Word Stack or A Pile of Thoughts

It was a classic game of Russian Roulette
but for the target beneath the revolver’s barrel
she held it
.44 Smith & Wesson, shiny and cold
to his heart
and she smiled when she pulled the trigger

Click
A dry sound, that may as well have been the shattering thunder
he could do nothing.  She leaned over,
gracing him with a kiss,
a sweet kiss that held every promise
from lips that would never be his

Click
She laughed at his torment
He closed his eyes and hoped for the end
She touched him then, she pressed herself against him
and he felt the warmth of her melt through her dress

Click
The barrel pressed to his heart
She felt its feeble flutter and she looked into his eyes
Like so many times before
she saw his pleading, his asking, his words
But this was her game

Bang.

I hate routine.  I hate the constant grinding, the way the days blur into each other, like different colored Play-Doh mashed together until all that’s left is a mound of shit-brown. 

Lately, it seems like things have been this way; there’s nothing new, nothing exciting happening.  The few events which provide precious breathing holes in the flood of boredom (VUDC, Senior Ball) are spaced at tortuous distance from each other, and in between, one has to put up with inane teachers, pointless requirements, and that frustrating cycle of breakfast-lunch-dinner of the same food, in the same house, in the same town, with the same people over and over again. 

It’s driving me nuts.

What places this situation in sharp relief is the added fact that I’m almost done here.  In a couple month’s time, I’ll be graduating and then it’ll be the flurry of activity getting all my stuff together to move out on my own (thank goodness, to a place on the opposite end of the world!).  But until that point, I have to make my way through the final gauntlet of mind-numbing inanity. 

"The best way to torture a kender is to put it in an empty room that cannot be opened with a lockpick." 

Of course, the best way to torture anyone else is to lock them up with the kender.

I attended a lecture yesterday by Ian Casocot, concerning blogs and their impact on literary activity.  The byline of the talk was "Exploding the Frontiers of Literature", which I thought was rather agreeable, because if anything has been able to capture the slough of humanity, both garbage and gold, it’s the collective of personal blogs in cyberspace.  It’s like one of the ultimate dreams of humanism as ideology, that every person be afforded the same space for expression and the equal opportunity to be heard. 

Ideologies aside, I think that’s a great thing, that no matter who a person is or what that person is writing about, the material is out there, side-by-side with everyone else’s.  It’s freedom, it’s expression,

But there is also a disturbing, political trend that is creeping into the blogosphere.  I can smell it, and I think that its a threat to the freedom of the blogger.  In the real world, we tend to categorize people in terms of a certain hierarchy, levels of and classes, stereotypes.  It’s immediately assumed that if x person is from y place, then x person is likely to be z type personality.

The same is becoming (or already has become) true for blogs.  If I blog on Friendster, I’m assumed to be writing angsty teenage self-absorbed rants; if I were on Blogspot, I’d be much more mature and intellectual. 

This sort of thing can probably be proven statistically; but so what?  The individual is not a statistic.  And it doesn’t make logical sense to assume that a blogger is less interesting because they’re on a particular blog page rather than another.

I could publish my blog on Blogspot or Wordpress, and advertise myself to the world as part of that inner circle, that clique of sophisticates (whether that empirically exists or not).  But no, I’m staying here, on Friendster, together with the angsty teenagers and love-sick preteens (whether there’s any validity to that claim or not). 

My blog is my performance space, and judge me not by where I put that space, but rather what I express on it.

Out of the desert, there are many tales that seem to have lost their beginnings and whose ends are nowhere to be found. 

The Tua’Reg speak of a traveler, a man who came from a distant kingdom, possessed by a demon. Some say he was an exile, banished for his transgressions; others say he was nejef, a sorcerer, a conjurer of the mysterious arts, overtaken by the dark powers he consorted with.  None were certain, but the very old who claim they saw him with their own eyes remember the sensation of evil that radiated from the stranger, and the shadows that followed the wanderer’s steps. 

Though the tribe hid from him in fear, the elders soon learned that the demon had no intention of doing them harm, and came to the wanderer in pity.  He uttered no word, and drank their water and ate their food, and was silent for thirteen nights.

