August 2014 – Page 2

Three Weeks From Now

by Bill McKibben

A lot of us who care about climate change will be marching through the streets of New York. If you want information, it’s here.

Several people have written in to ask me what good it does to march. Wouldn’t it be better to have a carbon tax? And there are people – some of them sincere, some of them concern trolls – writing in to say, “you’ll be using fossil fuel to get all those buses full of people to New York.” It would be better to have a price on carbon, and we will be using diesel to bus people to New York – all true.

But 25 years after I started writing about climate change, I’ve come to believe a few basic things.

One, we have long known much that we need to do to start addressing the issue (job one is to put a serious price on carbon, and stop letting Exxon use the atmosphere as a free sewer). Two, we won’t do these things as long as the power of the fossil fuel companies remains so powerful – we will continue to move in the direction of renewable energy because it makes sense, but we will do so too slowly to make a dent in climate change. Three, the power of the fossil fuel companies is a function of their money, which buys more influence than their arguments deserve; in fact, scientists long ago won the argument on climate change, they’ve just lost the fight. Four, the only thing that can match the power of that money is the power of movements. They’re hard and slow work to build, but when they reach a certain point they can change the zeitgeist, and suddenly segregation is obviously disgusting, gay marriage is obviously common sense, and so on.

I’m not certain we’ll get to that point – movements don’t always work. But I am certain that we won’t get there without one. And I’m certain too that even if we knew the odds were low we should march. Part of it is simply to bear witness, to say: when scientists issued their warnings, some portion of our species paid attention. It would be fun to see some of you there.

(Image: MIT students posing as science superheroes yesterday as they recruit their colleagues for the climate march)

Finding The Words For Wonder

by Dish Staff

W.S. Merwin recites his poem “Yesterday”:

Fiona Sampson appreciates how the poems in The Moon before Morning, the former Poet Laureate’s latest volume, “don’t explore topics so much as enact a kind of close attention to them that is indistinguishable from rapture”:

The movement and music of these poems is so involving that it’s easy to miss their underlying world view. Everything is connected, and everything is also always in motion. If Merwin were a philosopher, we would call him a pre-Socratic and place him alongside Heraclitus: “Even if I were to return it would not be / the place we came to one evening down a narrow lane / […] leading down to the edge of a small river” as his poem ‘Still’ says. If Merwin were a physicist he would belong with Robert Brown of Brownian motion.

Other poets have tried to capture this perpetual motion. Fredrich Hölderlin wrote about the “on-rushing word”; Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s rapturous wordiness attempted to act out revolutionary motion. But Merwin shows us that the discipline of attention, “a time of waiting / hoping to hear”, is enough.

Calling Merwin one of the few great living poets, Sampson adds a recommendation: “Read him while he is still contemporary.”

Philosophize Hard

by Dish Staff

Tom Hawking is “100 percent serious” about acknowledging Andrew W.K. (of “Party Hard” fame) as a philosopher for our times. He cites W.K.’s recent response to a reader of his Village Voice advice column who asked him why he’s so obsessed with “partying”:

In his answer to the question, Andrew W.K. took the opportunity to set out his views on life: “I take joy very seriously, and partying is the formal pursuit of celebration itself.” He argues that expression of joy is fundamental to our nature: “Believing that joy is wrong is the most violent disrespect to our inherent nature as loving, pleasure seeking creatures. Let us elevate ourselves and embrace our highest and mightiest capacity for happiness.” And, ultimately, he suggests that it’s from this that one can derive some sort of meaning for existence: “This life is our chance to unleash as much joy onto the world as we can.” Y’know what that is? That’s philosophy.

He evaluates W.K. as a “secular humanist”:

His idea of partying recalls the pleasure principle one of the very earliest humanists, Epicurus (although, in fairness, Epicureanism would probably frown on partying ’til you puke). There’s also a healthy dose of existentialism in there: when he asks “What’s all the rest of this madness for otherwise?”, he’s confronting the concept of the absurd, and in suggesting that the meaning we derive from our lives is “to remain at play and in awe, not to mock the severity of our collective plight, but to truly stay engaged in the bewildering and ferocious grandeur of this adventure we’re on together,” he’s come up with a strategy that sounds a lot more fun than embracing Kierkegaard’s answer (religious faith, basically) or resigning yourself to pushing a Sisyphean rock up a hill for all eternity. … [T]he point is that Andrew W.K. is addressing very similar questions to those that get addressed in philosophy departments around the world every day — and he’s doing so for a much larger audience (including, by the way, that of the student union at Oxford University, where he gave a talk titled “The Philosophy of Partying” a couple of months back.)

