First Sermon: Symmetry

Symmetry is the basis of human beauty. Proper proportion and balance. It can also make a strange design look captivating when mirrored to form a whole. This is to say, when asymmetry is evenly mirrored, it becomes part of a larger symmetry.

Of course, the example in this image is one of truly infinite and equal examples. We have all been so thoroughly familiar with the concept, really since birth, that discussing it seems as vacuous as contemplating the color of the sky. But the reason it is so intuitive is what interests me--not for the pure sake of intuition, but how and why it is intuitive. A better way to express this follows how we perceive it: balance.

Fox News compulsively (and usually emptily) trademarks every report of theirs as "fair and balanced". Third party observers in general are supposed to bring a balanced perspective. When a unicycle is perfectly balanced, it has no velocity. The rider has to carefully apply biased weight to one direction in order to move, and it is the same for any arena in life. This is why Republicans of today scoff at negotiations with terrorists, because in principle it is an attempt to balance what they perceive to be an inherently, morally asymmetrical situation. That is to say, if we are to say that God and Satan are equals, it brings religion and the "good" to a standstill in much the same way that a biker does not want to remain in the same place with equal attachment to his origin as that of his destination. If forward is no better than backward, relativism and balance seem to make everything grey.

Of course, this is a much calmer portrait than what conservatives would paint of this situation. If we forget (the story goes) the "sacrifices" of our men in uniform, if we trivialize 9-11 as equivalent to the Iraqi civilian deaths which followed, then it takes the wind out of our sails and allows evil to take over. The logic behind this is essentially "eat or be eaten, kill or be killed". One can't deny this is an ultimately utilitarian principle most animals have to live by to some extent, but we have to remember that we invented language and slogans and we are the only animal which applies them religiously. If an animal kills without the influence of physical need or psychological illness, we would nevertheless describe it as insane and ripe for euthanasia. Even so, one would be hard pressed to find an animal who came up with a theory about people or their pets and decided to apply it by avenging their desecration of nature. This is what the Nazis, Soviets, and Catholic Church have done historically, out of isolated "pet" theories. ...But weren't they just following the rule of symmetry? Socialism, after all, is based in equalizing the classes.

The problem with this has historically been blamed on the concepts of socialism as a perverse symmetry. To live with God is to accept asymmetry in this world, the sacred wall between divine and profane. To mix the two would certainly taint and fritter the sacred, right? My reaction to this has always instinctually been that it is a paranoid philosophical position, but it is an extraordinarily fundamental assumption for our species and this is where we begin the exodus: what if they are wrong?

Doubt is similarly an asymmetrical position. You have conceptual assertions such as "good" and "evil", and society naturally gives birth to the complementary argumentative position of doubting these assertions. It's science, literally. That is what science is, hypothesis and applied doubt. Where the hypotheses come from nobody knows, but there are infinitely more where the last one came from so there is no need to search.

By writing this blog--exploring the relationships of ideas, having a conversation (mostly with myself) while faith in categories ends discussion of their meaning--I am already trespassing the meaning of those solid categories. If the world is rigidly separated into illusion and reality, evil and good, where do I stand? To ask the question is implicitly to call the categories into question, yet we normally don't know where to take the conversation from there and so we fall back onto the categories like an inarticulate, battered but dependent girlfriend would. Would God ever doubt what made him the ultimate good? Would Satan ever call himself a moral crusader and actually believe it himself? "Conservatives" have to rely on the concept of illusions and immaturity for this latter question because the majority of their public opposition (pro-choice and anti-war activists, etc) does just this.

Well, people can be deluded, but Satan is a spirit and thus he doesn't have the same problems of confusion we do. He lies all the time and knows it, they might say. But who are "they" and who is "he"? Corner any theologian and he will confess that he can't say anything specific about what God thinks or what his role with Satan is...yet the two characters are concrete ideas for people and have a definitive, unambiguous influence on how people behave in this world. Freedom of interpretation, at this level of the discussion, is cited. To which I respond that a non-believer is the only person in a position to have a truly un-influenced interpretation of good and evil. That is, if the top officials of any religion have no answer but to say that God reveals himself to people individually and not in communicable, arguable terms, we truly have a feudal system of belief. Those who are able to acquire power over language and cultural ideas best own psychological real-estate which people must share-hold in order to satisfy their vague concern for religious matters. Those who spend enough time thinking about it realize it's open terrain while those who have no time to sit around and chit chat philosophy never reach that point of transcendence.

As Tolkien writes through his character Elrond, "Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."

Stay tuned for the punchline!

What this blog has become

So I started a long while back with no better outlet for my frustrations and pride as a razor-wielding critic of popular culture. Journals don't have soil for ideas to grow, it's all sand you're casting your seeds onto, but the fortunate thing for people like me is we have the internet these days and I can change the ground I sow. These "breadcrumbs" have sprouted into a garden this Spring in my school work, but more on that later.

"I also take the position that contemporary history is going to be retained on [music] records more accurately than it is going to be within history books," said Frank Zappa in a 1972 interview with Martin Perlich. When I remembered this today, it struck some kind of mental bell that sympathetically vibrated another cluster of neurons which tossed back this quote from Stephen A. Tyler in an essay he wrote for Writing Culture: Poetics and Politics of Ethnography in 1986, entitled "From Document of the Occult to Occult Document":

The model for postmodern ethnography is not the newspaper, but that original ethnography--the Bible.

