The Blog of Innocence

Am I too pessimistic for my age?--A 15 yr old wants to know

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:57:00 +0000

Among other things, I talk about social technology on this blog. I've long been curious about the multiple uses and applications of Q&A social media. These "advice" services have grown dramatically in recent years. The ability to get an expert opinion for free is tempting. But you can even pay to get answers on some sites promoting "experts".

Every popular Q&A site has a different value-add, a unique offering. Aardvark, a fairly young Q&A service, was recently talked about in The New York Times. The distinguishing feature of Aardvark is that the application asks only a "friend" or "friend-of-friend". According to the service:

A real conversation with a friend (or friend-of-friend) can be much more helpful than searching the web — all the knowledge and experience in people’s heads can’t be put on a web page!

The idea is that if this person is connected to you somehow they will be more reliable and more relevant. But people who ask questions on Yahoo! Answers, the most popular Q&A social media site on the Internet, get a faster response because there are so many people online to answer the question, and the archives cover a vast storehouse of previously answered questions.

Q&A sites are interesting as social media experiments. Typically, there is a reputation system in place. Users who answer more questions and receive higher ratings from their peers gain more exposure. In other words, power users have more influence on the site. This happens to be true of all social technology.

Tonight, while I was on the Yahoo! search page, a strange link appeared up in the News section. "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" was the "news story" and it directed me to Yahoo! Answers. Once I was there, I read the question, then the answers; and I "friended" a couple of the people whose answers I liked. (BTW, this question crops up regularly on Yahoo! Answers simply because it cannot be resolved).

Within seconds I received an email in my inbox stating someone had invited me to answer their question. I went to the site and the question was this, written by a 15 yr old:

Am I too pessimistic for my age?

I'm 15 and I don't believe in

-God
-heaven
-hell
-true love
-fate
-destiny
-love at first site
-the perfect man/woman
-soul mates
-salvation
-miracles

honestly, there's no solid proof that any of these things exist and I just can't find a way to let myself believe in them.

So I kinda feel...empty.

I had nothing to do, so I thought I would answer her question. Why not? At her age, I could have used an answer to that question.

Here is my reply:

You will feel this way your entire life. Some days you will forget, but you will always return to this feeling.

Every human being feels this way. It is part of what it means to be human.

Don't get overly hung up on it.

Use the feeling of emptiness as a positive motivation to make your life mean something.

If you start out with nothing, then you always have the potential to be something.

If on the other hand you start out with everything, you have everything, feel everything wonderful, then what is there left to do?

So emptiness is good. Even if it feels lonely sometimes, it's good.

I look at this feeling of emptiness, loneliness, boredom, etc. as an advantage.

When there is less water in the cup, there is more room. Beliefs are like stones in a cup of water, the more stones, the less room. So not having set, fixed, rigid beliefs actually turns out to be a good thing!

Feelings come and go. You'll always have time on your hands. How will you spend it?

That's up to you.

Your optimism or pessimism will usually depend on something. Sometimes we think of things in a positive light, sometimes in a negative light. Some people are pessimistic by temperament; others optimistic.

There is nothing wrong with being pessimistic. And, on the other hand, optimism is not always good.

You may not have a belief system now, but someday you will. You will have a belief system if you're religious, secular, or not thinking about "existence" at all. You will come to believe in certain things.

You just haven't lived long enough to believe that strongly one way or another about these ideas.

Proof is always riddled with error. You will never have proof, but you will come to believe in things.

You're telling a story about the world and your experience in the world.

It will always be a story.

"Every man believes he's in possession of the truth."

One of my favorite writers said that. Robert Musil, in his opus, The Man without Qualities.

If you want to exercise your mind, read that book.

The unique ability to tap into a diversity of opinions is the essential character of the Internet. Q&A sites are popular for this reason alone. A service like Yahoo! Answers or Aardvark can really help a person. You know the feeling of wanting desperately to know the answer to something.

I enjoyed writing this response to an anonymous 15 yr old. I don't think I'll spend the rest of my days answering questions on Yahoo! Answers, but for a change of pace, it was a worthwhile experience.

We enjoy helping each other out. Especially when we get to share our wisdom and make a sincere connection.

You can see how other people responded to her question here.

IMAGE FOUND AT [DAILY DOSE OF IMAGERY]

How many of us are self-medicating?

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:25:00 +0000

I sent an odd email to my father the other day. I was intoxicated when I sent it; actually I was high. I had been smoking weed for the past week almost daily and not entirely sure why I reached for my stash each night and proceeded to put myself into a stoned state. The experience was not always a good one. In fact, on some nights I descended into an extreme paranoia—even when there was nobody around to trigger it. The positive effects, I guess you could call them, were my racing thoughts and the hypo-mania my personality lends itself to while high. There were so many brilliant ideas shooting off like fireworks from my synapses, but translating these ideas into writing seemed increasingly difficult. To me, drugs have always been a way to make contact with another world, another dimension of myself.

The night I sent the email to my father I was researching the growing trend in self-medication. I rummaged through the top results on Google for “self-medicated” (it turns out this is also a movie) and “self-medication.” First I wanted to know the definition of self-medication so I turned to Wikipedia.

Self-medication is the use of drugs or self-soothing forms of behavior to treat a perceived or real malady. Self-medication is often referred to in the context of a person self-medicating, in order to alleviate their own distress or pain.

What originally drew me to the idea of self-medication was the broadness of the topic and the number of people (I knew) who seemed to self-medicate in one form or another. While “addiction” is a term usually reserved for a specific class of people enslaved by their substance of choice; “self-medication” sounded more ambiguous.

Surely, it doesn’t have to be ambiguous. There are plenty of people suffering from mental illnesses in which self-medication is a clinical fact. The correlation is so common that doctors have come to expect it in patients with depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and anxiety disorders.

These people have “real” maladies. But what about those of us who don’t? I’m pretty sure I don’t suffer from a real or perceived malady, and yet I self-medicate.

But my definition of "self-medication" is broad. For example, I drink coffee at least twice a day. This has become a sort of ritual, like a religious exercise. I have my coffee at a local Border’s. I always bring The New York Times with me; I find a comfortable chair in a spot where there are few distractions. Coffee is a powerful stimulant, but sometimes I think the ritual holds more sway over my body.

I’m also addicted to cigarettes, which I’ve tried to quit many times. My essay “The Divided Self” gives a psychological portrait of my struggle to quit smoking. I keep telling myself that my smoking is temporary, as if nicotine were a drug I’ve prescribed to myself to cope with reality for the time being.

And so we can expand “self-soothing forms of behavior” to include almost anything. My father has never taken illegal drugs and he rarely drinks more than a glass of wine. But he engages in many “self-soothing forms of behavior” from meditation to yoga to hiking.

What's the underlying malady my father self-medicates with his intensive yoga practice? Maybe it's stress, maybe over-activity or insomnia. I don't know, but it seems my father with his "healthy" practices and me with my "unhealthy" ones are attempting to treat some internal issue.

Does it sound like I'm validating my behaviors? I hope not. Self-medication is not always a bad thing, as I see it. But I'm curious about human behavior in general and why we medicate ourselves in the broadest sense of the term. After all, "self-medication" could simply be a metaphor for how we cope with reality.

The question posed in the title of this essay is not meant to be condescending. I seriously want to know, "How many of us are self-medicating?" Because I have a hunch that self-medication is pervasive, and I would like to know of how many people identify themselves in this way . . .

“Dysphoria” is a term sometimes associated with “self-medication.” The general idea is that we self-medicate to assuage, or lessen, the effects of an undesirable mood such as sadness or anxiety. I think this complicates the matter further. How many of us engage in behaviors to alter our mood? The American culture clings to the idea that shopping, eating, exercising, taking a pill, and (fill in the blank) will make us feel better. Because most of the time it's true; at least temporarily, like my cigarettes.

The growth of the pharmaceutical industry in the last two decades has led to many of us becoming connoisseurs of our own vague conditions, our own dysphorias. And this is especially true of teenagers and women between the ages of 18 and 44 in the United States. We take pills rather nonchalantly for every slight problem that arises. And you don’t need a prescription drug in order to self-medicate. The vast selection of over-the-counter drugs practically grants the consumer status as diagnostician.

But I digress.

The email I sent to my father was odd because I sought to convince him of the connection between my mother’s degenerative disease and her incessant painting with toxins and solvents. You see, there was a section of the Wikipedia definition that stood out from the rest—even as I was stoned, or perhaps because I was stoned.

Exposure To Organic Solvents

Chronic exposure to organic solvents in the work environment can produce a range of adverse neuropsychiatric effects. Occupational exposure to organic solvents can lead to alcoholism with higher numbers of painters for example suffering from alcoholism. It is possible that a small number of alcoholics are self medicating the toxic effects of organic solvents albeit with another toxic substance alcohol.

I wondered if my mother was self-medicating because, as an oil painter, she was exposed to many toxins. But my father sent me a curt reply: “No, your mother was not self-medicating.”

My mother never drank a sip of alcohol. But she did plenty of other things excessively, and obsessive-compulsively, creating for herself an abundance of self-soothing behaviors. Gradually her nervous system broke down until she lost her ability to draw a straight line on the canvas.

I’ve decided to put the pot away. I’m not smoking weed, or drinking, at the moment. Two roommates have just moved into my house and the new experience of living with other people has motivated me to go to sleep at a normal hour and avoid the temptation to self-medicate.

I still drink coffee twice a day and smoke a pack of cigarettes. But maybe those things are not considered “self-medication”.

ARTWORK BY LUI FERREYRA

Visit Escape into Life for more essays by the author

The Kindly Ones: The Anti-Hero is Us

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 01:15:00 +0000

The real danger for mankind is me, is you. And if you're not convinced of this, don't bother to read any further. You'll understand nothing and you'll get angry, with little profit for you or me.

The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell

As many of you know, my writings are preoccupied with the question of innocence. The question of innocence inevitably begs the question of guilt. As a perceptive reader, Mark Kerstetter noted in my post about Michael Jackson, "I do believe he desperately and tragically sought innocence. It's an inexhaustible theme: how is an adult innocent?"

When the reviews and appraisals of Michael Jackson's life flowed into cyberspace after his death, I thought for sure this man is a perfect example of my theme. A larger-than-life entertainer who strove for innocence and yet lived in dangerous proximity to its opposite.

Also, I've been researching the new culture of self-medication, and wanting to write an article on the topic. Can a culture consumed with self-medication really be so naive? Aren't we all just looking to cover up the pain somehow?

Strange is life when you open the mind to associations, parallels, and linkages . . . I went to Borders today to have my coffee and read the Times. This is not unusual for me; I go to Borders nearly every day. But today I did not read the Times. Instead, I wandered up and down the aisles, glancing at the latest hardcovers.

You haven't read any book reviews of mine because I haven't read many books lately--or at least finished them. The newspapers take up all my time and attention. As a writer, they do fairly well to fuel my inspiration. (Disclaimer: this is not exactly a book review--a book preview, rather)

In my article, "Is the Internet Killing Culture?" I discuss how I abruptly stopped reading "serious" literature. I read literature for nearly ten years, inside and outside of college, covering large swathes of French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Austrian, and Italian literature.

At the time, I read few contemporary novels, even fewer American contemporary authors. I read what excited me, what boggled my mind, what catapulted me into writing. The dearth of American literature in recent decades was not something I cared to scrape the bottom of--there were plenty of incredible and delicious novels written by French and Russian authors in the last two centuries.

Today I opened up a big book. Causally, capriciously, I opened up The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. Whether a novel is full of brilliance or entirely lacking the scaffolding to hold it together, I always stop to look at those monsters approaching the thousand page mark. Why? Because I am in awe of any author who can discipline their life to write such a long tale. The editorial process is maddening enough, let alone the dedication it takes to sustain a level of productivity for five to ten years.

So this book that I looked upon was large. By the cover I could see it was written in French and translated into English. A cursory examination of the side flap and back cover taught me that it had won France's most acclaimed literary prize, Prix Goncourt, the same prize Proust won for Vol. 2 of In Search of Lost Time in 1919.

