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Thinking of Yourself, Less

Posted by :James Howden On : September 9, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Time to plant.

I remember when humility was a virtue, a quality that most people felt was praiseworthy and useful. We had no trouble distinguishing it from humiliation, which was a shameful condition visited upon us by others. Oh, we liked it when the braggart was forced to “eat humble pie” (sometimes, even, when it was us who had to eat that bitter confection), but mainly we felt that baking that pie and nibbling at it regularly was not just good medicine but often a sweet and sustaining way to eat.

Here’s today’s question: does a humble writer try to increase his page views by shamelessly flogging his ‘brand’? (“Duh, of course!”) Or to put it another, less JH.comAllTheTimeHeyEnoughAboutMeWhatDoYOUThinkOfMyWebsite?- centric way, how can we use the incredible connectivity and expressive potential of social media without becoming insufferably dull and incurably self-absorbed? I don’t know, and mainly err on the side of Luddism and avoidance.

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Take the Red Pill! Rainn Wilson & The Matrix II

Posted by :James Howden On : August 31, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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This is the second part of my recollection of actor Rainn Wilson’s talk at the recent Association for Baha’i Studies conference in Irvine, California. Part One is here.

Rainn Wilson related, with wonder and amusement, how excited many people became in  connecting the “man was embryonic in the world of the matrix” quote of ‘Abdu’l-Baha to the  mind-blowing Matrix trilogy. He said that there were groups of people who embrace “Matrixism” as religion, and regard ‘Abdu’l-Baha as its early prophetic voice, and as its link to the entire history of revealed religion. This was news to me, but I found them in a most curious and bemusing on-line presence. One of their four basic tenets is the use of hallucinogenics as a sacrament; another is “adherence to the principles of one or more of the world’s religions until such time as the One [Neo doesn’t count] returns”. This tiny group does elaborate a few more funky laws, my favourite of which is that “all forms of professional athletic competition have now been abrogated”. (The revenge of the picked-on against the surly jocks!) That’s funny stuff, I guess, unless it’s pathetic. However, it points out again, if we needed more evidence, how hungry human beings are for a sense of meaning in life.

Wilson showed another clip from Matrix the first. Neo faces off with the baddies who are trying to prevent him from penetrating and exposing the mass hallucination that intelligent machines have created. Their programming illusion is intended to convince the humans that life is as it always was – meanwhile, their actual bodies are imprisoned in pods and used as robot fuel. This is where many of the oh cool! effects of the movie are featured. Neo bends

“Bullets, be still and know that I am Neo!” Who hasn’t done this?

space and time. A hail of bullets slows at his silent command and clatters to the floor. He leans at impossible angles, and leaps with impossible speed. He artfully decomposes a bad dude by flying right into his holographic gut and exploding him from the inside. (Nice!) Neo has wondrous powers in the supercomputer-generated matrix because he understands that it is only a projection, an unreal construction. (Well, and because he is The Chosen One, which obviously helps.) By knowing the reality of life in that world, he becomes the master of it. 

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Rainn Wilson Explores The Matrix

Posted by :James Howden On : August 30, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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The Association for Baha’i Studies is knocking the “stuffy” out of the notion that academia and intellectual pursuits are narrow, competitive, elitist and pretty darned dull. The concept of scholarship is being remade out of its old “ivory tower” paradigm into something more closely resembling a noble, shared adventure in learning. This, among many other things — the new friends I meet, the musicians I add to my playlist, the books I lust over, the writing ideas I hatch — has made the Association’s annual conference one of my greatest treats. So many smart and good-hearted people! Such outstanding, mind-altering presentations! So many confirmations of my careening efforts to “walk the spiritual path with practical feet”! 

Anyway. What follows is Part One of a report on one of the highlights of the recent conference of the ABS in Irvine, California, which is (kind of) on the way from Ottawa to Dalian…

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“So I went to the fights the other night and a hockey game broke out!” Rodney Dangerfield

It’s an old gag, but it’s still a goodie. In the same spirit, I went to the 37th annual conference of the Association for Baha’i Studies and a pop-culture laugh riot ensued. Not only did I feel happy and a little smarter at the end of that comic lecture, but nobody tried to sell me anything except ideas. This is the second time, so far as I know, that actor Rainn Wilson has spoken at one of these spirited, brainy conclaves. He brings a healthy kind of irreverence and the humour one would expect from a certified Comedy Star, but also a serious commitment to his faith community, a sharp mind and a blazing conviction that soul matters. (And no, he doesn’t speak or behave like Dwight Schrute from The Office.)

The iconic poster: trenchcoats and coolness and guns, oh my!

