I never thought I’d have a bleeding heart, but sitting here behind the Great Firewall, I must say that I have begun to care quite passionately about things I dismissed disdainfully in the past.

Let’s take Apple.

When I was in the states, I didn’t like Apple because the whole thing was like a very pretty commercial.  Apple was trying to represent itself as free, and open, and even liberating– computing for the new generation.  But in actuality, it was closed, protective, isolating.  Free computing means something very different in the 21st century when we have viable alternatives to either of the software giants.  I don’t want a fucking commercial showing everyone how free I am.  I actually want my computer to be free– free for me to modify it, tweak it, get into its guts and understand it.  I want some responsibility for it.

But all that is peanuts today.  Today, after living in China for a year and a half, I have a different reason not to buy Apple.  This reason still has to do with freedom, but it’s a more fundamental kind of freedom.  Let’s look for a minute at Foxconn.  This is the company that makes your iPods, your iPhones, and probably your Dells and your HPs as well.

This is a company that recently inspired mass suicide in its workers because, not only are the working conditions so repugnant to human decency that I doubt any American can really put it in perspective, not only are the wages insulting beyond all reason even given the local cost of living, but these people no longer have a choice.  They are not workers, they are slaves.  The police in Guangdong support Factory Security which beat, brutalize and humiliate workers.  Journalists attempting to investigate are beaten and evicted.  The police do nothing.  In the wake of mass suicides that finally garnered some paltry media attention… Foxconn installed netting in their factories to ensure that workers could not successful kill themselves by jumping from heights.

This is ridiculous.  This is slavery.  I need all of my friends and family to understand this.  When you look at that little Apple, there’s nothing amazing about it– there’s nothing cool, nothing free, nothing 21st century.  That Apple doesn’t stand for a new era, it stands for slavery.  And there’s no reason to buy it.  We have other options.

Fuzhou is alive. The heavy doses of sunlight and the sweltering breath of the air take some getting used to (perhaps Tom Robbins would call the place too vivid), but if there’s one thing that sun and water do together, it’s create an alchemy of life. It’s been a while since I last wrote, but there have been half a thousand times between now and then that I’ve thought of writing more, and half a thousand times that I felt I didn’t have time. In the jungles around the Minjiang, there are panthers, monkeys, birds and lizards; there is life devouring life with all the vibrant intensity required by the excess energy of sun and water poured into their half-mad bodies, and the same vicious, hilarious intensity seems to be present in every moment of life in the Minjiang’s city.

At night, during the day, at an odd an unexpected hour, a rattling cacophony of firecrackers sputters and pops, setting off electric bike alarms in a one-block radius.  When I leave for work in the morning, there is the Chinese property manager who sits on a plastic stool outside a little shack in front of our apartment, shirtless and pudgy, his eyes vacantly curious, his mouth unsmiling, his front teeth missing, a cigarette burning down to the filter as he stares. In the building twenty feet away from our own, a top floor apartment burned down the other day. Today, as I walk passed the bank on my way to the bus stop, a Chinese armored car guard with what looks like a semi-automatic shotgun can’t help watching me and laughing; a little gold chain hangs round his neck over his body armor.

When Tania and the baby and I go to visit Qishan, a mountain covered in beautiful waterfalls and breathtaking vistas of bejungled mountains shrouded in mist, we take a van from the bus stop to the entrance of the National Park. The van driver presses his foot compulsively to the gas pedal, doubling the speed limit on the straightaways and taking the nearly one hundred eighty degree switchbacks up the mountain so quickly that the rear axle makes a shuddering shearing sound as it pulls through. The road is not big enough for two cars to pass each other, the drivers have no way of knowing how and when someone is coming down the mountain, and there are no seatbelts.

I am laughing, holding on to my seat. Tania is trying to brace herself while holding the baby. Isabelle is sound asleep, flopping around on Tania’s chest as the van bumps and lurches.

I ask the English student, Melody, who is our guide, “How many people do you think die on this road due to head on collisions every year?”

Good naturedly she smiles and answers, “Do you really want to know the numbers?”

We all laugh, the van drives into a wall of fog, and the driver accelerates.

All this gives me occasion to wonder how Buddhism ever survived in China. Detachment seems antithetical to the Chinese experience. Everything is too absurd to be ignored. When, on Qishan, we finally break through the foliage and look out on the massive Pearl Breaking and Jade Spilling waterfall that is Qishan’s pride, it takes a few minutes for one of our members to notice that this massive waterfall disappears shortly after hitting the ground. Enough water for a heavy stream or a slight river spills over rocks, falls onto a bed of broken stone, and promptly vanishes. There’s no sign of water flowing down the valley. Where the fuck did it go?

But these questions will have to remain unanswered. To the Buddhist question, I may have more of a solution. After Qishan, our enthusiastic van driver drops us off at a nearby Buddhist site that is still under construction: the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery. After sliding to a halt, skidding across wet marble, we are greeted by an equally enthusiastic monk, who plays with his prayer beads more as a nervous habit than as any show of serenity. He walks about in front of us explaining every detail of the constructions: the hand-carved dragons and cranes, the meticulously etched marble walls, the boddhi tree imported from India, the solid jade statue of a Buddhist protector deity with garishly red-painted nails. When we break off on our own to explore another part of the monastery, he suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere appears in front of us again to be our guide.