But none of these things usually matter to me more than the first paragraph. When I read the first paragraph of a novel, I generally know enough to know if I want to read more of it. So I stood over the Goliath in the middle of Borders with people flooding into the store and breezing all around me. I began reading:

Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened. I am not your brother, you'll retort, and I don't want to know. And it certainly is true that this is a bleak story, but an edifying one too, a real morality play, I assure you. You might find it a bit long--a lot of things happened, after all--but perhaps you're not in too much of a hurry; with a little luck you'll have some time to spare. And also, this concerns you; you'll see that this concerns you. Don't think I am trying to convince you of anything; after all, your opinions are your own business. If after all these years I've made up my mind to write, it's to set the record straight for myself, not for you. For a long time we crawl on this earth like caterpillars, waiting for the splendid, diaphanous butterfly we bear within ourselves. And then times passes and the nymph stage never comes, we remain larvae--what do we do with such an appalling realization? Suicide, of course, is always an option. But to tell the truth suicide doesn't tempt me much.

The "bold" lettering is mine. You can see now why this novel caught my attention. It was the voice of the narrator who instantly seduced me into wanting to know more about his particular troubles and woes, but even more than that I believe it was the narrator's self-knowledge that compelled me to pick up the book and bring it over to the small tables in the cafe where I set down my coffee and continued reading.

The title comes from the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies, The Oresteia, written by Aeschylus. It refers to the Furies who were vengeful goddesses that tormented anyone who murdered a parent. In the story by Aeschylus, the Furies are transformed into merciful goddesses instead of spiteful ones by the goddess Athena. They are renamed the Eumenides or "The Kindly Ones"(1).

What this has to do with the book I have no idea. I am simply mesmerized by the complexity of the narrator's thoughts, his intelligence, and humanity. The voice of the narrator in fact recalls to me reading Proust, whose narrator seduced me much the same, although the temperaments of the narrators are probably nothing alike. But that too, I can't confirm yet . . .

How can one not identify with this?

Ask yourselves: You, yourselves, what do you think of, through the course of a day? Very few things, actually. Drawing up a systematic classification of your everyday thoughts would be easy: practical or mechanical thoughts, planning your actions and your time (example: setting the coffee to drip before brushing your teeth, but toasting the bread afterward, since it doesn't take as long); work preoccupations; financial anxieties; domestic problems; sexual fantasies. I'll spare you the details. At dinner, you contemplate the aging face of your wife, so much less exciting than your mistress, but a fine woman otherwise, what can you do, that's life, so you talk about the latest government scandal. Actually, you couldn't care less about the latest government scandal, but what else is there to talk about? Eliminate those kinds of thoughts, and you'll agree there's not much left.

This is a controversial novel. If I previously thought that Michael Jackson was the supreme archetype to my theme of innocence, then Littell has just upped the ante. In the clever guise of a memoir, the novel tells the story of a former SS officer who witnessed the massacres of the Holocaust. He also, we would assume, took part in these massacres; and gave the orders to carry them out.

To be sure, we are now on the opposite end of the spectrum regarding my theme. The narrator's innocence should not even be in question. Of course, he's guilty of his crimes. This point seems so obvious we shouldn't have to debate it. Then again, maybe innocence or guilt is not the point after all . . .

Once again, let us be clear: I am not trying to say I am not guilty of this or that. I'm guilty, you're not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did.

I'm not even finished with the first chapter when a troubling philosophical thought arises. If this narrator is the quintessential anti-hero--a Nazi--then how is it possible that I identify with him as a man?

He's neither psychotic, nor a sadist, but he's committed these crimes against humanity and I haven't. If not for his fundamental evil, what separates us?

A rare author elicits this kind of recognition in her audience. Literature has the power to bend reality with language. I believe Jonathan Littell has done just that.

Browse The Kindly Ones on Harper Collins Publishers

Buy the book on Amazon

Read more of my essays on Escape into Life

The Pursuit of Happiness

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:39:00 +0000

"Flag" (1954-55) by Jasper Johns

Tonight is July 3rd. In honor of our nation's birthday, I would like to share with you an essay that has meant a lot to me over the years. Written by John Perry Barlow, the former lyricist of the Grateful Dead, "The Pursuit of Emptiness" touches on our greatest strength and our greatest weakness as a nation.

Turning the famous and elusive utterance in The Declaration of Independence, "the pursuit of happiness" on its head, John Perry Barlow questions this unalienable right penned by Thomas Jefferson. For in Barlow's eyes, it makes little sense to "pursue" happiness in any form. He wisely quotes Chuang-Tzu, who says, "Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness."

And wholeheartedly I agree. In fact, right now I'm working on an article for this blog on the American culture of self-medication. Our impulse to self-medicate--not only with prescription drugs, but with food and exercise--seems closely related to the "pursuit of happiness" mentality.

The American people are after something, whether it's fame, recognition, love, wealth, sex, or satisfaction. What propels us is our insatiable demand for more. For awhile, this drive even kept our economy running.

The irony of happiness is this. Barlow quotes Swami Satchidananda:

If you run after things, nothing will come to you. Let things run after you. The sea never sends an invitation to the rivers. That's why they run to the sea. The sea is content. It doesn't want anything. That's the secret in life.

A magical and lovely idea . . . "Let things run after you." Happiness is not something you pursue; happiness is something that pursues you.

The fireworks go off in the neighborhoods surrounding my house and I'm glad to be alive. I'm glad to be pursued by happiness . . . keep it coming . . .

To Read John Perry Barlow's "The Pursuit of Emptiness" click here.

Vanity Fair says Michael lost his Youth

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:17:00 +0000

I happened to catch sight of a memorial article to Michael Jackson in Vanity Fair, "In Memoriam: Michael Jackson". The article celebrates Jackson's career and then pop-psychologizes him toward the end (no pun intended). Here's what it says:

He was different from all the other celebrities. He dressed different. He looked different. He even walked different. He did it backwards. And he aged backwards too, or at least he tried to. And that was the great tragedy of his life. His youth had been sacrificed to the music industry, spent in recording studios, and dealing with the trappings of fame. He would spend the rest of his life trying to recapture that innocence, receding into the William Randolph Hearst-like seclusion of Neverland Ranch, seeking for his own Rosebud. He surrounded himself with candy, toys, and other children, with whom he would never have normal relationships. Beginning in the early nineties, accusations of child molestation and troubling reports about his private life would overshadow even his own sublime music.

I was poking fun at Vanity Fair for reducing Michael Jackson's entire life to a psychological drama of lost youth. However, this sort of mythologizing is common when we are trying to understand a larger-than-life figure. There may be some truth to what Vanity Fair is saying here, but definitely not enough to put on a man's gravestone. "In Memoriam" means "in memory of" in Latin.

Why did I choose to pull this clipping of all the millions of other clippings of Michael Jackson floating around the Internet? Because it relates to my theme, the theme of this blog . . .

Was Michael innocent or guilty according to Vanity Fair's assumptions? Did he know better? Or was he pure-minded?

I'm guessing it was pretty murky for Michael if he was addicted to painkillers. But there is an innocence to him in the Jackson 5 that totally gets replaced by another image. "Off the Wall," "Thriller," and "Bad" demonstrate a sort of defiance, not innocence but lack of innocence.

Read my ode to the King of Pop here.

Narrative Photography: Central Illinois to Chicago and Back

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:26:00 +0000

Ever since I wrote an art review on David del Pilar Potes's photography, I've been very curious about the narrative aspects of photography. Potes's work inspired in me a vivid interest in the possibilities of storytelling through the digital medium. It was only by coincidence that I happened to purchase my first digital camera a day before I wrote the review.

What initially drew me to David's work, besides the remarkable photography, were the arrangements. In my interview with Potes, I asked him about his methodology and reasons for presenting photos in a linear format. He writes:

"The photos shown together help the dynamic in each group. Each photo I think helps the other photo. I've tried to maintain a rhythm in each gallery, a visual rhythm, trying to convey visual poetry almost."

"Each photo helps the other." This is what I'm interested in. I'm interested in the linear relationships between photos, how the progression of photos builds an emotional complexity, or simply carries an idea through.

I don't think I've achieved this yet with my latest set. But I'm experimenting and slowly learning the subtle art of narrative in photography.

These photos were taken over a period of a week or two, between my time spent in Normal, IL where I live, and Chicago, where I spent a short weekend for Father's Day. The two people in the restaurant are my father and sister. The man with the cat on the leash is my neighbor.

Opening Pandora's Box: Assisted Suicide

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:44:00 +0000

Last night, very very late (I think it was around 4 o'clock in the morning), I was just about to go to bed when I cracked open Pandora's box on Twitter.

I tweeted:
What is the current state of public opinion on assisted suicide for medical reasons?

And then I tweeted:
B/c I feel as though if I become sick and have cancer I should have the right to die.

Unprepared for the deluge of comments on this topic, I shut my computer and went out to the garage to have a cigarette (yes, I'm still smoking). Why was I awake so late? I got back from the bars around 2 am and found myself in a pensive mood. So I began writing. What I wrote down is of no importance, but the realization I had afterward is. I realized that I want the freedom to choose assisted suicide for medical reasons if I ever become terribly sick. This was an entirely personal realization; meaning, the thought was not inspired by anything but my own desire to have this right for myself.

I hadn't heard much of anything about assisted suicide in the news lately, and I began to seriously wonder what the current state of public opinion on the issue was. I wanted to know, "What do people believe?" Because in that moment, I knew deeply what I believed and how I felt.

I'm still exploring the possibilities of Twitter. The ability to tap into a vast and variegated live audience from different locations around the world, and at any hour of the day or night, is a phenomenon that draws my curiosity.

So what did people have to say on this topic? Well, I received a flurry of mixed opinions, but the majority of them leaned toward the individual's freedom to assisted suicide for medical reasons.

I was only interested in one question: "What do you think about assisted suicide for medical reasons?" In my rudimentary approach to sampling public opinion, I seemed to overlook the millions of other questions that went along with my original one; the what-ifs . . .

What if the person is not terminally ill?

What if the person has Alzheimer's and can't decide for themselves?

What if the person is "pressured" into assisted suicide?

While I understood that an abundance of hypothetical situations are enmeshed in the topic itself, I was still looking for some straight answers. These were some of the responses I got:

@salwaansart I agree with assisted suicide for medical reasons.

@dijeratic Depends where you are - some states do allow for it, all states should, in my opinion.

@JamesHancox Still mixed I think. Personally, I support a persons right to choose. Needs to be VERY carefully monitored though.

@buffysquirrel i don't think any of us needs a right to die; dying is going to happen whether we like it or not

@PaulMathers I am inclined to agree although I like to think I would not take that path personally. But as a right I'm inclined to agree

@DavidMunn Yeah, I'm in favor of euthanasia as long as the individual is making the decision without pressure.

@JackAwful You're knocking on an open door here. I was a nurse for 10 years. Kevorkian was a brave man and only the suffering know.

@crazygibbonsorry 140 characters. If someone is in a fit mental to decide state that's fine. Becomes difficult if they aren't.

@desireekoh13 Your responsibility to make decision when in right state of mind, so no one has to be responsible for making it for you.

@NightShiftNurse assisted suicide should be legal. I have seen too many patients suffer.

@StirringTrouble How you can call yourself innocent and promote assisted murder? I'm sorry, but you're off my list.

That last one really caught me off guard. I replied, "I promote the freedom; not murder."

Just as a side note, I call my blog The Blog of Innocence because I cultivate a wonder, an innocence, about the world in my writings. Because, to me, each new experience is a new reality. I feel as though I will always be innocent to life. This naivete is actually something I practice as I attempt to learn more about myself and more about others.

The interesting thing about assisted suicide for medical reasons is how diverse laws are from country to country, and within countries as well. I would like the law in Illinois to reflect my right to die for medical reasons.

I have Hepatitis C, which means there is a 50% chance I will develop liver cancer. In addition, I smoke and smoking is proven to cause lung cancer. Compound these possibilities with my already abused system from years of drug abuse.

