Discuss Amongst Yourselves

I was struck by the following passage in Will Oremus’ recent Slate article about coffee’s “third wave”:

“Their search for a better cup has given rise to a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious. Stumptown of Portland, Ore.; Intelligentsia of Chicago; and Counter Culture of Durham, N.C., don’t just sell ‘dark roast’ and ‘light roast.’ They sell coffees like Stumptown’s Indonesia Sulawesi Toarco Toraja, which is grown by smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website. The beans come with descriptors like ‘fair-trade,’ ‘single-origin,’ and ‘shade-grown,’ and sport ‘flavor profiles’ that would make Robert Parker blush. They’re roasted and brewed with obsessive attention to details like the extraction rate and brewing ratio, which are separately optimized to bring out the best in each bean.” (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/crosspollination/2014/03/blue_bottle_coffee_vcs_search_for_the_new_starbucks_starts_in_san_francisco.html)

In reading this, I was overcome by two primary emotions, the first of which feelings was surprising in the way that discovering you are bleeding when you aren’t aware of a wound is. I have only recently discovered the pleasures of coffee, having for years believed that “I can’t handle coffee,” which belief ran so deep that I listed it on the “25 Facts About Me” that everyone was filling out on Facebook a few years ago. (In retrospect, the “25 facts” fad was likely a narrative ur-form of the selfie, like novels presaging movies. The book, of course, is always better than the movie, and “25 Facts” trumps the selfie. Making it doubly depressing that if I posted 25 new facts about myself every week on Facebook it would come off as raging narcissism, whereas the posting of selfies as new profile pictures is an easy ticket to 25 “likes” or more. Fortunately, I can embed all the new facts about myself I like in this blog, which is symptomatic of merely mild to moderate narcissism, and therefore well within cultural norms.) But after several slow and steady years of building up caffeine tolerance via Irish and English breakfast teas and cultivating a willingness to endure an afternoon of mild shakes and low grade anxiety (given that I felt that way all the time before giving up gluten, crashing off of coffee is sort of nostalgic), I am a newly minted member of coffee nation. (Note: If you can meaningfully apply the suffix “nation” to a term, as you can with coffee or e.g. the Red Sox, then the group in question has already lost its soul.) But I had no idea I had fallen “truly, madly, deeply” for coffee until I read the quoted passage and felt a wave of sadness as I realized it will never again be possible to simply enjoy a good, or even a very good, cup of coffee.

The Slate article focuses on Blue Bottle, a San Francisco-based purveyor of coffee that has attracted some serious venture capitalist investment. Oremus’s slant is that Blue Bottle might turn out to be Apple to Starbucks’ Microsoft. Massive and rapid growth seems a bit unlikely for a business that handcrafts each cup of coffee, a practice which, if nothing else, puts a natural cap on prospective sales, but growth, of course, is the name of the venture capital game. When pressed for an explanation of how Blue Bottle will survive the natural pitfalls of corporate expansion, Blue Bottle founder James Freeman explains to Oremus “his goal is not to keep quality constant—it’s to keep improving it, even if that means growing more slowly than he could otherwise.” (ibid) The growing slow part of the equation is all well and good, but it is the first part, the part about constantly improving the coffee, which is so sad. Because what Freeman and the entire third wave of coffee have forgotten is that a cup of coffee can only be so good. And, even more importantly, this is good enough.

If there is one cliché at the heart of late capitalism, “When good enough isn’t good enough” may very well be it. Originally intended as an ode to the pursuit of excellence, it has become a diagnosis. The original meaning, the understanding that excellence is always within reach, has been twisted into a forgetting that perfection is always beyond our grasp. “Constantly improving the coffee” is also an echo of constantly growing the economy, the failure to recognize the limits of flavor reminiscent of the failure to recognize the limits of growth. If our great wisdom traditions tell us anything, it is that this very moment, the eternal here and now, is “When good enough is good enough”; see both Tibetan Buddhism’s “Basic Goodness” and the Book of Genesis: “Then God looked over all he had made, and He saw that it was very good.” In reading about third wave coffee, one gets the feeling that on the seventh day, the barista worked straight through the night.

But, as noted, sadness wasn’t the only emotion in play as I read the quoted passage. It also felt awkward, like accidentally walking in on your roommate having kinky sex with his or her partner. In describing “a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious,” Oremus has missed the mark; third wave coffee makers and consumers haven’t found religion so much as they are indulging a fetish. To be clear, this isn’t equivalent to a straightforwardly sexual fetish as exhibited by e.g. New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, whose foot fetish videos, endearingly produced with the full cooperation of his wife cum foot model, found their way onto the internet. Instead, third wave coffee is entangled in the process of sexualized commodity fetishism, a Marxist concept that sounds dense and complex, but is actually rather simple. It is, in a nutshell, an explanation of how we end up desiring consumer goods. And third wave coffee is fraught through and through with this misplaced desire.

