Bars

July 31, 2011 – 6:35 am

I write this on the bar counter of Grand Prize, where a red light casts a glare like a broken bottle on the road side over every surface. There’s a din around me but when I pause to listen the music stops. “I’m thinking…”, “It’s you. Push it out now.” These conversations go on without me. There are moments when you become aware that you are of no consequence to your surroundings. You have become like a tile in the floor of the room’s subconscious. No one could offer you an alibi. It is not that you are inconsequential, but that no one is conscious of you.

It’s like being an invisible man who flickers on and off. At any moment someone will notice: the bartender realizes that that guy’s drink is empty; another lonely stranger eyes an empty seat but hesitates because of the man writing fervently in the next seat. Writing draws attention here because the mind does not have the imagination to block blot him out.

I have two responses to being the invisible man. Either to feel lonely and grasp for attention; or to feel powerful and watch with distant satisfaction.

…

Earlier on a bicycle I passed through Rice University. The pavement fit smooth and seamless under the wheels. There was not a cloud in the sky but wisps curling around the edge of the horizon. Rice has a marvelous sky above it. You pass under oaks whose limbs blot out the light, and you emerge under an endless canopy. It feels as though you have stepped into a desert after wandering around a forest. The buildings aid the effect; they are low or feel low even though they rise in multiple stories. Compare the average height of a University of Texas building to a Rice one and I bet that difference is too small to account for the dwarfish their stature. Rice structures are all horizontally striped and nearly monochrome. I took a picture in the courtyard, facing the statue of the founder and the arched gates, which look as though they were made to keep out a barbarian horde. You can only tell they were not because there is no door, no bridge or mote or portcullis, and you are photographing it all.

…

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The People Value

June 7, 2011 – 5:32 am

I found out today that I got into business school. I wasn’t overjoyed and realized I felt like a volunteer for a war effort who’s being shipped off to the front lines and thinks, my god, what have I gotten myself into.

That’s when the volunteer becomes a real soldier. (or deserter?)

My biggest fear in going to business school is that i’ll start seeing people as numbers, as market categories, as overhead costs. I’ve worked hard to see each person as unique. To blow apart categories. This is my attitude as a poet.

But when i buy sneakers i see people as numbers. i see the price tag, not the person. I might, if the store is empty, see the salesperson. But I don’ see the workers who made the shoe; the transporters who shipped it; the marketers who judged it; the designers who invented it. And I certainly don’t see the persons who make up any of those categories.

Biz people know exactly why their products and services cost what they do, who makes them and who they affect and how. They know this better than anyone else. They can’t hide behind ignorance when others finally see the person in the number, a person overworked and underpaid. (Yet researchers/academics are around to unearth the unaccounted externalities of companies, b/c companies try to hide them.)

That knowledge and responsibility should be an an incentive to act humanely. But we know the incentive fails all the time. I intend to figure out how it’ll work for me.

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Perspective

May 24, 2011 – 6:34 am

A bug climbs the hairs of my arm as I type. It has no clue how lucky it is to have a kind God rule over its landscape.

When Gods see themselves as people, people are safe from Gods and only have to worry about each other.

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Goals and Monsters

May 19, 2011 – 1:51 am

I had a dream that I was climbing a ladder of human bodies to reach a ship that I had fallen from. The people broke off the ladder as I stepped on them, screaming and cursing. They fell and disappeared and I had to look away to keep going. I had a choice in this dream: to step on people to reach the end of the human ladder or become another rung.

Is this how ambition operates outside of dreams?

No: Only cheaters act inhumane as they break rules to reach a goal.

I avoid phone calls when I’m busy. I tell little white lies and skip out on exercise and eat more cookies. In pursuit of a goal, the habits which maintain the fiction that I’m human cease.

Is this because I’m not human enough–without enough compassion and competence–to chase the goal without cutting corners, or because the goal itself produces inhumanity regardless of who pursues it?

When you stop acting inhuman–by shutting people out of your life, treating your body like trash, neglecting other duties–your goals may become unreachable. But even if you achieved those goals, who would want to reward a monster?

Not me.

In 2009, the US government bombed Al Majalah in Yemen, an alleged Al Qaeda training facility. Forty civilians were killed or injured. When pursuing death in order to protect lives, the lives of others is an inconvenience.

