Life is a delicate balance of competing interests, a mushy porridge of actions that seek to validate themselves into existence. Only by conscious choice can they take root, from a small single celled idea into something more concrete, real, defined. My filter is the squirrelly labyrinth of my head, the silk screen of conscious energy that pushes its way into life’s experimental field. The ultimate selection of what becomes true and real for me.
Dear Diary,
There has been much competition for the space inside my head. Two months prior the girl and I traveled to Rio for our visa interview. It was an awful trip, five days of tortuous viral depravity that kept us moaning between our bed and the local pharmacy. The city was beautiful, cloudy, with cool weather that left a mystical haze of fog rolling between the mountains. We wanted to drink beer but we couldn’t. We wanted to explore Lapa, Impanema, and Corcovado, and did minimally through a sea of headaches and pain.
The hours leading up to the interview were long; spent mostly in doctor’s offices, copy centers, and waiting rooms. Small things caught our attention, like how full of people open city bars are in Rio, how green the city is compared to Salvador, and how lewd the pornographic graffiti plastered to public spaces.
Dear Diary, Did I mention we got the visa? Aside from not eating breakfast on the day of the interview and feeling like I was going to pass out, all went well. The triple stack hand burger sized pile of documents was approved, and our interview equally successful. The consulate lady that held our interview who invited us into the private room was quite beautiful—young—a sigh of relief for someone scared of an old school bureaucrat that might thumb his/her nose at my biracial-bicultural-bilingual relationship.
She asked a whopping two questions. How did you meet? What do you plan on doing when you move to the US? Both we answered like, I assume, a real couple that interrupts one another and competes for the ladies full attention.
“So yeah we met at the conference”, says the girl. “We moved in together right after.” “Well not right after.” I say embarrassed. “We dated for a long time first.” “Yes, but, what are you going to do when you move the States?” “I don’t know”, I say thinking I shouldn’t have said I don’t know. “I was invited to the University of Alabama to do a doctorate, but we may apply for jobs in Miami or elsewhere”. “Oh well ok then, here’s your visa”. “Like really?” “Like Really.” “Well ok then.”
Dear Diary,
It’s been two months since Rio and I’ve been going a little crazy. You ever have that feeling that you are living a life on the cusp of a new life, so the old life isn’t much of a life anymore (the senioritis thing where you have already checked out of the mental hotel?) That’s me, not enjoying work, a little bored at home, but really trying to fight it. I think most people have this tendency right before a big move and it sucks. I need to seek more live in the moment philosophies and enjoy the last few months I have in Brazil. I need to dream less about the unknowable future and enjoy what I have in the here and now. I am going to do better I promise.
Dear Diary,
Ok well I tried. Speaking of the unknowable future, there are some things I’m looking forward to in getting back to the States. They include:
1. Less urban chaos, crime, trash, pregnant dogs, sidewalk loogies, and general misbehavior of my poor ass neighborhood. Lack of pagode playing in my ear will be a big plus. 2. Access to breweries, diverse food items, and good cheep beer. 3. Roads and drivers that don’t consciously try and kill you. 4. Getting back to old hobbies as in:
5. Showing the girl my world. 6. Party in my mountain cabin with friends. 7. And much much more.
Granted, for any who would take offense at my apparent dislike for Brazil, I will certainly make a much larger and more heartfelt list on things I will miss.
Dear Diary,
It’s good to be back. Hoping to write more on these pages in the days to come. Hoping you become one of the silk-screen mind top list priorities that birth into this world.
As time winds to a still, Pictures taken of present past, Solid now and here to stay, The water wheel slowed, Our time undone We seek new life We find our way.
* * *
If I were to represent my time in Brazil graphically, mathematically even, it would most likely resemble a Gaussian distribution, also known as a bell curve. The bell curve is a graph that is used to represent a set of variables in which most values cluster around a mean, while outliers can be found above and below the middle line. Speaking metaphorically, the bell curve is an excellent model for tracking the rise and fall of a phenomenon—the manner in which an object, or individual, or event is birthed into existence, rises to prominence, and then falls back to the origin from which it came.