Commodity fetishism can sound rather bland, and hardly worthy of the term fetish, until we acknowledge its sexual underpinnings. Note the difference between the two following definitions of the term:

1) “The psychological phenomenon of commodity fetishism, which ascribes an independent, objective value and reality to a thing that has no inherent value- other than the value given to it by the producers, the seller, and the buyer of the commodity.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism)

Yawn.

And 2) “Marx said that fetishism is ‘the religion of sensuous appetites,’ and that the fantasy of the appetite tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the desires of the worshipper.” (ibid)

Now we’re getting somewhere! And perhaps, seen in this light, Oremus is correct, and third wave coffee does indeed involve religious reverence. But in aiming for (sexual) self gratification, it is a debased form of religious worship. (This is not to suggest that there is anything debased about Rex Ryan’s conjugal relations with Mrs. Ryan; sexual fetishes are apples to sexualized commodity fetishism’s oranges. And if an apple a day keeps divorce away, bon appétit.) In worshipping commodities like third wave coffee, we have made a graven image out of our own desire. (Full disclosure- I have my own commodity fetishes: automobiles and, of all things, tennis racquets, which I like to justify to myself by imagining them as substitutes for lightsabers. But really.)

The old saying goes that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Just so, Eros is as bound up with its opposite, aggression, as yin is with yang. Thus it comes as no surprise that third wave coffee, the new sexualized commodity fetish par excellence, is rife with aggression as much as it is with sex. The clue here is the “smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website.” To interpret the clue, we turn to Robert Cluley and Stephen Dunne’s explanation of the turn from commodity fetishism to commodity narcissism:

“Consumers who claim to be ethically concerned about the manufacturing origins of commodities, nonetheless behaved as if ignorant of the exploitative labour conditions under which the workers produced the goods and services, bought by the ‘concerned consumer’; that, within the culture of consumerism, narcissistic men and women have established shopping (economic consumption) as a socially acceptable way to express aggression.” (ibid)

What is most important about both Cluley and Dunne’s description, as well as its glaring example in the form of Stumptown’s smallholder farmers’ faces, is that this is a veiled aggression. Veiled, most of all, to the aggressors themselves, who, in consuming “fair-trade” coffee not only deny their inescapable culpability in the (literal) sins of globalization, but imagine themselves as rebels against the very system that has no better symbol than a $4 cup of coffee. All of which brings to mind the conundrum facing African Americans: would you rather live where the racism is overt (i.e. the American south) or covert (e.g. Boston)? In this case, would you rather live amongst the wolves of Wall Street, or amongst the wolves in sheep’s clothing inhabiting San Francisco cafés (or your local third wave coffee shop)?

Time for decaf, indeed.

The Plane

As I write, it has just been reported that the debris spotted in the south Indian Ocean, debris which was the best lead thus far in the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, may well have already sunk to the bottom of the ocean. And so we are left with the mystery that has captivated the world since the plane’s disappearance on March 8th. Captivated, of course, is just a polite way of saying obsessed, if I may use myself as a test case (and Courtney Love, who, via Twitter, offered her own possible lead in the search and declared herself “a little obsessive.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2583143/Courtney-Love-claims-located-missing-MH370.html). I know that my captivation by the missing plane reaches the level of obsession because I have been Googling for updates on the search as frequently as I have been checking Foot’s Forecast for news of the next snowfall. (Another snowstorm is coming on Tuesday, on the heels of this past Monday’s Mid-March six-incher, which featured the eerie combination of snow and daylight savings time and felt like getting a sneak preview of climate change’s Earth 2.0.)

So, then, why are we so obsessed? Russia has invaded Ukraine, an event with far greater potential to upset the geopolitical applecart than a missing plane, and I haven’t heard one single mention of it in my daily rounds. In stark contrast, everywhere I go it’s as if we’re all suddenly Tattoo announcing “The Plane! The Plane!”, except that this time there is no plane.

I happened across the beginnings of an explanation of our obsession during one of my countless Google searches. The article, which, unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark and is now, like the plane, lost, explained that the missing plane was so particularly jarring to our collective consciousness because we live in the age of surveillance, be it in the illicit-external form, i.e. the NSA reading our boring emails, or of the self-imposed variety, e.g. 236 Facebook friends (my current tally) keeping tabs on us.

I think this is the start of an answer, but getting further traction requires that we expand the analysis in a few crucial directions. First, we must define the conditions on the ground in the surveillance state, where Descartes’ famous cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” has been displaced by “I am seen, therefore I am.” In fact, as a good Episcopalian, I would argue that “I am seen, therefore I am,” was our default setting long before Descartes was even a gleam in his mother’s eye, except that up until the well noted “Death of God” and the attendant rise of secularism circa sometime between the Civil War and the War to End All Wars (which, tragically, had to be renamed with a Roman Numeral) the seer guaranteeing existence was God Himself. This isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of folks who still believe in God, but to note that once belief in God became optional (which is likely the best possible definition of secularism), belief in God, while still capable of grounding an individual life in sufficient meaning, could no longer provide a corporate proof of existence; for God to prove our existence, everyone has to believe in Him (in the same way that juries can only prove a defendant’s guilt if everyone on the jury agrees). And because it turned out that the cogito was as ill suited for the role of “ground of all being” as I was for manning the drive thru at McDonald’s (where I had the same effect on traffic, if unintentionally, as Chris Christie did in Fort Lee, New Jersey), we are left looking for a substitute seer in our modified cogito. All of which made the rise of the surveillance state and the explosion of social media perhaps inevitable, and which also helps to explain why no one cares that Big Brother is reading all our email; illicit-external surveillance doesn’t bother us, and, in fact, we secretly embrace it, because it means that at least someone is watching.