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The Horizon Problem by Peter Kachtik, Guest Writer

May 17, 2011 – 4:07 pm

A few years ago, I became aware of an aspect of life that I think of as the “horizon problem”. The name refers to a visual analogy, so let me start with that:

Imagine you are driving across the Midwest. The highway stretches away, straight and level, both in front of you and behind. On either side, flat grassland stretches away to the horizon without so much as a ripple or hillock. Only the occasional farm house or lone tree provides a brief interruption to the unbroken line of the horizon. In fact, everywhere you look, that flat and level line of the horizon lies the same distance away.

You start to think, “I must be in the exact middle of the world. Everywhere else is either near one edge or another, but I am in the center.”

Then you drive 20 miles more and look around. You see exactly the same thing: yourself in the center with the horizon equally distant all around. In fact, the place you originally thought to be the middle of the world is no longer even visible from here.

Twenty more miles yields the same, and the next twenty after that.

This image, I think, represents how many of us view our political, religious, and cultural ideologies. Whatever worldview we hold, we see it as the rational center of an ideological landscape surrounded on all sides by irrational, fringe positions. Whether you are a Democrat looking at a Republican, an industrialist looking at an environmentalist, or a secular humanist looking at a Christian, wherever you stand seems the most reasonable place to be, while those who disagree with you seem to occupy some sort of extreme position.

What we often don’t acknowledge, however, is that the people holding those positions see themselves as occupying the rational center of their own landscape, surrounded on all sides by distant fringe of which we ourselves are a part.

While this analogy yields many interesting consequences, I wish to highlight two:

First, if everyone is the center of their own landscape, then no matter how far someone seems from you, you will probably find that they see someone else even further away. No matter how extreme you think a religious fundamentalist or militant atheist or political ideologue is, you will usually find that they know of a more extreme position that they think goes “too far”.

Second, just as with the physical landscape, distant ideas may appear closer to each other than they actually are. In other words, the differences between ideas that are close to our own will seem large and significant, while the differences between ideas that are far away will seem small and insignificant.

Let me illustrate with my own experience:

Growing up in an Evangelical Christian household, the difference between Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism seemed incredibly important. As I moved away from that ideology, however, the difference between those two positions grew smaller and smaller until they now seem almost indistinguishable. Likewise, from my initial position, ideas like Atheism and Pantheism seemed very similar: neither believed in Jesus as the One True God, so what was the difference? Again, as I crossed the theological landscape I came to see that these positions were almost as distant from each other as either was from my starting point.

In politics, ethics, and human relationships I have found much the same thing.

I do not think the lack of an absolute center or absolute edge means that all positions are the same, but recognizing the “horizon problem” may help undermine the temptation to dismiss those we strongly disagree with as kooks, idiots, or even liars. If, instead, we can acknowledge that what our opponents are saying may seem not only reasonable but obvious from where they stand, perhaps we can step outside of our own position, cross the gap, and see the world as they see it. Doing so may reveal new horizons that we never knew existed.

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Guest Blogs

May 17, 2011 – 12:17 am

This week I’m going to publish the first of a series of guest blogs.

A round of voices should help erode the cockiness of any individual one. In The
Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that the ancient Greeks approved when the God’s taxed hubristic heros because the Greek city-states themselves had to team together to crush one that grew too powerful, threatening the others with vassalage.

As the hero of my own world, I’m bringing in the God’s to show me some humility. Get ready.

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The X-Men Generation.

May 10, 2011 – 4:29 pm

The X and Y Generations are both the X-Men Generation. We both want to be young, sexy, and powerful, and we’re prepared to be mutants or freaks to do it.

Mutants overcome their fear of rejection by being too powerful to be rejected; they handle solitude by having adventures everyone else wants to know about; they affirm their uniqueness through the use of their super power and in doing so create their own subculture; and even as society beats them down, they still strive to save it.

Our creative generation is nearly the same with the difference that we are arguably superhuman cyborgs–mobile phones + talking cars + bluetooth + treadmill = superhuman cyborg–who overcome solitude by making it worth talking about (blogs and status updates).

Like the superpower of the mutant which makes each one special, our culture considers each person unique in some way and makes the demand of each one to accept, even highlight, that uniqueness. Think of interviewers asking what you bring to the table; the pressure to create your own style (all that money parents shell out on their teenager’s clothing); the DIY craft culture.

Mutants have the power to save the world but they have to save themselves first. Their struggle is both psychological (accepting themselves) and physical (battling evil). Wolverine, Spiderman (technically not an X-Man), Thor (technically not a mutant), Harry Potter (technically a wizard), Gandolf (definitely a wizard)–all these characters resonate with us as models for how to accept a newly discovered power.

