Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Depends on Your Point of View
What if you could see all the world’s sunsets and all the world’s sunrises—all at the same time? Such a thing is possible, if you travel to the moon on May 4, 2004. On that day, the earth will eclipse the sun, and the only sunlight reaching the moon will pass through the keyhole of the earth’s atmosphere. The air will scatter the blue light down to the earth, but the red light will make its way back into space, and, from an earthly point of view, will dye the moon with the color of blood.
But from the perspective of someone on the moon, our planet will have a red and gold ring of hope around it, which, for just a moment, will let you see all the world’s sunsets on the west side of the earth, and all the world’s sunrises on the east. You could consider yourself united with millions of lonely poets and happy lovers on earth, finding a home for their heart in that sight.
No one has yet photographed this event from the moon. We can only gaze up and wonder what someone there might see if they were gazing back at us.
Science • Way of Life • Optimism • (53) Trackbacks • Permalink
Monday, November 24, 2003
Butterfly Kings
You may imagine that monarch butterflies are so named without reason, but in fact they are the steeds of the Faerie Kings, who flitter about on their mighty beasts with sublime aimlessness. To a Faerie, indeed, it is a sin to pretend that you know where you are going.
You cannot see the Faeries on the backs of butterflies because they will not let you see. They hide in the folds of the wind from all creatures with eyes, and especially from the creatures whose eyes may understand what they see. They do not like to be understood, and they distain to be followed by anyone.
That is why the Kings are separated from the other faeries, with no one to rule except the bugs, the plants and each other. They take turns playing rulers and rebels, fighting with their symphonies of insects. Cicadas are particularly popular instruments of art and war, compelled under the sway of their masters’ magic to sing in a language they cannot understand. With such poetry and song, the Kings make alliances and break them, declare victory and decry the tragedy of their betrayals—all without even a single drop of faerie blood.
All Faeries are aware that were these Kings, in their reveries of poetic war, to allow such blood to touch the skin of any earthly thing, it would be as if stars had collided, and a vast fury of light would blind them all.
Since the Faerie Kings make war with art, and never rule any other Faeries but themselves, they tend to displace the Faerie Musicians and Poets out of their jobs. Unable to compete, these are left with nothing to do but govern the rest of the Faerie peoples.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
The Wonderland of Science Fiction (and the Matrix)
The Matrix: Revolutions is playing in Shanghai. If you’re in town, I recommend that you stop by and see it. It’s in English with Chinese subtitles.
I invited one of my best Chinese friends to see it with me last weekend. She happened to take the English name Alice before I met her three years ago, which is a beautiful coincidence to anyone who has seen the Matrix films. I imagined that this movie might make her feel a bit like that Alice, following the white rabbit to Wonderland, so I tried to catch her up on the main idea of the story as we had lunch before the movie, to show her just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
“Ok,” I said, “actually, not many people realize this, but the word Matrix literally means ‘womb.’” We were still waiting for the food to come. The restaurant was decorated with strips old China Daily newspapers on the walls, and strange spiraling glass decorations hung from the ceiling. “In this movie, though, it means something very different.”
She nodded in confirmation as she checked in her electronic pocket dictionary, and the Chinese words for womb appeared on the small screen. “Ah, yes. I see.”
“Well, the idea in this movie is that everything you see around you is not real, it’s all part of this giant computer world called the Matrix. These bodies we think we have are actually just computer programs—our real bodies are sitting in little red capsules somewhere just making electricity for intelligent machines, while our minds are trapped in this false virtual world. The main characters in this film are people trying to save humanity from this ‘prison for your mind,’ and awaken everyone to the truth.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “It sounds really complicated…”
- * *
Most Chinese are not used to science fiction stories. Although science fiction has made great strides in recent years (the popular Chinese magazine Science Fiction World being a notable example), it has nothing close to the volume and diversity that western countries have. The cultural atmosphere, from Confucian traditionalism to Maoist crippling of the educational system, has not always facilitated the development of the imaginative arts.
I had feared that Matrix: Revolutions would be a huge, confusing mess to Alice, but when she came out of the theater, she was giggling to herself. “It’s just like a video game! In the end, they saved the world by using Chinese Kung Fu!”