If I were to track my journey along this line, it would be difficult to say exactly where the beginning is. Perhaps the beginning lies sometime in the late 90’s when my dad forced me to write a summer book report on It Happened in Brazil, my great grandfathers travel and missionary writings. This is the first time I can concretely remember thinking about Brazil as something other than an imaginary place full of jungle and scantily clad Amazons. Perhaps we could track it to my first trip to Brazil in 2003, or to the beginning of this blog, or even my sudden decision to move here in 2008.
Wherever the genesis lies, this mental child of mine has certainly run its course, requiring a great deal of perseverance, maturation, and development. And I feel that my time here is drawing to a close. If I were to visually scan the bell curve of my story, moving my eyes from left to right, I would certainly move past the introduction, past the rising action, and the climax. What’s on the horizon now is a fall back to the beginning, a resolution that has its end somewhere where I began. I suppose this bell curve, this dramatic sequence is at the heart of every great story and quest. We must go out in order to come back in, and my time to return home is immanent.
In two days, Vivi and I will head to the American consulate in Rio de Janeiro for our visa interview. If all goes well the imperial authorities will check our documents and say yes to the future that we have been planning. If they say yes, then my story will come to a close, and I will launch myself in some other obscure direction.
For now, the bell begins to toll, and my time, our time, is winding to an end.
Some things in life happen unexpectedly. While I have been working on my master’s degree for the last 2.5 years, actually graduating somehow feels unexpected. It’s like you keep your nose to the grindstone focusing your attention on the work at hand. There are small goals to meet, little actions to fulfill. Suddenly, after years of effort, you pull your head up and look around, surprised that you actually accomplished something.
I’m not sure if this degree is going to be of use, or rather, if I will end up in the education field. Part of me is still really attracted to alternative forms of education, to interpretive work, guiding, reenactment, and the like. Part of me can see myself ending up in a museum, doing creative work in curation, gallery design, and public outreach. Then again, the other part of me wants to earn some money in this life time, and the education field is not exactly the place for that. Education is less of a vocation and more of a life calling, but we’ll see what happens at the end of the day.
I’d like to take this opportunity to post a commencement speech that I found extremely profound, both in video and text format. It is a speech by the late David Foster Wallace, an academic and writer who became famous for his short stories. This speech, for me, defines the Big Truth of increasing your awareness through education—that it doesn’t necessarily help you know how to think, but what to think about. This is the kind of thing that would do us all good to listen to on a daily basis, a reminder that we create the internal realities in our lives.
So in the end I’m happy to get me graduated, and to further invest in the future that lies ahead.
This is Water - David Foster Wallace
"(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
Well we're back in it again. Brazilian bureaucracy is biting at our heels. My three years here in Brazil have been a non-stop lesson in how a government can waste your time; first with my own papers and now in preperation for our exit visa. I hate to say that these kinds of situations are the exception, but sadly they are the rule.
So, true story. Vivi finds out that the SEDEP department have an old version of her name on file, despite the fact that she had the documents changed over a year ago. Little snags like this can have big consequences, especially as we try to gather our visa paper work under a deadline.
Here is how the day went:
Vivi: Good morning Sir. I need a letter of good conduct but my name is written wrongly in your system.
SEDEP: You have to go to SSP department to correct it.
Vivi: But I called you this morning and you said I should come here.
SEDEP: Yeah, but they are responsible for that! It’s on the next building. Then, you come back here and I’ll give you your certificate.
Vivi: Thank you Sir.
(at SSP department…)
Vivi: Sir, I need to have my name corrected in your system.
SSP: Why?
Vivi: Because it’s written wrongly and I need a police certificate in my (real) name.
SSP: Ahhhh! Ok. Let me (try) to find your documents.
( 20 min. later)
SSP: Lady, was there a paternity recognition in your case?
Vivi: Sorry??????
SSP: We don’t have your father’s name in our archives.
Vivi: Sorry???? Well madam, I can’t see how it’s possible since my father was the one who got my birth certificate.
SSP: Ahhhhh! Maybe we made some mistake…
Vivi: Really? (irony)
(20 min more…)
SSP: Here it is! You see? It didn’t take that long!
Vivi: No madam. (irony) Thank you so very much.
(…back to the SEDEP department)
Vivi: Hi, it’s me again. I think my name is correct now.
SEDEP: Ok! I’ll check…
(25 min later…)
SEDEP: Here it is. Take it to the “Cartorio” in Barra (another neighborhood…) to have the signature recognized.