And what can I say? There’s no Buddhist detachment or serenity in this monastery. The carved dragons have a madness in their eyes, and they laugh with a kind of insane abandon from every column, censery and bit of tile. They clutch little envelopes with Chinese characters in their claws, and if they could move it seems all but certain they would tear your face off and flee laughing into the clouds.

But the Buddha himself, that classic Chinese Buddha? You know, the fat one with the huge ears and the laughing smile? Well, he makes an appearance, too. In the last room of the monastery we are to visit before leaving, there is dim lighting. The room in dominated in the center by a giant golden Chinese Buddha. I am perhaps as big as his toe, and certainly no bigger than one of the boots of the four demon-faced warriors that flank him on either side, brandishing umbrellas, polearms and swords. And what does this giant golden Buddha evoke?

I can’t put my finger on why; I’m sorry. But standing beneath this massive golden Buddha, the only thing I feel is a sort of supernatural fear. As though, if this giant golden statue were to come to life, with that aloof but simultaneously uproarious smile fixed upon his gargantuan face, that he would be laughing. I can only imagine that his laughter would be like the laughter of the giant to Jack of the beanstalk fame, but less intentionally cruel. There’s something in this Buddha’s face that seems to say: everything is the most hilarious joke! At the same time, there’s something in his size and his weight and the direction of his eyes that makes it impossible to imagine he would notice someone as small as I– and that if he did, he would notice me only long enough to squish me beneath a vast, golden thumb. This is a graphic image in my mind as I stand before China’s laughing Buddha. There’s nothing cartoonish in the picture of a glimmering, shining thumb spilling blood and human organs out in every direction as it grinds this flimsy bit of flesh against the marble of his temple floor. The only hope in this vivid and unlooked-for vision is that I, with my clever human mind, can somehow outwit, outrun, and defeat this massive golden god and his demonic bodyguards; but even this fantasy is somehow stifled by the magnitude of the task. Vaguely, I wish for a grenade, or some plastique, but even of these weapons my imagination remains dubious. For what good would a bit of gunpowder do against a golden god?

This post is also on my blog Domestic in China at domesticchina.wordpress.com.

As I wash dishes in the sink that’s about half a foot too low for comfort I can hear music blaring from an apartment across the way, the tracklist a combination of the catchy, simple tunes of ultramodern Chinese pop and the flute and Chinese violin of streamlined traditional music. When I look out the window there are dozens of caged-in balconies running parallel to my building with laundry swinging from various arrangements of hangers and clothespins. As I hang up laundry clumsily on my own balcony, I can hear the sounds of China, honking traffic, children playing, a heated conversation (most conversations I overhear in Mandarin sound heated or even angry to me, and so this seems normal). Some mornings I can hear a trumpet call signaling the start of the morning for all the navy officers in the barracks right next door.

These are just the sounds and sights from the windows and balcony of our apartment. Walking outside of my apartment building is a whole different story. Right now my apartment seems like a safe vantage point from which to survey and eavesdrop glimpses of the life streaming all around me in the other apartments and the small street below. Many small aspects of life inside this apartment are slowly beginning to feel less foreign, and some aspects I might even end up preferring over the ‘American way.’ Like the compact and minimalist kitchen with counters designed for someone much shorter; it also has a two burner stove that works as well as a professional stove in the States. But there’s no oven and no space for something like a dish rack. And while it takes me longer to hang clothes to dry on a bamboo pole that is too high up to reach without standing on a stool or using a pole designed specifically for the purpose of retrieving and hanging hangers too high to reach, it’s pretty nice having clothes dried by the heat and breeze of Fuzhou. This inconvenience combined with the fact that the small washing machine (which I am very thankful to have as I watch women across the way hand-washing everything) seems to destroy my underwear when I put it in with bigger clothes forces me, and I am beginning to notice most Chinese people, to wash small loads at a time, so that I almost constantly have laundry going. It turns out this feels less cumbersome and more routine than letting clothes pile into huge mounds before having a huge laundry session.

Thus, I am discovering the small conveniences and inconveniences of a Chinese home. I’m sure this is all mundane and boring to anyone reading. And I suppose that is part of my point. A bunch of little differences in the mundane aspects of everyday life for a typical Chinese person add up to a very different feel in the fabric of everyday existence. But it turns out, mundane is still mundane. The novelty is interesting, and I am hoping that the challenge of getting used to all these little differences will be worthwhile. But many things, like mopping the floor and dusting, are pretty much the same, and they are mundane as hell.

Part of my challenge here in China is very similar to what it would be if I was trying to make and keep a home in America. All I can say to most Americans and Chinese who have the interest to ask is, “No, I don’t work. I take care of Isabelle.” My dilemma saying that in America was that I often felt that dreaded label of “housewife” creeping up on me. Well, now I’m a housewife in China. My first instinct when I imagined my experience here, I am a little embarrassed to say, was to learn how to be a Chinese housewife. There is something of an academic pursuit behind this impulse. How do Chinese women make the most efficient use of minimal resources and space? How do they clean? How do they cook? How do they take care of the needs of children? Should I try this lifestyle on for a while?