Mr. Schrute’s Wilson’s talk was designed to show that the 1999 blockbuster film The Matrix had more to it than awesome special effects and a cool visual style. He wasn’t joking, but he was hilarious.  Just in case we’d forgotten, or had missed Keanu Reeves (as Neo) and Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus) and the gang when The Matrix came out, Wilson went to the video screen for a reminder.

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reORIENTation

Posted by :James Howden On : August 26, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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(Or is that DISorientation?)

(Or maybe a simple case of disappointment? )

Downtown Dalian: Labour Park and Highrise Central. No view of the hills, or of the sea, that highlight this windswept little village of six million.

They’ve had a tropical summer in Dalian. My dry, windy Chinese city had wild thunderstorms last night and remains a humid mess of clingy air and greyness. Usually, the ocean winds blow away the smog, but not today. (Maybe it’s not all car exhaust this morning.) The gardens at the top of our hill are taller and more riotously green than I’ve seen them. The weeds make visions of compost dance in my fevered head. The last few weeks of our Canadian summer, plus a weekend near Los Angeles, were bright but surprisingly cool for August. Here, I go through several shirts a day, and I’m not even trying to move much.

Marching music plays on an endless loop from the college next door, where this year’s pseudo-scholarly inputs are being put through their paces, without a hint of a metaphor. Their introduction to higher education, these future hairdressers and kitchen hands of China as well as their more highly tested university counterparts, is to march and march. There are team-building, patriotic and letting-off-steam aspects to the drill, but as bystanders our experience is one of martial music on repeat, amplified exhortations and ceaseless counting: Yi! Er! San! Si! Yi, er, san! Si!

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Define Your Terms, For God’s Sake

Posted by :James Howden On : August 21, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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What do we mean, fergawdsake, when we say that something must be done/undone/thought about/dismissed for this ultimate reason? 1 And who believes in God anymore? Well, lots do, and I suspect that more would want to, fashionable intellectualism aside, if only the idea of the Creator weren’t so polluted by fairy tale images, anti-scientific credos and rancid politics.

Here is one thing we might mean: when we do things at our most sincere, or our most urgent or beneficent or noble, we are helping God out, doing the (theoretical) Lord and Master of All Things a good turn. Well. This assumes that the Prime Mover needs a nudge in the right direction from one of the millions of species populating one little blue planet. That doesn’t make a lot of sense; it’s at least arrogant, if not delusional, to think that Something capable of fashioning a universe needs my advice or yours.

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Where It’s Art

Posted by :James Howden On : July 28, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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“But Wayne, how did you get into this?” Perhaps this question came from my wonderment at a quiet man going into retail in the first place – and not just any sort of shop, but one selling original paintings, sculptures, stained glass, woodworking and pottery. I’ve been in the Ethel Curry Art Gallery many times over the past couple of decades, as family ties have drawn me regularly to the small northern Ontario town that is its unlikely host.

The Gallery from outside, reflecting a northern summer sky.

I’m a small town boy, and I love these places, but they’re not noted for their devotion to and support of the arts, if I may risk a generalization. Haliburton, about three hours northwest of Toronto, is a pretty little place, perched by a lake and surrounded by wooded hills. The surrounding county of the same name, bordered on the north by Algonquin Park, contains an absurd number of lakes and a surprisingly large roster of artists among its 16,000 citizens.1 One of them was Ethel Curry, whose nephew Pete owns a woodsplitter and a small retail building in Haliburton village. Wayne is a woodworker, and as he tells the story, it wasn’t long before conversations about wood led to others about art and display space which led, 18 years later, to him explaining the genesis of the gallery to me. Again: the whole thing thrills and bemuses me, and I can’t believe it’s around the corner from Jug City convenience and the “Aprons and Soaps” shop. And how does a veteran of African development work, a confirmed loner, dog-lover and crafter of meticulously detailed model ships and other wooden delights, become the owner of an art emporium about an hour south of Nowhere?

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07/01/2013: The Longest Canada Day

Posted by :James Howden On : July 6, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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I’m almost back to normal, though my body remains confused about why I

Missed the big party in the capital, but that was alright with me.

insist on lying down in the dark between 1 and 5 am, which it regards as Afternoon Drive Time. It would be if I was still in China, but I’m sitting in a sunny, leafy backyard behind a loving occasional home that features books, the resumption of sweet old conversations, gustatory temptations that haven’t crooned to me from such close range for nearly a year, and beds in the basement for son and bride and me. We’re back in Canada, almost completely. We flew on Canada Day, which for a long while seemed it would never come; when it did, it went on and on.

It started the way most days have recently, at least for this displaced Canadian trying to figure out Where is HERE? Though worn to a frazzle by an exhausting wrap-up of my working year in Dalian, China, my bladder and the barking of sunrise called me from my bed at about 4:30 a.m. Happy Canada Day! I tried to get back to sleep, but my mind-emptying mechanism was on the fritz. (I couldn’t stop writing parts of this thing, for instance, but I was also mentally packing, packing.)