Then, as the sun rose, a sandstorm descended upon Tua’Reg.  The tribesmen took shelter within their huts, only to turn and peer into the darkness that had fallen. The storm howled and the sun was gone behind the furious veil of sand.  They heard the demon-possessed man yelling into the wind, and the women shut their ears against his spell. 

Silence fell, a black silence, the absence of sound deafening in its embrace.  The few who still watched saw the man falter, as the sand swirled around him.  Then all was still, the sand falling like rain around them.  In the village, all was still and dark, yet the storm whirled around them, as if a wall of sand encircled their world, shutting off both light and sound.  The men of the tribe crossed themselves, and watched and waited.

A woman came, walking out of the sandstorm as if emerging from the pool of an oasis.  Her hair was the color of night, her eyes deep and radiant.  In one hand, she carried a scarf of the sheerest black silk, and in the other, a dagger made from the light of the desert moon.  And in the silence, the men heard music.  The stranger, kneeling in the piled dust, looked up at the woman, and she began to move, dancing in darkness.  She danced to the ever-shifting rhythm of the desert sands, she danced to the song of the scorpions and the stars.  She wove a cloak of shadows around the demon-possessed man, and the music was silent, and the Tua’Reg found that the day had turned to night, and the sandstorm, the woman and the stranger had all but disappeared.

This is not a poem.  This is me letting out how I feel about things in this world. 

Combat struggle conflict war endless

Draw the string across the bow music to ears

The striking of a drum in the jungle

The cries of a lost child

Into oblivion

now

Swords will rear empty space pierced by

light across the expanse a mirror upon mirror eternal

An afterimage of the night, a soul ripped from its flesh

the beating heart the jungle drum

that rattle of gunfire

that refuses denial

BECAUSE MAN

WILL BE

victorious.

A touch of death no different

from a touch of peace.

now

Not so much an issue of "racism" as it is an issue of differences in expectations perhaps.  What I’d like to see is an explanation for why Asian standards and measures for "good debate" are not part of the World standards and measures for "good debate".  Why should American, Australian and European debate be considered as predominant (in the sense that it’s used as the World standard) to Asian standards?

All I want is an explanation, everyone deserves that.

I pulled my bike up along the steps at the base of small hill, capped by a glittering wat (Thai for "temple"; same idea behind the name "Angkor Wat", recalling the shared roots and ancient rivalry between the kingdom of Siam and the Khmer Empire).  The bike I was using was an old one, like the ones in the old movies of Saigon where straight-backed girls pedaled in droves across busy streets and navigated between Volkswagens.  It was rickety, no doubt, rented from the shop near the ticket booth, but every creak and groan seemed appropriate with the atmosphere.

A pair of large wooden gongs, simply cut from the cross-sections of some massive tree, hung from a sort of frame near the steps that led up to the wat.  A little girl was playing with them, tapping the large panels with a wooden paddle, the hollow sound mingling with the slight tinkling of bells coming from somewhere, disturbed by the wind.  I watched as her parents took pictures.  Though the sun was bright, the air was comfortably cool, and the wind was picking up.  After a few minutes, the girl and her parents went up the steps.

I looked up at the temple that crowned the hill.  I couldn’t appreciate the detail at this distance, but from where I was, it was clear that, although small, the place of worship was beautifully designed.  Its roof curved up to the typical point, painted with gold, shining in the sun.  Its walls were white, and sunlight glittered off of small mirrors embedded in the columns.  Patterns, carved and painted, embellished the entire facade.

The motif of points or cones reaching into the sky, so central to shape of traditional Thai architecture (and head dress), has something to do with the concept of the Buddhist/Hindu cosmos (one will notice that in the history of Southeast Asia, particularly the Thai-Cambodia-Laos-Burma region, the religion was influenced by both Hinduism and Buddhism, filtering in from their roots in South Asia).  The center of all things is the holy mountain, Mount Meru.  It is proximity to the center that brings power, holiness and prosperity.  This sort of of world-view leads to the typical architecture seen in every traditionally Thai structure, from the wats and stupas (symbolic repositories of Buddhist relics) to the roofs of the Thai homes and the head gear of their dancers. 