When I think along these lines, although I am interested in the answers to these questions and I am sure I will learn many of the answers, I begin to feel as boxed in as when I was picturing myself in the role of a typical American housewife. Yes, I am speaking of the stereotypical American housewife, but there are many truths in stereotypes, and that’s a topic for another entry perhaps. The issue for me in acting out the role of housewife is not the household chores in themselves. This may sound silly, but I think it is a worthwhile exercise to learn how to do menial tasks mindfully, so that none of one’s time is wasted with mindlessness. My problem is the amount of time a day one can spend on chores. Realistically, they are endless. I can feel quite satisfied and productive spending a day getting a long list of chores done, mindfully, of course. But not everyday.

So how do I spend my time? How do I take advantage of the fact that if I’m not spending all day everyday doing menial chores, I have lots of time on my hands? How can I be much more than a housewife in China or America without having an official job?

Here’s what I did today for a start. After Isabelle woke up from her first nap, I strapped her on my back in the hen fangbian (very convenient) Ergo carrier. I set a comfortable pace walking to the grocery store, taking the volley of stares one at a time, gauging whether to smile or simply return a steady stare. I learned last time I was in China that a smile goes a long way, but I have also realized this time around that I don’t have to smile just because I feel on display. It’s a fine balance between reacting to self consciousness and truly trying to make a connection with someone.

As I walk past a playground surrounded by trees I stop to talk to a woman holding a baby who looks around Isabelle’s age. She is good-natured enough to be patient with my halting and simple Mandarin and repeat herself a few times. These are the essential elements in learning this new language and making connections with people: patience on her part, and persistence on mine. I learn that the baby is also a girl and 4 months old. I tell her the baby is big for 4 months old, and that Isabelle is a 9 month old girl and small for her age. The woman denies that her baby is big and tells me that Isabelle is big, that she has big feet. I am guessing that it is a compliment to say someones baby is big, so perhaps that’s why she denied it? There are nuances to learn surrounding children here.

I tell her I am going to buy some food and I walk on. A little way along a man sitting on a stool outside his little shop waves at me and asks me, “Ni shuo zhongguo hua ma?” Do you speak Chinese? “Yi Dian.” A little, I say. He is beaming at me. He is also patient, and we have one of the better conversations I have had so far in the two weeks we have been here. Like everyone, he asks where I am from. He remembers seeing me walk by before, sometimes with a taller man. “Wo de zhuangfu,” my husband, I tell him. I tell him Christopher is an English teacher at Minjiang University and he nods as though he had guessed so already. He asks how old I am, and tells me that his daughter is one year older than I am. Then he fawns over Isabelle a little bit, and waves down a woman from the shop next door to tell her the news that I speak Chinese and that I am only 23 with a 9 month old baby. I don’t know if I will buy pork from his pork shop where the meat seems to be hanging out in the humid heat, but I will certainly stop by often to chat with him.

At the grocery store, I look around for shrimp in the already-dead-and-on-ice section to no avail. I ask an employee where the shrimp is and he leads me over to the very-much-alive tank section where they are floating around. I think, what the hell, and watch as he scoops out a handful with a net and starts picking out bigger ones to put in a plastic bag. I sauteed those suckers up tonight on high heat with onions, garlic, and soy sauce. The taste of fresh shrimp is very different from frozen shrimp. It may take some getting used to and some experimentation with cooking methods.

Those were my little adventures of the day. I was only out walking and shopping for an hour and a half and I came home feeling tired and satisfied. I am going to take a walk every day and try to do something new every day, whether it’s walking in a different direction or trying a new food. I will certainly drum up the courage to talk to people everyday. Big steps, or little steps, I will be getting somewhere.

by Christopher Luna

Chinese generosity and optimism is a survival skill. Every day, by ten in the morning, the heavy breath of a tropical sun has settled over narrow sidewalks and streets frantic with the heavy exhaust of buses, taxis, glossy black sports utility vehicles, clattering old trucks and vans. The canals that run in their narrow channels beside the streets are brackish, and they stink. Halfway between our fourth floor apartment and the nearest bus stop, already drenched in sweat, I watch a preteen girl vomit into the canal. Her mother gives her an enthusiastic slap on the back, and I think, Welcome to China.

Before I came to China, I read a blog by a teacher in a smaller city south of Fuzhou. There were only five entries in the blog. It opened, receded swiftly into a sort of grim pessimism centering around the Chinese habit of spitting all over the place (probably exaggerated from what I have seen), supposedly brutish table manners, and the filth that litters Chinese streets and alleys. Perhaps it is no less filthy here than in downtown Los Angeles, or New York– but that beautiful tropical breath lays heavy on everything, inviting fermentation and decay. You can smell Fuzhou, and it smells like rotting fruit, sweaty bodies, exhaust, with a whispered undertone of raw, boiling sewage.

Call me crazy, but I have already begun to be accustomed to the odor– despite it’s profundity, it is by no means the most unusual or distracting element of the city. Walking down the street to catch a bus, I’m jarred by a sudden music. I look over, and driving along at a leisurely pace through rush hour traffic, a battered old truck, newly painted with brilliant white and red, grumbles along, full of musicians playing out to whomever happens to be walking along. There’s no sign of advertisement on the side of the truck, they’re just driving along playing music during rush hour.