And so, these are my concerns. What if I get sick? What if I develop cancer? Can I choose to die?

What baffles me is that people feel they can tell me I don't have that right. But this should be my decision.

My mother died of a degenerative disease. I watched her slowly lose all of her motor abilities, all of her facial expression, her balance, her ability to walk, her ability to speak.

Around forty-five years old, my mother was diagnosed with multi-system atrophy, a variant of Parkinson's. She went strong until everything was taken away from her. Her last three years on earth, she couldn't talk, couldn't walk, couldn't use the restroom by herself.

She never told me she wanted to die. But then again, she couldn't speak. How would I know? It became increasingly difficult to know her thoughts about her situation.

She was completely lucid until her death. Only in the last month, when she was unable to even eat enough food to stay alive, did she show signs of confusion.

The doctors never called my mother's illness "terminal". They called it "degenerative".

I watched my mother suffer. I saw what she had to go through for five agonizing years. And I wonder if such a thing were ever to happen to me, would I want to continue to live?

For more essays by the author, visit Escape into Life.

PHOTO ART BY MARIANNE ENGEL (via BOOOOOOM!)

Re-thinking Iran and Twitter

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:46:00 +0000

After writing "Is Social Technology Making Us Smarter?", I felt a twinge of regret for not having capitalized on my argument.

While we all agree that social technology is becoming a greater part of global society, it is easy to get carried away. I've noticed that rational arguments about social technology can quickly become quixotic pseudo-spiritual prognostications.

There have been a half-dozen articles since the huge media flurry over Twitter and the Iran elections that attempt to curb our enthusiasm about the prospect that social media is going to change the world. Here are just a couple from Wired, Slate, and Forbes:

"Iran: Before You Have That Twitter-Gasm . . ." (Wired Magazine)

Let's not get carried away about Twitter power's role in Iran's demonstrations. (Slate Magazine)

Information Is Overrated: Twitter's not gonna change our world. (Forbes Magazine)

Toward the end of my last post, I believe I grew a bit vague, relying on Peter Daou's mystical vision of the "collective turning-outward of human thought". It sounded good at the time . . .

Now I'm going to admit to you that I'm not entirely convinced that social technology is making us smarter. This weekend I got a chance to visit my father in Chicago and one of the things we talked about was Iran and Twitter.

My father knows nothing about Twitter. He's only learned of Twitter's existence from newspapers like The New York Times. He was born in Iraq and lived there until his twenties. So while he doesn't know much about Twitter, he happens to know a lot about dictators. He lived under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

I'm less inclined to believe that social technology is making us smarter after having talked with my Dad. But I still believe we are becoming smarter through the use of blogging, Twitter, and the vast number of social networking sites. The reason for this is so simple I overlooked it in my first examination.

Social technology, at its core, enables, encourages, and expands collective intelligence. And so, it may seem like splitting hairs, but the real argument is that collective intelligence trumps individual intelligence. Social technology does not make us smarter; we are already smarter in large groups. Because social technology creates the network for collective intelligence, we tend to think it is causing the intelligence but the intelligence was there all along, we just never tapped into it.

Let's put this into a global perspective.

"What allows a dictatorship to function is its ability to isolate the people. To keep the people from communicating. That's how every dictatorship works."

My father continues, "In our country, we had a right-wing hold on the government for eight years. How did Barack Obama get elected? Not because of Bush's failures. It was because Obama's campaign took advantage of the Internet. Obama learned that he could accomplish incredible things using these new technologies."

"Whatever the outcome of the Iranian elections, it's not as important as the fact that the protest occurred and a threshold has been broken. Authoritarian regimes will have a harder time suppressing their populations. The momentum of electronic communications and media is growing every week, every day, creating a massive counter-movement to the traditional practices of dictatorships such as China and North Korea."

In my first article, "Is Social Technology Making us Smarter?", I mentioned an "inscrutable" aspect of social technology. I was unable to pin down what made Twitter a phenomenon on a large scale. I used the word "inscrutable" because I didn't have an answer at the time.

Now I know that the mystery behind Twitter is collective intelligence itself. As I said before, social technology does not make us smarter; we are already smarter in large groups.

From the "Afterword" in The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki writes:

The growing interest in collective wisdom is the product of a host of different factors, but I think in many ways it's directly connected to the increased importance of the Internet. In part, that's because I think the ethos of the Net is fundamentally respectful of and invested in the idea of collective wisdom, and in some sense hostile to the idea that power and authority should belong to a select few. Many of the Net's most distinctive landmarks--Google, Slashdot, Wikipedia--are the products of the wisdom of crowds, and more generally, the Net, almost by its very structure, seems antihierarchical. It provides a vivid demonstration every day that systems can work smoothly and intelligently without having any one person in charge.

Surowiecki believes that the conditions necessary for a crowd to be wise are: diversity, independence, and a particular kind of decentralization. Social technology seems to embrace all of these conditions, which is why I may have initially seen it as the cause of augmented intelligence. But this is looking at the world through a grain of sand.

We are intelligent, we are collectively wiser, and our latest technologies only reveal this truth more.

For more essays by the author, visit Escape into Life . . .

ARTWORK BY KOLAHSTUDIO IRANIAN UNDERGROUND ART

Is Social Technology Making Us Smarter?

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:43:00 +0000

L'Oro dell' Azzurro by Joan Miro (via Spaceweaver)

Two interesting articles, one from The Atlantic called "Get Smarter", and another by Peter Daou called "The Philosophical Significance of Twitter: Consciousness Outfolding" reflect in their arguments the growing speculation that social technology is making us smarter.

Both articles come as a sort of rebuttal to the claim held by Nicolas Carr in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" also originally published in The Atlantic, that our scattered attention in the Internet era means that we are less capable of deep contemplation.

I've written about the fact that my continuous engagement with technology has noticeably decreased my attention span for doing certain things, such as reading literature ("Is the Internet Killing Culture?").

Carr's argument in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" draws on a similar experience. He writes, "Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do"(1). He sees the Internet as the culprit because "It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed."

Cyber-theorist Linda Stone describes the effect of technology on humans as one of "continuous partial attention"(2). Most online users, either at work or at home, can relate to being bombarded by a flurry of instant messages, emails, tweets, Facebook messages, etc. Checking your social media profiles is perhaps the most effective time-waster ever invented.

It seems as long as we are on our laptops, desktop computers, or cell phones, we are part of an information flow that never really ends. The ability to enter and exit this digital flow can be difficult, especially if you are prone to procrastination.

I believe we are coming to a greater understanding of the impact of intellectual technologies on humans. Carr's article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" only points to the drawbacks of a culture enmeshed in digital systems. What it does not do is assess the ways in which our collective and individual intelligences are growing.

We first need to concede to the fact that technological distractions are a major consequence of living during this time. If you have email, if you use the Internet, or a smart phone, you cannot escape digital distractions. Google itself is a sort of Siren that draws us to her search bar to make queries and get lost in a sea of ever-changing information. Every new social technology, from the latest Twitter app to Facebook's obsession with development, promises a cooler tool and a greater distraction.

Now that we all agree social technology limits our attention spans, let us examine the ways in which we are becoming sharper as thinkers and communicators, and more effective as individuals and societies.

Many bloggers, including myself, draw on print publications to form opinions and advance arguments. This is not to say that print publications are better, but simply that most of the time paid journalists from respectable sources have done their homework. The bridge between the blogosphere and print culture is narrowing, however; many writers for newspapers and magazines have blogs, and a new crust of elite Internet publications such as Huffington Post and TechCrunch are gaining ascendancy. The growth of citizen journalism essentially means that more people are writing about what they are reading. While it is true that I am reading less literature, I'm also reading more things that impact me in the news and arts. In short, I am engaging in a dialogue with other writers and culture as a whole.

The shift from a readerly culture which privileges paid, professional journalists to a writerly culture in which anyone can post their opinion and discuss a topic has been underway for some time now. What we are seeing, to interesting effect, is how traditional media relies on the same technology to disseminate information as citizen journalism does. Hyperlinks, Page Rank, and social media are not only leveraged by Internet publications but any publication that wants to be seen, heard, and talked about.

I believe an active, writerly culture is far more intelligent then a passive, readerly one. While both writers and readers seek patterns in information, writers do something with those patterns and that information. For example, to write this post I had to read four different articles, some of them with conflicting claims; I had to synthesize them, evaluate each of their claims, and assert my own. This is a much more complex process then reading a book. Even a great book, even literature. This is what people do in college and grad school, except I'm doing it on a regular basis for fun.

Now not every person on the Internet is a blogger. And not every blogger produces the same volume of content. The point is that everyone using the Internet is participating to some degree, forming what publisher Tim O'Reilly calls the "architecture of participation."

Built into the active component of using the Internet is also the social component. Since Daniel Goleman's groundbreaking book,"Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships", we have come to believe that there is more than one form of intelligence. Our abilities to connect with one another characterize social intelligence. What does this mean in the Internet era?

Jamais Cascio writes:

Intelligence has a strong social component; for example, we already provide crude cooperative information-filtering for each other. In time, our interactions through the use of such intimate technologies could dovetail with our use of collaborative knowledge systems (such as Wikipedia), to help us not just to build better data sets, but to filter them with greater precision. As our capacity to provide that filter gets faster and richer, it increasingly becomes something akin to collaborative intuition—in which everyone is effectively augmenting everyone else(3).

Cascio seems to suggest advanced forms of information architecture. These advanced forms are social and participatory, targeted to our needs as individuals, and productive of a kind of collective intelligence.

Communication technology has progressed from oral culture, to manuscript culture, to print culture, and now information culture(4). Digital culture infused with social technology merges the characteristics of three of these four cultures. We can use Twitter as an example. Twitter reveals certain aspects of an oral culture (telling your friends what you are doing), certain aspects of print culture (public announcements, quotations), certain aspects of information culture (hyperlinks), and lastly a more inscrutable aspect that has yet to be defined.

The role that Twitter played in Iranians protesting the presidential election points to the development of this inscrutable aspect of the technology. That is the dynamic that gets created between users and whole populations. The dynamic shapes communication, insight, and action. It is inventive, always changing, and most definitely intelligent.

Peter Daou writes:

In the larger picture, the most intriguing thing about Twitter is not how it is different from other online communication mechanisms, but how it is the same: one more technological innovation enabling the outfolding of consciousness -- the collective turning-outward of human thought(5).

The "collective turning-outward of human thought" is a vision that ultimately means we are growing more in tune with one another. When we are intuitive at a collective level, the potential for local, national, and global re-organization and improvement is possible and real.

The sequel to this post is, "Re-Thinking Iran and Twitter".

For more intellectual essays by the author, visit Escape into Life.

Normal, IL: Documentary Photos Part Two

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:13:00 +0000

The first set of photos that I took of downtown Normal only covered half of the main street. This is the other half. Photos of the downtown area would be incomplete without pictures of Babbitt's Books, the local secondhand bookshop.

You'll also notice some construction going on. The downtown area is being completely renovated right now. Parking is horrible and the construction has affected some of the local businesses. All the store owners I talked to are looking forward to the new sidewalks that were poured today.

I woke up at four in the afternoon (because I was up all night). After checking my email, I went into Normal to take the last set of pictures. Most of the stores were closing.

In my last post, I talked about my interest in documentary photography . . . Well, I had an insight tonight about these pictures I've taken in the last two days. At first, I thought there was such a thing called "documentary photography," but now I'm starting to have my doubts.

Although these are pictures of my town, I think they reflect me more than anything. Does documentary photography really just document ourselves?

The first slideshow has a youthful, rebellious feel. I focus on headshops, skateshops, and used CD stores. The second slideshow depicts the town as nearly deserted because of the construction.

I come to the scene late, to take pictures. The workers have all gone home, except one. The giant orange equipment sits idle in the trenches.

Also, notice all the pictures of books, it's because I love reading, I love looking at books, I love holding them. And I've been in Babbitt's Books many many times. I used to go there every day.