Correlation doesn't mean similar causation, but these two quotes crested a wave building for over a century in what we religion scholars and theologians call the Social Gospel movement. The idea is that Jesus' teachings were counterintuitive--for people whose notion of the divine was objectified and lifeless. Oral histories and musical ritual are at the core of our human ingenuity, and the pants we started to put on this ability is in my opinion what started our estrangement from what we already know, what Lao Tzu and Socrates both knew before Jesus put it into language the drone could barely start to understand.

Of course, the best way to get to the total layman is Hegelian dialectical talk, and this has been a struggle for Marx critics who have to stomp out his fans like multiplying roaches. Marx was inspired by Hegel, the kind of literary philosophy he founded, to use Richard Rorty's terms. I'm throwing names at you because an oral tradition is equal parts performer and subject matter. If you're not interested, go away. Zappa continually told critics the same.

So here we have the danger of translation. Nietzsche hated the message of Christianity. I try not to judge the message or the messenger (arguably indistinguishable if they are true to its content), but hate the sin of misinterpretation so long as it is rigid.

By "the danger of translation" I mean that if people don't get a consistent grapevine, one that is living and intact through all the hands that pass it down to you, then what they get at the end of the vine is rotten grapes. You have to tell the whole story, and the story has always been bigger than any format can contain, so we hold rituals to continue the story and then after the section is over we all go back to work or bed. Not telling the whole story is what people call "heresy." For ages, the extended format of our oral storytelling has left people of the finite book to think we are babbling with no plot, just entertaining...whatever that would mean. Have you ever tried to get up in front of people without material or some emotion to communicate?

Anyway, heresy has thus become associated with those who spend their lives fighting against it. One book can never tell the whole story, but those who hide behind the book sound a lot more authoritative (performers don't author anything).

What does this have to do with rock music? Modern music in general has both been extraordinarily marketable and liberating in the West for the past century for the same reason. Blues and folk music blossomed with live translation from white boys, but that arena is luckily enough of a conversation space for the translators not to be confused with the ones who carried the message through slavery. In the 1970s and '80s, white people got a little carried away with the liberation their own open-mindedness brought, and the cohesiveness of utopian vision in the '60s died. But it rose again, according to disciples like me, in the sensibilities of '90s rock. Now the second wave has left most people just tired of the old and completely estranged from the present and future. What to do?

Well all I can say is there's a tsunami of prophetic artwork coming our way. I might write a book about it. Someone else might make a musical career out of it. We're all just telling stories and reconnecting (re-ligio: "re-attach"). Meditation doesn't just happen among neurons, it can happen in a social setting--that's what the brain is anyway. Am I calling myself a prophet? Only insofar as "prophetic" is a word most aptly used to describe things which are not profitable.

Keep yer nose clean!

What does this phrase mean? Well, now that I have returned to this blog from hiatus, I can assure you I've done my best to keep a clean nose.

Some picking was involved, some scratching at other times, rubbing...so is this piece of advice a reminder to be hygenic in your compulsive picking and scratching?

As we usually do, when a bit of cultural information seems to be vague, we end up out of necessity inventing or stitching together ideas that give it meaning. Our perception of "God" is the most obvious answer, which for me personally is onomatopoeia, but in order to explain that I'll have to postpone for another post.

How do I make sense of the phrase? First of all, it's not especially important that we know or attribute exact meaning to anything. Naturally, some words or phrases are only appropriate figuratively and as expressions. "Break a leg" refers to the abstract sense of good performance that is evoked better by this phrase than the director saying, "Now, I want you to go out there and do A, B, and C..." or "Don't screw up!" The vagueness both puts trust in the performer's own intuitive skills as well as calling attention to them.

Keep your nose clean. My interpretation of this dawned on me in relation to a ritual I participate in within my culture. Smoking the "peace-pipe," as pot smokers like me enjoy ironically referring to it, has two commonly reported effects: hyper self-consciousness and a distinct smell to the smoke. These two factors feed off of eachother within my consciousness whenever I'm in public because it is an illegal and somewhat taboo substance. So, having just coated my airways with THC vapor, airborne ash, and tar, the smell of pot not only sticks to my hair and clothes but the airways inside of my body. What happens then is that if I'm in public, my hyper-self-consciousness focuses much of my attention on how blatantly stoned I am to the outside observer. Am I walking funny? Are my eyes glowing red? Most importantly, do I reek of pot?

Stay with me here. In order to figure out how much I smell like pot, I have to do things like smell my clothing. But I'm sure you've had the experience as well, of smelling everything you can think to check for the source of a smell, not finding it, but nevertheless still smelling it coming from somewhere when you stop sniffing. Sometimes it's an unknown source, maybe the chair your sitting in already smelled like methane when you sat in it.

...But sometimes it's hard to place a smell because you're the source. This doesn't make you a bad person. There are many times that I'm sober and people think I'm stoned. Also many times I'm stoned and people don't realize until I say something wacky. But sometimes I'll be stoned in public and smell myself as reeking of pot while others don't seem to smell it...so what's going on and what does this have to do with the title?

All that smoke coats your breathing pathways, and I mostly breathe through my nose so most of it passes in and out of my nasal cavity--and gets stuck there. Now I usually blow my nose if I can before going out stoned, to eliminate this problem. This is my own parable equivalent to "removing the beam" from your eye before reaching to help another with the splinter in theirs. So now I'll contribute to the chaos of meaningless adages and declare "He who smelt it probably smoked it!"