Another bit of weaving, today in the lab. Another piece of bricolage. I awoke thinking about blog day, and about how Sally and Sarah and I have been busily working on Sally’s new website this past week, and how I’ve got band rehearsal this evening, with a couple of new songs to get ready to present, and so little time to write. I awoke thinking about how surreal that feels, to be at once processing the “mid-century extinction meme” and, at the same time, going about one’s day and one’s business as if nothing has changed. I awoke thinking about The X-Files, and how it used to drive me crazy, how they would uncover, in the “mythology” episodes, more and new and ever-more-important information about the global-elite-alien conspiracy and then, in the next episode or three, act as if none of that had even happened. I awoke thinking about how many times that very thing has played out in my life, how often I’ve uncovered new information, new ideas, and then worked doggedly to incorporate those new ideas into my life, and observe how so many around me could just say, “yeah, cool… new idea… ” and then, seemingly, go on with their lives as if nothing had changed.

Surreal, this life, these times. Surreal, I say.

Then I got up to find this article - Captain Kirk’s Predecessor: Star Trek Was RAND Corporation Predictive Programming - from my friend Kathie, which was fun, and that reminded me of my own Star Trek post, below, which I wrote for my previous blog. Reading my old things is always a bit surreal as well, to see what I was struggling with or thinking at the time, to note how I would say things differently now, if I would say them at all. I observe here my greater and growing facility to balance critique with wide-perspective acceptance of what’s so. I note here that I’m still processing with my children around matters of family, culture, and story, and that the processing feels both more fever-pitched and more peaceful right now. I note the judgmentalism in my language, and wonder how and if that serves the Cosmos. I note how the bit about boredom and connection continues to resonate. And I note how my own life so often feels like a matter of jettisoning my old engines in a desperate attempt to escape the gravity of my own acculturated ego.

I don’t know what this all means, or if I’m going somewhere, or if I’ve already arrived. I’m trying to follow my heart, here in the lab, rather than my head. I’m practicing letting my gut lead in this particular dance. And bricolage is poetry, I think, rather than science, and sometimes it takes a while for meaning and clarity to arise through the obscurity of metaphor and language.

For now, WordPress and my mandolin call, and life goes on, and on, and will until it does no longer, and then maybe even then… and I need another cup of coffee. Mulder and Scully never did really get to the bottom of that global-elite-alien conspiracy, and I’ve yet to get to the bottom of that meme, and the dominant mainstream culture has not yet reached the end of “giving it all you’ve got.” We go on, all of us, and what happens unfolds, a great Cosmic dance of creation in which we are all dancers and singers and mandolin players and website designers.

Pax, all,
T

We’re Givin’ It All We’ve Got, Captain!

Originally published 5/23/09

If I needed confirmation of the claim I’d made in an email to my daughter just yesterday morning that “I’m no longer a member of the culture in which you live,” I could not have asked for a better one than the new Star Trek movie, which Sally and I saw last night. I’m so many standard deviations from the mean these days that I’m now on the next normal curve over. That’s how it feels.

“You’ll want to see it again, right away,” I was told. “It’s hilarious,” I was told. “It’s the best Star Trek ever,” I was told. And yet, as I sat there watching, what I noticed inside was this: I was bored. I’ll have to remember that. Because this has happened before. The next time a movie gets such universal acclaim, the next time a good number of my friends and family tell me how great a movie is, I’m heading the other way. I am not a member of the dominant culture. In fact, I regard the dominant culture as twisted, insane and bankrupt. So I cannot expect to like what that culture likes.

Charles Eisenstein, author of The Ascent of Humanity, speaks of boredom as that feeling of discomfort one feels when the distractions and busy-ness end and you slow down enough to feel the wounds of separation that dog our every moment as creatures of this culture. That resonates. Sitting in a theater surrounded by people surrounded by Middlebury surrounded by Vermont surrounded by the US surrounded by North America surrounded by a planet of 6.8 billion and counting, surrounded by lilacs and red maples and turkey vultures and moose, surrounded by air and water and soil, surrounded by muons and photons and particles and waves, I felt disconnected from it all, as the splash of color and movement and sound and fury thrashed and weaved before me, desperate to draw me into itself, frantic with the need to re-capture me into its story. And I wasn’t having it. My immunity has built up to the point where I can no longer succumb to that particular disease. I could only sit there, bored and more than a bit sad, watching the story dance and chatter, and wondering what it was that could have possibly so enchanted my friends and relations.