No matter how objective we try to be, we reveal ourselves. We cannot help it. The self cannot be disguised. We represent ourselves in everything we do.

Normal, IL: Documentary Photos

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:53:00 +0000

I recently bought my first digital camera. Inspired by the work of David del Pilar Potes, I decided to try my hand at some documentary photography. In particular, I'm interested in how photographs are arranged and the meaning that arises between pictures based on their linear relationship to other pictures. My background in fiction may explain this narrative approach to photography.

A single photograph will of course catch my eye; but for some reason, a gallery of photos produces a greater emotional effect. I want to know what I can do with a gallery. I can tell a story with the arrangement. . . the story can be literal, closer to an objective documentary style, or the arrangement can be more lyrical and associative, more subjective.

I also see myself as a "journalist". Not an old-school journalist, but a new media journalist. I don't work for a newspaper and I never have but my writing is hugely influenced by reading The New York Times. Combining my joy of essay writing and this new appreciation for documentary photography, I can see many possibilities for experimentation.

Interview with the Photographer

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 08:21:00 +0000

In my last post I wrote about my subjective experience of looking at David del Pilar Potes's photography. This interview is meant to accompany that post and give some insight into the workings of a professional and artistic photographer.

My first question is about your arrangements. How do you choose an arrangement of photos? Is there a narrative to each gallery? Do you have a narrative in mind for "Jammin with Ash"?

Each gallery on my site has photos shot from either different times and/or places. Each gallery does have a theme; it depends how each group of images I've selected moves me.

The photos shown together help the dynamic in each group. Each photo I think helps the other photo. I've tried to maintain a rhythm in each gallery, a visual rhythm, trying to convey visual poetry almost.

I love how you mix seascapes with urban settings with portrait. Different subject matter but it all fuses together so well. Can you expand on this dynamic and the unity your arrangements create?

All the different images create a dynamic that somehow makes each subject cohesive. It is intended, but it's not like I go out and try to find trees or oceans and food and friends. I happen to have my camera with me and document my life around me. I'm trying to provoke emotion through the selections and if you have responded to them I am stoked that you can feel
it...

These photos seem to me works of art. Almost every one of them, I would say is "art". Are these pictures you take off the cuff? Or do you patiently wait for the right moment?

As a photographer timing is essential to the shot. Most of my photography is off the cuff, but sometimes I do wait for the moment, especially shooting people. I appreciate you considering my work art! I approach my photography as my art.

What is your "method"? Do you take hundreds of photos and one or two come out to look so beautiful?

You know, I am shooting constantly. Each finished roll I throw in a bag until it reaches to around 20-30 rolls then I send out to process them. So the 20-30 rolls, each with around 36 images each, is sometimes shot in a period of 3-6 months.

My method is the editing process. With each roll there are so many images. Some rolls I have maybe one photo I like, some 2-3, and so forth, editing down the batches of rolls and creating a "gallery" for them. If I could I would publish each "gallery" as a book; that is sorta how I intended them to be.

Can you talk about process? I know nothing about photography. Do you work in a dark room?

I shoot all b&w film in which I process the rolls. From there I would print in a dark room and/or scan the negatives.

Do you also take pictures in color but choose not to display color photos on your site? Why do you like black and white?

I do shoot color but I haven't delved too deeply in it just yet. I plan to, I'm just not ready for it, art-wise. I actually have a big bag of color rolls I haven't processed. I have around 100 rolls or so that I've shot the past 3-4 years or so. That's gonna be fun when I tackle that... with b&w I do love the emotion it provokes, the grain you can feel, the simpleness of it, the contrasts...

In your bio you describe yourself by saying, "However, with his background in self-publishing, he strives to move within multiple genres of the medium. " Can you explain a little more what you are doing in terms of "moving within multiple genres of the medium"?

The past couple years I've integrated my career into my photography. For work I shoot commercial photography. I have different portfolios that I'm still figuring out how to integrate on my site. I have a difficult time separating the two, right now its oil & water, trying to combine them both.

It shouldn't be so hard, but initially I want to present myself as an artist. So the past years I've been trying to integrate my work as an artist by collaborating with other artists, creating different zines, apparel, trying to get my fingers in different projects. And as a commercial photographer, I'm trying to get different gigs shooting product and fashion. The whole art & commerce has a balance I'm trying to find.

Last but not least, why photography? Why did you choose to express yourself and create art primarily through this medium? And if you practice other creative arts, tell me what they are?

You know I never aspired to become a "photographer". I've been shooting for the past 15-16 years now and finally committed as a "photographer" about 2 years ago. I've always wanted to be a writer, but I stopped writing in my early 20s because I felt I needed to live a life to even write about one. I'm a poet at heart and my images I create allow me to have some release creatively.

More of David del Pilar Potes's photography can be found at his website.

Follow David on Twitter.

The Photography of David del Pilar Potes

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:48:00 +0000

Ultimately, photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida 1980

I'm interested in photography. Some believe that photography is fundamentally different from other forms of representation. Roland Barthes happened to believe this and he made it the focal point of his short book, Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography.

My mother owned this book by Barthes. I borrowed it from her many years ago. Her notes are still in the margins, scrawled every which way. To write this review, I retrieved the book from my library, attempting to gain some knowledge . . .

In all honesty, I don't know if photography belongs in a special category or no category at all. But the effect of certain images on me is beyond a doubt mystifying. And this was the case when I looked at the photography of David del Pilar Potes.

I'm going to try to recount my subjective experience. While surfing the Internet one night, I found this image:

A man sits beside a Banyan tree, reading. The primordial world hangs over him in luxurious, gargantuan branches.

At first I couldn't situate the image in my mind. That is, I didn't know exactly what I was looking at. The grotesque musculature of the tree trunk seemed to conceal the tree itself. And then I noticed a little man sitting beside the tree on a bench and a garbage can about ten feet away. As I scrolled the bottom bar, I witnessed a seamless collection of photographs nothing like this one, but all of them strangely connected.

For the rest of the night I tried to understand what it was about David's photographs that stirred in me such a visceral, intense preoccupation. Looking at them, my heart raced, and soon I needed to contact the artist and tell him that his photographs were producing this response in me. I would have to write a review of them; there was no choice. For the review, I would need to sample his images; how else could I convey to my readers the mystery behind these photographs?

The next day I returned to the pictures and studied them more closely. I wouldn't hear from David for another two days. At this point, I remembered the book by Barthes that I had inherited from my mother. I started reading it.

The studium speaks of the interest which we show in a photograph, the desire to study and understand what the meanings are in a photograph, to explore the relationship between the meanings and our own subjectivities. (1)

Yes, I was interested in these images. What else could explain my "enthusiastic commitment" in Barthes's words? It was this interest that drew me back to David's website again and again.

The studium is a result of my volition, my will to study the photographs.

There was meaning in the photographs, but the sort of meaning you scooped up with your impressions and created yourself. There was no pre-existing meaning, only suggestions and possibilities, which made studying the images similar to looking at artifacts in a museum. You could play with the storyline of each object, invent the characters and their relationships, tease out the latent emotion of the scenes--

A teenager sprays graffiti on a concrete wall. How far is he from civilization? Or is this civilization?

You're looking at one of my favorite pictures by David del Pilar Potes. Again, we have the juxtaposition of the natural world and a single human being. A teenager is figured prominently in the foreground, but in more than half of the picture, the forest soars over the concrete walls.

We seem to be looking down into the mouth of the embankment. It's hard to identify exactly what or where the location is. Some place in the mountains.

The inability to situate the image, like with the Banyan tree photograph, provokes me. Barthes would say this detail "pricks" me. He calls it the punctum.

At first I think the teenager spraying graffiti also "pricks" me--or rather his vandalism does.

But then I realize that I'm not against the subject-matter. I connect with the youth who in the middle of nowhere scrawls his name on the wall. Although he's vandalizing property, it's not the vandalism that bothers me.

The concrete walls, the hollow embankment, bothers me. Ugly, massive, and intrusive. I would vandalize the walls myself . . .

Already, I've created some value, some meaning, for the teenager's act. This meaning gives the picture its wholeness. Not only does my private meaning forgive the teenager's act, but I also know that whatever is happening in this photograph, it is exactly how it should be.

The punctum (a Latin word derived from the Greek word for trauma) . . . inspires an intensely private meaning, one that is suddenly, unexpectedly recognized and consequently remembered (it "shoots out of [the photograph] like an arrow and pierces me”); it ‘escapes’ language (like Lacan’s real); it is not easily communicable through/with language. (2)

These definitions are not taken from Camera Lucida. If I quoted from Barthes's text, it would shed little light on what I'm talking about. He has to be read in context. I'm relying on Kasia Houlihan's annotations of the book.

Her eyes are closed and she's pointing to infinity. The city smiles in the background.

David del Pilar Potes excels at describing humanity. The breadth of the subject-matter, the comprehensiveness of the photos, capture many different lives held together by a common spirit.

Potes says his "primary aesthetic is in documentary photography, focusing on people and landscapes." I scroll through each of the five collections on his site, discovering seascapes, rock formations, dolphins, fires, prophetic graffiti, dogs playing in a gully, solitary boats, theater performances, a couple in a diner, portraits of strangers, a motorcyclist in an empty parking lot, ethnic festivals, pictures of food, acrobats . . .

And you cannot pin down the photographer. He disappears into his work. He does not privilege spectacles over mundane aspects of life. He lovingly documents all. And when his arrangements do include photographs of the bizarre and fantastic, the pictures stand out as they would in real life. Because sometimes our world is purely odd.

More of David del Pilar Potes's photography can be found at his website.

The Divided Self

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Fri, 29 May 2009 02:15:00 +0000

[Francis Bacon, by Lucian Freud]

I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.

--Ovid, The Metamorphosis (qtd. Jonathan Haidt)

About two months ago, my girlfriend and I broke up and I picked up smoking after five years.

I must have forgotten how long life actually is. Because I believed I would never pick up another cigarette again. During my five year stint of no drugs, no alcohol, and no cigarettes, I also practiced meditation daily and didn't eat meat. And I exercised six days a week.

There was a beautiful discipline to my life. My body was trim, my mind was clear, my goals were within reach.

I look back at the era of my rigid self-control and wonder. I wonder if I was happier living in a healthy body. I wonder if I truly appreciated my health.

I remember the lifestyle demanded an inordinate amount of work and conscious effort to maintain. But there was also an energy that helped me along, a natural stimulant my body must have been producing to keep me so focused.

And now?

Now I'm chain-smoking, staying up late, and eating poorly. I'm also less concerned about having the occasional drink or the occasional joint. What happened? Where did I stumble and fall?

It seems I covered the territory of the sober, the nicotine-free, and salubrious, and now I'm flirting with the other side. Maybe life is better--or easier--caffeine-addled, ignorant, and undisciplined.

Things must have not been so wonderful before; otherwise I never would have forsaken my wholesome lifestyle. There must have been some boredom or irritation with that life to dissuade me . . .

In my current wasteland of petty vices, I find no shortage of problems. But that also seems to be the advantage. My physical concerns take up so much of my attention that I have little time to ruminate on emotional setbacks.

This question of the divided self has been revolving in my mind. Only because the division is so painfully obvious when you want to quit smoking.

Last night, I laid in bed, after having my last cigarette of the day.

"That's it. You're done. You-are-done. No more smoking!"

And it made perfect sense at the time because my lungs practically felt like I was experiencing the onset of some mild form of emphysema; short, shallow breaths, the body convulses with cold-like symptoms.

I got out of bed and put the Nicorette gum I'd bought two weeks ago on the dresser drawer. This pantomime of quitting, these small, ineffectual acts--I'm familiar with. I've thrown away a dozen ashtrays and several full packs of cigarettes before pathetically searching the garbage to recover them.

Morning came, and of course I remembered last night's ordeal, wanting desperately to quit. The gravitas! The suffering! I recalled it but I walked past it as one walks past a store window on their way to work.

How could it be happening again? I'm lighting a cigarette, I'm inhaling, I'm even enjoying the damn thing in a sick sort of way.