- * *
When I was small, I used to watch sci-fi movies and television programs with my father every weekend. When he came to pick me up and drive me an hour and a half away to his home in Denver, he used to tell me science fiction stories in the car.
He made them all up on the spot. Of course, years later he admitted how difficult it had been, how many times he had said “uh” and “um” while thinking of what should happen next and keeping his eyes on the road at the same time.
But I was enthralled, waiting on his every breath. When I wasn’t listening to his stories, I used to ask him about all kinds of scientific possibilities, and draw cartoons of my own sci-fi stories in my sketchbook. Somehow I began to see science fiction as way to envision the future so as to give people some sense of where they were going in their lives right now, and would ask them to think about where they really wanted to go.
- * *
On the surface, the Matrix really is just like a video game, with flying kung fu, laser guns, and hordes of mean robots to blow up. Of course, our reality is about none of those things. Reality means making friends, cherishing your family, and working hard to accomplish goals; it means waking up every morning to a world in which the most important thing is to serve other people and to make yourself a better person.
From another perspective, however, the Matrix is an excellent example of a fantasy story unlocking something much more than dazzle and hype. Underneath the fantasy, action-flick context of the story-line, there is a message about striving and transcendence, choice and fate.
Whatever form it takes, a good story should bring out the beautiful reality in us, show us a deeper layer of our own selves, and make us desire to bring others into that new reality as well. It should liberate our minds from the forgetfulness we fall into, where we worry too much about things that are somehow less than real. Any faithful journey into the wonderland of human imagination is ultimately about a very real understanding of human nature. By creating a fantasy world so unlike our own, we can highlight the basic things that make us what we are—truths that all the worlds cannot change.
(...dedicated with special gratitude to my father, for all the stories, all the patience, and all the “uh”s and “um”s…
Friday, November 21, 2003
Writing Itself
Sometimes, when I am writing something, I really hit on the essence of the words and it comes out nicely the first time. Other times, I write for a long time about something I like very much, but I keep on missing the right mark by just a little bit. Sometimes I can’t even write at all—my brain just goes to mush and begs me to watch television or something.
When I am having difficulty with articles for this website, I am compelled by the urge to keep revising them, working on them, and trying to see what I’m doing wrong. I can feel it when something is wrong with my words, like dirt on my skin, itching me, begging me to wash the problem away. But with writing, the problems don’t just go away as easily as soap and water. They need a long time to soak in the back of your mind, until you can come back later with a cleaner mind, and see clearly the same mistakes you were blind to before.
Writing even a simple paragraph is a journey. It may take minutes or days before it feels right enough to let someone else read it.
The shoes on this journey are perseverance. You write and write until you can’t write anymore… and then you keep on writing, even about writing itself.
(updated 11-23-2003)
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Where is Your Home?
My home is a floating speck of dust. If you concentrate closely on this photograph, you’ll see it roughly in the center of a golden beam of light—just a pale blue dot. I live on that dot.
I am obviously very small… smaller than you might think. Small enough, if you can believe it, that billions of creatures just like me all live here on this same little dot—with plenty of space left over!
All this extra space is just crawling with other kinds of life, too; and most of them even smaller than we are! In fact, life seems to appear everywhere here. Every moment, we breathe in hundreds of life forms even smaller to us than this dot is to you.
But the problem is that even though my home is so small, it seems really big to most of my fellow creatures. They fight all the time over who controls different parts of this place… and all this fighting means that we don’t share things. Hundreds of millions of us have to go hungry even though there’s plenty of food, or get sick even though there’s plenty of medicine.
Some say that much of this little dot is going to be more or less unusable in just a few of our short life-spans. They point out, quite rightly, that we’re all stuck here. Together. And the thought of that just terrifies them.
But to me, it’s just that terror which causes all these problems. Our dot is not a cage, it’s a home, and the people who live here are a family. If more of us could see this picture of our home like you do, as a small point of light, perhaps more of us would start to think of it as just one place—one home, each and every pixel of it belonging to all of us at once.
It is our tiny, priceless jewel in the mist.
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