i am ashamed

of america.

to be a republican.  (yeah... i am not really in my heart.  just on paper.)

of the news.

of stupid people who have no idea how the world works, but they are somehow running it.

of most christians.

of comfortable jerks who think the world is defined by a cosmic order that they fit in and then think that everyone can fit in as long as they just adjust to fit it, and they don't, so everyone who is poor somehow deserve what they get.

of what our politics has degenerated to.

of how much anger i can feel and feel justified in feeling at a debate over the way morons control my life and our lives.

at how stupid people think that the way things are right now is the way things are supposed to be.  as if capitalism is the natural order of things.  as if the way they want to run things is somehow the right way to run things.  as if what they are trying to do is not simply imposing a system on us that fits their personal profit, agenda, and comfort. as if these people aren't "brainwashing" children when they tell them that it's okay to get rich and not worry about other people and that capitalism is a good thing.  it is not a natural system!!  i am glad they mention the matrix, because i realize how little they understood the movie.  an important point of the movie is that the freaking people escape one matrix only to enter another matrix!  there is no metanarrative, no grand, overarching ideology, and there is no escape from systems of ideology!  i am not even sure what movie they were watching!  neo leaves the matrix only to enter another order than is defined by morpheus.  he doesn't become free of capitalism or something.  the more i think about it, the more i can't even see how he could tie the matrix into the conversation.  ugh!  they are morons!

okay.  so is this how most debates on tv are run, now?  because i refuse to participate in them from now on.  i am so mad right now.

this is what i am talking about:

http://videogum.com/426211/fox-news-finally-takes-on-the-communist-muppets/top-stories/

i liked this comment from the comment guys:

"so lately i’ve been reading a lot on discourse analysis surrounding economics and the political aspects of economics, since the lines between governments and economies are getting incredibly blurry and weird, which is simultaneously incredibly boring and incredibly fascinating. and watching segments like these is very very interesting, because you’re watching the power elite literally scraping the bottom of the intellect barrel to figure out how to continue to dominate a conversation regarding why profit maximization is a great system- and they are losing it. they are actually starting to lose the narrative that they have built over the past fifty years regarding the roles of the state, the market, and society, because the logical extremes of their positions are becoming realized and it is an incredibly unsustainable and tenuous system. and apparently last week the republican governors association met in florida and had a strategy session to figure out new language to use- including the fact that they shouldn’t even say the word capitalism anymore because it has negative connotations! so now the republican party is probably going to start saying “economic freedom”. but that’s crazy, right?? the fact that the republican party is even recognizing that saying capitalism is a losing political marketing strategy! it gets my nerd alert bat signal tingling!"

and this is the best music video/ song in my life right now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIKeQTjeo0M

and this is the best/ most painful video in my life right now.  it's why i can't buy clothes anymore:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV1hQSt2hSE

love, zach

why i love animal collective

dissonance and cacophony

i think the world is trying too hard to organize itself.  every form of organization on a wide scale is wrong and too exclusive, just like this sentence is always wrong because it is an organization trying to understand and be inclusive of too much.  something will always be left out.

chaos is not right all the time.  that is not what i am saying.

what i am saying is that chaos is very right a lot of time.  there is a cathartic benefit to noise bereft of the signal.  my life is chaotic-- and i know that yours is too.  music like animal collective's allows for chaos, creates room for understanding and loving chaos.

i think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rS0RcyqYFc

please read this:

this is an essay my Professor wrote about the Self and the world/the environment.  i think we all should read it.  and by "we", i mean everybody in the world.