I wonder if the truck is playing patriotic tunes, if it’s part of the Party’s propaganda machine– I wonder, but on some other level than the primary appreciation of the fact that there’s music in rush hour for busy Chinese commuters. The Party’s an odd thing, and here’s where I wish I could read more Chinese. It seems every block or so there’re these plastic posters with bright red lettering and a pair of cartoon cops. The male is winking rakishly, and his female compatriot has finger held up, as though in warning. I am dying to know what the poster says.

Because the cops here are strange. As I wrote before, they seem to have little of Moses’ power when it comes to parting traffic. The cars muscle police cars with sirens and lights as much as they muscle cabs and buses. Half the police cars look like a heavily used private citizen’s sedan. As they pass, you can see rubbish in the back seat, and a shade for the front windshield tossed haphazardly in the back. They’re dirty and sloppy, some of them, and others are gleaming and highly official.

Walking to the bank for the first time from my Hotel, a rickety Police van pulled up suddenly to the curb a few feet away from me. The sliding door opened and Police spilled out like Star Wars Storm Troopers, with helmets, bullet-proof vests, and shotguns. The first one looked shocked to see me (which, along with belligerent apathy, overwhelming friendliness, and idle amusement are the acceptable responses to seeing a black-fedora wearing foreigner saunter the streets of Fuzhou drenched in sweat), but the crew “hup hup hupped” their way with a purpose into the little Police station. In the States, you would have only seen Police so armed and moving with such a purpose if someone was about to get shot.

A handful of days later, another Police van pulled up to the curb about twenty feet in front of me and came skidding to a halt. This van looked more sinister from the outside. Windows on the back of the van were tinted to opacity from the outside. A bus-like retracting door set into the side of the van retracted for a moment, and out came a casual Chinese teenage in a bright pink polo shirt and khaki shorts. He paid little attention, and started texting someone as he walked away and the Police van screeched off.

I’m struck by the absurdity of the juxtaposition, and I wonder if all of this is posturing, a sort of show of force that, were it not so ironic to Western eyes, is meant to remind everyone that the Police are everywhere, and heavily armed. Why tote shotguns and run up the steps to a Police station? These men hadn’t the look of people who had just done violence. There was a kind of bizarre confusion on their faces, as though they weren’t themselves sure what they were doing and why they were doing it. What about the van with the blacked-out windows, perfect for disappearing someone? Instead, it could have been a bus dropping a kid off from school. It’s hard to convey that these things aren’t ominous, except in a kind of Catch-22 way. I don’t really fear for myself when I see it, but the contradictions inspire a kind of deadly serious laughter.

The Police are their own anomaly. Most of the people we’ve met here are more than generous, more than friendly. Our landlord helped us move our bags, and let us move into our apartment without paying him anything until a bank transfer came through; most people in shops and stands smile and show us around, trying to explain everything to us. Even the older Chinese, more stoic and aloof, try to hide a smile half of amusement and half of wonder at this little American family buying a baker’s dozen of dumplings off the street. The owner of the rice and noodles stand puts the huge bag of rice we buy on his bike and follows us home so that we don’t have to carry it. Everyone smiles.

Even when they cheat you. At a Carrefour, the sort of French equivalent of WalMart, a checkout girl takes my hundred kuai note and enters it as ninety two kuai, shoving the receipt into my hand as she’s already checking someone else out. I thought the change was wrong, but the change is right on the receipt, and I don’t figure out how the scam was run until long after I’m out of the store. Another store doubles the price of bananas when I’m not looking. It’s important to recognize the tight-lipped, smug smile of the person scamming you against the open smile of wonder at the person who’s curious and glad to see you. I suppose they’re both glad to see you, but as Tania says, you have to be willing to make a scene or you’ll get had. Argue in the store. Walk out without buying anything if you have to. I don’t think we’ll have to often. There’s a younger fruit seller near our house, a guy in his twenties, and there’s an honest look in his face, a simple deliberateness to the way he cuts a bunch of bananas in half and weighs them.

And everything is so cheap. A bag of rice that I have to carry over my shoulder, must be fifty pounds, costs fifteen dollars. A case of beer is five. Dinner for two at a nice restaurant with more shrimp and fish than we can eat is seven dollars. Dumplings are five cents apiece. Sechuan beef and noodle soup for five people, with beers all around and rice for Isabelle comes out to seven dollars. Take out is a dollar per person, a cab is never more than two dollars, and the buses are five cents per ride.

Our apartment is a case in point. The building is drab, worn down, beat up. There are four flights of poured concrete stairs, with no lift. But when you step into our apartment, it’s like a different world. Marble and hardwood floor, a huge living room and office that, alone, would contain our old apartment in Amherst. Two big bedrooms, two bathrooms, a big kitchen and dining room, air conditioning in every room, and it’s furnished with beautiful curtains, beds, couches, chairs, cookware, utensils, wall hangings painted by the landlord’s father, just about everything we could need. Our rent, with utilities and fees, comes out to about three hundred fifty dollars a month, only a little more than the rental allowance provided as part of my salary by the school.

