What Is Real?

Oh to be free and alone by land or sea
And what does it mean to be free?
To experience the vastness
The interconnectedness of all things?
To feel no pressure to conform to illusion
To be in touch with what is truly real
And what is real?

The dirt beneath my feet and in my hair and on my skin
The trees and grass I pass through on my way
The stars that wheel around in never-ending cycles
The dance of living things that has existed before each petty social agenda
And will in some form outlive them all
What is real?

Is it real to feel things for no tangible reason?
Is it real to love, to laugh?
What’s funny to one person is offensive to another
What is real?

Is it real to get upset for no good reason?
Is it real to cry, to lament?
What’s sad from one side of time is rationalized from the other

What is real?

And what is merely consciousness
Or is it something mere
Is perception any less a player in the cosmic game
Is it the referee, making the calls
Or perhaps perception is the game itself
And our senses are the refs
And our friends the fans
And our emotions and values and choices are the players
Sometimes we win, and sometimes we lose
But as long as we enjoy the game
When the game ends we can say we truly lived

It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.

~*~

I can never, ever tire of Blade Runner. I can never hold it all in my mind; it's too much.

Is it a story about the future? About a cyborg's fight against death? A man's search for meaning in a vast, glittering, empty abyss of a world? A woman's discovery of her own darkness? About the rise and fall of genius? About something big, something small, something in between? Every single thing in this movie is rife with potentiality. Everything, everyone is pregnant, they have this glow about them of potential energy that cannot find a way to become kinetic. The world is too slippery, there isn't enough friction, the momentum of their lives carries them despite themselves. Even doing nothing is still doing something. And still the life inside them clamors, begging to be released, to be expressed. Every single eyeblink is fierce, every lick of the lips is a silent scream, invisible fists shaking against a cold darkness that spreads into every corner of their insides.

There is nothing good in this movie. There is nothing evil either. There are no extremes at all. Even death itself, supposedly the extremity of life, is transformed into something artistic, a statement about human conscience and consciousness. If a cyborg is "retired," is it still death? Do you have to be a human to be truly alive?

Perhaps the most important question this movie forces you to ask is: What is beauty? Is beauty sexual? Is it sensual? Is it innocent, jaded, drunk, scummy, sparkling clean, classy, horrifying, inspiring? Does beauty exist in the eye of the beholder, or is it merely an attempt, an idea relegated to cyberspace, to the action potentials firing off in neurons?

More than anything else, this movie makes me feel small. Not in an insignificant way...but in an awestruck way. I could be any one of billions, perhaps trillions of people that wander the back alleys, the fancy plazas, the multiple planets and constructs of an unendingly alive universe. Everything dies, everything ends, but to end it must exist at all. Everything IS.

And that is all we can ever truly know. I am, now. Will I be, tomorrow? Was I, yesterday? My memories could be false, my hope for survival unrealistic. But in this moment, this one moment, under rain that blots out the stars, surrounded by lights, glare, traffic of all sort, but utterly alone...I exist. There are pyramids of light surrounded by vast expanses of vacuum and darkness. And the light that I cast, when I spend my potential, and my life becomes kinetic, is insignificant to the point of nothingness when compared to all the lights of all the lives that have ever been. But none of that matters, because I am not them. I can only ever be me.

All we are is a collection of lights, speeding around each other, engaging and disengaging. We swirl around inside ourselves, we whirl amongst each other, we are living stars. And one day all our collective lights will disappear.

Never Again?

Yesterday (Sunday) was Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. And as luck would have it, in my ongoing Holocaust curriculum with my seventh graders, we got to talk about the Milgram experiment, Obedience. Have a link: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 That's a 45-minute video © Milgrim about his experiment comprised mostly of footage from the experiment itself.

Milgrim designed this experiment partly as a reaction to the Eichmann trial, the 50th anniversary of which is this year. The Virginia Holocaust Museum had a film festival this weekend, playing these three films over three days: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Journey Into Life: Aftermath of A Childhood In Auschwitz, and The Man Who Scattered Eichmann's Ashes Into The Sea. I did not get to see any of these, and I'm disappointed by that. The VA Holocaust Museum always has fascinating stuff. The people who work there are all fantastic, honest, hard-working people. I adore them, and I strongly encourage people to visit the museum, as often as possible! I have been fortunate enough to receive several guided tours from the Museum's own Director of Education (once with my 7th graders), and their exhibits are generally speaking about half memorial/artifact display and half educational/interactive with applications and understandings beyond just remembering the past.