The vanishing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, then, is to be understood as an eruption of nothingness. In a world where to exist is to be seen, the plane’s disappearance is a resounding answer of “Yes, definitely!” to the terrifying question always lurking in the tenets of materialism, a question precisely formulated by Charles Tart:

“Am I just a meaningless accident in a meaningless cosmos? The result of zillions of meaningless molecular collisions that just happened to turn this way?” (http://www.academia.edu/2560387/Is_transpersonal_psychology_consistent_with_a_materialist_account_of_consciousness)

Because if the plane can go missing, despite the concentrated efforts of a surveillance state that is, like the Death Star, fully armed and operational, so can the rest of us. In other words, rephrasing the answer to “Am I just a meaningless accident in a meaningless cosmos?”, we can say, re: human beings and self-aware consciousness, “Easy come, easy go.”

Rather than face our terror at the seeming brute contingency of existence, we bury it beneath our fears, wishes and/or fearful wishes: “The plane was hijacked by terrorists who will use it to deliver a nuclear weapon in a major western city,” or “The plane is having an extended, peaceful encounter with extraterrestrials who guided it to a safe destination in their UFOs in order to launch a shift in global consciousness.” (The latter was/is exactly my fantasy.) Every version, there are literally thousands to be found on the internet, is an escape from encroaching nothingness.

Barring the unlikely Re-Birth of God, i.e. the reestablishment of unanimous monotheistic belief as it once existed (in western civilization), the only viable approach to collective therapy for the terrible specter of nothingness personified by Flight MH370 can be found, of all places, in a Grateful Dead tune. The pertinent lyrics, “Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world,” dissolve the materialist nightmare that we are temporarily (until our pending doom) marooned in the universe. Our mutant cogito is reformulated one last, decisive time: “The Divine in me sees, therefore I am.” What joy, as seers, to witness the end of Descartes’ cancerous dualism along with its foremost symptom, modernity’s fear of annihilation.

Would that we all might see, and that, in seeing, we might cease our obsession with Flight MH370, and begin its mourning.

"Happiness is the Truth"

My new favorite song is Pharrell Williams’ “Happy,” an ode to happiness, especially happiness in the face of “bad news,” which makes it a song about the only kind of happiness currently available. And I was listening to the last ten minutes of Fresh Air the other day, which has become my favorite part given that it features reviews of all the books, movies, TV shows, and musicians I have no time for amidst working full time, raising up three girls, staying happily married, and penning this blog. (Going Freud one better I have not just love and work, but love, work, and art, which to this sometimes-Freudian feels a little heretical, like adding a third item, let’s call it yong- Chinese for permanence, to yin and yang.) Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker came on and, miracle of miracles, he was reviewing Pharrell Williams’ new album GIRL, a review which opened with a sampling of “Happy.”

At the end of his review, Tucker mentioned that “Pharrell has come in for some criticism recently as being merely a glossy pop hit maker, for lacking edge.” (http://nprfreshair.tumblr.com/post/78770019820/ken-tucker-reviews-pharrells-new-album) Immediately I was flashing back to 1988, when Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” climbed all the way to #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and 1989, when Public Enemy dropped “Fight the Power” for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a searing anthem of Black liberation that included the following lyrics:

“Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Was a number one jam
Damn if I say it you can slap me right here”

To borrow a phrase from Yogi Berra, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

Pharrell’s joyful smash hit and the sullen, shaming backlash, the contretemps between Bobby McFerrin and Public Enemy, all of it has me questioning the relationship and tension between happiness and injustice. And it is a questioning on unsteady ground; who am I to interject myself into a discourse between Black artists on the subject of, of all things, happiness? Of all White privileges, is any more galling than the act of gerrymandering the Other’s cultural narratives, erecting boundaries around what can and cannot be spoken? E.g. everyone knows that Rosa Parks refused to get up out of her seat on that bus, but almost no one knows that this was a planned, coordinated act of nonviolent resistance. Just so, if I were to opine on the if, when, where, and how of Black happiness, would it be substantively any different than repeating the official (White-washed) version of Rosa Parks, the story of the perhaps brave, but nevertheless isolated, impulsive act of a lone, tired woman? Wouldn’t the appropriate Black response be Ice Cube’s “Keep my name out your mouth”? And if I champion Pharrell and McFerrin, am I any different than George H. W. Bush, who co-opted McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” as his 1988 presidential campaign’s official song (at least until McFerrin issued his own “Keep my name out your mouth” and flat out refused to perform the song for as long as Bush kept playing it).