Vivi: All right! Hummm… I’m sorry sir but my name is spelled wrongly. It’s Viviane ****** not ****. You forgot the S.
SEDEP: Ahhhh! Just a min…
(20 min later)
SEDEP: Here it is!
Vivi: Sir?
SEDEP: yes?
Vivi: I’m sorry but now my father’s name is wrong. His name is Ari dos **** not Ari dos SANTOS. We have no SANTOS in our name.
SEDEP: Ahhhhh! I made a mistake again… Just a min…
(20 min later)
SEDEP: Here it is. I think now it’s correct!
Vivi: That’s great! I know my name is really complicated! Thank you so very much.
It has been a couple of weeks since my parents took off, and I am now back to the work, diet, gym, routine. The last few days of vacation I became restless, feeling as if I had too much time off from the discipline of normal life. As much as I loved the exploring, the international visits, and the gluttonous eating habits of people with nothing to loose but their six pack, it was definitely time to return to the grind.
Over the holiday break, I happened to stumble across two profoundly interesting books on spiritual development and evolution. The first is called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), a kind of philosophical treaty on metaphysics and quality published in 1974 by by Robert M. Pirsig. The book sold over 5 million copies worldwide, and currently holds the Guinness Book of Records title for the bestseller with the most publisher rejections (at 121 respectively). The novel, which is kind of a mind meld written by a exceedingly intelligent man, uses a long motorcycle trip to frame a prolonged exploration of life and how best to live it. It references perspectives from Western and Eastern Civilizations as it explores the central question of how to pursue technology so that human life is enriched rather than degraded. Narrated in the first person, it incorporates a parallel presentation of trip details and an ongoing retrospective concerning dramatic events from the narrator's past, creating a rich symbolism that explores the mysteries of why we exist and how to view the world.
Many of these discussions are tied together by the story of the narrator's own past self, who is referred to in the third person as Phaedrus (the wolf), a teacher of creative and technical writing at a small college who becomes engrossed in the question of how to define “quality”. His philosophical investigations eventually drive Phaedrus insane, and he is subjected to electroshock treatment which permanently alters his personality.
The greatest theme in the book is indeed this exploration of quality, what the source of it is, and how to see it in daily life. In Phaedrus’ mind, quality becomes a kind of link between mankind and God, a means to unify classic (logical/objective) and romantic (emotional/subjective) perspectives. His quest for truth because a kind of spiritual quest—a joining of qualitative and quantitative outlooks in search of a larger reality and the source behind it.
One of the quotes that he wrote stuck with me:
"Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships."
I got to thinking about my own spiritual path, how I used to be hungry for greater knowledge, and how I had lost in recent years the desire to hike through those mountains. After reading the book, I felt like a tiny spark had ignited, urging me to carry on. As chance would have it, I have been doing some research for a novel that I have in mind to write, and I came across Thomas Campbell’s massive work – My Big Toe (Theory of Everything) – in my research. Campbell (or Old Uncle Tom as he likes to call himself) is a truly interesting character; a kind of mad scientist, digital physicist who has dedicated his life to researching altered states of consciousness, philosophy, physics, and metaphysics. His work is beyond ambitious, seeking to create a model of reality which supersedes the current boundaries of science, which moves past Einstein's unified field theory, and that answers the big questions through an attitude of open minded skepticism, logic, and scientific pragmatism.
I’m not going to sugar coat his work, nor go into the concepts here. There is just too much to digest. And his theories are very much mad scientist, very beyond what the scientific community would consider acceptable (or at least safe). If you’d like an introduction to his theories, these videos are a good start.
What I enjoyed about his work is the attempt to go beyond little picture views of God and reality, and how he explored the concept (a direct link to ZAMM!) of finding truth and improving the quality of your consciousness. I will not admit to a whole hearted commitment to all of his concepts, but in his work I did find a successful mixture of science, spirituality, and off the center metaphysics (like Out of Body experiences which I personally have experienced) increasing my curiosity and desire to learn more. Where his concepts are taking me I will have to illuminate in another post.
Suffice to say, I feel renewed in this quest towards greater truth. Clarence Darrow once wrote, “The pursuit of truth will set you free; even if you never catch up with it”. I figure time is nigh to go running through those mountains.