http://flickering-flame.blogspot.com/2008/05/problem-of-painlessness.html

empathy and humanity

On my first interaction with “The People of Sand and Slag” what I experienced was something like great excitement for the future. The story, on further readings and in retrospect, is truly sad, mourning something that is lost-- something “human.” I think the first time I read the story, I was only able to see the great gains of “humanity” in its power over death, treading into the realms of near-immortality; this is a future human resolved into a sort of creature with awesome control over everything. As humanity seems to have been able to develop anything it needs with its control over the mechanics of cells and structuring molecules, using even the debris around them to stay alive, saying, “Mud makes us tick”-- the phrase “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” takes on a new meaning, here-- it has attained a sort of immortality and immunity from pain (“Jack laughed and...sliced his arm off”) (Bacigalupi 43, 45). Along that line of progress, though, something has perceptively been lost, and that is almost too sad to bear. Why is what humans have lost so inescapably sad? I think the answer lies somewhere in the fact that what many people would use to define humanity as “humanity” was lost somewhere between where we are now and the future in which Bacigalupi invents. That something is missing is easily obvious, but why it's sad is not so easily seen; comparing Paolo Bacigalupi's short story with Philip K. Dick's text Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, what is lost becomes more visible through Rick Deckard's interactions with androids and animals. What is lost, more than a physical difference, is an overall sense of empathy in humanity that animals are able to lay bare.

On further readings, the peak of disgust and sadness that I have engaged with in the text of “The People of Sand and Slag” was when Jaak talked about the dog: “I don’t know. That dog’s different from a bio-job. It looks at us, and there’s something there, and it’s not us. I mean, take any bio-job out there, and it’s basically us, poured into another shape, but not that dog….” (Bacigalupi 51). Humanity seems to continually be gaining by technology, but where something is gained something has been lost. What is lost seems to be summed up in the ideas of Isidore the chickenhead about what he thinks a bounty hunter is-- “something merciless that carried a printed list and a gun, that moved machine-like through the flat, bureaucratic job of killing. A thing without emotions, or even a face; a thing that if killed got replaced immediately by another resembling it. And so on, until everyone real and alive had been shot” (Dick 158). I like Isidore's definition of what it is to be alive-- to have a face and to feel emotion-- the opposite of a machine. Unlike the dog, what humans have lost in “The People of Sand and Slag” is distinction and emotion; they have somehow merged with the dust or the kipple of Dick's future. They are made mostly of sand, the end result of the entropy of the world. Instead of combating that beast entropy any longer, the humans have somehow merged themselves with the dust; ironically, what humanity seems to have lost in merging with and creating things out of kipple is inherently what nature lacks as well-- empathy. “Humans” of the future are like nature, indifferent. They can only create shells of humans and shells of themselves and pour themselves into that, but that seems to be the extent of what they have and what they are.

Thus what is lost, down this road, is what we know humanity to be. Even now, “humans” are not what they used to be. In Jeremy Rifkin's “Empathic Civilisation”, Rifkin discusses how the way human brains were wired in the past is much different from the way they are wired now (we are now plugged into new gadgets and connections, and we see a global picture of the world). That “human” even 20 years ago is different from the “human” we are encountering today (Rifkin). To be human is not a constant and stable idea, and it is in steady flux. Humans in Bacigalupi's future, then, have changed to the point that they have basically achieved immortality, possibly the ultimate gain that we can have from technology. It seems to have come at the price of eliminating everything that is not human or “other”, something that can tell us what we aren't, so we know what we presumably are. The sadness that seems to inform the text of “The People of Sand and Slag” is the sadness that this technological immortality now equates to total sameness. It is the idea that now there is no sentient existence outside of ourselves that we cannot fully comprehend that makes us “human” right now. It is the validation of something that is not human that makes us tick in a sense that is definitely more than that of the physical mud-- it makes us tick in a sort of emotional sense. It is that validation that Deckard sought as he gazed into the eyes of the ostrich (Dick 27). The new sand people do not bemoan their situation and their losses; maybe because they do not know what they have lost, just like Rachael did not feel the loss of the sheep that she pushed off the building or Pris the pain the spider felt when she cut off its legs (Dick 206, 226). Why do we, as humans, mourn the loss of this kind of life? It may be because what we are clinging to, right now as humans trying to remain human, is empathy. For us, in a sentence: empathy makes us human. Empathy is based on the fear of death and our understanding that others are also subject to death and that pain can move us closer to death or decreases the pleasure we have in this relatively short time on earth (Rifkin). Maybe that is why Jaak says that the last poet on earth, who rejected weeviltech and who decided to die rather than to live in a world without natural animals, thought that “being human meant having animals” (Bacigalupi 51). Without death, there is no empathy. Without empathy, there is no humanity.