But to avoid the question raised by, on one side, Pharrell and McFerrin, and, on the other, P.E. and the current arbiters of appropriate artistic expression, seems in the end little more than a copout. Because, reversing The Merchant of Venice, if you prick me do I not bleed? In other words, White privilege, while it may have its (unjust) perks, ultimately fails in its efforts to offload pain, suffering, and evil onto the Other. In a tragic yet just irony, the surfeit of pain, suffering, and evil dumped on the Other does nothing to spare White folk from the Buddha’s first noble truth that life is suffering. Making the question of the tension between happiness and suffering perhaps even more urgent for White people than anyone else, given our historical delusion that, much like the old bumper stickers announcing that “Virginia is for lovers”, suffering is for Others. (Re: “Virginia is for lovers,” I would be willing to bet that the Commonwealth of Virginia gave its advertising account to the same people who came up with Virginia Slims’ “You’ve come a long way, baby,” both slogans somehow evoking active lifestyles, sex, and retrograde patriarchy.) It’s time for White folks to take the red pill and get real about our suffering, own it, and, in the process, considerably lighten everybody else’s load.

Once we do so, we begin to realize that the pertinent questions here are even older than that abomination known as the Atlantic slave trade. They are at least as old as Job, whose third act opens the gap in which Pharrell, McFerrin, Public Enemy, you and me now find ourselves in freefall. Job, of course, lost everything via an act of God that we wouldn’t even hesitate to describe as evil if it were committed by anyone other than God (not, mind you, an isolated incident- see God asking Abraham to murder his son Isaac; the staying of Abraham’s hand at the last minute may have spared Isaac’s life, but still feels very much a day late and a dollar short given that Abraham had already emotionally committed to the unthinkable act). Job, courtesy God, is later rewarded with a second family for the loyalty he showed throughout all of his many trials. The question, which is the very question I believe Pharrell and McFerrin are answering differently than Public Enemy, is whether or not Job should be happy with his second family. Is it okay that the Lord taketh away, just because He also giveth? Stretching the question even further to wrap all the way around the issue of justice, is it okay that the Lord sends his rain on both the just and the unjust? Is it okay for Job, African American males, privileged White folks, any and all of us including even God Himself, to be happy?

As for Job and the African American males, I would suggest that the answer to the latter question is an unequivocal yes. Not, I should hasten to point out, to encourage victimization, at least of the passive variety. If Job and America’s twenty million Black men are to be victims, let them also be vindictive, and let them remember that happiness is the best revenge. So conceived, Job’s happiness is not out of fidelity to God, a fidelity which would, in its obscenity, strip Job of all remaining dignity, but an act of rebellion. And, understood as revenge, Pharrell and McFerrin’s happiness isn’t the obsequious shuffle Public Enemy paints it as, but a form of intentional, nonviolent resistance that would make Rosa Parks proud. (We should note, if only in passing, that Public Enemy’s confrontational approach to race relations, an approach from the “By any means necessary” side of the resistance continuum, also has much to recommend it, including the possibility of bringing things to a crisis point; as Chairman Mao liked to say, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”)

Happiness sans reconciliation between Job and God, and between Black and White Americans, is, however, fraught with danger. Which is why the very first thing Nelson Mandela did when taking the reins of power in South Africa was to establish a truth and reconciliation process. Mandela re-taught us that true happiness is never vindictive, always inclusive, and therefore radically revolutionary.

Inspired by Nassim Nicholas Talib’s brilliant The Bed of Procrustes, a collection of well over one hundred of Talib’s often provocative philosophical aphorisms (e.g. “In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.”), I have begun composing my own. So far I have seven, including the following: If the revolution is to succeed, it must be funny.

Humor, of course, is concentrated happiness; even the darkest humor is but the stitching of happiness into pain. Following William James’ “We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing,” I would argue that Pharrell, McFerrin, you, me, Job, God, even Public Enemy, shouldn’t be happy because things have changed, (they haven’t much,) but in order that they might.

We may never be able to change the fact that the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. But in unflagging, tender happiness we may finally learn to love Him anyway, just as He has always loved us, even given our considerable baggage, making our relationship with the Divine into that of a happy old married couple who not only recognize one another’s flaws, but love each other for them. Let’s sing the Song of Songs, and cast off the exhausted Father-Child symbology. It’s time we all grow up.

But even if we do, it is likely that God, suffering, and death will continue to confound. Job is constantly speaking to us. Nevertheless- Don’t worry, be happy. Love.