After three long years my parents have finally come to visit me. It was a great thing to see them hobble out of the arrival gate at the airport and walk into the madness of Salvador. I am already a tad bit exhausted from playing tour guide, and a tad bit sick, so I am going to post some of my dad's musings on his experience here. It is great to see this environment through fresh eyes. My blog has lost some of this excitement--the thrill of fresh experience like seeing a shiny thing for the first time. I have been trying to convince my dad to start writing a blog. Perhaps you readers could do a better job.
"Just a quick mishmash of the experience so far. Way intense and rich here. Son Aaron (aka Leo) and girlfriend Vivi have been high;y educated, bi-lingual hosts. They have two apartments side by side. Claire and I have had the run of one. Situated atop a honeycomb of structures that make up this Rio Vermelho neighborhood, on a hill, we look down at the Atlantic ocean and across to the apartments of the uber riche. Down below is a sea of sound, of pulsating life. Always there is sound, and always the unexpected happens in a din. Who needs TV when you can just look out the window? And in those windows blows a nice breeze of the Atlantic, providing a cool breeze to attenuate the tropical heat. We awake in the protection of our little hole, then venture out into the intensity that is urban Brazil. We return, take a shower (several a day), then nap.
Time here is not like home or even North America. It is stretched out longer. This is not Germany, where pedestrians tend to walk fast to get from A to B. This is Brazil in the tropics. More like you go from A, but get to K, with all these letters in between to experience. So much to draw one out from simply getting lost in one's own head and have the days go by like a quick shuffle of cards.
Brazil is SO not-me. OCD-like analness seems to have been bred mostly out of these people (exception: shopping mall things that imply wealth). Thus constitutes an ideal vacation environment. The contrasts here is very high. A slum next to walled unobtanium apartments. Dogs sleeping among trash next to the public urinal - a wall, while the well-dressed stroll by without a thought for the trash, dogs, or urine. Live and let live. And everywhere people hang out, socialize, sometimes with song and dance. My tendency to want to fix things is here washed over by a tsunami of imperfection. It doesn't bother the Brazilians so much, so I take the hint and relax. Manhole cover off? Not to worry. The kids and granny will just step around it after missing the dog turds.
Brazil economically is protectionist. If it's imported it's way expensive. If it's made here despite low labor costs, it's still expensive. The upper level of society here makes money to an extent hard to imagine. The shopping mall we visited was packed full of people greedily paying way too much for every item. That photo of the shoe store only shows the edge of the crowd! I've never seen crowd like that on an ordinary day in a US shopping mall. There is a lot of money flowing around here, yet by proportion there isn't a broad middle class. Brazilians just breed too fast for the availability of resources to catch up. Despite being generally poor, Brazilians are among the most content people I've experienced. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Jesse Jackson could stand on street corners all day ranting and raving, and they'd be ignored as just art of freak show of life. Very hard to make these people go to war over anything.
Back to economics. The photo of fuel prices at a fuel station shows centavos (cents), so move decimal places two places left to convert to their currency, Reis (pronounced hay-ice). One Reis is 0.59 dollars, thus premium gasoline here is R2.82/liter or $1.62/liter. That's about 6 bucks a gallon. Lots of fuel choices here too. I think the ethanol option may be pure ethanol (haven't confirmed that yet), and the gasoline - premium, might not have any ethanol. Buses and many small trucks use diesel, and the taxis get their fuel, compressed natural gas or CNG somewhere other than the typical fuel stations.
Speaking of buses, every time you step on a bus, no matter how far you go, it's R2.50 for the body-jossling bus and R3.00 for air conditioning and a little less abuse. Ride the bus 10 times in a day and you've knocked off R250! The buses are very fast and jerky. If you stand up and don't hold on firmly, you will be tossed to the opposite side without forewarning. The drivers barrel through intersections. Whatever gets in the way is simply injured or dead, and that happens a lot here. Be on guard or die, simple as that. Yet many Brazilians I saw had really no thought for what they turn their backs on. A fellow might be leaning against a car window talking animatedly to a friend with his butt hung way out in the street. A barreling bus will miss his ass by a centimeter, yet he'll not notice. Perhaps this comes with a high breeding rate? Some genetic trigger goes off that says, "There will always be more Brazilians - I'll not worry so much about staying alive."