But my mind--changed. It must have. It changed over night. Because in the morning, I didn't feel the same emotion, the same devotion to quitting, the same visceral disgust.

Instead, in that languid mood of not caring, I drifted to the garage, the place where I go every morning to smoke a cigarette.

It makes me curious that we have these unconscious desires which are essentially controlling us. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt compares the self to a rider on the back of an elephant. He writes:

The image that I came up with for myself, as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.

But the power to change your life is real. I know it's real because I've changed my life before. I used to be a drug addict.

But life is long and nothing stays forever. We may think we will never waver, that we will stay married until death, that we'll never go back to smoking or overeating or compulsive shopping.

But we do. To waver is only human. And these decisions to quit, to change, to reform, to improve, I want to embrace them--and more than that--I want to seriously carry them out and change my life.

But it is perhaps wiser to have the knowledge that someday, no matter what changes I do happen to make, I'll have to start at the beginning again.

More Essays . . .

Magic and the Subconscious in Michael Cheval's Art

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:29:00 +0000

[Comparative Analogy II by Michael Cheval]

One of the pleasures of writing art reviews is that the writer gets to enter the world of the artist’s creations. Obligingly, the reader follows as the writer gently leads her into another dimension, another continent of possibility. Perhaps no other living artist deserves a guide, a shaman, for his works than the Russian master, Michael Cheval.

I am no shaman; but I will lead.

I set out to write illustration art reviews for Escape into Life, but inevitably I stepped into a brier patch of fine art, notably Cheval’s. The instant I saw his work, I knew I had to write about it. The images had cast a spell on me . . .

There is magic in this artwork. Not only are the paintings populated with magical characters, court jesters, and magicians themselves, but a supernatural magic suffuses each painting like the flower juice Oberon orders Puck to drop into Titania’s eyes as she’s sleeping in Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Love-in-Idleness” is the name of the flower in the play. Likewise, Cheval’s artwork conjures visions of supernatural spheres, doorways into parallel realities, and glimpses into absurdist theaters.

Absurdity is Cheval’s main subject. But he creates his own definition of absurdity, which his paintings seek to reveal. To Cheval, absurdity is a “game of the imagination, where all ties are carefully chosen to construct a literary plot.” In addition, he says that absurdity is “an inverted side or reality, a reverse side of logic.”

Cheval’s works are grouped into themes; "Nature of Absurdity", "Eternity of Absurdity", "Illusions of Absurdity", "Reality of Absurdity", and "Sense of Absurdity".

The shape of a dress or a faucet will become another object, a surreal object, such as a table or a horn instrument; but it will retain the original shape of the dress or the faucet. Such are Cheval’s games of the imagination; we do not always know what we are looking at. The eye must adjust to the picture object-by-object as it simultaneously takes in a new chessboard of reality.

Despite the illogic pervading the works, there is a coherency of representation. The heightened realism reminiscent of 17th century Dutch art does just that—the precision knits our illusions together to such a degree that we see Cheval’s paintings as actualities playing out in another dimension.

There are so many delectable images on Cheval’s website, and a viewer can spend hours looking at them, lost in a labyrinth of dreams; but for the sake of review, I will talk about two of my favorites.

[Air of Attraction by Michael Cheval]

Let us begin with the little boy in the jester’s costume holding a lute, and with the slightest turn of his head, looking outside of the painting. The painting is called, “Air of Attraction.”

It seems he’s sitting on a green velvet pillow in the middle of a dirt road. But the dirt road, like the boy himself, is illuminated by sunshine, and green plants and grass grow right beside him. The boy’s costume is distinctive. He wears a floppy jester’s hat with four prongs and jingle bells on the end. He wears white stockings and purple knickers, and his dress seems more meant for the royal court than the middle of a road. But there he is, playing his lute and dreaming off into the distance.

Gravity or the lack thereof plays a large part in Cheval’s parallel realities. And here we see some apples on the ground (obeying gravity) and one apple floating above the boy’s head (not obeying gravity). The boy doesn’t look at the apple, but just under it; his gaze fixed by an innocent daydream as he plays his instrument. We almost hear the measure of delay between the plucked strings and are drawn along with him into a current of distraction.

And what does the title mean? Perhaps the “air of attraction” is how involuntary attention comes across us like a spell and makes us all children for its duration. The child represents this phenomenon best because it is during childhood that we are engrossed in our games and our imaginary worlds. Moreover, the painting has an intangible quality of air; the sunlight on the dirt, the bright colors of the boy’s costume, the boy’s eyes lost in distraction, the floating apple; all of these elements conjure a sense of the ethereal. It is as if a supernatural law is guiding our distractions and attractions.

[Lullaby for the Hero by Michael Cheval]

We move to our next painting, “Lullaby for the Hero”, and in this case our hero is another little boy. A mime in gold and crimson-striped tights and regal Late Stuart costume holds the boy in his arms. The boy is dressed in armor and a royal blue cape; he holds a lance pointing down and stares directly at us. The mime is looking off to the side. It appears as if there was some horseplay, the mime has just picked the boy up off the ground, and now the scene is fixed in stillness. The knocked-over chair suggests this earlier bit of chaos.

The boy’s sister (presumably) holds a magic wand and looks dazed by her own magic. She is in the picture but not in it. Her gaze betrays her. She wears a baroque pink dress with a collar. Contrast her eyes, mesmerized--to her brother’s eyes, which are alert and aware of us. The toys on the floor of the children’s playroom, a wooden rocking horse with a bicycle chain, a globe, alphabet blocks, and a train, are like riddles. Why is there a toy train if trains haven’t even been invented yet? And what century is this exactly? The costumes seem to place it in the 17th century, but did they even know the world was round at that time?

And then, the most powerful image looms in the background. The wall of the children’s playroom is a gray-scale mural of a war battle with men on horses. A violent, bloody scene, it reminds me of the Shield of Achilles in Ulysses. The shadow-play over the gray-scale mural adds to the gloominess of it. The mural is actually Leonardo Da Vinci's "Battle of Anghiari".

The connection between the boy’s play-armor and the “real” battle on the wall has many different connotations. Does the mural forebode a war that the boy, when he grows up, will fight in and perhaps die? Or is the mural there only to reveal the other side of child-hero's play world? Could the children be acting out an adult world in their playroom? And if so what does the little girl in pink represent? She doesn’t seem to belong in the “real world”. But the boy, who stares at us, knows he belongs.

The mime is a particularly evocative figure to me. My mother was an oil painter and she used to dress up in a mime’s costume and paint herself, looking into a mirror. I remember her with the white face makeup and the blank, bemused expression just like the mime in “Lullaby for the Hero.”

Who is singing the lullaby?

The mime is the artist and his song breaks the boy’s fierce play-acting; the song puts his wild fantasies to rest. He is only a boy-hero for now, not a real hero yet.

In his essay, “Abusurd Intacta,” Mark Gauchax writes:

Instead of relying on cultural sources, he (Cheval) explores deep motives of unconsciousness that are easily understood because they are universal, regardless of one’s geography, experience or knowledge. His paintings lead their independent life. Outside of time and space, this artist spends too much time communicating with specters.

The few cultural and historical references we have in Cheval’s paintings, 17th century dress, courtly figures, jesters, are all jumbled. The narrative is not linear; as Gauchax writes, the paintings cut through historical time and the probabilities of space. What we connect with, then, what we make sense of, is our own subconscious.

As the mime in “Lullaby for the Hero” becomes my own mother who has passed away, I slowly begin to see myself in every little boy that Cheval has ever painted. And the magic, Oberon’s magic, Cheval’s magic, Shakespeare’s magic, is the belief that I am represented here, and here, and here . . .

Michael Cheval's Website

What does a Global Collectivist Society look like?

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sat, 23 May 2009 02:35:00 +0000

Whatever it is the Internet has created--this force moves with light-speed--and I argue it will ultimately surpass the traditional "failed" economy, leaving mega-institutions and mega-corporations to operate, if they operate at all, in a second, inferior space.

What does this new economy look like? How does it function differently from capitalism? And what are the changes in social behavior?

This month's issue of Wired magazine hints at some of the distinguishing features of a "new new economy" (Chris Anderson's phrase). Anderson writes:

What we have discovered over the past nine months are growing diseconomies of scale. Bigger firms are harder to run on cash flow alone, so they need more debt (oops!). Bigger companies have to place bigger bets but have less and less control over distribution and competition in an increasingly diverse marketplace. Those bets get riskier and the payoffs lower.

And then Anderson quotes venture capitalist Paul Graham who says, "It turns out the rule 'large and disciplined organizations win' needs to have a qualification appended: 'at games that change slowly'. No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed."

I'm not going to pretend that I'm an economist; because I'm not. But what I will do is tell you my experience.

I am witnessing an extraordinary level of collaboration and connection between strangers over the Internet. Many of you know that I run an Arts and Culture webzine called Escape into Life. Part of my job is to find writers and artists to feature in the webzine. I speak to scores of individuals each month asking for their participation in some form, whether it is posting their artwork or asking them to write articles.

Ten years ago, communicating with a stranger over the Internet and asking them to do an assignment for you was unheard of. I'm not paying these writers and my site barely gets 200 hits a day. My influence is virtually nil. And yet, I am greeted with interest and excitement when I tell people I would like them to contribute.

What has changed? Are we acting differently toward each other as a result of social technology?

I think everyone would agree that social media and Internet collectivity is changing the order of society. We don't know the extent social media will overturn aspects of the traditional marketplace, but we are seeing some interesting results.

As a professional blogger and social media freelancer, my work puts me at the center of a perfect storm that is leveling the playing field between institutions and individuals. These days it seems like the bigger you are, the worse off you are; and the tighter your network, the smaller your scope, the better you'll fare.

The New York Times talks about the influence Amazon.com is starting to have on the publishing industry because digital books for the Kindle are expected to be cheaper. The publishing conglomerates don't want to lower their prices, but the people demand that they do; and Amazon.com is actually putting their ass on the line, taking cuts from sales, because they have more faith in their new economic model then the economic model of corporate capitalism.

It's ridiculous to pay $15 for a digital copy of a book anyways. The article suggests that eventually the publishing houses will bow to Amazon's pricing just as the music industry did to the i-Tunes store.

Mega-corporations cannot compete with the innovative technologies of startups. And as Paul Graham keenly points out--they cannot keep up with the speed. It's like waking up from a long sleep and finding yourself in a new location. The landscape has drifted from a physical location to a digital one. And in the digital world, the same rules of purchase simply do not apply.

With behavior changing between individuals toward a greater collectivist spirit, and prices changing to accommodate an economy based on the decentralized power of millions of small companies, it is not hard to foresee a time when nations become artifacts.

We are working together with people from all over the world to create, produce, sell, share, trade, hire, and invent. A global collectivist society is not a science fiction utopia but an emerging reality and I can't wait to see myself as a citizen of the world.

ARTWORK BY ANDY MUELLER

Is the Internet Killing Culture?

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Mon, 18 May 2009 08:16:00 +0000

[The Age of Civilization by Jan Soucek].

I have a confession to make.

I haven't been able to finish reading an entire book in over three months.

My compulsive and ardent participation on the Internet, writing blogs, commenting, publishing poems, and reading others' work, seems to have something to do with this.

Mostly my reading these days is confined to the well-written columns of The New York Times. I am a New York Times enthusiast and reading the newspaper coincides perfectly with my short span of attention.

A couple weeks ago, I grew interested in the phenomenon of "mass amateurism" on the Web and I wanted to investigate it. I asked a couple prominent literary bloggers, Nigel Beale from Nota Bene Books and Andrew Seal, from Blographia Literaria, to write essays for the Arts and Culture Webzine I edit, called "Escape into Life."

In Nigel's essay, he quotes the author Andrew Keen from "The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture". And while I won't re-quote Keen here because the message is in the title, I would like to respond based on my own experience of the last couple years, and how my behavior has changed in regards to the medium of the Internet.