China is generous in so many ways to foreigners. It’s not just the apartment or the help that so many people seem willing to offer– it’s the moments. We had a choice between the apartment we’re in and a more modern apartment on the sixteenth floor of a high-rise with a stunning view of Fuzhou from above. But our little balcony here looks out into a narrow neighborhood street. Hanging up laundry today, as the cooler winds in the evening began to blow, I could listen to the sounds of the neighborhood, and look across at the other balconies and buildings. Children played in the street, a few little electric scooters drove past, and somewhere I couldn’t see a man was hawking some kind of wear, repeating over and over again in a melodic, almost mournful voice, his little chant. Across the way, someone was learning to play a Chinese instrument, and the faltering piping was carried along on the tropical breeze.

I wonder about these people. I can’t imagine what it must be like for many of them to have never seen a white person face to face. On our third day in China, I ran across the street to get some food for Tania and I at a little Chinese fast food restaurant. There was a young University student who we had seen the other night, and she spoke some English. I noticed her, so I smiled to her and nodded. She seemed so nervous, so overflowing with a kind of nervous, high-energy enthusiasm as she mustered the courage to come over to me and say, “Can we be friends?”

Here’s something unique. I can imagine that people who visit or move to the United States, with whatever paltry handful of phrases in English that are analogous to my terrible few Chinese phrases, would be filled with the same seesaw of emotion that I have. In moments where someone cheats me out of a few kuai, or moments when I’m not sure, for a moment, if I know at all what I can do in a situation, I’m suddenly hit by a wave of unreasoning fear and despair. A friend of ours told Tania that, when she finished finalizing her plans to go to India for the second time, she suddenly thought to herself, What the hell did I just do? She remembered how hard, how overwhelmingly terrifying the experience had been at times, and she was struck by the absurdity and magnitude of the undertaking of going back. In the moments where I feel lost or alone, I absolutely understand that. What the hell did I do? What business do I have being here, in China. I can’t even speak the language well enough to find my way around.

I can imagine that a Chinese immigrant to the United States, especially one with only a few English phrases, feels the exact same thing at times. But there isn’t a reciprocal intensity of emotion from Americans. It might be mildly interesting to most Americans to meet a Chinese immigrant, or a Chinese person visiting the States for work. But there’s nothing to compare with the kind of profoundly emotional enthusiasm of our new friend Lily. When I smiled and told her that of course we could be friends, she was overwhelmed. It was as though I was a celebrity.

When she came by our hotel room the next day to spend some time with us, she confessed that she couldn’t sleep the night before, because she was so excited to know us. She took us to a place called Two Lakes in the center of town, and we walked through the tropical heat, beneath the heavy yawning trees that Fuzhou is famous for. The sky grew dark, and eventually released a massive cascade of spattering rain, with sharp cracks of thunder and flashes of lightning. We took shelter under the awning of a little tea shop, waiting for the rain to pass, and when it did the stifling breath of the tropical sun had been vanquished. The breeze was cool, and a fine evening descended on the four of us, Lily and my family and I.

And Lily’s optimistic enthusiasm was like that cool breeze. It was hard to communicate to her that the intensity of her thrill at meeting us was reciprocated. In a city where I know no one, where I know next to nothing, where I am often lost, here’s a woman who wants to know me, wants to learn about me, wants to understand me. In the cab on the way back to our Hotel, she looks back to us and says, “I think Americans, their mind is… “ and she searches for the right word, “open.”

Sure, there are plenty of Americans with very closed minds. But there’s this profound hope in her voice as she confesses this thought, this hope of a very open Chinese mind. Perhaps this is a little window into the spirit of the world that still looks to America with star crossed eyes of hope and optimism– that sees in the spirit of the West the possibility of openness and a future that need not be at odds with the rest of the world, and that can usher in some new kind of understanding– like a whisper of that nascent notion of a new kind of culture that isn’t so imperialistic as either the United States or China.

A few days later, getting our medical checkups, a Chinese Doctor tells me with approval, “I think America kingdom– okay!” He smiles appreciatively behind his surgical mask, and I wonder why there are so few hard feelings in the Chinese populace for America. Maybe it’s because we never won a war against them. Maybe it’s because we helped them against Japan (Tania tells me that the Chinese still remember this and many still bear the Japanese ill will). Maybe it’s because whatever Westernization they have undergone, they have done so on their own terms, not giving ground to an imperialistic governmental cultural pressure, but rather appropriating to their own uses what they wished and standing firm against whatever they did not. And perhaps there’s a real division of powers going on here. China has its domains, and the United States is loathe to press China on any of these domains. There isn’t the animosity and fear that circled around the Cold War with the Soviets. There’s no fear, it seems, on the part of the Chinese or the Americans that there would ever be war between these two powers. Maybe the general feeling of the populace towards Americans is less interesting, though, than that shining spirit of optimism in people like our new Chinese friend.

Tania, Isabelle and I are off to the West Coast. We leave today for Gunnison, then to Great Basin, then Tahoe, then Lassan, then Arcata.

The adventure begins.

Here’s a letter I wrote to catch up with an old Professor; thoughts about life and what’s been on my mind lately predominate:

It’s been a while since we talked or since I wrote, so I thought I’d send you an email with a bit of an update about what’s going on with us.

Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit: but the other way around, too.  What we experience in dreams– assuming we experience it often– belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as to anything experienced “actually:” we are richer or poorer on account of it, have one need more or less, and finally are led a little by the habits of our dreams even more in broad daylight and in the most cheerful moments of our wide-awake spirit.

Suppose someone has flown often in his dreams and finally, as soon as he dreams, he is conscious of his power and art of flight as if it were his privilege, also his characteristic and enviable happiness.  He believes himself capable of realizing every kind of arc and angle simply with the lightest impulse.; he knows the feeling of a certain divine frivolity, an “upward” without tension and constraint, a “downward” without condescension and humiliation– without gravity! How could a human being who had had such dream experiences and dream habits fail to find that the word “happiness” had a different color and definition in his waking life, too?  How could he fail to– desire happiness differently?  ”Rising” as described by poets must seem to him, compared with this “flying,” too earthbound, muscle-bound, forced, too “grave.”

– Nietzsche, Aphorism 193 in “The Natural History of Morals,” Beyond Good and Evil translated by Walter Kaufmann

Another piece of correspondence between my friend and I.  This is the last one I posted here, and there were obviously several between.  But I think some of this stands on its own.

- I don’t really think you want to be the Joker. In my view, you are far more interesting than that. I do find him intriguing as a kind societal mirror, but his character is limited by its love of destruction for destruction’s sake. But I agree that he does have a kind of anti-glamor.

- Yes. That is exactly my point about death and meaning – it is like everything else: it’s significance depends on us. Perhaps that seems to you merely a tautology, but I think it is something people often forget. It is important to remind ourselves, so that we can recognize when we are fetishizing.

- I didn’t mean to simplify the tendency to violence to merely a chromosomal issue. My joke about hiding was more to admit that my own non-violent tendencies might change when under attack. Gender is a far more complex issue than that, evolution provides tendencies and intelligence/culture plays with them. But I would also add that most women I know (for instance), when they find themselves in not so friendly parts of a city are far more aware and cautious of strange males on the street than they are of strange females.

-It strikes me that, rather than going round in circles, perhaps we are working from different ‘definitions’ (not those provided by a dictionary).

So maybe, if we want to move forward in thinking/conversing (and maybe we don’t want to for now), we might have to answer some questions.

First: What is it that we are calling violence? How does it differ, if at all, from destruction, killing, etc.? I think one problem with this discussion in our society is that everything gets perceived these days as violence.

Second: What is the difference between necessity and appropriateness?

Third: What would be some basic ‘justification’ (because without something to that effect we are back with the Joker) of a ‘better’ violence? I guess this goes back to the question of appropriateness.

Because the problem with the analysis of 20th cent. violence is, I think a telling one.  Of course I would agree that genocide is most often motivated, as you say, by fear and revenge. This is easy to see in retrospect. But the real problem seems to me to be that the perpetrators themselves did not know that at the time.  From their own accounts, many of them truly believed they were creating a better world (and I would put some of our own country’s violence in this category as well).

So, given that the stakes are so high, how can we be so sure that we are right? Or if this is impossible (as I think it is), what kind of purpose would render the question irrelevant?

And finally, the big one, which is perhaps a life and not a question: If our society is without values, what values would we prefer to be living by? Criticism/destruction is easy, creation is much more difficult. Your vision of the overman – who is he really?  Is he Nietzsche’s idea?

Three and a half stars out of five.

It’s pretty funny, I’d liked to have given this movie four stars, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Perhaps it’s half that I watched Dark City inebriated for the first few times that I can really and completely forget its flaws in favor of all of its darkly beautiful appeal, but I wasn’t able to do so with Knowing.  The movie is just a mix of the great and the terrible, where the great is actually rather striking and could have made this an excellent film, and the terrible could get you groaning in the theater.  Still, my verdict is that it’s worth a watch.  If you read on, you’ll get spoilers.

It’s also pretty funny that this movie attempts to deal– albeit in an often hammy, often heavy-handed fashion– with an issue that’s been occupying me as of late: the popular and ultimately rather banal debate between science and religion. Perhaps it’s actually better that a hammy movie tried to deal with this than a great movie, because the debate itself is pretty hammy. So a note first to those people who didn’t like it for its ridiculous message promoting mysticism or its alienification of religion.

You’re missing the point. I’ve read some confusion among the critics and heard some confusion from various people about exactly what Knowing‘s message is, and it seems to me that there’s no lack of clarity in this movie, whatever else it lacks. Within the story of the movie, the basic premise is this: aliens have been communicating with mankind through a kind of telepathy or something that manifests in humans as difficult-to-verbalize visions; these visions account for religious prophecy, thus Ezekiel’s famous vision of the fiery chariot with the wheels within wheels was actually his only way of describing the fiery alien spaceship that descended from the sky. Angels are actually glowing aliens that look like they’re on fire and have translucent “wings.” In essence: religion has been man’s interpretation of his interaction with aliens, and these aliens have been interacting with man because they foresaw (we don’t know how and it isn’t important) a terrible disaster that would destroy earth.

