around the country (simply the midwest on this leg, I believe). At our show, he came out and introduced his film, I believe by the same name, showed the film, did a Q&A, and then played a solo acoustic set.

The whole thing was stunning. I should again preface this by saying that prior to this show, I considered Franti (Or, is it Michael, having met him?) a spiritual leader in a broader social sense and a spiritual guide and friend in a personal sense. Yes, the music is that powerful. If I can figure out how to put a podcasted song of his up here, I will.

The film is about a trip he took last year to Baghdad and Gaza. He explains it as if it were this intentionally simplistic Kane like wandering through the streets of Baghdad strumming his guitar. Indeed, he did play everywhere. However, he admits to a lot of negotiating access and avoiding danger. The most powerful theme of the film is the constant use of smiles, kisses, and music to be present with people. He is over six feet tall with long dreads, so he looks a little wacky, especially in an Iraqi context. With that added to the silly persistence with which he played his guitar and sang his songs, he seemed to be a powerful presence in a powerless place.

The Q&A was good, very good. Barefooted, smiling, and a little tired, he came out to speak with us for a while (it may have approached an hour). He was grounded and full in his thinking and articulate in his answers. The discussion ranged from the content of the film to world culture and back to the details of making the film. I asked a question about the ease of going to Baghdad. Franti replied that it was easier to go to Baghdad than it is to go to Canada.

When the answered questions were done, or when Franti decided to start playing, the music began. Initially, I was concerned that the container of a man, his guitar, and a mic'ed box under his foot would not hold the same revolutionary flavor that the produced music I listen to does. He started off soft and lyrical. I thought, "oh, Bob Dylan style. Well, that's fine." Soon he was rocking out though. At first I was stunned by the power of the bass on his electric-acoustic guitar. Then I realized that the mic'ed box under his foot was a kind of bass drum. It was only a small wooden box, but it shook the room with its basic beat.

He invited everyone down to the front to dance and many did including myself and the friend I had brought with me. The music became frenetic at points and I was jumping higher than I thought possible. I later realized that we were standing on a suspended floor (only wood) and so it served as a trampoline. What fun! Anyway, at the time, I thought it was transcendental inspiration that sent me so high. The dancing became more intense and I was up there, in the music, in the air, in my heart.

That is usually where I feel Franti's music: in my heart. The musical container in which his words encode some mysterious meaning blends with the bodily container of my physical form. The music stirs in my chest. Is it literally related to the organ called heart? I don't know. I suppose it could be. The heart beats and so does Franti's music. I can only imagine that there is some possible consonance between the two; especially since the former is so fundamental to my body and the latter was so overwhelmingly environmental.

The metaphorical heart, however, the heart of the chakra system or the heart called thugs in Tibetan which refers to the mind itself located in the chest is surely where I receive the transmission of revolutionary spirit from Franti. Either way, I feel it. The music's Hyundai-like container ships me feeling, emotion, knowledge, intention, and energy via Shanghai or Long Beach and delivers it to the door of my chest where I hungrily devour it, my rib cage opening wide to consume the tender flesh.

The final moment of containment I would like to mention is Franti's use of "interpretive dancers" at his show. I do not know if he uses them frequently. I imagine that he does it often and that Madison was not unique that Wednesday night. In preface to a song, he asked if there were any interpretive dancers in the house. I thought, "Oh, god, there must be a dozen such folks in this room. It is both a Franti concert and Madison. Come on." But alas there was only one hand raised: a friend of mine from Yoga Teacher Training who's presence I had not noticed. She climbed up on stage and was asked to pronounce her name. She did. Franti made another call out for dancers. I was shocked. No other hands raised in a room full of what I had assumed to be a mass of extroverted, music grooving Madisonians.

He turned and looked at me. I was about five people deep in the crowd on the dance floor. He pointed to me and said, "you." I did the classic "who me, not me" look around. Then I did the classic hand to the chest, question, "me?" He said, "Yes, you, come on up here."