There is a movement within Holocaust museums at present to expand beyond just the European genocide of the Holocaust to include education and exhibits about all genocides, as well as programs to fight such injustices, or at the very least encourage being informed about them. When I visited Yad Vashem in Israel in 2008, our tour guide passionately spoke about his support for expanding the concept of Holocaust museums to include exhibits and education about genocides worldwide including the present day.

Tonight, my dad's synagogue held its annual Interfaith Holocaust Service. (I led two songs.) We had several presenters and speakers, including two Holocaust survivors. One of them, Alex, also gives tours sometimes at the VA Holocaust Museum, and he brought up the idea that these more recent and ongoing genocides make hollow the favored phrase of Jews worldwide regarding the Holocaust: "Never Again." Is it really Never Again? Did the world truly learn any lesson from the genocide during WWII? The Nazis imprisoned and killed Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, mentally handicapped, political opponents, etc. etc. The Jews were selected for mass extermination, an organized and chillingly orchestrated process that mainly occurred over the last few years of the war. But it all happened so long ago. A generation ago. I suppose I can see why governments can claim to be horrified but not lift a finger to help the women being systematically raped as a weapon of war in the Congo. What is going on there is horrifying to the extremity of my capacity to imagine, and it is happening RIGHT NOW. My intention is not to grandstand and guilt trip and make anyone reading this feel bad for not flying out to the Congo and single-handedly dealing justice to rapists. My point is that awareness is the first step in a long and painful process of achieving social justice, and I believe that one must spread awareness. Holocaust museums and exhibits, educational programs, news reports on current events and genocides, supporting lobbyists, supporting organizations who give aid or give voice to the helpless: that is a form of spreading awareness and taking action.

It is easy to sit back in your life and tell yourself that you'll start thinking about these things tomorrow, next week; that you care, of course you care, but that you're busy, that you have various more important tasks. And that's true. We should not sacrifice our own lives for others unless we truly feel called to it. I don't spend my every waking hour campaigning for those rape victims. But we should make time. More and more I come to believe that this world is one big neighborhood in the vastness of space. Safety issues aside, there is almost nowhere on Earth I could not travel if I had the proper equipment and supplies. That means that those women in the Congo are my neighbors. That the Bosnian Muslims killed in the 90s were my neighbors. That all people, everywhere, no matter their crimes or their vices or their hatreds are all my neighbors. That all those who have been victimized, who are hurt, who are suffering, who have been numbed to their own pains, are my neighbors.

It is easier to put off caring for those who suffer. It is hard, maybe the hardest thing a person can do, to offer legitimate and deeply-felt sympathy for someone who has been victimized. It forces you to acknowledge your own vulnerabilities, your own mortality. It fills you with vague apprehension, with guilt for not magically being able to help them when they "really" needed it, with fear that you have nothing useful to say, that there isn't anything you can do, that your involvement is pointless, that it's better for everyone if you just make a donation/take a flier/sign the petition/etc. and move on.

However, I believe that making the effort to face your fears, to confront your own mortality, to challenge your insecurities, to open yourself up to care, is a worthy cause in and of itself. Caring hurts. Yet that pain can ultimately be constructive. That pain leads us to break down the parts of ourselves which hurt others...and ourselves. That pain causes us to empathize with those we encounter in our lives. That pain encourages us to thwart our self-loathing tendencies. Opening our hearts to others necessitates opening our hearts to ourselves. It makes it harder to hang onto grudges, prejudices, us vs. them rhetoric, and any of a myriad of ways we have evolved as emotional creatures to cope with the overwhelming intensity of relating emotionally to others.