The vast majority of motorcycles are 125-250cc and whisper quiet (stock exhausts). All are gasoline and 4 strokes. The dominant format is practical: standard or dual sport. I have yet to see one obnoxiously loud Harley, or even a quiet one. Probably because it would cost $125,000. The only cruiser I saw was a VW Beetle converted to a trike.
Leo used to have one of these 250s, until too many personal near-death experiences and observing many motorcyclists turned road pizza. Last night as we were walking back from a night on the city, we saw one down, flat on his back, unconscious and staring up. The ambulance had turn the wrong way and headed away from the accident scene. At least he was in one piece. I want to stay and rubber neck, but Vivi didn't want to hand around because her brother had recently gotten attacked by a delivery truck, after it had cut off and he took off his helmet to bash the mirror off.
I did see sport bikes (crotch rockets). Very few however as they cost ten times more than in the US. You have to have a serious case of hyper testosterone to get one of these. Sometimes groups of them will go out at night to race around on the emptier streets.
More economics: The running shoes I buy for $65 and repeatedly wear out sell for $500 here! A run-of-mill boom box we can buy at a garage sale for $25? How about $1,000 at the shopping mall here. Brazilians get the most out of them though. They'll run the volume up to where the speakers move around. As a result of the high prices, goods afforded by the masses, from faucets to fans tend to be rather cheaply built. Our apartment front door would pass for a shower door in the US. A thin aluminum and single-pan glass thing you can hear everything through.
I have been amazed about the buildings here. Masonry and concrete, but very lightly constructed. They have no seismic history and thus not much in the way of codes. A big earthquake here would would result in fatalities rates worse than Port au Prince Haiti. They build the same way for the 1st story as the 5th. Spindly columns of concrete with four 10mm bars, thin cast concrete floors (look at the thickness of the stairs in the photo), then back fill with 4X6X10" hollow fire brick. The poor neighborhoods are a honeycomb structure of this stuff, like a giant buzzing hive. They might begin with one story with spindly 10mm steel bar steel reinforcement sticking out for many years in anticipation of the second story. If one of the kids trips and gets skewered... well, that's just life. Decades later it'll be 4 stories, with access, walkways, balconies, stairways, and doors as somewhat an afterthought. The roof might get finished off with a covering, or it might remain open, with no edge. Fall off and that's all she wrote. It's scary and entirely wonderful be visiting a society free from safety phobias and tort lawyers. Dogs wander everywhere, yet I have yet to see any of them end up as road pizza. The dumb ones here aren't protected from their owners or laws. They just get taken out of the gene pool.
There is a prosthetics and orthotics shop just down the hill from the apartment. I plan to bumble through a visit with Leo the translator. There is an O&P market here. Is superior technology could be brought in at what is to them a reasonable price, the volume of business could be substantial.
This is a very religious place. Lots of various forms of evangelical Christanity, some quite in your face (like the sign on the path up to the apartment you see in the photo). I see many churches,and lots of missions. So far I have not seen a dynamic Catholicism, though it was long established (since 1501). Catholic churches everywhere, so I suspect I'll see more than just tourists about. Jehova's Witnesses have a strong presence here. African paganism is very active. People dress in white, sacrifice chickens, beat drums, and party at all hours with fireworks to honor various gods. Right now the sea god is being honored. Last night late in religious zeal someone lit exploding rockets that shot up from the house below and blew up right outside our bedroom window. We almost soiled the bed.
I've been starved for good beer here. Everything is piss lager that is even weaker than in the US, amazingly. You can drink several beers and nothing happens. Refreshing when hot and good for business. Probably a good thing as the generally skinny folk here with little beer bellies, should they have something more powerful, would be engaged in even more mayhem.
We aim to survive this and be all the richer in experiences.
106. That’s quite a figure. 106 is the number of Brazilians who died this last weekend in traffic accidents on the country’s roads. Three short days, Friday to Saturday, is all it took for 106 people to wipe themselves out of existence. Hundreds more lie in critical condition in local area hospitals, wondering how they will recover. The worst part about this number, which I caught on the news, is that it is by no means a statistical anomaly.
Brazil has one of the highest rates of car accident fatalities in the Americas with 24.2 killed in crashes per 100,000 members of the population. Brazil ranks third in the world with the worst road death rate per person, just behind El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Crashes claim over 35,000 lives despite a federal campaign to educate the public on road safety.