But the concept of the center leads to even further articulation, in the megalopolis of Bangkok.  The urban center is the heart of Thailand, and it is the center of every aspect of Thai society: politics, education, business, religion. To be someone, you have to be someone in Bangkok; to wield influence, one must be associated with the center.  Buddhist world-view meets human migration patterns.

I stood at the base of the steps, running my hand over the railing, a stylized snake, that greeted comers with all it’s seven heads.  This was a representation of Naga, the snake-god who shaded Buddha from the sun with its seven hoods, as the Enlightened One meditated. 

Making my way up the steps, I caught the smell of incense and I saw the source of the tinkling sound of bells: adorning the rim of the temple’s roof, hundreds of tiny bells dangled in the wind.  Another sound is added to all this: the murmured prayers of the faithful.  I remembered that it’s New Years Day, and although this is different from the Buddhist calendar, the combining of cultures made January 1 as much a day of supplication and prayer as any other day of new beginnings.

I realized that I didn’t have a camera, and kicked myself inwardly for the failure to bring one.

Nearby, a woman peddled flowers and incense in exchange for a "donation" of twenty baht.  Religion always has a business aspect to it, I don’t care what religion you say it is.  At the top of the hill, there are actual iron gongs, and people were saying prayers striking heavy metal disks solemnly.  I watched, before removing my shoes to walk into the temple itself.

Inside, the walls were mirrors, giving the impression of a temple that IS the center of an infinite number of temples, stretching out in five directions: left, right, front, behind and above.  The floor beneath was smooth dark marble, and in the center of the small place was a stone slab, covered in the tattered gold leaves and coins.  I quickly pulled out my guide brochure, and learned that the slab is believed to be the footprint of Buddha.  An old woman knelt before it, praying, as she pressed a piece of gold leaf into the slab.  She held an incense stick in her hand, and bowed.  I moved to another side of the small shrine, and knelt, my feet pointing backwards beneath my knees.  If the head is the most holy because of its being associated with the center, the most dirty are the feet, and it is courtesy and religious propriety to not point the feet at either guest or shrine.  I kneel, but instead of praying, I took a blue Corona notebook out of my travel bag, with every intention of writing about this experience.

After several minutes of just taking in the place, I noticed a young girl enter.  As she went to her knees in front of the stone, she glanced at me. I nodded in reply to her smile.  After praying, she then tossed a coin unto the slab.  She then stood, getting up hastily and looking into the mirrored walls.  I wondered what she was doing, when I realized she had a brush in her hand, and she was gazing intently at herself as she fixed her hair. 

Later, I left the temple, and met a group of debaters from the University of La Verne, in California. 
"What’s up there?" One of them asked.
I put my notebook back into my travel bag. "It’s like a prayer place, the footprint of Buddha or something." 
"Wow.  You wanna go up?" one of the girls asked her partner.
He shrugged.
I got on to my bicycle. "You can go up and try praying, just don’t point your feet at the shrine," I added.
The girl grinned, and started up the steps, her camera held eagerly in her hand. "I’m going.  See you around!"
I nodded. "Later."

The bicycle creaked and moaned as I set off to find more things to explore.

I don’t know if I have any sort of moral or intellectual high ground to throw criticisms at people who seek to limit the experiences of others in the name of their religion, political alignment, national identity etc.  but I feel an instant sense of disgust for such actions.  True, it is only through our faith that we can know anything (faith forms the basis for all other forms of epistemological approach… ie a rationlist episteme comes from faith in the process of deductive logic, and so on), it may not necessarily be a harmonious and peaceable thing to make presumptions on what everyone should consider "right". 

I have, for the past three years, looked at the limits of Christian belief, as I have identified myself as a Christian since I was 12.  I have been an active member of different church organizations,  seeking to become closer to God through a living relationship with Him, facilitated by my being a part of various fellowships.  But I think that somewhere along the way, people may have gotten it wrong, and in so doing, have caused so much pain and suffering at the tip of good intentions and the "Will of God".  And all this hurt, I believe, stems from a basic fact about the way religious organizations approach the questions of knowledge.