This premise was completely clear– and the story and the script left little ambiguity that I saw about whether these mysterious characters were actually aliens, or actually some kind of magical angels. The visual aesthetic was aliens. The conversation between Cage’s character and his son at the beginning of the film about life on other planets was a painfully obvious foreshadowing that the movie would be about aliens. The aliens took these people to what was clearly visually designed to be another planet– even if an untouched, beautiful, idyllic planet– not heaven. It’s a very different image the creators of the film would have gone for if it had been their hope either to imply that we were dealing with supernatural beings, or if they had wished to be ambiguous.

The point of this relationship between aliens, man, and Cage’s skeptical half-nihilistic and often badly written MIT astrophysics Professor, was not meant to vindicate religion. Ask any Sunday-school Evangelical if they’d be comfortable with a film that interpreted angels as spacefaring aliens and the Armageddon as a solar flare and you’d get yourself a blank stare. Similarly, the point of the movie wasn’t to snidely poke fun of religion– ask any Dawkins-loving secular humanist if he’d be comfortable with the message that Cage had to learn there was more to existence than he could possibly understand merely rationally and you’d get the sort of sullen reaction to this film I’ve seen from some “secularists.” But that’s the whole point– the movie actually tows an exceptionally unbelievable and hammy interpretation of a middle-line. It’s not a complicated middle line that fascinates the intelligent film goer with where and how these screenwriters drew it– the middle line itself is clear, bold, maybe neon and flashing.

The middle line is simply that both sides have it wrong. Those who are religious and hold to every last letter of their religion have it wrong because they’re forgetting the profoundly personal, profoundly visionary nature of the spiritual confrontations with a “higher power” that brought about the authorship of their holy books. Instead of being inspired by the prophetic poetry of the Bible, in many ways they make their own science out of it, and rob it of all heart. Now, if I thought that the Bible was the end all and be all of visionary human experience, I might be a little disappointed to find out that it was aliens all along, but the point isn’t the flashing neon line that the screenwriters have drawn, but rather that whatever it is that’s responsible for the visionary human experience, it’s pointless and pigheaded and misguided to hold to the interpretation of supernatural angels with a long mechanical and Orthodox history– the truth is bound to be something more elusive. So the dogmatic religious person is offended because instead of God, we’ve got E.T.

The secular humanists out there will roll their eyes and call the story a thinly veiled advocacy for religious mysticism because it’s about a form of communication between humans and aliens that can’t be proven, that’s visionary, and that seems improbable. But again, that’s the point. On this end of the spectrum, the movie is lambasting that arrogant, often ignorant position of secular humanists that religion, mysticism, the visionary experience and insight of man can all be safely written off in the face of modern rationalism. The movie indicts this position not only by having a story in which simple rationalism breaks down, but also by crafting this story very much in line with the rationalists’ own preferred mythology (aliens and telepathy– Asimov, Clarke, Sagan, what other ‘hard’ scifi authors have played with telepathic aliens?), while simultaneously showing just how insignificant our existence could be made by circumstances totally outside of our ability to control.

Maybe the line drawn between science and religion here is so hammy, in some ways so silly, because the secular humanist and the religious person has become so hammy and silly in the debate. If there’s one thing this movie does well, it’s that it speaks in a language understandable by both sides, while implying some of the complications of either sides’ languages.

As far as a moral of the story goes, I approve. Which is funny, again, because I’m in the middle of writing what I hope will be an equally accessible but far more subtle set of essays working through the science and religion debate. As a movie, independent of its message, I only half approve.

Some of the dialogue is almost unbearably bad. I don’t buy Nicholas Cage as an MIT astrophysicist, not because of his shoddy and asinine nihilism (because, after some of the things I’ve seen “respected” analytical philosophers write, it would be very hard to surprise me), but because he didn’t ever strike me as someone familiar with hard science. I thought his class at MIT was a joke; in truth it was a piece of heavy-handed exposition to drive home the point of the movie. And the conversation between Cage’s character and his son about aliens sounded like it was lifted right out of “Contact,” but delivered without half the emotion Jodie Foster put into it. Also, the “together forever” hand gestures were stupid, and I squirmed a bit when Proyas attempted to use them to evoke emotion.

Indeed, now that I’m thinking about it there wasn’t a single place in the movie where I found the dialogue itself to be impressive. There were only places where you could ignore the neon sign of the script attempting to beat you over the head with its message, and watch Proyas direct his cast with finesse. The most effective scenes were those lacking dialogue altogether, or those with only the most sparse dialogue.

So, a pretty poorly written script, but somehow really moving and thought-provoking. The effects and direction were excellent– really brilliant. Everything I said about bad CGI effects in movies doesn’t apply here. The plane crash is wonderful, and very well integrated into the live action. It’s horrifying, confusing, and seems more than half real. The subway crash less so, but it’s not bad. The aliens are well done, considering the fact that they’re trying to evoke Biblical imagery, or give us a sort of image-behind-the-prophecy look. Indeed, the spacecraft had to have been created with a fair attention to detail and some cunning, as it evoked the wheels-within-wheels of God’s chariot from Ezekiel, the fire hidden in smoke of God. The “angel aliens” evoked an alien aesthetic and Biblical angels– they seemed to be on fire without really burning, and you could see things that people would interpret as wings. The destruction of the earth was not only convincing, it was startlingly so. I wasn’t expecting good effects from this movie, but the earth burning, the fire making its way across the globe consuming New York, looked very real– and when they pulled back to show the atmosphere slowly burning off the planet I was totally sold. The alien planet at the end of the movie wasn’t nearly as believable, but they get points for giving it some CGI plant instead of grass– and even if it didn’t look real, it did look beautiful, and dreamlike– a sort of storybook ending, which I appreciated.