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Guest Post: A Chinese Student Speaks Up

Posted by :James Howden On : June 29, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Through a P2C2E — a “process too complicated to explain,” as Salman Rushdie called it in his wonderful youth novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories — I got to meet Ms. Z. Like many Chinese university students, perhaps most, she studies in a major chosen by her family, not by her. Unlike many, she is a writer, even in her second language. In a spasm of bravery, she wrote an English essay about something honest and true-hearted and even a bit angry, and it found its way to me. It is a declaration of independence. It is her youthful emancipation proclamation.

I was moved by her courage and her plain-spoken message, and asked her permission to share it with my readers. (I did a quick edit of some rough second-language edges, but this is all Ms. Z.) She is not a “typical” Chinese student, if you assume such a thing exists, but neither is she alone. Perhaps you will enjoy a small taste of life in a Chinese university — but this time, from an eagle-eyed student perspective. She calls her piece “Marionette Generation”.

The ties that bind.

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The Party, the Bread, the Track, and the Circus

Posted by :James Howden On : June 10, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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God knows that I love bread. (Bread and I, however, are in the midst of a relatively amicable separation, and my waistline has noticed.) The student body at my university, and especially at the rich-kid college within it where I teach, is of a particularly well-fed demographic, and they see their grindstone bachelor’s degree exclusively as job training, nothing more. (The majority work in majors chosen for them, often with no real interest or aptitude in the subject but only faith in the promise of the “comfortable life” that most Chinese — understandably — seek.) Though privileged within Chinese society, they do endure acres of boredom and megatons of rote learning, so the circus does come to town. And though I am not above the occasional superior sneer at the circus entertainments chosen by others, I’m still a sucker for the Olympic march of the athletes, small-town parades, the communal experience of fireworks. Even loners like me love a good show, some high-wire performance, but I was recently put in mind of the ancient Roman poet Juvenal’s scorn of the use of “bread and circuses” to pacify a population.

It was Sports Day at my university in northeastern China, a day common to most schools here. It is a more of a show than a track and field meet, and actually two days of class are

The March of the One-Time Athletes. A beautiful day for a show. (Photo: JP Mayer)

sacrificed for it. Many students are required to miss class sessions in the days before in order to prepare, but not for their events. In a country where precious little importance is given to physical education – except, that is, for the tiny minority selected in their youth or childhood to attend State sports schools and bring sporting honour to their province or their Olympically-ambitious country – this once-yearly festival of geng kuai, geng gao, geng qiang (“faster, higher, stronger”) sees astonishingly little athletic preparation, or even the possibility of it. It drives my Canadian friend JP, a masters decathlete and long-time high-school coach, just slightly bonkers.

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The Gate Swung Wide, and Nobody Really Heard…

Posted by :James Howden On : May 23, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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…but many can still hear the echoes of that new age opening, and the view through that humble Portal gets wider and more dazzling with every passing year.

This is a small shout-out to the Baha’is of the world, who today are joyfully remembering, as a great and holy Figure known as “the Bab” — an Arabic word which means “gate” or “door” — had predicted in 1844: “This very hour will, in the days to come, be celebrated as one of the greatest and most significant of all festivals…”   Bay Street, Wall Street, Tiananmen Square and Hollywood Boulevard don’t yet shut down on May 23, but millions of people, in the world’s greatest cities and in some of the most out-of-the-way neighbourhoods you can imagine, will be recalling a quiet, thoroughly marvelous conversation in southern Iran, a dramatic dialogue that begins the most recent of the world’s great spiritual traditions. 169 years is not quite enough to appreciate what that meeting of two young men meant,* but we’re learning.

There’s not a lot of poetry in this space, but years ago I wrote the following on a day like this, thinking of a 25-year-old merchant of Shiraz and the flaming young scholar who had suddenly realized the object of a years-long quest:

TWENTY-THIRD OF MAY

 Today the world changed.

 Today, a young man

who did not watch the game of the week

told a secret.

They called him a merchant.

Used cars were not in his traffic.

 Nobility kissed commerce.

 He did not crow

I am the Greatest!

for a mass of sedentary millions.

 I am the Gate of God

He whispered

to a road-weary audience

of one.

A final resting place in this magnificent shrine, a golden symbol of the promise of 1844.

* But it’s FIVE YEARS TOO MANY for seven innocent members of the Iranian Baha’i community, who have been locked up for the crime of  working for global harmony, justice, and peace. It’s a great and terrible story, one of the bitter sub-plots of the chronicle of the “planetization of mankind“, as a Christian thinker described it. (It’s happening. Fitfully, inevitably.)