First of all, for those of this blog’s readers who are Christian (regardless of coordinates you are on the spectrum of religiosity) understand that this isn’t the blog entry of an atheist, or someone who has decided to become "anti-God" or even "anti-Church"; I believe in the body of believers, and God is still very much a part of my life– I wouldn’t be writing about how bad misinterpreting Him can be if He wasn’t.  Rather, I want to caution other believers (regardless of what faith it is you believe in) against the harm that religious fervor can bring about.

Now, religion is a straightforward matter of accepting, that is believe, a certain set of propositions about reality, and living according to these propositions.  If the doctrine says, "Accept Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour", then it follows that the person who claims to adhere to this must likewise "Take up your cross and follow Him," and "Go into all the world and make disciples of all men."  Now, the problems arise in the idea that "Going into all the world and making disciples of all men," (as an example for this discussion), is a directive rather than an order.  In other words, it’s a general statement of purpose rather than a detailed step-by-step how-to.  It is the difference between "Build a house," and "Dig a foundation about 15 feet into the ground, pour concrete into this, and wait for it to set…"

The directive becomes subject to interpretation.  And the very process of interpretation is belied by intention.  What I mean by this is that when someone interprets something (as per processes of communication), the original meaning as intended by the sender is passed through the distorting lens of the perception of the receiver.   I’ve talked about this before in this same blog with Kant and cognitive psychology.  What happens next presents quite a problem in the discourse of religion: the original set of propositions, which form the foundation of religious affiliation and identity, are exploded into as many different possible interpretations as there are people willing to interpret.

Prior to the ripple of schisms within the Roman Catholic Church, only few were allowed access to the propositional set articulated in the Bible.  This meant that there was a unified set of interpretations, sanctioned only by the Church leadership.  Of course, this led to a very narrow field of doctrine.  Taken to its ends, the enforcement of this unified set of interpretations led one of the most barbaric and horrifying institutions in Western history, the Inquisition.  Then, with the advent of Protestantism and the mass production of copies of the Bible, the field for interpretation widened.  There wouldn’t really have been quite so much of a problem, except for one thing: absolutism.  People with different sets of interpretation condemned one another, to the point of actual wars being fought across Europe, both covert and in the open.  It got bad enough that certain religious groups, like the Quakers and the Puritans, decided it was better to try their luck in the wilderness of the New World rather than stay at home in England or Holland.  Every time someone came up with a new interpretation, they were branded, chased out, persecuted, called "heretic"; its not hard to imagine them also being patronised, chided, "prayed for", or confronted in order to bring them "back into the fold".  Whatever the strategy, the core idea is the same: differences are not okay, everyone needs to have the same set of doctrines.

Religion is the enemy of differences, of diversity.  When a new book is labeled as "Anti-Christian"; when an author is derided by believers for "Betraying Islam"; when a teacher isn’t allowed to teach because of being an "atheist"– those are manifestations of the sort of shut-the-door-on-everyone-who’s-not-wearing-the-same-color-tie sort of thinking that religion represents. 

I’ve chosen to embrace the teachings of Jesus because I believe in Him and and I believe in what He was talking about.  He didn’t hedge people out, like the Jewish religious leadership was doing; rather, He embraced each person for who they were.  He still told them what they were doing was wrong, but that wasn’t a basis for branding them into "my children/not my children".  He didn’t say, "Okay, you disciples, you are more special than the others, so you get better rewards in heaven; umm, the thief, the prostitute, and the Roman, well, you’re still going to heaven when you repent, but you won’t get the cookies."  My understanding of what Jesus was talking about is that there aren’t any entitlements because you’re more or less of a believer in Him; we’re all on the same footing.  This sort of inclusiveness, of sincere respect for the differences abounding between people, is something that I believe in. 

What so many religious leaders and authorities have chosen to do, however, doesn’t seem to be this.  They take an interpretation that is more "My way or the highway."  And although I can respect that sort of teaching, what I can’t reconcile is the manifestation of this teaching in the whole range of forms of persecution/non-tolerance, from patronising to ridicule all the way to (although I hope not today) torture and public execution. 

