OOO, the real world!

Well...it has been quite awhile since I actually updated this.

This marks the beginning of an interesting year. Normally about this time, and by normally for the past 17 years of my life, the end of August means a return to school, be in elementary, middle, and high school, or back to the university. 74% of my Augusts have been spent returning to something.

This time, not so much.

New house, new roommates, new city, new friends, new schedule, new jobs, new expectations, new worries, new concerns. But hey, that's part of it, right? This whole growing up thing that we are all expected to do at some point in our lives. I'm just lucky this isn't the 1600s. Growing should have taken place when I was 15. Or even in my great grand parents time, the early 1900s, I should have been married by now. I suppose that's just as good, because in my great grand parent's family I would have been a pariah (a dancing, traveling, non-religious, person who enjoys a good craft beer on a summer night had no place in the strictly and formidably devout South Baptist family).

I will curtail this. A real post of my usual boring and pretension will follow soon. I wanted to, and still do, try to keep this philosophical, inquisitive, or a good place for a short rant which even as a rant I want to be somewhat useful for my own thought process.

Welcome to the real world, me!

Driving Suspension

The best part about night drives is the limbo.  It isn’t purgatory.  It isn’t even a kind of waiting really.  It’s a suspension between decisions.  Nothing has to be decided on, the course is already set, the destination in mind, and if the driver is lucky the little arrow will hover near full for miles, removing the need to stop. 

Drivers don’t really even have to think anymore.  We take our favorite songs on our iPods, mp3 players, old mix CDs.  Podcasts on economics, politics, humor, spare us having to have original thoughts.  We need only listen and watch the world flow around us. 

At night there isn’t a lot to flow around.  Especially traveling on those mid state highways that pass between major cities separated not by tens but hundreds of miles through small towns, farms, and pocket forests.  Someone starting in a bustling city in the afternoon, cursing rush hour traffic for keeping them from a destination four hundred miles away where they have no set time or need to arrive quickly, can lose even the other drivers on the road after turning of the interstate.  Moreover, traveling alone, there will be miles of highway without the rude glare of other headlights in the rearview, or the telltale pinpricks of red taillights, like eyes, wandering back and away.

After three hours a driver can be pretty far into the limbo, the suspension between places.  The sun which required the visors to be lowered, sunglasses to be donned, explicatives to be uttered, is almost fully gone, leaving only traces of orange and purple in a navy and deeply darkening sky. 

From the four lane mid state highway a driver might turn onto a smaller two lane state road that curves over hills and through farms (if one is lucky enough to travel in the Midwest).  A driver rushes past sleeping houses, no lights visible inside, flies by small, dying towns built around railroad lines which no longer stop or care.  Where do the people go?  The grocery is boarded up.  The car dealership sells cars, but no one is ever there to look. 

But the town is gone again and the last ten minutes of the podcast is playing, or that part of the song that the driver always sings along to, no matter how bad or out of tune the voice. 

It could continue like that.  It could, really, in that suspension.  Experience is the only indication that the driver is getting close to the end. The dark pinpoints of light cannot illuminate landmarks.  The stars—old standards of navigation which could have provided the necessary course having long since fallen out of use in lieu of GPS and Google Maps--are only a part of the backdrop, the stage, the setting.  They move, but unperceptively, unhelpfully. 

And it’s not that the driver doesn’t want to arrive.  Everyone wants to get to where they are going.  Eventually.  Some are in more of a hurry than others.  Maybe this time, the driver’s pulse quickens, recognizing the last twenty minutes (distances measured in time, “how far is this away from that?”  “Oh, about twenty minutes”), the courthouse of another county before the destination providing the only point of illumination for ten minutes at sixty miles an hour in any direction. 

But the suspension, because the driver, me, I’m nearing the end of it.  Because waiting like that, driving three hundred miles, a little over four hours doing over seventy miles an hour and what’s more doing that in the evening, feeling the sunset and not watching it, listening to This American Life and Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me! (I’m a card carrying Liberal with a capital ‘L’) and my favorite music on the iPod I got for Christmas two years ago, just the waiting, I don’t have to choose anything.  Not really. 

Questions I had in my head at the beginning of the trip resurface.  The pulse, the crawling feeling, the drumming fingers, impatience with the music because there aren’t songs for this exact feeling, because the limbo I was ok with because I didn’t think about it, that time is almost over.  In ten minutes I’ll be there, in another place.  A definite place, not an idea at the end of some time on a road, but a definite, physically defined real as far as we can tell series of sensations and facts that isn’t transitory but NOW. 

Because in two minutes I’ll put the car in park.  I’ll turn the key and the low hum of the engine with cease.  The radio will be silent, the music gone, the voices of National Public Radio quiet till the next three hour trip.  It will be me, and the car, and some reality that for two hours flowed around me, not noticing, but suspended.  