From college onward, I delved into literature as if it were a contact sport, devouring the classics with fervor and intensity. I majored in English, which gave me somewhat of a background in reading these authors, but I went beyond my studies to read European classics most of which weren't taught in my classes.

I loved French and Russian realism. I relished the imaginative powers, the ability of these great writers to create worlds inside their fiction. My favorite authors were Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola in the French tradition; and Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov in the Russian.

Literary realism became my opium; I seemed to be able to live off of it forever; indulging in these beautiful and convincing worlds. Intoxicated I would spend days in the library reading, losing track of time and forgetting everything that pained me in my trivial life.

The days of literary intoxication may be over, however. I recall them with a sort of nostalgia but I can no longer enter those worlds. I refuse to abandon myself to them; I don't have the patience to read Zola's meticulous story-telling or Tolstoy's epic handling of characters and events.

What has happened since? Have I changed? Have I lost my ability to engage in culture and art?

The Internet has definitely changed the way I read and what I read. But it has also changed my view of myself from a passive receiver of "culture" to an active participant and creator of it.

In many ways, I've become the epitome of the amateur artist on the Web. I publish everything; poetry, essays, novels, even some sketches. And like many bloggers, I bask in the freedom to express my thoughts, my impressions, my art.

I poignantly remember a creative writing college professor once telling me--after I announced my desire to become a professional writer--"You won't publish for another ten years. I've seen the corpses."

And so, now it is with a certain exuberance and defiance that I publish freely on the Web, all with the click of a button.

To me, the proliferation of artistic expression, the videos on YouTube, the online novels, the loads of bad poetry, cannot be equated with a loss or diminishment of culture but instead a replenishment of it. "More artists, more culture," I say--even if the great majority of those artists are naive and unskilled. The individual acts of creativity, that's what's important, and with more people creating, I see the phenomenon of mass amateurism as a boon.

The novel I'm reading now--when I take the time to read--is called, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. While I've lost my attention to read classical literature, my attention seems to be on par with the requirement for contemporary novels and non-fiction. Any casual observer of the novel by Geoff Dyer will recognize that he is no Balzac, no Chekhov, no Flaubert. Contemporary novels are infinitely easier to read than classics, especially the ones that make it on the New York Time's "Bestsellers List".

But I'm glad I have my Geoff Dyer book to read for pleasure, because I can't possibly focus my mind on War and Peace. My level of attention simply will not allow it. I'm still nostalgic for great literary works, and Amazon.com knows well that I still like to buy them, but do I read them whole? No. I can't finish them.

The Internet is a medium of conversation and expression. It is participatory. Reading a whole stack of books by myself does not seem conducive to a lifestyle that clings impulsively to a MacBook throughout the day.

The question then becomes: Is art and literature in the modern age diluted? Is it watered-down literature?

We hear about the death of American poetry, the death of criticism, and the death of the American novel. And increasingly, international audiences are finding it harder to relate to literature in America (see the New York Times article, "Yet Once More a Laurel Not Bestowed").

The Internet may not be entirely responsible for the supposed death of the arts in America, but there is a certain insularity to American prose and poetry that not a lot of international audiences "get" or appreciate. I think too much of contemporary writing is abstract or superficial; it lacks the density of great works of art.

And yet, ironically, my faculties have gone down for appreciating those great works, and I'm more likely to pick up an amusing and mildly thought provoking novel--nothing too serious or intense.

[The Great Illusion by Jan Soucek]

But there is another side to my (subjective) experience on the question of whether the Internet is killing culture. While my dedication and commitment to literature has diminished, my attention to visual art has increased. Escape into Life attempts to merge literature with the arts. My mother was an artist and I have a great admiration for visual expression.

I believe the Internet has in fact expanded my capacity to appreciate and discuss art. Never before have I had so much art to look at and admire, to study and remark on.

With this discovery, I have begun writing illustration art reviews for the Webzine. I take it upon myself to find outstanding illustration artists on the Web, both award-winning and amateur artists, and I write detailed accounts of their work. This practice has definitely enlarged my "culture".

Not only am I writing about artists, but I'm having an exchange with them, developing a social network and fostering relationships with people who share the same interests.

This, I would say, is not an act of "killing culture"; but an act of embracing it, an act of helping it flourish and grow.

One commenter (@TheDarkEngine) writes, "But when 'mass amateurism' is accepted as the norm by the culture at large, it may lose its critical abilities."

TheDarkEngine is right when he says that critical abilities are necessary to judge cultural works. My optimism for capital "C" culture in regards to the Internet is that I believe we can sharpen our critical abilities by discussing which amateur and non-amateur poems, novels, and visual works warrant our attention.

The critical faculty will not "atrophy" (TheDarkEngine's word) if we actively take part in organizing art and criticism on the Web and talk about it. The proliferation of voices must enter some kind of filter and that is the task of educated readers and the artists themselves.

We can point to the success of one body of "amateur" work; which is Wikipedia. Wikipedia proved that amateurs can in fact trump their professional counterparts with the advances of social technology. Old-school critics who defame literary bloggers may underestimate the value of the many over the one. When this essential quality of the Internet gets overlooked, it may appear on the surface that the medium is not producing anything valuable to culture.

The many voices of the Internet is the Internet. The play of educated and non-educated voices, the high and low, the critical and non-critical, this is the essence and to reject the essence is to reject a large portion of human activity at present. Social technology--and all of the Web's manifestations--are becoming inseparable from culture.

The Internet demands some degree of participation from everyone--whether its reading a blog post, commenting on one, or rating that commentator's comment. But everyone can choose their level of participation. Together, the collective efforts of individuals, small web publications, large media outlets, Wikis, forums, social networks, bookmarking sites, determine the shape and trajectory of culture over the Internet.

With each new medium that comes along, some Ivy League professor will exclaim that culture is dying as a result. Culture is not dying; it's transforming in unpredictable ways, unexpected off-shoots, and amazing digressions. The audiences and the consumers of art, and the creators themselves, may not look the same. But who ever said they should?

And who ever said Culture is static?

This question is open for debate in the forums at Escape into Life, "Arts and Culture Webzine" or you may leave your comments below.

IMAGES CAN BE FOUND AT BLDGBLOG and KDCAY (VIA BUT DOES IT FLOAT)

Oliver Dominguez

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:15:00 +0000

Versatile artist, who studied at Ringling College of Art and Design, moves effortlessly between local-color city scenes and classical, elegant depictions. Most recently, his work was featured in the show for the Society of Illustrators at Gallery Nucleus in Los Angeles.

“Time is important to the artist.” Thus reads Dominguez’s website; he’s quoting himself. Judging by his works, the artist must use his time wisely because he’s achieved something brilliant.

Many of Dominguez’s editorial works involve people in urban settings. The street scene is his dominant subject matter. In these scenes, his ability to capture the city in a single, telling moment takes us beyond the usual territory of the illustration and into something wider, like a painting. The city characters are at times done in meticulous detail, in which we gather their personalities and situations; at times in a sort of caricature that gives exaggeration to the scene; or crowd depictions where colors and patterns come out more than faces.

Norman Rockwell’s influence on Dominguez’s illustrations is by no means veiled, and Dominguez himself credits Rockwell as being his greatest inspiration. Departing from his Miami-influenced urban subject matter, Dominguez illustrates 50’s era children in overalls and flap-hats, and in one picture, a nun brings out a basket of oranges into a schoolyard. Adults are often missing from the picture or placed just outside of it--we see the bottom half of their bodies or merely their hands. In “Hunger”, a bunch of scalawag kids rush up to a plate of cookies held out by a mother. Each one of these works of narrative art conjures up a story, with a dynamic moment of action and intensity.

But my favorite Dominguez illustration evokes neither the urban “local-color” nor the Rockwell type portraits, but a very classical and exotic art. “Walking a Monk” is the perfect example of this original style I’m referring to (done with acrylic and graphite on illustration board).

I love the layout of the picture. It begins with the subtle background, the wide stone staircase, the tilted umbrella over the shoulder of the sauntering monk, and then the massive body of the spangled tiger. Using this layout, our eyes naturally follow the stairs down, we glimpse briefly at the face of the monk--and everything converges in the marvelous beast.

The movement is precise. The tiger’s midriff turns inward as its hind legs and lavish tail swing in the opposite direction. Notice the perfect placement of the tiger’s front leg extending forward. In fact, a fine balance of opposing angles hold the illustration together. The monk and the tiger look in opposite directions. The monk looks up into the top left-hand corner of the picture while the tiger looks down to the bottom right.

Dominguez’s work has such marvelous coloring and impeccable detail that the sheer absurdity of the picture can easily go unseen. This is a monk walking a tiger on a leash. How improbable! How absurd! And yet in this improbable and exotic scene there is a thematic and metaphorical unity. The saffron robe of the Buddhist and the tiger’s coat, in a way, mirror each other. The billowing of the monk's robe makes the distinction between the two figures almost untraceable. They seem one, in this provocative, energetic moment.

OLIVER DOMINGUEZ'S WORK

This is the third in a series of illustration art reviews for the Arts and Culture Webzine, Escape into Life. If you are interested in writing reviews on illustration art, please contact me. More reviews can be found at Escape into Life.

The Occasional Jerk

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Sun, 10 May 2009 06:26:00 +0000

On another blog of mine, a commenter left a reassuring bit of advice to me under my post, "What is it to be an artist?". I'll quote verbatim:

Yeh. You're not a writer. Hard to imagine how you'll become one. But the first lesson you need to learn is to focus on the most basic components of your craft first -- which means sentences and fundamental grammar. Forget about those wise-ass quotations from real writers. You're a million miles from there. Walk before you run.

And my response?

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

That's Kurt Vonnegut.

Doubt, Mr. Toast, is natural for any writer or artist. I'm not ashamed of my doubts about my writing; in fact, I embrace them. This seems to be difficult for people like yourself who pretend otherwise.

I know I'm a writer. Freelance writing pays my bills. I write for law firms, non-profit organizations, and companies.

The post was asking the question, "Am I an artist?"

But judging by your posts, Mr. Toast, you seem to delight in flinging venom at other writers. Such as Nigel Beale from Nota Bene Books, who happens to be writing the next article for Escape into Life.

A little more investigation about the anonymous jerk on the Internet will reveal one thing.

You're not alone. He does this to everyone.

Mr. Toast (happens to think he's a literary luminary) and enjoys, yes, downright relishes, telling people they suck at what they love to do.

I'm not going to reference his website here because he doesn't deserve the attention, but on countless posts people are leaving comments on his blog basically to tell him to fuck off.

The occasional jerk is not a new phenomenon. There were jerks before the Internet and there will be jerks after it. But cyberspace, and especially the blogosphere, does lend itself to the flourishing of these trolls.

From Communities in Cyberspace, by Peter Kollack,

Even a casual trip through cyberspace will turn up evidence of hostility, selfishness, and simple nonsense. Yes the wonder of the Internet is not that there is so much noise, but that there is any significant cooperation at all.

Having recently indoctrinated myself into Twitter, I was surprised to find out not how much vileness and stupidity there was but just the opposite. I discovered a spontaneous overflow of conviviality and mutual interest.

Twitter forms a different ecosystem than the blogosphere. Because the posts are so short, it is less a reflection of one's self (although it can be, of course) and more an interaction with the community.

I'm addicted to Twitter. I love the simultaneous conversation with hundreds of people. Amid the noise, you sense a spectacular driving force of mass communication upturning all of our notions about what it is to communicate.

The occasional jerk shows up on Twitter as well, I would imagine. But there's nothing like a blogger who insists on drawing attention to his own blog by making rude comments on other people's blogs.

He is alone in his self-hatred.

In this post, "The Blogosphere is Full of Jerks", Dave Schuler writes:

Finally, there’s the jerk, the individual who contributes nothing positive to the common objective but is always ready with a put-down for those who are trying to accomplish something.

And here:

You can’t remonstrate with a jerk: the jerk can always respond with more of the same. The only alternatives are to become a jerk yourself or to shut up and take it in silence.

