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Sunday, 13 March 2011

Cruel Season

The tall, dry grass is burning. Flames flicker and dance, advancing in a cracking parade of demon pixies. By day the billows of gray smoke are seen rising into a desolate sky. By night the orange flames are blazing scars into distant mountains. And in places where the fires have subsided, a charred landscape of blackened earth gasps for water. Every last drop has evaporated. Our benevolent, life-giving sun has become its death-dealing alter ego, daily exacting a fiery retribution on us for having enjoyed the nightly reprieve of its absence. The world is withered and parched; even the sky is choking. Days pass in degrees of heat. Repressive. Agonizing. Deadly. It wears down our best resolve and leaves us sapped. Insipid. Panting. Listless. Drained.

This morning a searing gust of dusty wind blows through the office door, blasting my face with grit. I cover my eyes with one hand and my coffee mug with the other. The wind subsides, depositing a layer of powdery sand on my lap, my arms, my neck, and on every other exposed surface in the freshly cleaned room.

Patience. Serenity. I smile and sip my coffee. It is all one can do amidst the unrelenting brutality of this preposterous season.

Sunday, 06 March 2011

Devil's Disease

For me, the worst part of malaria is not the piercing headaches, or the impossible chills or the body wrenching shakes, or the swamp of sweat that becomes my bed. Those are each, in their own right, a life sucking facet of this gripping disease. But they are not the worst. The worst part is the array of faces. Let me explain: The worst part of having malaria is when my hallucinating mind transforms knots of wood, or a mix of cracks in the wall, or obscure parts of a painting or picture into the shapes of faces. The visions start at the height of my racing pulse, at first benignly. Just a mix of shadows and lines transformed into the profile of a dark face. But as I foolishly let my mind slide deeper into the reverie, the faces become clearer and increasingly sinister. With my mind pulled down into the dark pit, each passing visage morphs into a more awful and terrifying one than before. Devilish, gasping, dark features form before my terrified mind. Skulls and flames appear behind sunken eyes and black gaping mouths. Once, when I was 12 years old, in the grasp of malarial fever, I begged and moaned for God to take my life so I could flee the legion of demon faces.

Even now, after long rejecting my childhood horror of demons, I still find myself staring into the sinister shapes of malevolent faces, while my eyes creep into the dark crevices which sprawl before my disease taken mind. Out of a strange inquisitiveness, I sometimes give myself completely over to see on what bizarre, dark journey the shapes will take me. And when I pass into a malarial sleep, dreams from my youth come back to haunt me, of skulls and infinite fire. I wake in a sweaty fit. Barely recovering from the dark fantasy, I pull the sheet close around my face, close my eyes, and pray for better sleep to come.

I should probably start taking a prophylaxis.

Friday, 04 June 2010

Morality, Love, and Chemicals
Or, An Example of How My Theology Continues to Diverge to More Distant and Stranger Paths
I like Jesus. I like how he took a vast religious system, centuries in the making, and boiled it down to a simple dictum: Love God and love one another. I like it because it’s simple, and simple people need simple creeds to live by. We don’t like pillars or points or steps; just give it to us straight. Jesus’ maxim also happens to be the last vestige of Biblical teaching that I haven’t seriously doubted and/or questioned and/or subsequently thrown out. It is the North Pole for my moral compass. However, I’m beginning to wonder how simple it is. For starters, what is love really? Throw aside all the passionately descriptive terminology, and we’re left with merely the good feelings we feel when we think about or interact with the objects of our so-called love. And, as everyone knows, good feelings come from an array of substances released into our neurochemical pathways with names like serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, dopamine, and phenylethylamine. So when Jesus tells us to love God and love others, he’s saying our brains should release those chemicals which provide us with feelings of happiness and general goodwill as we ponder God and Man (in hopes, of course, that we then act positively on those feelings). Our goal, consequently, must be to foster the release of such friendly chemicals; to find ways to increase their frequency and potency to show that we are growing in our love. We should therefore enhance our diets with foods containing substances which catalyze these chemical reactions. So, you see, morality becomes a question of whether we’re eating enough chocolate or not. Now that sounds like the beginnings of a good, simple creed: Eat chocolate. Unfortunately it isn’t a universally adaptable principle, as some people just don’t have access to the wonderful world of cocoa products.
Putting the chocolate aside, I’m actually trying to get at a serious issue here. Sometimes you find out that your last moral sustenance might be nothing more than a tart mix of psychology and physiology. Our deepest feelings of all things good, beautiful and true are duly described, explained, labeled, and filed away into science by behavioral psychologists and evolutionary biologists. That doesn’t make the topic (or our feelings) any less fascinating, but it does affect one’s idea of God. As I pursue this train of thought God eventually becomes the Great Progenitor of Creation who kicked it all off, then let it unfold how it would. That is almost too much to swallow for someone who has grown up in a religious tradition which suggests he can have a deeply personal and engaging relationship with his Creator. Besides, it still doesn’t answer the final question, Why?
In the quest to engage my mind in its search for Reality I’m often presented with equally sensible yet conflicting notions of what Is. Trying to reconcile them leaves me in an agitated flux of existential angst. But I would rather be there, would rather be a bit adrift, a bit rootless, than firmly planted in a comfortable delusion. And when all else fails, I can simply come back to what Jesus said: Just love, bro. And have another piece of chocolate.