A Poem For Sunday

by Alice Quinn

Many 16^th and 17th Century English poets were also musicians—perhaps chief among them Thomas Campion (1567-1620). Campion’s ayres were often pirated before he could publish them himself, and in a note introducing a selection of them, he wryly addresses this issue, “To be brief, all these songs are mine, if you express them well; otherwise they are your own. Farewell.”

Peter Warlock, composer and scholar of Elizabethan music, felt Campion was “at his best in half serious songs” of “deliciously pretty tunes.” The jaunty one below is one of my favorites, from the Book of Ayres (1601).

“I Care Not for These Ladies” by Thomas Campion:

I care not for these ladies,
That must be wooed and prayed,
Give me kind Amarillis
The wanton country maid;
Nature art disdaineth,
Her beauty is her own;
Her when we court and kiss,
She cries, forsooth, let go.
But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say no.

If I love Amarillis,
She gives me fruit and flowers,
But if we love these ladies,
We must give golden showers,
Give them gold that sell love,
Give me the nutbrown lass,
Who when we court and kiss,
She cries, forsooth, let go.
But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say no.

These ladies must have pillows,
And beds by strangers wrought,
Give me a bower of willows,
Of moss and leaves unbought,
And fresh Amarillis,
With milk and honey fed,
Who, when we court and kiss,
She cries, forsooth, let go.
But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say no.

(Photo of an Amaryllis flower by Thangaraj Kumaravel)

Face Of The Day

by Dish Staff

Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher photographed Westerners who traveled to India to find enlightenment. Alyssa Coppelman comments on their three-part series, The Searchers:

There is, of course, a difference between delving seriously into the practice of meditation—something the world’s population would no doubt benefit from—and donning another culture’s clothing in what could be perceived as an effort to zip-line one’s way to nirvana. It’s as if the holy experience is in the costume rather than in the practice, and the state of mind they’re legitimately in search of is being reduced to an inappropriate Halloween costume.—even if it’s not really the case. What role does wearing robes or a turban play in bringing the wearer closer to their goals? From the outside, some of them look like they’re wearing a Halloween costume—which is why, accurate or not, it also evokes “Columbusing,” the recently-popular term for the age-old practice of cultural appropriation. And yet, this is all a part of Bezzubov and Sucher’s examination of the subject, and it is their openness to and acknowledgment of this implicit facet that makes this series so engrossing and appealing.

See more of their work here.

Quote For The Day

by Dish Staff

“I don’t know Who – or what – put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

From that moment I have know what it means ‘not to look back,’ and ‘to take no thought for the morrow.’

Led by Ariadne’s thread of my answer through the labyrinth of Life, I came to a time and place where I realized that the Way leads to a triumph which is a catastrophe, and to a catastrophe which is a triumph, that the price for committing one’s life would be reproach, and the the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation. After that, the word ‘courage’ lost its meaning, since nothing could be taken from me.

As I continued along the Way, I learned, step by step, word by word, that behind every saying in the Gospels stands one man and one man’s experience. Also behind the prayer that the cup might pass from him and his promise to drink it. Also behind each of the words from the Cross,” – Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings.

The Devil And Flannery O’Connor

by Dish Staff

Ralph C. Wood claims that for her, “as for ancient Christian tradition, Satan is something far more sinister than the sum total of human ill will”:

[F]or all that is traditional in her conception of Satan, O’Connor is concerned not to make him obvious, lest he be easily dismissed as a bogeyman. In fact, her demons disguise themselves in thoroughly Freudian and Jungian terms. Freud regarded Satan as nothing other than a symbol, albeit a powerful one, of repressed erotic desires or else of neuroses lying deep within the unconscious, often negatively projected “onto individuals or groups that we identify as enemies or potential enemies.” In the work of Jung, Freud’s student, Lucifer represents the massive destructive energy resident in the universe as it stands over against the equally enormous constructive powers that Jung links to the divine. Yet for Jung, Lucifer’s name still applies: He is the light-bearer whose demonic negativity dwells in a mandala-like complementarity with divine positivity. Only as good incorporates evil into itself, Jung teaches, can higher wisdom and wholeness be attained.