Animals are important to us to prove that we have empathy. Conversely, in Bacigalupi's future, animals aren't important any more because empathy isn't important anymore. Whereas Deckard's obsession with animals seems to come from his need to prove to himself that he is human and not an android, and that androids are definitely not human. His entire career is based on this assumption-- that androids are inferior to humans, and what makes them inferior is their lack of empathy. This is why the Voight-Kampf, or empathic response test is so important, because in the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the only decisive division between human and android is empathy. This starts to get sticky and complicated because there are also many humans who don't have empathy. Deckard seems robotically cold in his systematic killing of the sentient android at the beginning of the novel, with the deaths of androids simply equating to money for him-- “And now let's visit Mr. Polokov, he said to himself. He patted his laser tube” (Dick 86). Just like Deckard in this scene, not all humans have empathy. Thus, any system that begins to claim a sort of superiority of this kind is destined to end in violence that is hard to justify, because it will call for the destruction of anything that does not meet the criteria for its tests; if it doesn't have empathy, it doesn't fit in our regimented theory of humanity, so kill it. But can we ever justify killing or ending a life? This could be why we mourn the loss of empathy, which, in this argument, is what makes us human. We mourn its loss because empathy keeps humanity in check (there will be no big bombs if we understand and sympathize with the pain we will be causing) and urges humanity to push toward a freer and more untethered way of life for as many people as we can. Animals come into play here because if we can empathize with something that is “weaker” than us, something that is “dependent” on us, we can empathize with each other, our equals, and that makes us human. Most of the novel is dealing with Deckard's anxiety over empathy-- his job depends on empathy being what makes life meaningful. He could not shoot an android that had empathy. However, is there more to his anxiety than just his dependence on it for a clean conscience in his line of work? Could it be that there really is nothing of true value to distinguish humans from androids, from one life to another, and that idea makes him anxious?

In Dick's futuristic world, humans are dominant and everything else serves a sort of “subservient” role. In this sense, I mean that humans see animals and androids as their lesser-counterparts, as if their lives did not mean as much as a human's. Even on this point, though, there is a hierarchy, and humans desire to keep animals alive, but killing an android doesn't mean anything. It seems that animals have a specific role in humans' lives, but could an android ever fit that role? Rachael eventually has a specific role where she seduces Deckard. Up to that point, Deckard had never seen an android as a being that could be a part of a relationship. So can androids look a human in the eye and have something behind that gaze that justifies humans as much as an animal can? For Deckard, it seems like it could be, because Rachael says to him, “You're not going to be able to hunt androids any longer... So don't look sad. Please” (Dick 198). He won't be able to hunt androids any longer because he feels a sense of “otherness”, or at least life that he had never sensed before Rachael. However, where it gets blurry is where Bacigalupi again brings in the idea that things created by humans can't be anything but human, just shells filled with our own selves, which destroys a sense of otherness. So androids do have lives, but are they as valuable as a “real” animal's life that has all the aura and mystique? Or is all life simply life? Either way, it seems that Deckard is able to have a relationship with an android, whether it is better than or more valuable than a relationship with an animal or not, so retiring androids becomes problematic. He is worried about empathy again.

