i saw oasis last night and was not terribly impressed.  the sound was a bit melted together and the light show was pitiful – and what little there was wasn’t even synched well with the music.  small complaints i know but i’ve seen tiny bands do amazing things with both sound and light…and oasis is far from a ‘tiny band.’  also, the ticket was about $75 USD so i feel justified in expecting higher quality.  they played ‘don’t look back in anger’ which is one of my favorites.  they didn’t have a great deal of stage presence and the songs sounded just like the album…in some cases that’s good but i was hoping they’d have a little more character.  maybe they’re just getting old.  the band did jam out for a bit on some of the songs (most notably ‘i am the walrus’) which was really great…i just wish there would have been more.  

i have tickets for the dj festival and mud fest, plus the cherry blossoms will be out soon and i’m sure they’re beautiful here…my computer is out of comission at the moment, but i’ll be adding loads of photos to flickr soon.

http://progressiveboink.com/archive/calvinhobbes.htm

“Remind yourself constantly of all the physicians, now dead, who used to knit their brows over their ailing patients; of all the astrologers who so solemnly predicted their clients’ doom; the philosophers who expatiated so endlessly on death or immortality; the great commanders who slew their thousands; the despots who wielded powers of life and death with such terrible arrogance, as if themselves were gods who could never die; the whole cities which have perished completely, Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and others without number.  After that, recall one by one each of your own acquaintances; how one buried another, only to be laid low himself and buried in turn by a third, and all in so brief a space of time.  Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice or ashes.  Spend, therefore, these fleeting moments on earth as Nature would have you spend them, and then go to your rest with a good grace, as an olive falls in its season, with a blessing for the earth that bore it and a thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life.”

Seth sent this to me and I like it a lot…very Spinoza-y.

“The moment I name it, is is no longer God; it is man, tree, green, black, red, soft, hard, long, short, atom, universe. One would readily agree with any theologian who deplores pantheism that these denizens of the world of verbiage and convention, these sundry ‘things’ conceived as fixed and distinct entities, are not God. If you ask me to show you God, I will point to the sun, or a tree, or a worm. But if you say, “You mean, then, that God is the sun, the tree, the worm, and all other things?” – I shall have to say that you have missed the point entirely.”

-Alan Watts

I’m fighting the ‘YOU-HAVE-TO-HAVE-A-CELL-PHONE’ society of Korea, and it’s going well so far.  It’s not easy though…I’m a discriminated against minority.  I conquered tv (once and for all, if might be so vain) a few years ago, have proved to myself that I can go without internet (but it’s rough), and I’m not even sure what it is that is making me not want a cell phone (the threat of brain cancer has a little to do with it…being a hypochondriac is genetic, evidently) since they are, as a tool, useful, but the culture they’ve spawned (particularly on the Korean subway) is sickening.  Whenever people are faced with social interaction of any kind they pull out whatever overpriced, overvalued device they define themselves through(ugh, you have a blackberry?  god, I could never use anything but an iPhone) and bury themselves in it, safe from all the demands of reality…and i’m the one that’s being anti-social.

The best and greatest example I can give of this concept in near modern times is from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, where the Devil is speaking to Ivan while the latter is in a state of delirium:

Why, the earth we have at present may have repeated itself a billion times; you know – become extinct, frozen over, cracked, crumbled to pieces, disintegrated into its constituent origins, becoming the waters again, ‘which were above the firmament’, then a comet again, then a sun, the another earth produced from that sun – I mean, this process of development may already have repeated itself an infinite number of times, and always in the same form, right down to the very last small detail.  A most indecently tedious monstrosity…

“The problem,” as Neo states, “is choice.”  The theory of eternal return is all well and good, but to be honest I never paid it much mind until it was connected for me with the idea of change, transmutation, self-perfection.  Ouspensky writes, in a fashion very similar to the Stoic philosophers, “A change can only be the result of effort; no circumstances can produce a change.  This is why all ordinary beliefs in the change of external circumstances never lead anywhere: circumstances may change, but you will be the same unless you work.”

So how can that be taken?  The point, I think, to be made is that of an alchemical nature.  Change is slow.  Change takes time.  Nothing happens by itself or all at once, only by degrees.  ”If recurrence exists,” says Ouspensky, “We cannot change it.  There is only one thing we can change; we can try to awake and hope to remain awake.  If we have to come back, we can not stop it.  We are in a train, the train is going somewhere.  All we can do is to pass the time in the train differently – do something useful or spend it quite uselessly.”