All Shall Be Well

My lovely wife, Jen, turns 40 this month, which means I turn 40 in November, which further means Generation X is in the process of collectively hitting this milestone throughout the decade. If we stipulate that modern medicine (or its holistic alternatives) will see most of us an extra ten years past our allotted three score and ten, then we are about half-way home. In addition to being a great time to run to the bathroom and then score some nachos, halftime also affords a brief respite to pause and take stock of things, to graph our current data, as it were. I would like to suggest that the trajectory of our generational line graph, our trendline, depends in many ways on what, in retrospect, we make of the signature Generation X death, the suicide of our rock and roll antihero, Kurt Cobain. Cobain is inarguably the most important (white male) Gen X figure because the art he made out of his angst was universally accessible; it spoke to people with real problems like abusive parents, depression and/or serious drug habits, and to people like me, who blared songs from In Utero on our college dorm stereos after getting unexpected C’s on sociology midterms. If reading Gen X’s David Foster Wallace was, per David Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody you knew,” then listening to Cobain was to hear their heart voice.

Google “Kurt Cobain on mainstream music” and you will quickly come across this:

“Kurt Cobain was an outspoken critic of the mainstream music industry, both prior to and after his success with Nirvana. He believed that major record labels promoted anything they believed would sell, and gave little regard to the quality of the music. This belief, combined with immense mainstream success of Nirvana, is believed by many to be the primary factor in Cobain’s suicide. In his suicide letter, Cobain stated that he no longer enjoyed writing or performing music, and hadn’t for a long time.” (emphasis added) (http://www.wisegeek.com/who-is-kurt-cobain.htm)

The perspective referenced here, that Cobain killed himself because he couldn’t reconcile his mainstream success with his religious belief that all things mainstream sucked, was pretty much what I was suspecting when I started my Google search. But if you read the full text of the suicide letter referenced at the end of the quote, you find the following: “Since the age of seven I’ve become hateful towards all humans in general.” (http://kurtcobainssuicidenote.com/kurt_cobains_suicide_note.html) What happened at age seven is a matter of public record; his parents divorced and “his mother noted that his personality changed dramatically; Cobain became defiant and withdrawn.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Cobain) In trying to grasp Cobain’s suicide, then, this leaves us with two seemingly competing narratives: 1) He never got over his parents’ divorce, or 2) He never got over his own fame. But if we dig a little deeper we find that 1 and 2 are simply the staging of the same basic tragedy, like West Side Story following on the heels of Romeo and Juliet. Because 1 and 2 are not only both striking cases of the collapse of meaning, they were both experienced by Cobain as self-inflicted wounds, making them sad augurs of his suicide.

Understanding divorce as the collapse in meaning of a child’s world should meet the criteria for commonsense. But to connect the dots, here is UVa sociology professor Brad Wilcox:

“Marriage conveys a sense of meaning, purpose, direction, and stability that tends to benefit adults and especially children. People who get married have an expectation of sexual fidelity, and that fidelity tends to engender a sense of trust and security.” (emphasis added) (http://uvamagazine.org/articles/the_marriage_crisis)

Wallerstein et. al. give an even better sense of just what this collapse in meaning feels like in lived experience:

“The children are badly frightened and apprehensive about what lies ahead. It’s as if the entire family at its weakest point is expected to deal with an earthquake and its aftershocks.” (http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/wallerstein-unexpected.html)

Even more importantly:

“There is now way for a sensitive child to see her mother cry or her father fall into depression without worrying she’s the cause of it- and so she takes full responsibility for her mother’s tears and her father’s moods.” (ibid)

It is almost certain that Cobain the artist was exactly that sensitive child. So not only was his world torn asunder at age seven, he was left to believe, consciously or not, that he had done the tearing. “I’ve become hateful towards all humans in general,” indeed; who wouldn’t hate the progenitors of a civilization that (from the perspective of a sensitive child) enables its seven-year olds to essentially hit the family’s self destruct button. Parental neglect is suddenly writ large, becoming, via the developing child psyche, universal human neglect.

As we know, Cobain sought, and ultimately found, refuge in Seattle’s underground music scene. (After, we should note, turning to his temporary non-parental caregivers’ brand of evangelical Christianity and then rejecting it; one can only wonder how history might have changed had Cobain stayed the course and formed a Christian rock band instead of Nirvana. If nothing else, I might be able to name two Christian rock bands as opposed to the current list that begins and ends with Jars of Clay, whose “Lift Me Up” is as good as anything ever released by e.g. Live.) Like all undergrounds, Seattle’s punk rock scene defined itself in contrast with the mainstream; undergrounds are forever playing antithesis to the mainstream’s thesis. To find belonging in his second, punk rock family, Cobain would necessarily have exhibited the fervor of the religious convert in expressing the family creed, especially since that creed, “everything mainstream sucks,” aligned with his personal encounter with that foundational mainstream institution, marriage.