“Just ask Carolina Amorim about that split second a dozen years ago that she would give anything to have back, as the 30-year-old journalist may never recover emotionally from the car accident that claimed the life of her then-boyfriend Alexandre Cabeda Egger Moellwald in Porto Alegre in 1998. In one fateful moment, Amorim went from preparing to marry the man of her dreams to seeing him taken from her forever – all because a motorist made an illegal turn, causing the couple's vehicle to crash into a street light. Moellwald was clinging to life when he arrived at the hospital, but he never woke up. The trauma sent Amorim into a downward spiral, as she became sick and anorexic, her weight dropping to a frail 39 kilograms (86 pounds).”
Driving on these roads, especially on a motorcycle, had me scared from the beginning. Road conditions are dismal, requiring one to stay alert to large potholes, small or nonexistent shoulders, and badly designed roadways (more turn lanes please). These infrastructure shortfalls are compounded by the fact that there are little to no police enforcing traffic laws. Speed radars and "agentes de trânsito" just don’t seem to have much effect.
But I think the problem goes much further than this. The problem with Brazilian traffic fatalities is less a physical and more of a mental one. There is a strange phenomenon that exists in this country which I don’t see as much in the United States. It is a question of social structure. In Brazil, when someone has established a connection to your immediate family, you will fight tooth and nail for them. A sense of camaraderie is very strong here, and extends to friends and distant relatives. The plus side to this is that people will rally to an allies cause. If you are hurt in the hospital, just watch how many friends will show up offering aid. People will call their people who will call their people who will make sure that you get decent care! But the downside to this is that, if you aren’t part of that immediate social circle, well then fuck you. You are dirt underneath my toes. This mentality extends to all aspects of public life, including the political scene and the inherent corruption within. Who you know is everything because being known is how you earn respect.
This strange mental philosophy, what I would call the ‘law of the jungle’, manifests itself most brutally on the Brazilian roads. Before a Brazilian gets in a car they can be the friendliest person in the world. But as soon as they set foot into that thin plastic and metal bubble, separating them from their immediate social reality, they become little testosterone induced dictators, willing to off just about anybody who would disrespect them or get in their way (ask me if pedestrians have right of way in this country).
On many occasions I have been scared out of my mind getting into a friend's or taxi driver's car. The worst episode happened just a week ago when my friends and I were returning from Praia do Forte (a local resort town). We got into a small transport van returning us to the city. The driver was trying to compete with another van for passengers, screaming ahead on the double lane road in an effort to get to the next bus stop before the other van did. It was an hour and a half of sheer terror, of passing on blind corners, and I am still kicking myself for not being responsible and getting off when I knew I should have. The funny thing was, most of the Brazilians on the bus were acting like it was the most normal thing in the world. I wanted to scream at them that THIS NOT NORMAL! THIS SHIT WILL GET YOU KILLED!
For personal friends and authorities, I do have some suggestions:
1. Please, please, please, have seat belts available in the back seat for your passengers. Most people bury the release connector because seat belts are just not what they do. As a driver, YOU are responsible for YOUR friend’s lives. Do the grown up thing and offer them a safety device.
2. Please slow down. I’m not interested in your race car driving skills. I prefer to arrive on location alive and late rather than fast and dead.
3. Please invest in road infrastructure and safety. Putting a palm leaf in a giant gaping hole in the middle of the street is not sufficient. Think about double lane highways on anything above 120 km per hour. Put in traffic cops not lazy sete personnel whose only seeming job is to arrive at accidents AFTER they occur.
4. And lastly, please everyone remember that “the other guy” out there could in fact be a part of your social circle. Let’s think about having a beer with him or her instead of a head to head face off where nobody ultimately wins.
With these small efforts, 106 traumas and life terminations is in fact avoidable.
BBB.What is BBB?In Brazil, BBB is the acronym for the much loved Big Brother Brazil program now in its 11th season.As a prime-time hit in almost 70 countries, Big Brother has held a steady domination in the reality tv market, garnering support from drama seekers and closet peeping toms.The show has a simple premise.Stick a bunch of misfits into a large house, lock the door for three months, and record every social interaction that takes place.To keep things compelling, the shows producers throw in a cash prize of a million dollars for the last contestant standing, who through savviness or charm or political know-how somehow comes out alive. From a sociological and demographic perspective, the success of the show may have something to do with the joy of watching a clash of cultures (or what happens to people in close confinement who come from different social backgrounds).It’s a bit like taking a Martha Stewart, a meth baking hillbilly, three nuns, and a monkey, and throwing them into a jail cell for three long and dicey months.The ultimate drama manifests in who allies with who and why.