It is noteworthy that, when I ask students to identify the voice that speaks inwardly to young Francis Marion Tarwater from the very beginning of the novel [The Violent Bear It Away], they respond in Jungian and Freudian ways. They almost always answer that this “stranger” who gradually becomes Tarwater’s “friend” is the boy’s sub-conscious mind, his inward self, his alter ego. Such obtuseness is as predictable as it is inexcusable. Yet it plays perfectly into O’Connor’s fictional purposes. Far from being an artistic failure, her ploy enables her readers, at least potentially, to experience Francis Marion Tarwater’s own terrible awakening to the true identity of his inner voice.

(Image of the Devil depicted in the Temptation of Christ, by Ary Scheffer, 1854, via Wikimedia Commons)

Get Your Drone On – In Church!

by Dish Staff

Believe it or not, Pastor Ed Young of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, thought it would be a great idea to run the above ad in Dallas-area movie theaters earlier this month to publicize a sermon series he was about to start. Matthew Gault offers the cringe-inducing details, expressing disappointment that Young “equates God with a weapon of war”:

Young sermonized drones over three consecutive Sundays in the middle of August at his Grapevine megachurch. Fellowship Church recorded the sermons and simulcast them at its nine satellite locations. Most of the churches are in Texas, a few in Florida and one in far away London. Videos of all three sermons are on YouTube.

The sermons begin with a slick video of a drone flying over a city. A live band plays in the background. A huge model drone looms on stage. Smoke billows from underneath it. Young emerges—a grin on his face—to explain his thinking on killer robots.

“Drones are everywhere,” Young says. “They can see things we never thought possible. Well, God makes a drone seem like a drone doesn’t know a thing.”

Young explains that he first encountered drones while filming a reality TV series. While sitting on the back of a boat, he heard a strange noise and looked up to see a buzzing camera drone belonging to the film crew. “This would be a pretty cool series—drones,” Young says. “Love them or leave them, they’re everywhere. I immediately thought about God.”

Scripture Is Overrated

by Dish Staff

Or so Razib Khan suspects:

[O]n an individual level religious belief and practice does not seem rooted at all in texts. Though one can make broad correspondences and draw arrows of causality, with an understanding at a lower and more fine-grained scale this model has as much validity as Galenic medicine. It captures fragments of reality and presents it before us in a persuasive fashion, but at a deeper level of inspection it fails to explain the basic mechanics of religious belief. …

Like the coffee table book that one proudly displays, the value of scriptures is that is a visible marker and a common point of reference, as opposed to an instruction manual. In Theological Incorrectness the author explores the reality that religious people don’t even seem to believe what they say they believe on a deep level. For example, monotheists and polytheists seem to have the same internal model of the supernatural world, despite their explicit verbal scripts being very different. To put this in another context, many people who espouse views which deny the existence of the supernatural still get “spooked” in a dark cemetery. Why? They are sincere in their belief that there are no ghosts and demons in the dark, but in the deep recesses of their minds reflexive intuitions honed over evolutionary time remain at the ready, alert for any sign of danger in the darkness. Similarly, most religious people may believe sincerely in a glorious afterlife, but when there is a gun to their head they may soil themselves nonetheless.

Camera-Free Moviemaking

by Dish Staff

Storm de Hirsch’s 1965 experimental short Peyote Queen is NSFW:

Amber Frost looks at De Hirsch’s legacy as “the woman who made movies without a camera“:

De Hirsch was actually a published poet before transitioning to film, and as such didn’t have ready access to a camera early on. Her first improvisational techniques were innovative manipulations of whatever film was just lying around at the time, making her as much a “sculptor” of celluloid as a filmmaker. The results of her experiments are now recognized as foundational films in avant-garde cinema. In an interview with [filmmaker Jonas Mekas], she spoke of her early work, like Peyote Queen, saying:

I wanted badly to make an animated short, but I had no camera available. I did have some old, unused film stock and several rolls of 16mm sound tape. So I used that—plus a variety of discarded surgical instruments and the sharp edge of a screwdriver — by cutting, etching, and painting directly on both film and [sound] tape.

Andrew Rosinski concluded that “it’s quite apparent that De Hirsch was somewhat inebriated while filming the sequence”:

Eventually the images flicker to technicolored hieroglyphs and what appears to be tiger (or some other big cat) claw scratch patterns. This is one of the strongest moments of the film; this queues spacey, reverb-drowned basement music. Soon the technicolor tiger claw scratches melt into dancing, human-like lines, and this is intercut with the progressive symbolism of the glyphs — breasts, fish, water, stars, the moon, female lips, seemingly a sailboat — De Hirsch represents these prehistoric glyphs by painting directly on the film stock. Unique, psychedelic motifs such as these certify Peyote Queen as an avant-garde gem.