Had Cobain been gifted with anything less than artistic genius, he likely would have lived out his days as a contented punk, i.e. as someone content with his discontent. Given that every action results in and equal and opposite reaction, the reactive antithesis has exactly the same quantity of available meaning as the thesis it rejects and mirrors; no is as deep as yes. But Cobain’s talent proved too large for the space afforded by “no.” Cobain’s band, Nirvana, was the first glimpse of synthesis, the transcendence of the mainstream’s thesis and punk’s antithesis into something entirely new. That something new is the way we are all going to be living on the planet by the end of this 21st century, which, in early 2014, is just beginning to come into focus. If, as Colin Andrews describes in On the Edge of Reality, “society’s conflict is between secularism and religion, capitalism and socialism, conservatism and progressivism,” then it is also between mainstream and punk. Andrews goes on to say that “The reconciling of these forces will require dropping long held ideologies that are blocking our ability to move forward. The tensions demand a shift in paradigms.” The tragedy of Kurt Cobain, then, lies in his inability to understand himself as a prophet rather than a punk. Nirvana jumpstarted the initiation of new meaning, and all Cobain could see was the collapse of the old.

Cobain’s blindness to his own prophesy is illuminated by a particular reading of the title of a documentary film about Nirvana and Sonic Youth’s 1991 European tour: 1991: The Year Punk Broke. When, in the early 1990’s, Nirvana, like The Beatles before them, became “more popular than Jesus,” all Cobain could see was that his band had broken punk, just as he (believed he) had once broken his parents’ marriage. In achieving mainstream success, Nirvana dragged punk with them into the spotlight, singlehandedly creating the “Alternative” music genre that would dominate the music industry for the next decade. By making punk mainstream, Cobain had unmade punk. He had silenced the antithetical “no,” and all he could hear emanating from his own music was a “yes” to everything he had ever rejected. Amidst all of this he had dissolved his second family in his short life, making his suicide the ultimate “Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” moment.

In her brilliant memoir, In Spite of Everything, Susan Gregory Thomas finds new meaning in Cobain’s death by providing an antithesis to the dark thesis Cobain settled on in place of the synthesis his music truly hinted at:

“All alone is all we are, whimpered our sweet, lost, sad, fallen hero. Our fear is that ‘alone’ is the central truth that lies at the heart of the universe, and that if we cannot provide them with an unimpeachably happy childhood, our children will be forced to stare into that void by themselves, too. But what if that isn’t true? What if there is more than this? What if the only truly perfect gem that we can really keep and share with our children is that none of us is alone- that they can remain loved and secure, in spite of everything?”

The alternate reading of 1991: The Year Punk Broke has nothing to do with broken homes and broken movements. 1991 was the year punk, via Nirvana, broke a hole through all the tired conflicts (“secularism and religion, capitalism and socialism, conservatism and progressivism,” mainstream and punk) that would keep us spinning our wheels in perpetuity. Like Obi-Wan dissolving around Darth Vader’s light saber, Punk’s disappearance into the mainstream was pure illusion; by delivering us the seeds of synthesis, punk became more powerful than we can possibly imagine.

“None of us is alone.” Cobain sang the opposite even as his music made way for this new meaning to break through, making Cobain more of a John the Baptist figure than the messiah figure he is frequently touted to be. It is up to the rest of us, collectively, to save things this time around. We can, and we will, if we heed Susan Gregory Thomas: “None of us is alone…in spite of everything”. This is the impossible, necessary truth on which everything depends. If we listen, then “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” This may strip Julian of Norwich’s prayer of the comfort of certainty, but these are uncertain times. Thanks to our modern-day punk prophets, our Cobains and Thomases, at least we know the path forward, a path defined by the fact that it is wide enough for all of us.

"Life is Long if You Know How to Use It"

I was reading The Tao of Pooh the other day, looking for an alibi with street cred for what had heretofore been my habit of ignoring the effects of climate change, when I came across the story of Li Ching-Yun (or Yuen). Li, from China, was reputed to have lived to be either 197 or 256 years old, depending on which set of records one consults. Pooh author Benjamin Hoff took Li’s advanced age as an incontrovertible fact, basing his judgment, in so many words, on the anal retentive nature of Chinese record keeping. In addition to Hoff’s endorsement, Li also received write-ups on his longevity in The New York Times in 1928, 1930, and again by way of an obituary upon his death in May of 1933, in addition to being featured in Time magazine just one week after his passing. The Time article, which quotes Li’s four secrets to long life (“tranquil mind, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon, and sleep like a dog,” as quoted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ching-Yuen ), doesn’t sound even the slightest bit incredulous.

