saturn return to sender

[originally written July 26, 2009 … updated and posted today]

I fancy that sitting—a la meditation—is kind of like music for me. I’ve studied some theory and have some talent, but I never practice. Coloring in chords on paper isn’t at all like touring with a band, and reading about, say, Rinzai and Soto isn’t at all like sesshin. I mean: I assume. Having never done that.

But, I found a nice little rock off the path with a view and a slanted face and it was actually pretty comfortable. I zoned out, zoned out of zoning out (aka, zoned back in), tried to allow the thoughts to arise and fade, noted the immediacy of the wind’s action on the flowers nearby, tasted the weird almost panic-inducing intimacy of what I fancy to be less-mediated experience.

Soon, I felt sadness, and I recognized it as the sadness that I carry with me everywhere. I furrowed my brow at it. I tried not to suppress it. What the fuck is this thing anyway? What the fuck is it? So strange. As strange as the beauty of the scene, the beauty of the people I know. I felt alone, with the wind and the mountains which refused to either validate or damn my presence. Fucking silent mountains.

But then I started breathing consciously. Then, in the breathing, I felt that I was … participating in the scene: the wind, the rock, the mountains, the creatures living on the tundra. I was not so separate from all of that, because everything there was breathing. Some words came forth to describe the experience and they sort of echoed in my head, as the sadness expanded, and before too long I was crying. The words were “breathing is to participate in the divine. breathing is to participate in the divine …”

I clung to the repeating words like they were a rocking-back-and-forth hug I was giving to myself, but they were not much solace. Participation isn’t solace, it’s just I suppose that participating is less absurd than not participating. I suppose it’s also nice to have company.

I decided then that the world seems mostly to be beautiful, and mostly to be sad. This is my view, my predilection, I think. By and large, beauty unfolds from hardship, and heartbreak is the inevitable end of beauty. The things living in the tundra turn the mountain tops all green and lush in spite of the unforgiving climate. People give to each other and work for what’s right despite their own suffering and damage, and despite the astounding injustice of human stupidity.

Beauty and Heartbreak: those are my current favorite names for the demon and angel lovers who dance the world into being. They’re fucking nuts, but somehow it seems like the only sane choice is to join in…

I’m sometimes startled at how confused and confusing the world is. Sometimes, I’m confused by how stunningly confused people are.

As one example, I was rubbernecking the articles at The Institute for Creation Research for something like two hours last weekend. It’s just so hard to look away! So magnificently twisted and grotesquely broken it all is!* ICR.org is a train wreck of straw men, misrepresentations and uncited claims. But that almost doesn’t matter; the whole discussion is moot immediately anyway because the basic claim of a “supernatural” explanation is perforce unscientific.

I know it’s a waste of time to poke around in the wreckage, and I won’t be saying anything here I haven’t probably said before, but … There’s this spectacularly warped bit where they insist that what they’re doing is “real” science, and that the secular scientific world is inventing fanciful magical forces to explain away the obvious. In this article, an organic chemist raises the homochirality problem in biological chemistry: how do proteins in organisms “know” the “right” form to take, if two equally likely forms emerge normally, outside of an organism? The answer, of course, is that God made it that way. Apparently, to say “we don’t know” is to be unscientific:

I find it interesting that when creationists start talking about God’s supernatural creation, evolutionists usually counter by saying that everything must be explained by natural science and divine intervention is not science. I find this remark extremely amusing. When we show them that the laws of natural science cannot explain the existence of chirality, evolutionists say that the process happened a long time ago by some unknown method that they cannot explain. Now who’s relying on a supernatural explanation? Although they would never call it divine intervention, they certainly are relying on faith and not on scientific facts. Evolution just hopes you don’t know chemistry.

*goggle*

Seriously, every time I read that, I have to put my eyes back in my head. Does the English language work differently for this guy? What part of “as secular scientists, we cannot explain this” means “we are relying on a supernatural explanation”? And which part of “as a Creationist, I believe that a supernatural being designed it this way” means “this is scientific fact”?** This fellow is apparently writing from the inside of a fun house mirror.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think people and the media (mostly) miss the point. It’s necessary to ask whether the policies the Obama administration brings to the office are the right policies. The debate—the tension between the essential conservative and liberal viewpoints—is healthy. Obama’s policies may result in good or ill, or (more likely) some of one, some of the other. I am not an expert on the economy, for example, and though I do tend to think that power should not be concentrated among the empowered, and so am for Obama’s policies, I am definitely ready to admit to the value of the conservative point of view.

But one thing Obama brings (returns?) to the office, and to government, and to our culture, which is in my mind unequivocally, marvelously, giddiness-inducing good, is the intellectual honesty required to be able to tell the difference. If we can’t honestly look at ourselves outside of ideology, it doesn’t matter what the policies are, because we won’t have honest access to the feedback of their effects, we can’t correct course when something goes wrong, and Rome will burn. This has nothing to do with liberal versus conservative philosophies, but does seem to have to do with the current Republican party versus the anyone else, and in particular versus the “reality-based community.”

An example. An Obama official admits the inevitable about the recovery plan: there will be wasteful spending. “How could it not?” columnist Gail Collins says.

Much of the stimulus money is being channeled through state and local governments, through tens of thousands of governors, mayors, county executives, transportation commissioners, parks superintendents and so on. Try to imagine the person in that pyramid with the lowest I.Q., and you’ll understand that there’s a dead-tree planter hidden in there somewhere.

(Note: That quote is the columnist, not the Obama representative.)

Can you imagine a Bush official agreeing that his plan will not work flawlessly? I can’t. A Bush administration official would talk around the point, avoid the question, generalize it to some kind of heroic-abstract “challenge” we must overcome. I keep coming back to the same metaphor (is it a metaphor?): Obama is a grown-up. Bush was a child. A well-intentioned, but petulant and untalented child.

Panicked and unable to understand why the complex world doesn’t bend to his will, a child will invent fantasies about the forces in play against him. Then he understands, he feels like he’s back in control. A grown-up accepts that the world is complex, evades understanding, that he can’t control it, but he takes responsibility and grapples with it anyway, on its own, ineffable terms. The grown-up is concerned with solving problems. The child raids windmills.*

I should say, it seems that Obama is bringing intellectual honesty to the government, it seems that he is a grown-up. We’ll see how the next years play out, but I am optimistic.

I had an idea for a little visualizer toy and started playing with Quartz Composer over the weekend. I’m always blown away at the power of that tool whenever I dip into it.

That said, I spent hours and hours trying to convince QC to do what I wanted. The macro I came up with for one part of the idea looked like this:

And after trying several variations, it actually—mysteriously—didn’t work in a critical way. I imagine it’s due to some lack of understanding of how QC’s pipeline works. But eventually I broke down and wrote the logic I wanted in Javascript using a single Javascript patch instead of that macro, and it looked like this:

Er. Yeah. You know how they like to say “and you can do all this without writing a single line of code”? Sometimes that’s only a good thing if you can also just write the damn code.

I also want to play with Processing sometime soon.