I've only come across the occasional jerk. Mostly, however, I find people who are generous with their support, thoughtful, and interested in what I'm doing. If they're not interested in what I'm doing, they'll go to another webpage. Which works out. Not everyone shares the same interests.

What I love about Twitter is that you can find people with your same interests and follow their conversations. To me, Twitter is the best tool to find a niche group of like-minded individuals.

But I haven't met any real jerks on Twitter or anywhere else on the Web, with the exception of Mr. Toast. There is a word for that kind of behavior. Misanthropy.

I don't claim to be a brilliant writer. I used to force myself to write. I disciplined myself to sit down for five or six hours a day.

But nothing came of it because I did not have the endurance to write fiction that way. Lately I've kept myself open, and the writing seems to happen on its own. I don't need to set a schedule to write poems every day. When I have a poem inside of me, it simply comes out. The same goes for my novel.

I'm interested in the question of mass amateurism on the Web. Because I think that I may be an amateur poet, amateur blogger, amateur novelist and amateur everything else for that matter.

When we're young, we imagine becoming great. All I wanted to do was become a famous writer.

There are many excellent writers, many excellent artists. The Internet reveals the abundance of them. My own little world is put into perspective. I do have a contribution to make, but so do others. "Wow, look at what they're doing."

I tend to develop tunnel vision about my own abilities. When you're confined to your own work, whatever it happens to be, you forget about everyone else.

The webzine I edit, Escape into Life, is helping me appreciate the greatness in others around me. By writing illustration art reviews I have a chance to step outside of my narrow world and look at what others have built, what others have created.

I can't think of a better antidote to the occasional jerk: Appreciate someone.

PHOTO FROM retrogoddess73'S PHOTOSTREAM

More Essays . . .

Lee Li Xian

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 05 May 2009 08:56:00 +0000

Self-taught illustrator from Singapore who studied Apparel Design and Merchandising at Temasek Polytechnic. Her works are incredibly original.

On Behance, a creative portfolio network, Xian's collections are arranged by thematic title, such as “My Machine Pal” (sample above) and “Color me and tell me I’m Colorful”. These unassuming works have a striking originality. Evocative of children’s book art, and done mainly in watercolors, there is a subdued, non-aggressive quality to the illustrations, but the themes are often complex and thought-provoking.

Right now I’m looking at “My Machine Pal” and Xian's art has so many connotations with our modern age of technology and gadgets. It doesn't take a leap of the imagination to realize that many of us are “closest friends” with our machines. Take away my cellphone or MacBook and watch all hell break loose. I'm emotionally connected to my machines. Xian's work captures this reality so well--and it is her unfeigned, guileless style which makes me smile at my own absurd behaviors. Her work brings me closer to myself and my own reflections. It is not an overt conceptual statement; it is merely suggestive and light-hearted, though pointing to a deeper truth.

In the collection "Color me and tell me I'm Colorful," Xian goes further with coupling an adult motif and a guileless, childlike style. The grotesque and bizarre enter the picture. A creepy, big-bellied man with one black pupil and one blue looks up at us. Presumably dancing a jig, he bounces (the curlicues are shown) on wooden shoes as if on a pogo-stick. His ragged mustache, hanging down like seaweed, adds to the overall creepiness of this water-colored leprechaun. What a wonderful sense of style Xian has--to put a tightly-wrapped argyle shirt and knickers on him!

He may be winking at us or he may be leering upwards. This half-menacing, half-sweet depiction frightens while at the same time evokes a latent sympathy for the character. The rest of the illustrations in the collection seem to depict lonely characters, either monstrous-looking, crying in panic, or staring into the back of a mirror and appearing in the opposite end.

I love the white space around the illustrations. The watercolors are brought out by that white space, and the overall effect is one of incomplete beauty. Like a child's notebook where each page has one sparse drawing on it, Xian's art mingles innocence and emptiness while conveying an original intelligence.

LEE LI XIAN'S WORK

This post is the second in a series of illustration art reviews. This month Escape into Life, Arts and Culture webzine, will become a permanent hub for illustration art reviews. If you would like to write reviews for us, please contact me.

Yuko Shimizu

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:24:00 +0000

Celebrated illustrator who has won countless awards and her works have appeared in Playboy, Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and on several covers of Neil Gaimen’s Sandman.

Shimizu did this drawing for PlanSponsor. The article is about choosing between two difficult choices. Of the scores of fantastic illustrations on Shimizu's site (and I looked at a lot of them), this one jumped out at me the most.

I have always been attracted to fine lines in illustration art and Shimizu's brass diving helmets have an unmatched realism that seems to reside in the perfection of her lines. While at the same time, the underwater scene has a dreaminess to it.

Two children hold each other’s helmets and water ripples from the whirlpool they stand in. Tiny pink mushrooms fall from under their masks. The two colors which vibrantly play off each other are the pink of the mushrooms and the brass of the diving helmets.

I love the bubbles emitted from the mask and the long tubes stretching through the water and out of the illustration. The children are connected by their hands holding each other’s masks and though we cannot see their faces, we sense the human element underneath the masks, the eyes gazing at each other.

The black and white stripes of the old-fashioned bathing suits also has a startling charm. This illustration achieves its poignancy by combining the antiquarian and the surreal.

You can find more of Yoku Shimizu's works at her website.

Escape into Life, a literary arts community for illustration artists and online writers will soon be dedicating reviews to outstanding illustration art and hosting a forum. This post is the first in a series of illustration art reviews.

Is All Innocence Tragic?

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:19:00 +0000

Some of you might be wondering about the title of this blog. What does it mean?

The title came to me last summer when I was reading the forward to John Barth's The Sot Weed Factor in a Barnes and Noble. Something about Barth's book suddenly caught my imagination--you know, the mystique behind a book which catapults a reader on a wild-goose chase to find it. But before I was going to shell out the money to buy the book I wanted to find out if the contents were as enticing as the idea (as well as the cultural fame of Barth's "greatest novel"). And so I found myself a big leather chair and began John Barth's Forward to the Anchor Books Edition. I read the following:

For one thing, I came to understand that innocence, not nihilism, was my real theme, and had been all along, though I'd been too innocent myself to realize that fact. More particularly, I came better to appreciate what I have called the "tragic view" of innocence: that it is, or can become dangerous, even culpable, that where it is prolonged or artificially sustained, it becomes arrested development, potentially disastrous to the innocent himself and to bystanders innocent or otherwise; that what is to be valued in nations as well as individuals, is not innocence but wise experience.

Other phrases he'd written in the Forward resonated with me, including "the bitter quest for independence." Yes, I could relate to being too innocent, dangerously innocent, and much of my adolescence revolved around this theme of tragic innocence.

Now that I'm an adult, what does it mean to be innocent? Can I still preserve some of that innocence without sliding into the despised state of arrested development? Nobody wants to be stuck in a place they were twenty years ago. And yet, sometimes my life strikes me as so foolish and pure. As if I were enjoying the thrill of it for the first time, even if the momentary delight meant forgetting my entire past and the very troubles which caused me to lose my innocence.

Which brings me to another Forward by an author speaking about his novel, Pornographia, in much the same way Barth does--that is, in trying to make sense of the novel for future readers. The novel is by the Polish writer, Witold Gombrowicz.

The theme is not innocence exactly, but the value of youth. Here he writes:

Let us try to express ourselves as simply as possible. Man, as we know, aims at the absolute. At fulfillment. At truth, at God, at total maturity . . . To seize everything, to realize himself entirely--this is his imperative.

Now, in Pornographia it seems to me that another of man's aims appear, a more secret one, undoubtedly, one which is in some way illegal: his need for the unfinished . . . for imperfection . . . for inferiority . . . for youth . . .

When the Older creates the Younger everything works very well from a social and cultural point of view. But if the Older is submitted to the Younger--what darkness! What perversity and shame! How many traps. And yet Youth, biologically superior, physically more beautiful, has no trouble in charming and conquering the adult, already poisoned by death.

In writing his epic historical novel, Barth comes to the realization that innocence poses a far greater danger to society and the individual than nihilism. It is "wise experience" which we should then aim for. But Gombrowicz takes a different angle. Fascinated by youth, he believes there is actually something valuable in incomplete experience and unfinished work. He believes that a sort of tragic innocence might save us. But it is not the same tragic innocence that Barth talks about. The tragic innocence of Gombrowicz is the body, sex, Eros.

Whatever innocence I have preserved in my life stems, I believe, from the sensual, artistic makeup of my being. I have an inherent curiosity in the moment--the moment when you are so engulfed by life you cannot possibly see it or examine it--your only option is to embrace it and live in it like a child in a giant body of water, lulled by the waves of emotion, sensitivity, and the sparks that humans create together, whether it is through an engaging conversation with a friend or a romantic encounter with a stranger. I become innocent to life in these moments.

Is this a case of arrested development? I hope not. But some of my behaviors lean toward what John Barth calls the "dangerously innocent". Take, for example, right now. It is 2:40 in the morning and I may stay up all night writing. Or my latest fall into dissolution which I talk about in the essay, "Aphorisms and Meditations". I may go to bed with the knowledge that sleep is good for me. Yes, an entirely adult thing to do. Or I may continue to break the boundaries I set up for myself in the adult world.

Am I embracing Gombrowicz's positive view of innocence or Barth's negative one? I see value and truth in both. Clearly, I cannot go back to being a drug addict. The life of an addict is the epitome of arrested development. It is a juvenile, idiotic and selfish person who thinks only of their own pleasure. Not innocence at all.

As an artist, I rarely display the behavior of a drug addict, but I get close to that of a child. I flirt with the boundaries in my mind, if not in reality. I attempt an attitude of innocence toward new experiences. I'm turned off by my cynical friends. They don't represent wisdom to me, or intelligence. They represent fear.

To be truly innocent is to be open to the world, unafraid to die, and looking forward to the "awfully big adventure" of life. That's what Peter Pan said when looked across the wide ocean. But where did he end up? Never Never Land, which can't be anything but a state of arrested development.

Or Don Quixote, another innocent saint. His innocence caused him a lot of bloody wounds and beatings. What do his strivings represent?

I'm drawn to the magical quality of innocence in life. I don't think I want to "preserve" my innocence. There should be no effort involved. Innocence should be a natural state. And if we've been hurt before and if it is impossible to be innocent, then we should try to forgive ourselves and others. Because love and innocence seem very closely related. To love someone, you must forget.

ARTWORK BY DAVID FULLARTON

More Essays . . .

On Science and Mystery

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:33:00 +0000

These quotations are taken from the science author and physicist, Brian Greene. Greene's most well-known works include, The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos.

For the most part, we teach science as if it were a technical trade: Learn these facts about cells. Memorize these equations describing motion. Balance these reactions that underlie oxidation. And then demonstrate competence by passing an exam.

With this lopsided focus on the end points of research, the scientific explorations themselves receive the most minimal attention.

But science is a journey. Science is about immersing ourselves in piercing uncertainly while struggling with the deepest of mysteries.

Einstein captured it best when he wrote, "the years of anxious searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express." That's what science is about.

To be a scientist is to commit to a life of confusion punctuated by rare moments of clarity.

Established truths are comforting, but it is the mysteries that make the soul ache and render a life of exploration worth living.

For me, the past decades of anxious searching have illuminated spectacular new landmarks: extra dimensions of space curled into tiny labyrinthine geometries, a cornucopia of universes bubbling up beyond the most distant cosmic horizon, the fabric of space and time being stitched from the threads of vibrating strings.

Regardless of the outcome, the journey has been exhilarating, and through it I feel an emotional connection to the cosmos that I don't think I could have acquired any other way.

My intuition tells me that this particular odyssey will arrive at a promised land, perhaps confirming today's theoretical insights, perhaps in a future form that will have evolved signficantly.

But if not, in the unlikely event that the work on which our generation has labored doesn't make it into textbooks, I can live with that.

It's what happens along the way that enriches us. The wrestling with mystery, not the ascension to resolution, defines who we are.