Not surprisingly, internet skeptics have stepped forward to play the role of doubting Thomas. Snopes.com renders its verdict on the veracity of Li’s longevity thusly: “Probably false.” Fair enough. Or so it seems until one reads Snopes’ reasoning, in which they use Jeanne Clement, the French woman whose 122 years is the world’s reigning “longest confirmed lifespan,” as a point of baseline comparison. Snopes’ argument in support of “Probably false” is as follows: “It’s highly improbable that he (Li) managed to exceed that milestone (122 years) by as much as 61% to 110% as claimed in the 20th Century accounts of his passing.” (http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/trivia/ching-yuen.asp) Before closing the case, Snopes proffers one possibility as to how Li could have had everyone fooled: it was “most likely attributable to his having assumed the identity of a much older ancestor or someone else of a similar name.” This is the classic two-step debunking maneuver of 1) naming a plausible alternative scenario, which scenario is then 2) ipso facto regarded as proof that the non-ordinary event did not occur, a maneuver used all the time in regards to e.g. UFOs: Because the sighted UFO could conceivably have been a flare dropped by weather research craft, then it necessarily was a flare dropped by weather research craft, end of story. (The fact that 95% of the time it was indeed a flare does nothing, of course, to explain the 5% of the time when it most certainly wasn’t.)

So, if we ignore the bait-and-switch “it could have been, so it must have been” maneuver, we are left with Snopes’ initial argument that Li’s uber-longevity was “probably false” because it was “highly improbable.” Snopes’ judgment, at the last, is but the tautological assertion that it (i.e. Li’s long life) is improbable because it is improbable. It is also begging the question in the technical sense of the term: “when a proposition which requires proof is assumed without proof.” (insert link here) Given this context, Snopes’ decree that a man could not possibly live to be 256 years old because surely he would die sounds an awful lot like the assertion that a man could not possibly run a mile in under four minutes because surely he would die. Li Ching-Yun, I give you Roger Bannister.

The real reason, of course, that Snopes decreed it “highly improbable” that Li lived to be 256 is that no one bloody lives to be 256 years old. This may be true, as far as it goes. But it may turn out that it doesn’t go very far at all. To understand why, we must turn to the writings of the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. But to bring Seneca’s thought into proper focus, it is important to first note that when at long last Li prepared to die he is reported to have explained that “I have done all I have to do in this world. I will now go home,” which is pretty much a paraphrase of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life.

Writing in the 1st century CE, Seneca’s Shortness was a letter to his friend Paulinus in which he bemoans the degree to which so many fritter away their lives, and impugns his friend not to fall into the same trap. Seneca cuts straight to the chase; within the letter’s first two pages he has distilled wisdom so potently concentrated that it leaps off the page two millennia later, as if written expressly for this overscheduled age:

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested…. Why do we complain about nature? She has acted kindly: life is long if you know how to use it.”

(This, we should note, could never have been written in an email, much less a text message; there are no emoticons that express depth. The loss of letter writing may be history’s single greatest unmourned tragedy. Love, friendship, intimacy- each has grown slightly less transcendent during letter writing’s “twenty-year death”, to borrow a term from Baltimore’s best writer of crime fiction, Ariel S. Winter. (http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Year-Death-Hard-Case-Crime/dp/0857685813)

By page eleven of the letter, Seneca is zeroing in on the different strands that run through space-time, strands which, when unraveled, will aid in the understanding of Li Ching-Yun:

“So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.”

Here, Seneca makes two things very clear: 1) Space-time allows for both living and existing, and 2) the two states couldn’t be more different. They are so different, in fact, that in just a bit I will be making the argument that they each lead to entirely different respective four-dimensional shapes of space-time. And I never studied physics! (I did manage to pass my high school physics class, in which I learned the following facts: 1) Velocity is not just limited to speed, but also includes direction. 2)…. As Tony Kornheiser would say, That’s the list!)

By page 25 in the 32 page letter, Seneca is describing the four-dimensional shape of lived space-time:

“He alone is free from the laws that limit the human race, and all ages serve him as though he were a god. Some time has passed: he grasps it in his recollection. Time is present: he uses it. Time is to come: he anticipates it. This combination of all times into one gives him a long life.”

Things shape up very differently in the realm of mere existing:

“But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. When they come to the end of it, the poor wretches realize too late that for all this time they have been preoccupied in doing nothing.”

Who is the figure who can escape “the laws that limit the human race?” For Seneca, this is only the philosopher, for philosophers “not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs.” I would note that in pronouncing that “only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive,” nowhere does Seneca limit things to western philosophy. He does recommend some specific ancient Greek philosophers and philosophies, but it is likely that these were all that were ready to hand in 1st Century Rome, and unlikely that he had copies of the I Ching and Tao Te Ching lying around. That he (Seneca) didn’t in no way disqualifies Li, who is described as “a Taoist immortal” who taught “that the fundamental Taoist practice is to learn to keep the ‘Emptiness,’” as a philosopher. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ching-Yuen)

Building on Seneca’s insight, and using Li’s extreme case as my exemplar, I am suggesting that those who achieve “the combination of all times into one,” or those who know how “to keep the emptiness,” literally bend space-time to their lives. And, further, that the space-time inhabited by the living is as distinct from the space-time inhabited by the merely existing as waking life is from dreaming. All of which makes elapsed time as recorded amongst the merely existing irrelevant to the truly long lived.