If androids are alive, but they don't have empathy, and humans are to become, essentially, androids, is this new future of sand and slag to be worried about? Is the loss of humanity as we know it to be mourned? Does the mechanization of humanity equate to the end of life? Deckard ends up saying, “...it doesn't matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are” (Dick 241). Dick's text seems to try to blur the distinctions between lives, or at least problematize our definitions of life-- maybe empathy does not exactly mean life or humanity. He seems to be trying to say that no life is more or less significant than another, because life is life. Then why is it so important to Deckard to have a real animal rather than an electric one? This starts to get tricky when we want to believe that all life is life, and it is all important, but there is a part of us, as humans, that does not want to surrender what we are, to say that all life is equal, without any special “aura”. But then, can we create a system of classification of “human” that somehow includes all humans and excludes everything non-human? There seems to be an abundance of overlap in this case- the android Phil Resch has a pet squirrel that he treats with warmth and with what could admittedly be called empathy. Have we ruled out that the people of sand and slag as non-humans? Or does Jaak feel something like empathy when the dog crawls all over him, licking his face, and Jaak says that “there was something friendly about it. I couldn't help smiling as I drifted back to sleep” (Bacigalupi 52)? For any one thing that a person could use to classify something as human, an android or animal somewhere has that characteristic. On the other hand, any trait or classification that could be used to look down on any “other” as non-human could be just as easily seen in many humans.

Then couldn't life simply be life? And couldn't any life then justify another life? Do we have to hang on so tight to what we might today call “human”? Nature seems to have a good sense of equilibrium that balances out loss with gain and vice versa. So what humanity presumably lost in “The People of Sand and Slag”, it must have gained something in return. However, despite the dog's best attempts at awakening a slumbering empathy in the people of Bacigalupi's story, they still ate it. Two of the people ate it without remorse. But Jaak says, “Still, I remember when the dog licked my face and hauled its shaggy bulk onto my bed, and I remember its warm breathing beside me, and sometimes, I miss it” (Bacigalupi 54). Maybe empathy will never die, but it will show up in places we would not expect. Even so, it required an animal to bring it out of Jaak...

Works Cited

Bacigalupi, Paolo. "The People of Sand and Slag." Wastelands. San

Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2008: 39-54.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. New York: Del

Rey, 1968.

Rifkin, Jeremy, Prod. The Empathic Civilisation. 2010. Web. 7 Nov 2011.

urinal psychology

there is a bathroom i frequently use in the university library.  the facilities stay clean, and they have good urinals.  the best part of the urinals is that the dividers between them are really tall, so you feel like you are all alone doing your business; this is opposed to the urinals in other buildings at the university where there are no dividers, and you feel like everyone is looking at you as you, you know, take care of business.  i digress.

in the bathroom that i like with the Great dividers there are four urinals.  four.  this, to my mind, is a terrible thing (i hate even numbers, anyway, but) you see, when a boy needs to use the restroom, he does not want to stand next to someone and do it- that would be uncomfortable, you might exclaim.  it is uncomfortable for me!  so the problem with the four stalls becomes that they only, at any given time, allow for two people at a time to pee comfortably.  five stalls would allow three people to pee comfortably, because it would leave an unused urinal between each of the men relieving themselves.

four urinals cause other problems for me: when there is one person using a urinal, and he is on one end, do i take the urinal at the other end, or do i take the urinal one away from the peeing boy?  this doesn't seem like a problem with a complex answer, right?  well the complications start to show their little faces when a third person comes.  if there is a third person on a four urinal system, that third person will unavoidably have to pee next to someone else.  with this new complication in mind, ask yourself again, where would i stand in relation to that one person peeing at the far end of the urinals?  if i am on the other end, the third person will have to choose between standing next to me or next to the other person peeing.

i hate this scenario.  i always feel bad if he doesn't stand next to me, because i start questioning myself, "am i doing this wrong?  do i look like i might be a 'peeper'?  did he choose to stand next to the other person because i look like i might try and be personable, strike up a lively conversation?  why didn't he want to stand next to me?"  on the other hand, if he stands by me, i immediately get self-conscious and uncomfortable.  i also am feeling bad for the guy on the other end, wondering if he is now running through the same questions discussed earlier.

that's why i prefer the scenario where i stand only one urinal away from the other person relieving himself.  in this case, the third person entering the restroom, who has to stand next to someone else without any way out of it, has to choose between numbers merely and not necessarily between who is less likely to take a certain advantage of peeing next to another person.  it has been reduced from personal judgment to a choice of numbers.  the only question the new third person has to ask himself is, "one or two?"  the answer of course is, "ah, i will pee next to only one person."  without doubt, this third person is full of gratitude to the second person for his wisdom and Great foresight.