So, despite its bad dialogue, there were elements of the story that were good. I think one of the places where the film really was ambiguous was in how Cage’s character made sense of the whole thing. Some people seemed to have assumed that he underwent a religious conversion and obviously literally believed in heaven at the end of the movie based on his speech to his son and his reunion with his father. I think the movie left this purposefully ambiguous. Indeed, my best guess is not that Cage’s character believed in a literal heaven, but that he instead believed that the deceased stay with us in our memories, and in that way they they continue to affect our lives. All the years he had with his wife before her death meant that she was “still around” for him– and he only realized that she played as much a part in his life after her death as before when he finally opened the long-neglected birthday gift from his wife to find a locket with a picture of his family and the inscription “together forever.”

Cage’s reunion with his family at the end of the film seemed far less a concession that his father had been right about God, the universe and everything than it did that his love for and relationship with his family went beyond what by that time seemed a silly disagreement about heaven; he realized that he loved his family, and that the visceral emotions of his relationship with them were more important than his contempt for religion– indeed, Cage’s character seemed to have been so overwhelmed by the events that far exceeded his expectations and understanding that by the end of the movie I think it didn’t matter to him whether his family believed in God, telepathic aliens or nothing. He just wanted to be with his family.

In any case, the movie did leave my wife and I thinking– not because the plot was ambiguous, but because even in such a contrived and often silly plot, the movie was attempting to show its viewers that we need an understanding of the world that acknowledges not only the possibility, but the power of that which lies outside the narrow focus of our microscopic hyper-rationality; that, at the same time, what’s important about our religions is the insight and experience of their visions. The result of religious and secularist narrowness is often as hammy as some of the relationships in this movie– sons who feel alienated from their fathers because of a quibble over the soul and heaven. We could ask for a better movie treating these themes, but this one will do, and it will entertain you if you don’t get your feelings hurt.

My mother and my wife, my niece and my daughter went down to the river.

My mother asked my niece, “Do you want to go dip your feet in the river?”

My niece said, “Dip feet river.”

I left the women by the river and walked down a little path by the bank.

The Western summer is hot and fresh, not like the summers in Massachusetts.  The dry heat is my home.

The little snaking band of hard-packed dirt would dry to the bones of the earth by noon the day after a rain.

The river babbled and rushed to my left, and to my right the high Western sun beat down on a wavering lake of green.

That fragrance of summer, of fresh wild grass baking slowly over months, sweet and full, with the film of dust beneath is the smell of the West.

That slow, methodical buzzing of the wind and the insects in the grass is the pulse of the West, the hum of its heartbeat.

I will miss the land when I am far away.

Life is a Special Kind of Pattern in any kind of medium capable of storing information, and consequently is able to evolve in whatever media in which it participates.  We are used to thinking of life as a very particular organic phenomenon, but as we approach the study of life from perspectives that seek to model it, we gain continued evidence that life is a pattern that learns.  Be it a pattern of organic molecules that learns to store, alter and communicate information through chemical means, a pattern of cells that learn to store, alter and communicate information among one another, a pattern of circuits’ switching that learn, or an ecosystem that learns, or a group of organisms that learn– at whatever level of abstraction that learning occurs, there is life.

Consequently, Human Evolution is Cultural as well as biological.  To people who understand biological evolution, this may seem an asinine statement roughly equivalent to the naïveté of Lamarck‘s notion of the inheritence of acquired traits.  Of course, biologists with often questionable intent have already spoken of the concept of a meme, a particular take on cultural change as informed from insights from biological evolution.  The relationship between culture and the self-aware man is by no means one-way, and indeed if the speed with which evolution can act to produce adaptation in a species is based on the speed with which a pattern may go through generations– or versions– culling out the ill-adapted and passing on the well-adapted, then human cultural evolution has the potential to act much more quickly than human biological evolution.

A Group of People Could Craft a New Culture based on new values, pass those values on to other humans with a finesse enhanced by contemporary understandings of how people learn; that culture could in turn feed back on the humans that created it, producing profound changes in both psychology and ability; those changes would then affect the group’s modification of the culture, and so on.

It Would be Foolish to Abandon our Past, even in spite of all the wonderful advances that hyperrational minds have been capable of.  There are a great many people in our contemporary culture who, with profound ignorance and profound arrogance, wish to disregard some of the most primal, lasting and evocative insights of humanity, simply because they misunderstand those insights to the same depth and severity of some of those insights’ most vocal champions.  As humans we have powerful faculties of discernment, and it is no small part due to the fire of the human spirit that we have come so far.  Any culture that is to thrive and exceed our present cultures will have to revel in the human spirit instead of treating it like a ghost story.

It Would also be Foolish to Repeat our Past, and this project is not an attempt to return to some idealized timeor culture.  Instead, we must move beyond the dogmatic understanding of the human spirit, based on anxiety and fear, and build on the work started by great humans in the past, informed by revelations from the present, and searching for the new insights of tomorrow.  We want something new, but we don’t need to burn books to prove it.