Before diving into particulars about the scientific theory with which I am taking liberties I should note that I am, of course, participating in the grand tradition of New Age interpretations of science’s relativistic and quantum turns, a tradition that reached its apex with the film What the Bleep Do We Know? It is a tradition that mainstream Science loathes even more than it loathes mainstream Religions, which Religions tend to defend their own turf, unlike New Age interpretations of quantum mechanics, which Science views as an encroachment into its territory. But even in the middle of my own wild speculations about quantum mechanics and relativity (more about which in a moment), what needs to be made clear is that Science wishes to have it both ways: 1) Science loves to point out that if general and special relativity and quantum mechanics have taught us anything it is that the world is nothing like what we take it to be; and yet 2) Science would have us believe that although this strange quantum world we inhabit is nothing like what we take it to be, it is, nevertheless, exactly like what Science tells us it is. When the truth is that we are at the very beginning of the quantum age, and, as President Obama is wont to say about Iran and its nuclear capabilities, all options are on the table. At this point, like Socrates, all we know is that we know nothing, and wild New Age speculations just may give us our best shot at some quantum wisdom. Not, I hasten to add, quantum knowledge, since quantum mechanics’ own uncertainty principle tells us that knowledge here is always bought at the price of ignorance there. We likely already have as much quantum knowledge as we are going to get, or need. (See the failure of that next would-be “quantum leap” in quantum mechanics, string theory, to coalesce.)

So, the concept in play, time dilation, comes from the theory of relativity:

“Time dilation is an actual difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers either moving relative to each other or differently situated from gravitational masses. An accurate clock at rest with respect to one observer may be measured to tick at a different rate when compared to a second observer’s own equally accurate clocks. This effect arises neither from technical aspects of the clocks nor from the fact that signals need time to propagate, but from the nature of spacetime itself…. The laws of nature are such that time itself (i.e. spacetime) will bend due to differences in either gravity or velocity.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation)

It is the latter cause, velocity, which just may help us understand what is really going on with Li. Because “the faster the relative velocity, the greater the magnitude of time dilation,” (ibid) i.e. the slower the faster moving body’s clock moves. To get a sense of just how flexible spacetime is when warped by time dilation, note that “a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel through the entire known Universe in one human lifetime.” (ibid)

To connect the dots, I am saying that the contrast Seneca makes between those who truly live, and for whom time, therefore, is abundant, and those who by merely existing have made life short, is the same contrast that exists between humans going about their business here on earth and any travelers (real or imagined) touring the universe at a constant 1 g acceleration. It is a contrast in velocity. To explain, I must return to the one thing I learned in high school physics: While the contrast in velocity between the planet-bound and the star trekkers is one of speed, the contrast in velocity between the living and the merely existing is one of direction. Seneca’s “philosophers” are always moving in the direction of the light, whilst everyone else is sitting on a log staring at shadows. (Please note that 1- the term “philosopher” as Seneca uses it has nothing to do with contemporary academic philosophers, many of whom may be gifted scholars and perfectly nice people to boot, but whom are also too busy moving in the direction of tenure and academic prestige, which pursuits are perfectly rational given that tenure and prestige are the common coin of academia, to bother with moving in the direction of the light, and 2- the last sentence is obviously borrowed from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which allegory is the Platonic form, if you will, of fiction as news that stays news. “Real” news media are, of course, the most entrancing shadows cast on the wall of modernity’s cave.)

In short, Li’s movement towards the light, his keeping of the emptiness, was so unswerving that the passage of time slowed to a crawl. Just as meaningful time dilation depends on speed (“It is only when an object approaches speeds on the order of 30,000 km/s – 1/10th the speed of light- that time dilation becomes important”- ibid), Li’s longevity vouches for his emptiness, his movement towards the light.

One of the interesting things about time dilation is that all parties, whether at rest or moving 1/10th the speed of light or faster, perceive their own clocks as progressing at a normal pace:

“The local experience of time passing never actually changes for anyone. In other words, the astronauts on the ship as well as the mission control crew on Earth each feel normal, despite the effects of time dilation (i.e. to the travelling party, those stationary are living ‘faster,’ whilst to those who stood still, their counterparts in motion live ‘slower’ at any given moment).” (ibid)

Just so, to the living party, those merely existing are living ‘faster,’ whilst to those who merely exist, their counterparts in motion live ‘slower’ at any given moment. Recall that Li found nothing extraordinary about the length of his life, echoing Seneca’s “a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements,” with his own “I have done all I have to do in this world. I will now go home.” To Li, life was just long enough to make use of it; recall Seneca’s “life is long if you know how to use it.” It is only to the rest of us merely existing folk, as exemplified by Snopes.com, that Li’s lifespan seems so distended. Staring at the shadows, our clocks spin faster than the altimeters of an airliner in freefall.

Spok, who toured the universe at speeds up to warp factor eight and kept the emptiness, frequently invoked the Vulcan farewell, “Live long and prosper.” To extract its wisdom I suggest holding it up to a mirror; when we understand long life as the product of a prosperity that has nothing to do with status and material wealth, only then will we move toward the light and exit the cave.

May we all prosper, and live long.