Image from pragmaticcompendium.com

Interesting View of Earth: "Welcome to the Athropocene"

Firstly, I love maps.  Relations are fascinating things to study, whether they be relationships between physical places, or more conceptual maps, like between ideas or people.  To be honest, I'm not sure what this animation is supposed to portray.  There is no verbal accompaniment, but the lights of the towns and cities as they stretch over the globe are thought provoking.

I do have one conjecture on what the spidery connections between cities over the water are.  I imagine that they are shipping lanes as well as flight paths.  It's interesting to me to see how interconnected the world is, and how far people have spread over its surface.

Signmark: Attending a Deaf (Literally) Rap Concert

On Sunday I attended an event I never thought I would attend.  I went to a deaf hip-hop/rap concert given by Signmark, a deaf rapper.  My friends and I also danced while at the concert (a mix of lindy hop, blues, and west coast) to his music.  It was a great deal of fun for us.  Signmark is a high-energy performer, made even more so by using ASL (American Sign Language) to communicate the lyrics.  He has a counterpart who does the vocal lyrics, but Signmark composes the lyrics and writes the beats himself. 

The crowd itself seemed to be half hearing and half deaf.   It was surprisingly quiet.  I was surprised at the variety of people who knew ASL or used it to communicate.  The six foot five man in the biker jacket with the long white beard and American flag bandana spoke only with his hands.  A knot of older women all signed quietly to each other, no sounds.  Faces are also part of ASL grammar.  It’s a very open language.   You cannot hide what you’re trying to say, and if you do try, you’re being rude. 

One thing you, my reader, may wonder is “how do deaf people enjoy a concert they can’t hear?”  Interesting question, and one for which I have an answer.  Firstly, the speakers.  They were powerful and very, very loud.  For some in the deaf community, it isn’t so much about hearing the music as it is about feeling it.  They can feel the vibrations, especially of the bass.  Additionally, many people at the concert, both hearing and not, had balloons.  A balloon amplifies the vibrations from the speakers.  Holding the balloon makes it easier to feel the music.  I highly recommend giving it a try. 

The lyrics themselves were really clever.  He rapped about deaf culture and deaf life, about problems communicating, but also celebrating the culture and the benefits of belonging.  I’ve included two videos of his songs below. I thought it was a great event and a great experience. 

TED: Globalizing the Local, Localizing the Global

Yes, I'm a TED junkie.  I thought this video about progressive movements in the Middle East, Qatar in particular, was very eye opening.  I hope you will take the time to view it.  It emphasizes the role of culture and identity in an increasingly global world where we struggle against what at times is a flood of pressure to conform to other's expectations of who we are and what we should be.

John Haidt: Religion and Life

I've tagged this video because I think it emphasizes a point I've been trying to make. I am a nontheist (if you've read my blog at all you've figured this out).  However, I am not a evangelical nontheist.  Religion has been an important part of people's lives for over thousands of years.  I personally don't have any use for it, you know this.  However, I recognize that it does play a central role in the lives of others.  So long as that leads to, what one might call, a liberal Christian interpretation of the Bible and the rights that are due to others as members of the species homo sapiens, then I have no beef with religion.  It is when religion encroaches on democracy, when we can no longer talk to each other, do I get bothered.  I feel the same about militant atheism.  It is equally unproductive.  That being said, enjoy the video.  I feel we as atheists have a lot to learn from religion, and a duty to correct the mistakes made in the name of it.

The Religiosity of Music

“More than one hundred years before Beethoven, stone deaf, had heard the imaginary music of stringed instruments expressing his inmost thoughts and feelings. He had made signs with ink on ruled paper. A century later four Hungarians had reproduced from the printed reproduction of Beethoven’s scribble that music which Beethoven had never heard except in his imagination. Spiral grooves on a surface of shellac remembered their playing. The artificial memory revolved, a needle travelled in its grooves, and through a faint scraping and roaring that mimicked the noises of Beethoven’s own deafness, the audible symbols of Beethoven’s convictions and emotions quivered out into the air” (Huxley, 428)

I wrote a paper, it’ll be three years ago, about an ‘object’ that evokes a religious experience. Having never had a religious experience it was a difficult assignment. The class was advanced philosophy of religion and it was populated predominately by atheists and agnostics. There were a few religious people in the class, but interestingly enough none of the objects the religious chose to present on where actually affiliated with what someone might call established religion.

Many of us, well, nearly all of us, chose music. It was a trend the professor had noticed. Each year a greater percentage of his class would choose music as an object of religious experience. I would like to reflect on the why of those choices and possible motivating reasons.