What I saw on the screen was pure Imperial swagger - that macho, never-say-die, bad-boy, break-the-rules, teen-aged invulnerability and exceptionalism that pulses through American veins at warp speed, taking command, getting the girl, making its own rules and nailing the enemy, in the end, with a hot spurt of phaser blasts and photon torpedoes. An adolescent Jim Kirk steals an uncle’s car, speeds down the highway, resists arrest, destroys the car, and stands to face the police officer chasing him… and the audience is ecstatic. An older Kirk picks a bar fight with half a dozen Starfleet cadets, gets the crap beat out of him, and wins the attention and approval of Captain Pike… and the audience laughs and smiles and nods its head. Why do they love him so? Because he’s had a hard life (his father died the day he was born). Because he’s strong and daring despite that. Because he’s so self-assured. And because he is totally unapologetic. Does this sound like any of our recent political leaders? Does this sound like an entire civilization? Just a thought…

This is what the culture has right now, I guess. Ten months (or many years, depending on which starting point you choose) into our current economic shitstorm, with banks failing and jobs disappearing and shelves dwindling and bailouts piling up, the affront to our collective ego has elicited this first big summer smash, this joint-statement issued to the world. To wit: nuh uh! It’s as though Uncle Sam is 15 again and you just told him he has to clean his room. Oh yeah? Well… you can’t make me! Cuz I’m… uh… cuz I don’t want to!

Our response to the crumbling world is to simply tell our stories louder, to do more of the same, to stand taller, stomp harder, swing faster and shout louder. We must maintain our heroic self-image at all costs. It’s all we’ve got to give, right? I mean… it’s worked up til now, hasn’t it?

Star Trek has been with me my whole life. I remember watching original episodes as a kid in the mid-60s. I’ve seen the original series many times. The Next Generation. The movies. It’s part of who I have been. Part of my story. And all of that just made it harder to watch this new iteration. It’s like… c’mon! More than forty years have gone by since that first episode. Have we learned nothing in that time? In it’s early manifestations, Star Trek actually had some facility for questioning the dominant culture, as much good science fiction does. It held up a mirror to our society, using strange planets and alien beings to make plain our own assumptions and beliefs, our weak points as well as our strong ones. But this new movie showed no such inclination, substituting a silly time-travel plot, lots of noise and flash, and a cutesy alien sidekick for anything more substantial. With the climate heating up, the oceans and forests dying, the oil slowing and the economy unraveling, Star Trek doesn’t once get close to the existential questions the new Battlestar Galactica started with in its first episode. Should we humans survive? Damn straight, we should, bro. Now get outta the way while I pop me some o’ them-there Romulans. And grab me a beer, bitch!

No doubt some will chide me for this. It’s just a movie, they might say. It’s summer fun. It’s entertainment. It’s popcorn and laughs and thrills and spills. Why do I have to take everything so seriously? While I might answer with any number of explanations, I think they all boil down to this: I know the power of story to shape the world. I consider story the most powerful force in the universe. And so I want to be very careful about the stories that play through my life. It’s story that has brought us to where we are. It’s story that will take us to where we are going. I, for one, would like to be conscious about those stories.

Ultimately, I regain my self, and sigh, and nod my head, and laugh a bit at my own wounded ego, at that part of me that could always see things that others didn’t, that couldn’t figure out how to be heard, that keeps fighting that same old fight. Star Trek serves simply as a reality check. The dominant culture really is “giving it all we’ve got.” Thousands of light-years away from home, this is what the culture has. And it has to play that out, fully and completely, until it hits bottom. Until it runs smack into the bankruptcy of the stories that power it. As an e-friend said years ago, “only when all hope is lost will the necessary actions be taken.” The necessary action, to my mind, including, at the level of culture itself, a change of story.

And there was a bright spot. At the movie’s end (spoiler alert!), as the Enterprise is about to be sucked into a black hole, as their engines fail to pull them out of it, as all the power they can apply is not enough to free them from total destruction, the Captain (I’m pretty sure this is what happened… it was difficult for me to make out all the dialogue) ordered Scotty to jettison the cores of their engines into said black hole, in the hopes that the resulting explosion would knock them free.

And it worked. Their desperate act of giving up that which had up to that point powered their ship… worked. They tried something truly different. And that is what saved them from annihilation. We may wish to remember that one.

Live Well and Discover, yo…

TTG