In my own reality tv show of life, BBB has an entirely different meaning.While I was out drinking a lovely whip cream frappuccino last night, I started thinking about the things that excite me, you know, the things that make me go all happy powdered sugar donut on the inside.It may just have been the caffeine going to my head, but I realized that you can tell a lot about a person by how they answer the question:What makes you happy?
Keep in mind I’m not asking the question:What makes you ultimately happy?This will produce an entirely different set of answers, because what ultimately makes us happy is harder to define and a bit more philosophical in nature (I’m going to devote my next blog post to answering this one).With the former question however, I’m more interested in superficial moments of glee—the rope swing process of emotional ecstasy where we feel happiness at the height of the arc, and then quickly fall back to normalcy as we swing back down.
So to answer this mark of self-identification, I must return to BBB.
Babes
Yes, call me cliché, but I am a fan of attractive women.Who isn’t really?Research has demonstrated time and again that there are tremendous social and economic benefits to being attractive. Attractive people are paid more, are judged more intelligent and will receive more attention in most facets of life. Studies suggest that even infants prefer pretty faces, which is funny because who really wants to be judged by an infant!?This phenomenon of pre-judging a person (without consciously realizing it) through the perception of physical traits is called the halo effect, and it is a powerful force in most if not all societies.I got to thinking about my own cognitive bias in regards to attractive people the other day, and that led me to the glorious wiki page on physical attraction.
What an interesting reading!Wiki tells us that there appears to be universal standards regarding attractiveness both within and across cultures and ethnic groups (although I would argue there are often cultural filters at work which produce beauty standards in opposition to this universal norm).Some interesting tidbits that I read:
Women, on average, tend to be more attracted to men who display a high-degree of facial symmetry, masculine facial dimorphism, are taller than them and who have a relatively narrow waist, a V-shaped torso, and broad shoulders.
Men, overall, tend to be attracted by women who are shorter than them, have a youthful appearance and exhibit features such as a symmetrical face, full breasts, full lips, and a low waist-hip ratio.
Studies have shown that ovulating heterosexual women and homosexual men prefer faces with masculine traits associated with increased exposure to testosterone (during key developmental stages), such as heavy brows, prominent chins, chiseled jaw lines, and broad cheekbones. The masculinity of male faces (and the femininity of female faces) is described as a sexual dimorphism. Female respondents in the follicular phase of their menstrual cycle (n = 55) were significantly more likely to choose a masculine face than those in menses and luteal phases (n = 84), (or in those taking hormonal contraception) It is suggested that the masculinity of facial features is a reliable indication of good health, or, alternatively, that dominant and masculine-looking males are more likely to achieve high status.Also, females tend to prefer masculine facial traits more for short-term partners, than for long-term partners.
A number of double-blind studies have found that women prefer the scent of men who are rated as facially attractive.For example, a study by Anja Rikowski and Karl Grammerdid had individuals rate the scent of t-shirts slept in by test subjects. The photographs of those subjects were independently rated, and Rikowski and Grammar found that both males and females were more attracted to the natural scent of individuals who had been rated by consensus as facially attractive. It has also been shown that women have a preference for the scent of men with more symmetrical faces, and that womens' preference for the scent of more symmetrical men is strongest during the most fertile period of their menstrual cycle. Within the set of normally cycling women, individual women's preference for male facial symmetry correlated with their probability of conception.[29]
….Anyway, I find these details to be remarkably interesting, not so much because of my own fixture on physical attraction, but rather as a fulfillment of curiosity on what makes the social system move—i.e. why we act the way we act in the presence of an attractive person.Knowing the why ultimately give us power to refuse these natural forces, to not ascribe positive traits to people that don’t necessarily deserve them (in job interviews, dating, political candidates, etc.).
Bikes
Let’s get something straight.My personal affinity for babes does not make me a social whore.Quite the contrary.While I will admit to a natural biological predisposition towards babeness, I don’t necessarily condone sexual promiscuity or cheating.People often use these ‘biological arguments’ to condone malevolent social behavior, especially guys.In today’s modern age, having multiple babes (guys or girls) can lead to any number of misfortunate circumstances, things like STD’s, cervical cancer, violence, children with unwanted partners, and an inability to cultivate profound relationships with other people.