I chose Rufus Wainwright’s version of the Agnus Dei. We were using Rudolf Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy as a model of dissecting what qualified as a religious object. The Wainwright song fit, at least to my mind, because of the emotions in invoked, its otherness, its darkness, the transition from minor and strange abruptly to a full and resounding major chorus. I was raised Catholic and so there is a very subjective reason why the song speaks to me. I used to sing the Agnus Dei, play it on trumpet and French horn. I used to be a musician in ensembles so I had a theoretical understanding of music. This personal experience led to the song being more meaningful for me than for others. Then again, this seems to be a hallmark of religious experience. It is deeply personal. It’s like jazz, “if you have to ask, you ain’t never gonna know”. There was something profound in its invocation, something that surely pointed to something other, something outside itself.

Music is problematic from a philosophical standpoint. On the one hand it is abstraction. The notes on the page stand for something, they’re at a remove from the immediate experience of hearing music. Moreover, there is not a principled reason (at least to my knowledge) why minor chords should sound sad or lonely. Why should certain frequencies (the one over period of oscillation) should have that quality when heard? At least, not unless there was something more to music than its playing and perception.

I’ve just finished Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint. In the novel there is a passage where one character, Spandrell, is desperately trying to believe in or find God and his last argument, his last resource, is music. This argument is ruthlessly knocked down by Rampion, a man who has a very Nietzschean view of human nature, disagrees because he sees music as an attempt for man to be more than what man is. The argument becomes, and the same for religious experience, does it refer to something outside of itself. If I have a religious experience, does it mean anything outside of what I felt? Just because I had what could be called an otherworldly experience, does it refer in fact to something outside of the world?

The argument in music’s case, as far as Spandrell pushed it, was summed up in this question, “Did the music refer to nothing outside itself and the idiosyncrasies of its inventor?” (427). Rampion thinks that it does not. Music is music. It is personal, experiential, but just because it is does not mean that it points to anything beyond itself, anything beyond human experience.

Maybe the reason myself and so many of the nontheists in the class chose music as our religious object is because of this perceived disconnect. Spandrell I feel would agree with us. Choose music, it’s somehow holy even if we don’t believe in anything holy. It points to something other. Rampion would laugh at the whole class and our project. Good try students, but you’re looking for something that isn’t there. Music reduced is still just music. It doesn’t refer, nor should it. Even so, the immediate experience of it is powerful, even for us who really don’t believe much of anything in the way of religious reality.

If anything this post has just been a series of musings and nothing very substantial. Oh well I guess. It’s a theme I’d like to explore given more time, more reading, and more musings. Perhaps the next book on my list to read should be Godel, Escher, Bach.

Either way, enjoy Rufus Wainwright’s Agnus Dei.

The Happy Secret to Better Work

"The absence of disease is not health". This quote stuck with me from the video. It's a great presentation, for one, using humor to create a positive atmosphere to give a presentation on positive psychology. I would like to try some of his ideas at the end on how to rewire the brain to think more positively.

And get back to the gym. That would be helpful.

The Consolations of Reading

I want to address the role of culture, and specifically literature, in bringing comfort and solace to people (specifically me, since this is, well, my personal blog).

I read literature, the so called “classics”, because they hold within them kernels of wisdom. The edges of those pages are dotted with my annotations and notes. I find little bits of advice that resonate something important. I can read a book different times and in different moods and find that the meaning changes, what I find was previously overlooked.

This quote I particularly liked from Aldous Huxley’s The Genius and the Goddess, “That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors” (pg 47, Huxley, Harper Perennial). I think this is true enough, to say something obvious. We often grapple with complex feelings and have only clichéd avenues of expressing them.

This is why I am partial to another de Botton quote from The Consolations of Philosophy:

“It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them, our pencil lines and annotations in the margins of their books and our borrowings from them indicating where we find a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our own minds are made” (pg 161, de Botton, Vintage).

These are a few reasons I enjoy reading. I find scattered pieces of myself and others I know in the works of those far brighter than I, and far older. Like those who look up to the sky and know how small they truly are, so too does literature and philosophy remind me how little I really know.

Do you have a favorite quote or book? Please share it with me.

Edinburgh Bluez Cruize, 2011

Following my trend of dance posts, I decided to mock up a video of the blues exchange I went to last summer in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was the Edinburgh Bluez Cruize, still one of my favorite exchanges. It was my first exchange since WCLX 2010, the previous year.

I met a lot of great people who reminded me why I should get back to dancing. I do in some sense owe them for the fantastic weekend I had in Ann Arbor.

Edinburgh Bluez Cruize 2011 from Ross Blythe on Vimeo.