however, even this setup has its drawbacks.  i think it's inevitable that if i choose to stand one urinal away from a person instead of the possible two urinals, he'll think something is up.  but to this, my concerned friend, all i can say is that i have thought it through, and this is best for the both of us, i promise.

the furniture is in ruins

writing of heroes, ralph waldo emerson said, "But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class, is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so cheap a rate, that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates's condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir Thomas More's playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher's "Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his company, —

_Jul_. Why, slaves, 't is in our power to hang ye.
_Master_. Very likely, 

'T is in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye."

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take any thing seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world behind them, and play their own game in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of the world; and such would appear, could we see the  human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking together; though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately  and solemn garb of works and influences."

humor is the most important quality that one can nurture, for it is the mother of the best virtues love and patience, and it can replace other virtues like hope and faith with higher orders of power.

hope is elusive.  it is expecting something that never is, because nothing can be what we hope.  humor, then, replaces an attitude of expectation with an attitude of jovial waiting for nothing, and being happy when something comes, whatever it is.  humor causes you to have a new sense of lightheartedness about the world, so that when something comes that you aren't hoping for or when something you are hoping for is different than you hoped (inevitable), you can smile and say a little quip and enjoy what's in front of you with a good demeanor. when you hope for something, you start to "know" what is coming, which is just impossible.  everything is relational, and even if you experienced something in the past, like going to the dentist and being in pain, you might "hope" or "expect" the same thing the next time you go, but you will be going in different circumstances.  the last time you went, maybe you had a cavity or sore, but you don't this time.  your expectations in every case are somehow going to be different than the reality or experience you will have.  with humor, you can detach yourself from expectations.  you can detach yourself from want.  in fact, you can detach yourself from everything, creating for yourself a new hovel or platform from which everything can be made to look hilarious.  this may cause people to call into question your sanity, but it is possible.  when people laugh at weird things, it makes you step back and wonder, right?  so there may be societal boundaries to work with...  but good humor will ask of you to understand that the world is full of resources that can be prodded to produce results of mirth and hilarity.  why would you want to live any other way?  humor raises you above levels of "seriousness" that weigh you down.  and why be serious and intent about something?  you are going to be wrong anyway; there is just so much in the world.

emo phillips, a notable comedian once said that humor can be found just "by turning something upside-down.  like a small child."

humor cultivates patience.  patience seems to be an offspring of smiling and shunted expectations; patience is watching a child kick at the pricks of freedom and merely smiling, not getting upset.  i watch children everyday who get upset at me for the way things are, and when i smile in good humors, they can know i mean no malice, and they know i know that they just don't understand the way the world works, yet.  kindly smiling and being light about such things is a Great opposite to freaking out about a child making a mistake.  humor makes mistakes lighter all around by giving you an air of patience.

there is a boy who is annoyed by his family, everyday.  the boy fumes and seethes watching his mother go around saying opinions that he wants to expose the malice of, but he can't.  this boy cannot love his mother right now.  now, add humor to this situation, and this newly detached boy is aloof from his mother's opinions and not weighed down by their senselessness.  instead, the boy makes a joke and changes the subject, or makes a joke and makes the subject come into a new perspective- one in which both parties know that something is only as serious or as sacred as you make it.  happily, now, the boy loves his mother again.  he can be around her, and she can be around him, because they are wrapped in a spirit of good-happiness together.  anger becomes displaced by humor, and fighting, shouting, hating are all but gone.

this being said, i am not in the position to say that such things should be totally eradicated.  i actually do think those powerful emotions have their places; however, i am in a position to say that i think those things are nicely balanced with a good dose of humor.  humor will bring a sense of binding and life to a newly wounded heart.  ah, the treacherous path of balance...