I did not hesitate. That moment felt like a deep exhale as I realized that all the years of dancing without knowing if it was good, bad, or crazy were erased. None of those words meant anything in that moment and may not mean anything to me ever again as they might apply to the dance I dance. Whether or not he intended it, I felt seen, I felt noticed, I felt called.

Michael then proceeded to pour his music into me. He played more than his guitar, he sang more than his song. He played me, he sang me. I danced. I contained his music.

Then, I got a kiss.

Containers 6: Hyperactivity

I am over-extended. Sometimes it seems like a disease. It is certainly disease. This past weekend, however, felt wonderfully hyperactive. I packed my schedule full of stuff, but a good part of that stuff was truly calm. On Friday night, I drove to Chicago. Initially, it was a pleasant drive. I took a dictophone with me and talked to myself about my thesis. That was very nice. Then, the reality of car culture set in as I approached the Des Plaines oasis. From this point, it is five miles to the O'Hare toll. It took me forty minutes. Death on Wheels. After that, I started to get a bit anxious about arriving at the New College reunion I was on my way to. The party ran from five to eight. I arrived at 7:55. Mike (Herr undergraduate doctor father) received my hug and laughed as I ran out again. I was illegally parked and estimated I had 10 minutes until the machine swallowed up my car and spit it out in Schaumburg or some other sewer sluice for illegally parked cars.

The next day, I got up late and spent a long, slow day wandering around the south side of Chicago with two once-lost, now found friends from the idyllic days of Sarasota. The day was warm, the lake was energetic, and the stroll was slow. It was very nice. The day and social setting was low pressure in such a way that I found myself staring into the lake and settling into meditation for a bit.

Whether calm or anxiety-ridden, hyperactivity holds my life. It gives me a way to pour my overflowing energy into creation of something. Mostly I give that energy to relationship. I find the most rewarding way of doing, of working, and of creating goodness in the world is by connecting deeply with others. This draw is also entrapping. The beauty of connection is both expressive and demanding for me.

Motion is another way that hyperactivity holds my life. Because of the geographic arrangement of the other half of my relationships, I must move constantly. Motion is also both inspiring and constraining. The wonder of motion is first found in the initial draw of the destination. When I began my journey to Chicago, I was fulfilled by the novelty of the journey. That is not to say I have not gone to Chicago before. Rather, it is the side step out of daily routine and the resulting explosion of motion that excited me. Then, the closer (and later) I got to Chicago the discrepancy between intended and real timing as well as intended and real location began to undermine the pleasantry of travel. The closer I got to the heart of the beast (Chicago's affluent, lake endowed north side), the more distressing my motion became. I got lost. I drove in circles. I feared the urbanity of Chicago and its strict intolerance for bumpkin Wisconsinites like myself.

Hyperactivity gives me a pot into which to pour my energy which might otherwise do something else. Like create? destroy? hmm....I wonder now what else it would do.

Peace,

Containers 5: Subjectivity

I initially wrote this as a comment in response to C's comment, but then I figured, it would serve better up here. Enjoy.

This blog is a representation of truth. It is a dirty, sad, inspired, joyous, partial, incomplete, and murky truth. It is my truth. Relativism is here, it is there, it pervades everywhere. The advantage of the blog, in comparison to academic writing, is that there is no expectation that I represent anything but myself, as ephemeral as it may be.

I think that this kind of writing and the proliferation of blogging, in general, is an entree into a subjective dimension of reality that multiplies the layers of objective reality itself. The presence of subjectivity in our minds and therefore in our bodies, located in space, is an objective presence. Subjectivity is a quality of our bodily presence in the world. Subjectivity is objectively present in the world.

Now, this whole conversation depends on a strict subjective/objective split which I do not fully accept.

My point is to say that an individual's speech acts, her expression and social communication, contributes to the public sphere and becomes a common reality. That common reality, a thing in-itself, refers back to a subjective disposition that was expressed by an individual and yet somehow sings to another's sympathy.

This is why I love the humanities: because it is an attempt to understand the speech of others in their own times and in mine. It is both the cry of another subject and the echo of my own.