If you do nothing else in your lives to fight injustice and victimization I urge you to take time out of your lives to care. Have a good cry. Get mad and channel it into your workout. Bring up a relevant topic in a conversation with a family member, friend, or coworker. Express outrage, sadness, disgust, despair, frustration, discomfort. Post on facebook. Write in your blog. To express emotions is a healthy, human thing. It doesn't have to be all the time. Most of us, myself included, don't have the energy to feel so deeply and fully all the time. Judaism provides holidays and memorial days to facilitate thinking about these sort of different facets of social justice, relating to yourself and the world, coming to terms with your weaknesses and bettering yourself and the world. America has its own days to remind us of such things. It is up to us to make use of the opportunities for caring that we encounter. It is up to us to stop procrastinating. It is up to us to take a hollow claim and solidify it piece by piece into Never Again.

~*~

Related reading: The Line from Subnormality by W. Rowntree

Death is change is the nature of everything.

Part of my problem is that I deal with everyday personal stress and drama by letting go and releasing my mind into contemplation of the All of Everything...backing perspective outward and outward until we are ants scuttling in an unending sandhill that scatters into stars and seas and the silence of dark and space. It inundates my conscious mind with images of poetic nuance that shape the words that leave my mouth and fall like dead leaves to the wayside. People say that winter is the season of death but that is incorrect. Winter is the season of neutrality, of being dead. Of waiting, of hiding, of limbo. Fall is the season of death, of dying, of corpse grey and slow rotting. Plants die as do hopes and dreams, but so do fears and lacks and lies. Death brings change to the things that can no longer support themselves. Slowly the living wood on our outermost consciousness either hardens to heartwood and becomes part of our foundation or it peels and rots away. Negativity gives way to positivity which reframes extant negativity which peels away to reveal new positivity...into infinity.

There is no such thing as Good and Evil out in the vacuum of space, any more than in the sparks of neurons reaching action potentials and firing away. All morality and all language is an illusion of discrete perspective created in order to give a single consciousness a method of processing sensory input with a widely applicable range. We want to extend the line on our graphs, we want to predict what will happen so that we are less afraid and alone. We want to understand the emotional longings that we call loneliness at all. We want to be a part of something, to feel like this enormous universe, this complex interlocking constantly shifting state of existence is personally relevant, that it is within our ability to control, to regulate, to bend to our particular personality and taste. No grain of sand is too insignificant, no distant star is too irrelevant, because we are all minute particles in the endless sandstorm of universal birth, growth, decay, and death. One day there will be no evidence left to show that human beings ever existed. One day every speck of matter from our solar system will have transformed utterly into something unrecognizably different. That has not happened yet, but it is as inevitable as the illusory passing of time as measured by, once again, our infinite desire to codify the cycles of change around us into something recognizable, predictable, and ultimately answerable.

We learn to ask questions so that we get answers. We feel pain and therefore comfort, we feel alone and therefore we belong. We see beauty and want to set it in stone, forgetting that stone itself will crumble, and that beauty is something in constant flux. It is an ideal that can never be actualized into something concrete because there is no right answer. Beauty is something to strive for in one's own mind, something to interpret. It's not something worth pandering to others, because it's not something that can ever be truly achieved. Emotions color our interpretations of beauty; the more we get to know people the more beautiful we sometimes find them, even glossing over physical things that we normally find unattractive. If nothing else this means that although we can see a perfect stranger and appreciate their appearance, true beauty is always something which runs deeper than simple physicality because our own needs and desires are far beyond that. And beauty is nothing more than our projections of desire. Just like everything else.

Part of our interpretation of the universe is expression of, projection of, and derivative from our desires. Collective and singular. We build instruments to prove neutrality is possible and to isolate unbiased truths, forgetting that everything that ever was simply IS and our interpretations are what color and bias things in the first place. Light travels at its own speed. "Where there are physicists there are oversimplified simulations. If they can build a simplified simulation, you are not in the simplest possible universe. If they can't, you are not in the most complex possible universe." Does this negate the importance of such work? Of course not. It's intrinsic; it's the most important thing we CAN do. But only because what we want is to take control, to call shotgun and ultimately get our universal driver's license instead of being stuck in the backseat craning our necks trying to figure all this stuff out.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that some days I like just riding along in the backseat.