My Thoughts:

This short article, taken from Wired Magazine's May 2009 edition, gives me a lot surprised joy and it captures, strangely, how I feel about life itself. Greene's elegant sentences shape for me what life is really about. A language of science can describe the moon and the stars and the galaxies, but essentially it is a language that spiritually reflects our condition as human beings. The moon and the stars and the galaxies are the outward signs and symbols of our own inner mysteries.

I love Greene's approach and attitude to science. He almost has a disdain for textbooks and the "end points of research." I agree. It is a backward method we teach in school and this point of view has profound implications for education.

Greene comes close to capturing how I feel in a moment of heightened reality, when I attempt to capture the surrounding complexity of my emotions in a poem. My experience in these moments is palpable and through a poem, I seem to grasp, if not the meaning of the moment, then I grasp the mystery of my being. And so, Greene writes science books and conducts physics experiments, and me, well, I'm a poet, life is my exploration and my ongoing experiment. But I think the two of us meet somewhere--whether it is in language, in our attempts to express the thing itself--or perhaps we meet in the universal human condition, the experience of not-knowing.

Virtual Life and Art on the Web

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 04:04:00 +0000

Here are some stunning highlights from the New York Times Magazine article, "Portrait of an Artist as an Avatar" by Sara Corbett:

His use of voluptuous colors, unbalanced composition and busy, layered images suggests both the bursting, overcapitalized nature of information technology today as well as the artist's deeper faith in the authenticity of the human relationships behind it.

People who spend a lot of time in virtual worlds will tell you that, despite the veneer of escape and anonymity provided by an avatar, virtual experiences nonetheless provoke emotions that are deeply felt, which may explain my mortification at losing my virtual hair . . .

Filthy operates as a kind of marketing magnet, a cult personality with a product behind it, and in this case, the product--Jeffery Lipsky's art--acts as a real-world bridge between a humdrum everyday existence and a more fantastical virtual life.

As the Internet continues to speed up and become more personalized, as our screen experiences become more immersive, some experts predict that the whole idea of having an avatar may soon seem less weird and more in keeping with all the other ways we already represent ourselves digitally, through our email addresses and blogs, our Facebook, Flickr and Twitter accounts.

"Art is moving toward the participatory," the sculpture's creator, a San Francisco artist named DC Spensley (who in Second Life goes by Dan-Coyote) told me when I called him later, saying that he creates only virtual art, despite the fact it is impossible to make a living at it.

Is it possible that by simulating an edgy, superconfident art star that you, too, could become one?

Scientists at Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab have found that avatars, with their artificial beauty and fantastical lifestyles, may represent more than wishful thinking on the part of the real people who create them; they may actually help bring those wishes to bear. People trying to lose weight are more apt to accomplish their goals when they spend time using a thin avatar. Someone looking to become more self-confident improves more quickly in real life after adopting an avatar that is good looking. Whatever their shortcomings, virtual worlds are insistently, even defiantly, aspirational places.

My Thoughts: Thank you Sara Corbett. I love that last line. This is a fantastic, beautifully written article and I invite everyone to visit the link that I will include at the bottom of this page.

But first I would like to share some of my thoughts on the emergence of avatars and virtual worlds on the Internet.

As a writer, I've always felt at home with the notion of an alter ego. And what is an avatar but an alter-ego taken to the level of virtual reality?

My life in many ways reflects the blurring of lines between fantasy, illusion and the real world. As a former drug addict, I deliberately played out some dangerous and hallucinogenic experiments with my reality. (See my blog novel that takes place in Vegas or the graphic novel rendition of it.)

But now that I am sober, I still cannot escape the lust I have for imaginary worlds. I read compulsively and often find that the solace of books and reading in general allows one to exist in the half-light of dreams. Also, for about three years, I have been cultivating an avatar of sorts named Lethe Bashar. I mention Lethe frequently in my posts because he is the main character of my novel and my Facebook page says "Lethe Bashar" instead of my real name.

And what is the purpose of all this?

Perhaps the blurring of lines between our conventional identities and our fictional (or virtual ones) is not so foreign to our experience of being human after all. Why not? Our identities are not fixed although we sometimes pretend they are. We have this desire as humans to experiment with our identities. The very notion of possibility, of becoming something more than what you are now, is the basis for this drive.

Sara Corbett, with her precise and creative language, probes the latest manifestations of virtual life and art on the Web. Perhaps the new social technologies are allowing us to exhibit our true selves, which, I might suggest, is the adoption of a "false self".

READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN NY TIMES MAGAZINE HERE

ARTWORK BY MARGUERITE SAUVAGE

Love and Friendship in the Age of Facebook

escapeintolife@yahoo.com (Lethe) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 05:18:00 +0000

I’ve been on Facebook for a little over five years. I joined when you had to be part of a college network, although at the time I was out of college. I joined the nearest college network to my town, Illinois State University, using a friend’s email address. My friend happened to be a professor and graduate student at ISU.

For a couple days, I seemed to enjoy the privilege of having access to thousands of coed profiles. I was single, living in a college town, and the technology of Facebook lured me into the fantasy that if I could chat with these college girls then maybe they would want to go out with me. After all, I wasn’t that old—just four years out of college.

But this misuse of social technology was bound to catch up with me. In less than two weeks, some of the students in my friend’s class were asking him why he was “poking” them, a feature on Facebook that invites the multiple connotations of flirting, getting someone’s attention, and an overt sexual act.

More than once, my friend blushed in front of his freshman classes. “You’re on Facebook,” his students announced. “What? No, I’m not,” he replied.

Suffice it to say I’d been conducting my nefarious social mingling under his real name. That night he gave me direct instructions to take his name off the profile. He said he could lose his job if the English faculty thought he was flirting with undergraduates.

After a couple pointless dates with college coeds, I gave up the pathetic and futile quest to find love (or something like it) over Facebook’s channels. I went on a Facebook hiatus and lived in the real world, oblivious to the improvements and expansions in social technology. Meanwhile Facebook was opening up its doors to companies, organizations, the United States as a whole, and finally, most of Europe and Asia.

I’m still part of the Illinois State University network, even though I’ve never gone to school there. My connection to ISU is thus purely coincidental. I’ve changed the email address and put my name on the account. I’ve chosen a pseudonym for my profile (because I’m a writer and I like pen names), but people can search for me under my real name. I’ve also dutifully filled in the blanks about myself, adding my favorite bands, movies and television shows.

On the surface, Facebook is a narcissistic distraction from daily life. It provides a cross between the mindless absorption of the TV set and the obsessive self-involvement of the bathroom mirror. It also provides a voyeur with enough material to last a lifetime. The minutia of status updates, pictures, videos, top ten lists, interest groups, invitations, and games, this is the white noise of Facebook constantly buzzing; a social hive for restless young (and mid-life) Americans to retreat to; a place where, at least momentarily, we feel less alone and more connected.

Over the years, the lost figures of my past, lovers, classmates, fraternity brothers, even downright enemies, have slowly accumulated onto my friend list. From kindergarten on, these lost figures were coming out of the cyber woodwork to greet me. My typical Facebook reunion is one of unanticipated glee or terror, depending on the memories and the length of the conversation.

High school acquaintances, girls I befriended at summer camps, old teachers, some of my parents’ friends and a couple odd relatives have found their way to my profile; the friend list grows over time, forming an interesting social mosaic.

Of course, these people are my friends only according to the loose Facebook taxonomy. Some of them I haven’t even met before. Some are in fact strangers. Others I’ve met and known for vast chunks of time, but honestly, I never really cared for them. And finally, a large group of my Facebook friends seem to fit the term, but only partially. Yes, we were once friends. But for last ten or fifteen years we haven’t said a word to each other much less knew the other person still existed.

What about my real-life friends? Ironically, most of them are not on Facebook! They refuse the technology like children refusing treatment in a dentist’s office.

So I’m keeping up with a handful of people whom I call my “friends” and who fit the bill better than anyone else on the list. We’re communicating to each other every five or six months on the weakest possible thread—doing a sort of call and response to the most general of questions, “How’s life?” or “What are you up to?”

I ask myself: Could I live without these exchanges? Could I live without the photo updates? Do I really need to know what my ex-girlfriend’s husband looks like?

This is not the past. Nor is it the present. It is the past interpenetrating the present. The people I once knew in high school or college have only a faint resemblance to their former selves. They may look the same, but there is something different about them. Marked by the passage of time, they are different people.

I could never really know these people, could I? A sporadic conversation through a private message board can only yield so much information. Nonetheless, I’m drawn to this virtual carnival of friendship as I indolently peruse the photo albums of old classmates and acquaintances. Their personal pages tell me so very little and yet that seems to be part of the fascination, the little colored fragments here and there which allow me to construct a fable of their separate lives.

There is activity everywhere. The buzzing of status updates, comments, and wall posts gives the impression of life behind the profiles. Located on my homepage, front and center, is the “friend feed”, a social ticker tape that informs me of everyone’s doings. New friendships are announced, as are modifications to profiles and new photos or videos.

Facebook didn’t really make a difference to me until I actually met one of these lost figures from my past. That is, I could have easily existed without the technology. It was an odd curiosity to glimpse through the photo albums of my old classmates, but not a necessity for social well-being.

After I broke up with my girlfriend, I found myself—once again—indolently browsing the pages of my “friend’s” profiles. One picture in particular caught my attention—my childhood best friend, Brad Dolin, and another childhood friend, Emily Crement, are standing together on a gymnasium floor, smiling for the camera.

In fact, I had seen the picture before. It was a classic in the annals of Butler Junior High memorabilia. I had grown apart from Emily, who now had a son. I wanted to reconnect with her and so I commented on the photo.

Within seconds of posting my comment, I received a message on my wall—not from Emily but from someone else. The note said, “CHRIS!!!!!!!!!!!! ALASWAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

In another couple seconds, this mystery person friended me and soon I was looking through her pictures trying to recall who on earth she was. Her main profile pic was striking, a ravishing young woman in an oriental green and turquoise dress. Half of her face is covered in shadows, she holds her arms behind her back, and stares down at the camera.

“These are the pictures of a model,” I thought as I continued my detective work.

“Do u pronounce ur name like leyth??? answer me that” showed up on my wall; and “THAT IS MY FAVORITE NAME IN THE WORLD. IT MEANS LION OR HEART OF BRAVERY IN ARABIC”

The name on my Facebook profile is not my real name. I think I've already said this. If you Google "Lethe Bashar" you will find a plethora of links related to this adolescent misfit. I’m a fiction writer and choosing a pseudonym for my Facebook profile seemed appropriate. Lethe Bashar lives out the drama of my rebellious past life in distant places like Madrid and Las Vegas. The novel encompasses three websites and is collectively titled, Lethe Bashar’s Novel of Life.

The mystery woman knew me from somewhere because now what appeared on my wall was, “omg how is mandy?? how is ur dad ?? i am soo sorry to hear about your mother”.

How did she know my father and sister? How did she know that my mother passed away?

Looking through her photo albums only increased my bewilderment. Either she was in the mafia or some kind of celebrity. A number of pictures had magazine logos on them. She was definitely a model. There were pictures from photo shoots and many glamorous poses with handsome men. In almost all of the pictures, she gazed inscrutably at the camera without the slightest smile on her lips. Her eyes were arresting and I wanted to know more.

“I don’t like talking back and forth on the wall,” she said. “Let’s use chat.”

And so we began our excursion to Yahoo Messenger, another bit of technology that has since become a favorite of mine. At last this woman’s identity was revealed to me. It took me far too long to guess who she was but this was a girl from my childhood.

She rode on the school bus with me over twenty years ago. Her mother dressed her in a white Christian Dior coat. She giggled at me when I jumped on the bus and ran down the aisles. Sometimes I infuriated her with my clowning around.

Perhaps my greatest surprise that night over Yahoo Messenger was our mutual, spontaneous interest in each other. I had reunited with friends on Facebook before, but this experience was totally different. . .

There is a whole story to tell about what happens next. But, for the moment, I’m going to protect my friend’s identity and choose to not give away any more details. All I will say is that we did indeed meet. And we are now happily engrossed in a romance of sorts.

ARTWORK BY MERJIN HOS