Buddhist Space on the Go

Music: A Crime to be Broke in America by Spearhead

I just had a conversation with my friend D who lives in Boston and recently got an Americorp position at a Refuge resettlement NGO. He and I met in Madison, WI on our primary adventure in the bubble of the isthmus. We were there in preparation for a larger adventure to the Himalaya to live, study, and wonder for an academic year in Nepal.

We initially lived in an area of Kathmandu called Bouddha. Yes, it is a word related to Buddha. It is the location of an enormous Buddhist stupa of ancient date. We often had a conversation that considered the role of the stupa in the neighborhood, the city, and the country. In fact, because we were thinking mainly about the situation of Tibetan refugees, we thought in regional terms as well. The connection there is that Bouddha was the home for many Tibetans, many of whom were first or second generation refugees. I think Bouddha represents an instance of a large network of Buddhist transportation of Buddhist space. In ways, it is also a transportation of Tibetan cultural spaces.

The reason I say that spaces can be transported is that there are senses of space that move with Tibetan refugees. Because Tibetan and Buddhist perceptions and experiences of space moved from Tibet to Nepal, the spaces themselves moved from place to place. They were in place in Tibet in a very deeply rooted and historical way. Buddhist culture had etched itself in the landscape in very direct ways. In some ways the entire plateau had been metaphorically subjugated: the demoness of Tibet was pinned down to the earth. Her wildly animistic body had to subdued by the civilizing and nationalizing force of Buddhism. The missionaries thought that the wildness of Tibet would be better under the foot of Buddhism. Tibet was subjugated such that it would be a place that would constrain and enable social and individual practices. The very landscape and conceptual tags it wore were reoriented so that Buddhism was communicated via relationships with nature, landscape, and environment in the most remote as well as the most urban places. These places were certainly encrusted on the surface of the earth, but they were also understood and internalized as conceptual tags. The world, in large part, looked like the arrangement of the tags on the landscape.

This vision is a worldview that does not change immediately with the transference of its people to another world. In the case of Tibetan refugees in Nepal, the move is very close, but extremely difficult. The highest mountain range in the world stands between Tibet and Nepal. Refugees, who are still leaving Tibet today, face high winds, cold temperatures, treacherous trails, and violent border guards in their exodus from the Tibetan plateau. When they arrive they are funneled through an underground railroad which is not always underground. The refugee trail was opened in 1959 when the Tibetan state escaped with the Dalai Lama. In fact, the routes between Tibet and India and Tibet and Nepal have been traveled for centuries. It was then that a significant block of the Buddhist space was transported from Tibetan places to Nepali, Indian, and other places. Many of Tibet's religious thinkers, practitioners, and leaders left Tibet in 1959. Some them arrived in Kathmadu and settled outside of town near the stupa of Bouddha. Because they brought a lot of physical, golden, and cultural capital with them, they were able to recreate their Buddhist spaces in Nepali places. The recreated place is not the same as the original place, but it is another inscription of Buddhist space in a place. The spatiality of Tibetan society and, in some cases, the space of Tibetan individuals was transported from an inscribed place to another place at which the power (via capital) was capable of inscribing a largely religious cultural order upon a place.

Society and Individual Experience

N,

In response to your notes on what NeoHumanistic Geography might look like, I post to the blogosphere.

In particular, I would like to address the role of society in an individual's experience. More specifically, I would like to detail the way in which social structures can serve as a window into the experience of an individual.

Social constructionism (the notion that social relations a la Marx's modes of production) steps too far in its claim that individual's situations are entirely socially constructed. This idea is already fading. However, the idea that individuals are profoundly effect by their social context is an important insight that should not be thrown out.

In fact, because of the formative influence of society on the individual, I think that it is possible to gain some understanding of the experience of individuals by examining their social situation. If social context (the same applies to other structures, I believe) shapes experience, then observation of the mechanisms of influence should give us a flavor of the experience of that structure and the experience of other phenomena that is shaped by that structural influence.