So…do I buy into the idea that I’ve written this article before, and I’ll do it again, and again, and again…?  I’m not sure.  There is truth, to some degree, in everything, but the flip side of that coin is that very few things as they are given to us are uniformly true.  ”All we can do is to pass the time in the train differently.”

So what is it about our culture’s shadow that creates this need for fear and subsequent catharsis regarding the ‘living dead.’  This isn’t a new phenomenon.  The first zombie movie ever was made in 1932 – right after the crash of the American stock market.  What this all boils down to is fear, just as every manifestation of mankind’s collective shadow has always done.  So what is it about Zombies – the living dead – that betrays our culture’s deepest fear?  There’s a segment in an interview with Erich Fromm about his book To Have or to Be that hits the nail on the head:

Interviewer: “I imagine that of all things the fist of ‘having’ closes on most firmly is life itself.  And yet since life itself is bound to be taken away in death, I wonder if that wouldn’t be to show that the having mode is entirely useless.”
Fromm: “That’s why people are so afraid of death.  I think the fear of death to a large extent is the fear of losing what one has.”

I had this conversation in essence not long ago – modern man’s chief fear is his death – and, why?  Because he defines his existence by that which he can possess or consume – actions mean nothing unless they are a means to an end where the end is, in most cases, the fulfillment of a base desire – usually lust or greed.  How then could death have meaning?  In our fragile perception it can only be an end (though it may well not be…that’s not the point) and this is terrifying.  Thus, zombies are our greatest fear – mindless, soulless beings who don’t consume anything but what they need to.  Worst of all, they are all the same – and what is our culture of having if not a perverted method of individuation?  Erich Fromm, this time in The Art of Loving writes:

Most people are not even aware of their need to conform.  They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individuals, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking – and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.  The consensus of all serves as a proof for the correctness of “their” ideas.  Since there is still a need to feel some individuality, such need is satisfied with regard to minor differences: the initials on the handbag or the sweater, the name plate of the bank teller, the belonging to the Democratic as against the Republican party, to the Elks instead of to the Shriners become the expression of individual differences.  The advertising slogan of “it is different” shows up this pathetic need for difference, when in reality there is hardly any left.

I just want to be a sociologist.  Is that so wrong? Also, Merry Christmas!

So here’s the story:  Last night, I make a post on a Facebook group Mike invited me to wherein you discuss a chapter from the Gospel of John every day up to Christmas.  Fair enough.  This was my post:

John 16: “I tell you the truth, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.”

I don’t think this means we can append ‘in Jesus’ name we pray’ to whatever desire we have and expect to see it granted – instead, desire to live and act and think in the Spirit of what Christ taught. Marcus Aurelius writes: “Where another man prays ‘Grant that I may possess this woman,’ let your own prayer be, ‘Grant that I may not lust to possess her.’ Where he prays, ‘Grant me to be rid of such-and-such a one,’ you pray, ‘Take from me my desire to be rid of him.’ Where he begs, ‘Spare me the loss of my precious child,’ beg rather to be delivered from the terror of losing him.”

Reasonable, right?  I had actually been thinking a lot about the Aurelius quote from the time I first got to Korea, so no surprise that it was on my mind.  Cut to five in the morning today.  I wake up from the following dream (this is what I wrote as soon as I got up, so it’s about as accurate as I can hope it to be):

I just woke up from a dream where I was with Nick and Jenna at a ski slope or a mountain or something.  We were leaving and having to go out a crazy tunnel.  Nick was ahead of me to the point I couldn’t see him anymore and Jenna was far behind.  I didn’t have any trouble knowing where to go, as if I were moving not by my own power or knowledge.  I was afraid Jenna would get lost, though, so much so that I was mentally noting the various twists and turns I was making on the way out of the cave.

I came to a toll but what was also clearly the scene of an accident (although no one present seemed to be even slightly phased).  The woman told me it was $75, which I thought was awfully expensive but I didn’t say anything – I just dug for money.  She asked me, “No [caddy?] today?” and I replied something like, “They’re traveling separately.”  I asked if she had seen a green truck (Nick’s vehicle) and she said she hadn’t.  Just then, Luce and Granddad were walking towards me and Luce stopped and said, “Dax, I have some bad news.  Your dad is gonna die (or is dying…I’m not sure which).  I asked where he was and Luce looked up the road and said, “On his way” or something similar.  I asked if I could leave and the woman said, “You can if you pay me $75.”  I woke up.

I’m not sure if the very first thing I did upon waking was to “beg to be delivered from the terror of losing him,” but it was in there somewhere.  I was still very uneasy, though, so much so that I texted my mom and called my dad to tell them to be careful.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…