Pirate Swing: The Rundown

I didn’t want this blog to be a diary, but I do want to mention my weekend and how it fit in with some thoughts of mine.

As I mentioned in my last post (http://rethinkmundane.blogspot.com/2012/03/meaningful-calendar-years-dancing.html) dancers often travel to other cities for workshops, social exchanges, etc, to meet new people and improve their dancing (or just party, because, well, do that, too). I had the opportunity to do all three this past weekend by going to Pirate Swing in Ann Arbor, MI. It was a five-hour drive from where I live to the event. I was fortunate to have a great traveling companion who put up with my pseudo-lectures about music, dancing, relationships, and secular life (she was of my basic metaphysical persuasion, so it was a comfortable topic).

Upon arrival, Friday, we jumped right into a class on socially acceptable ways to lift a partner in a dance. Immediately following we jumped into three hours of life music, then one hour of late night blues. Tired, we went back to our host’s house to sleep and clean up for the rest of the weekend: the workshop portion.

In the morning I tried out for the advanced track classes. I was excited to make it in, on the last dance no less. The advanced classes were, well, advanced! Even if I remembered only one thing from each class, I feel I became a much better dancer than before the class. For that day, Saturday, I took over 6 hours of classes, followed by 6 hours of dancing in the evening.

For Saturday evening we were graced by the music of Christabel and the Jons (http://christabelmusic.com/). I highly recommend this band, especially for their blues songs. Also, because it was Pirate Swing, there were people dancing in pirate costumes, some more functional for dancing than others. One of my favorite dances of the evening came at about 3am, to “O Mary Don’t You Weep”, the cover by Bruce Springsteen. But I can honestly say I didn’t have a bad dance the entire weekend. Everyone was wonderful. The people were fantastic.

Sunday was our last class, followed by dancing at Guy Hollerin’, food, drink, and dancing. I can’t think of a better combination. Unless it is food, drink, dancing, and good company to do it with. There was a Sunday late night party with blues and booze. It was a great way to unwind after a tiring but amazing weekend. I was reminded of why I love dancing in the first place and why I need to travel more than I do.

Another lesson we seculars can learn from religious calendars: the weekly stuff can get boring, but every now and then there is a festival occasion that reminds us why we stick around. Pirate Swing felt like one long party, even when it was work, because we love what we do. Dancing isn’t why I breathe, but it sure helps.

Meaningful Calendar Years: Dancing, Mostly

Given my recent reflections on secular life and its relation to religion, I began thinking about the parallels between dancing and religion. One of my earlier posts was Alain de Botton’s talk at TED Edinburgh on secular religion (watch it http://rethinkmundane.blogspot.com/2012/02/alain-de-botton-atheism-20.html) and certain aspects of religion that secular people can learn from. An idea I’ve been thinking about is a Secular ‘Liturgical’ calendar. The idea is that a secular ‘religion’ would have a calendar that directed thought towards various important topics or ideas at points throughout the year. What kinds of festivals would a secular religion that values inquiry, rational thought, and humanism have? I don’t have an answer, but I’d like to pursue this line of thought with someone.

But this brought me to dancing, specifically swing and blues dancing, and how our dance calendars can be like liturgical calendars. I have weekly meetings with my dance club, something like ‘worship’ where we all gather together to dance. We have weekly lessons that meet outside of the larger community togetherness time (sort of like Bible study). And we have pilgrimages. We travel; at least the more devout of us do, to other cities, sometimes other countries (Herrang Dance Camp is like our Mecca http://www.herrang.com/) to see other dancers in other dance halls, sometimes repeatedly, year after year. It becomes tradition to go certain places at certain times of year.

There are even orthodoxies and unorthodoxies in swing dance. For Lindy Hop, there are straight Lindy Hoppers…and then there are people like me who like their Lindy a little less fundamentalist and a little more playful. And with Charleston it can be the same thing. Even in blues there is a strict interpretation of what is acceptable practice and what is not.

Like a church, mosque, or synagogue, dancing fosters a community with similar, if not always the same, values and outlook. We differ in a lot of ways, us dancers, but we do share in basic loves of movement and music. And with our schedules we are oriented towards thinking about what we enjoy doing, where we enjoy dancing, and who we enjoy dancing with, whether they be Balboa or Blues, Lindy Hop or Charleston, or if we’re the Unitarian Universalists of swing, Fusion.

And we need this is the secular world, or at least I think we do. I have a framework like that in dancing, but it’s not true that every person who is nontheistic is a dancer, and every dancer doesn’t necessarily engage in the dance calendar (think Easter Catholics, and I can make that joke because I used to be Catholic). My musings on that will follow soon.

So if dancing can be a religion, I wonder if I can put that on the next census.