In the case of gender and ignoring naturalistic arguments for the moment, we understand that socially constructed or, at least, maintained norms hand down an understanding of gender roles to the individual. Those roles are not of static constitution nor are they homogeneous. However, they are present in some form. Whatever the instance of that form, the individual must confront (or not) their own understanding of gender as, to some degree, given by socially transmitted norms.

Such norms are differentiating at a stunning pace, and so cannot be addressed en masse. However, if we take the time to read specific structural influences, I think it is possible to unearth an aspect of individual experience therefrom.

Containers 4: Separation

It has been brought to my attention that this blog may be too personal to have a direct link from my professional page. After worrying a bit about undermining my credibility, I began to think about the problem in terms of, you guessed it, containers. My website is a container for certain transmissions of information. It holds linguistic content in which I have encoded my thoughts, etc. That container has certain rules about who can put things in it and who can take things out. Basically, I can add all the fluid I want and you, the dear reader, can look at that fluid. The website at the university is ostensibly for academic purposes: it holds a little bit of my work and persona as an academic out for the world to taste. Once it has more to it, it will do that work more thoroughly, I hope.

So, there is my "professional" website. (The prospect of speaking of academic work as professional is not uncontested, though I don't remember where right now.) People who do not know anything about me go to that website with the intention of taking a look at the work I do. A friend of mine who is in a similar "professional" position (a grad student) and whom, in this post, I will refer to as "C," suggested that linking this blog to such a narrowly intentional site may be too personal and thereby compromising of the project of the above mentioned website.

I didn't see anything wrong (obviously) with linking the blog to the site initially. After all, the link is labelled "reflection." It is not called, "academic writing" or "the crux of my academic work." C, I do not mean to harangue you, I am simply making a point. In fact, other links are specifically labeled, "Geography" and "History," employing double meaning. Each of them is an academic discipline in which I have interest and they each serve to reveal geographical and historical items.

So, I guess my initial response is: the website is not fully academic. As a container, it holds the trailheads, the links, to several different paths. A few of those are academic and a couple are not. Additionally, I have tried to write with a bit of removal in the posts on this blog. I am not writing a diary of my daily events, nor am I using the blog as psychotherapy; rather, I am trying to tease out a theme, containers, from the variety of my reflective projects (geography, yoga, UUism, and blogging itself).

However, I am open to criticism such as: this blog is too personal to be linked to your geography website. If you agree with our friend "C," please drop me a line in the comment section of this post or by email.

Containers 3: Music

This morning at church, the service was all music. Our Director of Music Ministry put together the service and it was quite...containing. The hymns were artfully arranged in such a way that led the congregation from a beginning point of celebration through meditative sensibility and into a deep moment of emotional confrontation/transformation . That moment was held, it was contained, by a song of forgiving lyrics and mournful yet optimistic melody.

I cried. A lot.

It helped that I arrived at the service with a powerful intensity of anger the likes of which I have not felt in a few months. That, paired with a recent drought of tears, and I was helpless. Like a lost child, I sat there in community and yet completely alone. I faced the musical Harrapan vessel with no clue. I was drawn by the vacuum of the container. I could not do other than empty that dammed flood and there I did do.

The service continued with music to heal those opened wounds and a few hymns later there we were, done and processed. I was not done yet, though, and had to continue my emptying elsewhere. Luckily, a spirit friend was available to hold me for that. She made me laugh a lot too. She was fasting for her third day and when she does that she gets very light and giggly. It was perfect.

The container of the service wasn't quite enough. While I am comfortable crying in public, it was not a complete comfort and I didn't get to the bawling I felt was due. I didn't want to upstage the service.

Oh yeah, my thesis, here I come baby.

Blog Link: The Thirsty Theologian

A rightist with good vocabulary and seemingly well versed in his Christianity. I give you: The Thirsty Theologian.

Writing

Is something of a wonder to me. Sometimes words flow forth and pile themselves neatly at my fingertips. Soon, the pile grows top heavy and tilts slightly. Then, the world tumbles, Babble falls under its own weight into a pile of rubble. Diamond rings lie wrapped around doomed fingers, however, and excavation with a small trowel may uncover a golden moment in thought.