Although a person may have a set of propositions that form the basis of a world-view, and may live according to the interpretation of these propositions, I think that the line must be drawn (as it always will be as long as there is such a thing as society) at the imposition of one view over another.  There needs to be a recognition of the whole range of people and personalities, and there needs to be an approach that seeks, not to narrow the field of ideas, but rather to explore the field of what people consider to be true, not with the intention of subverting this diversity, but celebrating it.

There are no high roads or low roads, only the roads we choose to walk on. 

Over the past few months, I’ve come across increasing
criticism directed towards a variety of institutions that are vital parts of
our society: education, government, economies, and mass media. Although defenders of these structures may
make claims that such criticisms range from the misinformed to the downright
malicious, I think there might be substance in the fact that more and more
people are recognizing the clumsiness, the inefficiency, and the distortion
that are coming out of these institutions that our society is supposed to
depend on in order to function properly. What this column intends to do is to present an idea of why all these
institutions are suffering the same malaise, and what can possibly be done to
make things better.

For the sake of clarity (and the
limited space The Weekly Sillimanian
editors allow for columnists), let’s focus on the structure of formal
education, as a case-in-point, to illustrate the general problem that I believe
is shared by the range of institutions our society operates with. Sir Ken Robinson, the author of How Schools Kill Creativity, observed
that formal education, as it is structured today—throughout the world—is
founded on a sort of hierarchy of subjects: science and maths at the top,
followed by the languages and humanities, with arts at the bottom. By the time a student is in high school, the
amount of time devoted the study of maths and sciences is substantially (with
only a few exceptions, such as high schools for the arts) more than the amount
of time given to creative pursuits, like dance or painting. The reason that curriculums are structured
this way is because our system of formal education evolved in response to
societal needs during the Industrial Revolution. At the time, children were foreseen to be
more likely to get jobs as engineers, doctors and business operators rather
than painters, dancers and poets. Educational structures were designed to promote employability among
their students, to work in corporations and firms, rather than to be airy-fairy
thinkers and dreamers. 

But that’s where the anachronism
lies. The 21^st century
needs—with a society of information junkies and deconstructed personalities—is
new ideas, new innovations and perspectives. Teaching children by rote is a waste of time because they could be
learning so much more about the world on a more open-source platform. Schools, as they are structured today,
represent a form of information flow that goes from top to bottom, from
instructor to student. But nature of
information exchange is no longer top-down; with the increasing accessibility
to cable television, internet, mobile phones and iPods, the shape of
information is becoming increasingly flattened. And schools have yet to respond to this in a dynamic manner. Roger
Schank, author of Making Minds Less
Educated than Our Own, writes that with the way schools are designed now,
the objective is not so much to learn but rather to please the teacher in the
classroom. And really, if we have to ask
students about what they remember most from school, the answers would most
probably be along the lines of who had a crush on who, what sort of clothes the
most popular people wore, the fried chicken in the cafeteria; not the practical
application of the Pythagorean Theorem or the 8^th President of the
Philippines. When a student gets
information from Podcasts, Mythbusters, YouTube or MSNBC, it’s very difficult
to get their attention on a copy of Renato Constantino. If the objective is to
teach them an appreciation for history, they might as well watch a DVD copy of “Flags
of Our Fathers”. 

But details aside, the contention
is this: that our system of education has yet to adapt to a society where
creativity and integration takes predominance over focused specialization and
rote repetition of skills. Although we
do recognize that skills and specialization do have their value, the weight
given to these aspects of our educational system have come at the expense of
other facets of human intelligence.

In the same way, government
structures, such as elections, haven’t changed for the past two hundred years;
shouldn’t we be rethinking the way we select our leaders when the electoral
system has promoted populism and politicians whose only concern is popularity
within a timeframe of their own terms? Likewise, shouldn’t business theory rethink profit-driven ethics, which
have resulted in economy-motivated warfare, social injustice, and exploitation?

As our society evolves at the edge
of changing technology and realities are shifted by the scale of information
exchange, it follows that our institutions, formed during the Age of
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, need serious renovation if society
is to improve. Rethinking things is now
more important than ever.

***in a bit, still trying to make sense of this whole tournament***