i once was in an upheaval about questions that can't be answered, and they felt like a giant, seething blob, undergirded with fine, flexible steel trappings slopping around in my head, crashing from wall to wall.  it also felt like the blob was charged with electricity.  in the midst of my pain, i stepped back- i stepped back and i saw it for what i really wanted to see it- and there was a little fish flopping around, harmless.  i laughed at my self, and i laughed at the fish.

humor is most poetic.  humor is most noble.  humor is most divine.  humor is the platform on which ideas are pushed ahead.  humor is the ability to rise above sludgy swamps of sentimentality and heavy atmospheres into new heights.  humor is beating prejudice.  humor is loosening the tongue.  humor is a life's pursuit.  humor is sincerity packaged in edible morsels.  humor is camaraderie.  humor is solidarity.  humor is the twist of your lips.  humor is stubbing your toe and laughing, because pain is funny.  humor is bending circumstances.  humor is honor.  humor is the highest truth.

"The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?"

-henry david thoreau

i am proud to present the cathartic discord of an unrhymed spirit

i've been thinking about art a lot.  in my own art, i have been trying to reach a certain level of universality.  you see, art can be so strange and idiosyncratic that no one can understand it or connect or relate with it, universality creates a bridge to cross into the artist's heart and feelings.  so a person may reach a high enough level of universality and allow people into their ideas, be those ideas ever so strange, and people will connect with them.  i think that is how the world of culture and politics and art work- we find people in history who are complete enigmas, but we are drawn to them because they make us feel like they are right and they make us feel normal, be they ever so strange.


i am going to use justin bieber as an example.  his music is perfectly universal and so, for me, slightly uninteresting after a couple of listens.  however, the way he came to his fame is perfectly strange, so he intrigues me.  he was a fifteen year old kid with one good song who happened to run into usher while he was working a lot harder than fifteen year olds work at getting their name out there; he was going around from city to city playing his song live for radio stations.  it is interesting and strange, and his music definitely has a universality to it, so he has the right combination to be famous- he couldn't have one without the other and make it in the world.  and he is changing the culture.  just look how he broke the boundaries of how people view children in art.  right after him there was the ark productions boom (rebecca black...) and a surge in people turning to listening to a younger generation's music.  i imagine there will now be more children artists who are listened to in the near future.

so art takes things that are universal and human, and mixes them with the strange, symbolic, obscure, and, for the sake of my topic, religious.  the universal is the bridge to the religious.

i had been thinking about this, and i have been excited about a poem i wrote, because i think it's the most universal poem i have ever written.  it's just got that feeling- one that can't seem to be cast aside or boiled down, but you can't put your finger on what it is.  i don't fully know where it came from, but i am happy to feel it here-

A nice treat for traveling boys

My eyes see more colors than kids with lips
Caught in bounded minds like prey
He saw her laying on the ground
Her back and profile talking with the empty ceiling
Condensing a month's worth of space
He laid down next to her
Ate the carpet
Turned
Facing her
Said,
"we just smile," he said
He said, smiling
It bent until it broke, entering the sky fluttering
"it was constantly changing, anyway," he said
"it's a relief to my mind, anyway. the kind of relief
when you suddenly see smudges on paper
after all those damned, perfect lines."
Outside, a cat was singing with the bounce of lights
"she's hungry,"
He said

this can be juxtaposed next to a line from dante, who not only had the universal aspect in his poetry, but a much more powerful mix of the weird/religious.