In my opinion, we need to find healthy ways to deal with repressed sexual desire.Some people play pool, other people drink beer. I ride motorcycles. ;- )
I’m not sure exactly what it is that makes a motorcycle so sexual.Perhaps it’s the visceral nature of the experience, the way you feel all of your senses – the wind in your hair – and live in the moment.Perhaps it’s the rather startling sensation of 1000cc’s of power vibrating between your legs.Whatever it is, motorcycles seem to be an effective way (though not always safe) to deal with ones testosterone.
My first babe was an old 1981 Yamaha cruiser.Not too sexy but practical.Then I moved on to the first love of my life, Josephine.Riding her through the windy back roads of the Colorado Rockies was a truly liberating experience.Now I have my sites set on a new “girl”, a 2010 BMW 1000 RR sport bike.I scheme of getting crafty, removing the fairing and painting her with Polynesian tribal decals.A boy can dream right?
Battles
The last area of my BBB is stuck somewhere between romantic notions of the past and healthy living.It is my decade’s long fixation with battles, with grabbing antiquated equipment and facing off with an oppositional force.On the delicate continuum of social status, I definitely scream nerd with this one.But I’m ok with that.Swords are my medium for physical happiness, the reason I go to the gym, run, and cross train other martial arts.I find that there is no better metaphor for conquering personal fear than with a direct conflict with another human being (which inevitably becomes a face off with yourself).
Here is one of my fights with my Kenjutsu group at the end of the year.I am the guy on the right, living very happy and in the moment.
So that’s it.These are my BBB’s, my momentary artificially flavored mediums of happiness.What are yours?
A week has passed and my Boulder friends Diane and Paul have come and gone. It's Christmas eve, 95 degrees, and the girl and I have decided to sleep off the day. We enjoyed our tour guide efforts with my friends, running around the pre-holiday chaos of Salvador, but are good and ready to take this vacation a bit more slowly. We only have 13 days until my parents arrive, until we fire up the tour guide energies once again, and are determined to a) stay lazy and b) spend less money.
Having our friends here was fun. I enjoyed the chance to see our city with fresh eyes and to reinvigorate my American identity. We did many exciting Salvador things like drinking chopp in Rio Vermelho, running around the Pelourinho, beach time in Porto da Barra, and escaping the city noise at Praia do Forte and Imbassai. It was your typical fun in the sun, beer, chilled coconuts and salty meat, tropical adventure.
For now, I will dream of a white Christmas and of spending time with family. As much as I'm happy to be here, the holiday season just doesn't feel the same without them.
Celebrating birthdays and Vivi's graduation.
No better way to do so than with friends and karaoke.
All the better to bring our Boulderites along with us.
Dance, lady, dance!
This was our hardest semester yet and a bit of r&r much deserved.
I did get to spend some time with my ex which was you know kind of great.
Turtles in a half shell. Turtle power.
Coolest wall paper to date. Download and use at your leisure.
I dare you to try and get me out of that bed.
Acroyoga junkies. They danced in the air and then...
Threw us around!
It was like a strange mix of challenging gravity and couples therapy.
We found this article on the beach; honestly the strangest little micro universe I have ever seen. It was a girl's shoe covered in barnacles. The clammy little devils would slurp their tongues out of their shell. Very creepy.
licate balance of competing interests, a mushy porridge of actions that seek to validate themselves into existence. Only by conscious choice can they take root, from a small single celled idea into something more concrete, real, defined. My filter is the squirrelly labyrinth of my head, the silk screen of conscious energy that pushes its way into life’s experimental field. The ultimate selection of what becomes true and real for me.
There has been much competition for the space inside my head. Two months prior the girl and I traveled to Rio for our visa interview. It was an awful trip, five days of tortuous viral depravity that kept us moaning between our bed and the local pharmacy. The city was beautiful, cloudy, with cool weather that left a mystical haze of fog rolling between the mountains. We wanted to drink beer but we couldn’t. We wanted to explore Lapa, Impanema, and Corcovado, and did minimally through a sea of headaches and pain.
Dear Diary,
Dear Diary,