Harry Potter was given his magic; his struggle was to accept the responsibility of his gift. Is that not what we struggle with? How to understand the gift of life augmented by the additional powers bestowed on us by technology?

The future of fictional role models will offer increasingly bizarre characters who are hybrids of many things–computers, monsters, models, geniuses, and warriors. The fictional types are one kind; Lady Gaga is just the first big example of one of these in real life.

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Check in

May 10, 2011 – 3:56 pm

Because I’m studying a bunch, I’m cutting down on blog posts. My plan is to have two per week for May, then get back to posting nearly every day. But until then my posts will be eclipsed by the far better work of guests. When you read their posts you’ll wish I had to study forever.

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Counting on the kindness of strangers makes you go insane; better to be pleasantly surprised.

May 9, 2011 – 8:09 am

I treasure my allies, but a treasure can become a cage. Think of Dragons. Joseph Campbell says the dragon envisioned in European myth lies asleep guarding troves of gold in their caves, unable to itself or to let anyone else enjoy what the gold may bring.

I have to remember not to guard my allies like a dragon over its gold.

I’m thinking about this because, after setting new goals, I’m astonished to discover friends and supporters rising to my side to help me.

And I’m so charmed by their kindness that I want to bottle it up to hold in my pocket or train it to go on walks with me in a park.

But friends are not your property; they aren’t pets that will always be there to comfort and adore you. Steve Covey says they aren’t bank accounts that you can withdraw from endlessly; you have to make deposits.

One of my favorite viewpoints is summed up in the phrase, “A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet.” I heard it first from a happy centenarian in a video on living well and living long.

But I wonder if a mobster would say, “A friend is just a person I haven’t asked too many favors of.”

Allies, friends, supporters–they seem to resist being held onto just like teenagers resist being loved by their parents. Expect too much of them and they’ll begin to purposefully give you little.
…
…
When you assess the property value of a potential friend, you’re the stereotypical business person.

When you see the intrinsic value in everyone, discounting the person’s value to you, you’re the stereotypical spiritualist.

Both tendencies are needed in the same person, especially a leader, and the test of their presence is:

Can you see how people may help you do good without becoming blind to how they are already good just by being?

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Fitting In.

May 4, 2011 – 8:03 am

All of a sudden I’ve decided very seriously to apply to graduate school. The prospect frightens me, to be honest, and while I was glancing at myself in the mirror during a study break I wished I had had on a mask. A mask and costume that a warrior would wear, protecting the whole body and frightening opponents, concealing the fear within.

There are traditions of peoples being bathed in the magical body paints of shamans to ward off bullets and counter hexes. That’s the kind of costume I want. Something immersive and brain washing.

But the costume I wear everyday makes me blend in. No one looking at me treats me as though I’m preparing for battle, though I am.

The psychologist Carl Jung came up with the word persona to describe the social costumes we wear to hide our true selves. Persona means mask in Latin.

So we all wear personas. Big deal. I want to know why some personas are more conspicuous than others.

Do different conspicuous costumes have something in common?
The goth.
The business person.
The punk.
The anarchist.
The professor.

Each of these visages sets the wearer apart as much as war paint would. I’ve heard people who wear these costumes called freaks.

(It’s important to point out that I’m thinking of these costumes when they are not worn for work. Many business people continue to wear their business persona even in recreation.)

I have a hypothesis for why I don’t wear freakish costumes: most people will judge me, dislike me on first impression, and think I’m a freak. Most people believe the freak is trying to hide or suffocate a nature under that costume. Under the freak’s costume is the normal nature, i.e., the nature of the majority, the natural costume of most people. That nature under the freak’s costume is what viewers see themselves as having. When freaks try to rid themselves of the normal costume, in effect they are trying to rid themselves of us. We, the normal ones, they hate. And we think this because the costume of the freak obliterates in the freak what most resembles us.

It is like a ritual of war. You dress up to distinguish yourself from your enemy and know your friends. You know your enemies because they look nothing like you and your friends.

But I don’t want anyone to mistake me for an enemy–even for an instant. And I don’t want to take sides with a subculture.

And yet I have a good reason to want to squelch the costume of the normal me. This normal me, the mask of the majority, shepherds me into the herd. Studying for a graduate exam exacerbates the paradox: how do you help yourself feel and act exceptional when you don’t wish to be mistaken for unusual?

Courage. For once agreeing that perception is everything. Getting a fashionista to fashion a costume that frightens an exam only.

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