Sunday, 23 May 2010

Anna Karenina, why do you beguile me so? This is my first Tolstoy novel and, while I’m not yet half way through, it’s easy to see how it became a classic. Tolstoy’s characters are wonderfully multi-dimensional and just generally human. He captures so well his characters’ internal conflicts and insecurities, and also their subtle and brief flashes of emotion. I suddenly find myself connecting with 19^th century Russian aristocrats. Tolstoy must be striking cords which transcend culture. Or maybe he has so engrossed me in his novel that I don’t know what is real anymore. But that’s the beauty of a well written piece of fiction; it presents an opportunity for complete distraction. You open a book and immerse your brain in another world so thoroughly that you don’t even realize you’re reading anymore. It’s funny to think about the distinct contrast between that other world and the realities of my daily life. At one point during the day I’ll be driving through a giant puddle, with mud and dirt clods flying every direction, trying not to hit a cow. That same day I’ll be totally transported to some Russian aristocrat’s summer cottage outside Petersburg, horses and everything.
Hopefully there’s something to be gained from the hours spent reading fiction. I think so, as I’ve found books, especially the classics, to be so much more than an opportunity for a bit of escapism. Reading them becomes an experience in life, on par with any other experience that challenges your perspectives and shapes your character. And, as I believe a challenged worldview is the only kind worth holding, I foresee having a good novel at hand until death.

Sunday, 28 March 2010

Voluminous. That is the first adjective that comes to mind upon completing Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. The novel, Rand’s magnum opus, is dedicated to her philosophy of Objectivism which, put simply, is rational man = god. She takes every opportunity to push this philosophy, and I think probably doesn’t care that her characters become unbelievable in the process. And it is a long process indeed. The sheer length of the volume was likely an attempt to wear down to exhaustion any of the reader’s objections to her philosophy. (One of her character’s monologues took me over a week to read.) But it had the desired effect on my mind. I had been reading a textbook on International Health at the same time as Atlas Shrugged, and its authors approach health from the political-economy point of view, promoting redistributive welfare states as the pinnacle of human achievement. Rand would use words like leeches and looters to describe those authors. And I, despite being a somewhat left-leaning individual, found myself agreeing with her more and more. What claim do the tired, poor, and huddled masses have on the vast wealth of self-made men? Rand would say absolutely none, and would despise anyone who might act in the name of humanitarianism or self-sacrifice. But despite the passionate rhetoric, which does resonate with the cold, calculating capitalist in me, Rand doesn’t seem to recognize that not all poverty is self-induced and that not all poor people are lazy bastards. In fact, the capitalist system she so fondly espouses has probably ruined as many hard-working people as it has supported. So I do continue to believe in redistribution (spread the love!), and in the role of unions, and in humanitarianism. But not too much. And so long as they’re tempered with a good dose of justice.

Rand grew up during the age of industrial giants. Here we are, a century later, and the mere mention of names like Carnegie and Rockefeller still evoke a sense of starry-eyed wonder at man’s ambition and achievement. There is something good and true to be said about a person’s hard work, their resultant superior ability, and their success. It inspires me to get off my lazy ass and do something useful for a change.

I read Atlas Shrugged over a period of three months, and definitely feel the loss after such a long companionship but also the sense that a burden has been lifted. Still, the experience has left me better for it and I come away with these following lessons:

1. Check your premises
2. Consistently live out your beliefs

3. Do something remarkable

Oh, and this lovely quote: “When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind – and it’s proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”