I came into a place mute of all light, Which bellows as the sea does in a tempest, If by opposing winds 't is combated. The infernal hurricane that never rests Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine; Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. When they arrive before the precipice, There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments, There they blaspheme the puissance divine. I understood that unto such a torment The carnal malefactors were condemned, Who reason subjugate to appetite. And as the wings of starlings bear them on In the cold season in large band and full, So doth that blast the spirits maledict; It hither, thither, downward, upward, drives them; No hope doth comfort them for evermore, Not of repose, but even of lesser pain.

these lines, these thoughts, all of this built up to a Great, big question for me.  what is right?  between the religious/spiritual world and the secular/universal world, which is right?

there are distinctly two different worlds out there.  i have tried to hold both in my mind at once, and they have both felt so real to me.  the religious world is one of light and life, of spirituality and beautiful, egotistical humility; while the secular or universal world is the earthy, human world full of reverent pride that is no less alive than the religious world.  one is the world each of us knows individually and the other is a world that is constructed from culture and society.  it's all different from person to person and from culture to culture, but they can be distinctly divided.  as i held both in my mind, thinking, "which of these do i have to choose?  do i choose god or the world?  they are both so real," a profound line from harold bloom jumped into my mind:

"The Comedy, like all of the greatest canonical works, destroys the distinction between the sacred and secular writing,"

people in the world are now divided between these two sects because the secular and the religious are both so real.  all of a sudden, to limit your world to only a certain set of symbols and ideas and feelings seemed crazy to me.  the world keeps unfolding the more people come into it.  ralph waldo emerson said,

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried... The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray."


the religious/irreligious/resenting gnostics try to boil the world to so many limits.  in some religious gnostics' minds, we see people with no room for anything but the Bible.  we see some who only listen to religious music or only speak on "religious" topics.  on the other hand, those other gnostics who know there is nothing of value in religion find salvation in social causes or saving the world.  but the imagination was built to be stretched!  we feel most alive when our minds are guided to make new connections- twines of the universe knitting themselves with the imaginations in our hearts; our soul thrives on feeling new things around familiar objects!


hamlet said to his friend,


"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."


the only philosophy that could be true would have to encompass all parts of the universe.


i thus return to exploring the idea of the agnostic approach of reading dante.  according to harold bloom, dante was a gnostic, but he was purely a gnostic of a knowing that he created himself.  he took parts of the Bible and bent them how he needed them; similarly he took myth and legend and places and bent them to fit his own world.  however, because he took so much of the world around him, he had a universality about him that people are drawn to.  explaining this, harold bloom said,


"Everything that is vital and original in Dante is arbitrary and personal, yet it is presented as the truth, consonant with tradition, faith, and rationality.  Almost inevitably, it is misread until it blends with the normative, and at last we are confronted by a success Dante could not have welcomed.  The theological Dante of modern American scholarship is a blend of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and their companions.  This is a doctrinal Dante, so abstrusely learned and so amazingly pious that he can be fully appreciated only by his American professors."

do you see?  he is so encompassing of the entire world around him that even though he is terribly strange, people are able to take what he says as truth; when in fact, what he has done to their entire belief system is filter and warp it through his own knowing.

he blends the secular so, so perfectly with the religious that the distinctions become lost and it becomes grounds for whoever wants a piece of dante.  if a religious gnostic wants to see a religious dante, they see a religious dante.

an agnostic who "wants to read the Comedy as an allegory of the theologians, starts with the only theologian who truly mattered to Dante: Dante himself."  it would seem that whatever approach one takes, in an agnostic sense, one will find that the world that dante lived in was warped by his own knowing, not straightened by a religious path of ideals, which makes it almost infinitely interesting to explore and wonder about.

it seems that we can say that we do not need to take the world to pieces and then choose just one piece of the world to live on, when it comes to the religious or the secular sense.  god, the universe, it is all in both.  you cannot have the one without the other.  is it not all real and a part of reality?

in conclusion to this small discussion of agnosticism vs. gnosticism, i say that gnostics build limits around life and the universe and their feelings and their minds and ideas.  on the other hand, agnostics are, as i have seen, careful to be able to bend, to expand and to grow- to enjoy life in all its varieties.  i don't care what religion or non-religion you are, you can be a boxed-in gnostic.

the agnostic is open to the idea that there is a universality out there that may lead them to new, often strange feelings and ideas and a constantly expanding spirituality, but that that is the most desirable part of life.  those religious and spiritual feelings are grounded by the universal- making both alive.  you cannot, in all actuality, feel alive without both, neither one without the other.