Poetic Eyes

We were instructed to blog on the idea that “poetry is what you see with poetry seeing eyes.” At first I was interested in the intellectual impact of a statement like that, that's the kind of talk that makes you feel intellectually superior when discussing it with other people. It's got some cognitive heft to it, if you know what I mean.

I watched the film “Shakespeare in Love” this afternoon, and it brought the concept into sharper focus for me. Throughout the movie Will Shakespeare speaks in very poetic language and I realized that this character of William Shakespeare sees the world through poetry seeing eyes, much like the real William Shakespeare probably did. He is able to eloquently describe the richest emotions, painting a bright picture for happiness and a dark but passionately beautiful picture for sorrow. His possession of poetry seeing eyes adds a significant layer to his character, making him a very expressive character, pretty much the opposite of Keanu Reeves.

Applying poetry seeing eyes to my life is something that will take concerted effort over a period of time, but once learned would probably significantly effect my attitude in a positive way. Not only thinking about how to describe my emotions and my surroundings but how to eloquently and beautify describe them would be the ultimate goal of truly seeing with poetry seeing eyes. And it couldn't hurt to rattle off some impressive language like Bill Shakespeare in front of the ladies.

At a slant

Emily Dickinson's idea that the truth can be told “at a slant” is a new one to me. New to think about but not new in practice; when I think about it I've been telling things at a slant as long as I can remember.

The real trick is telling it slanted just perfectly, catching the optimal angle and rolling with it. The perfect slant catches the truth at it's most interesting. Engaging and enthralling the listener or reader but not going so far as to make what is being presented seem fantastical. At the perfect angle, no one can tell there's a slant at all.

The fact that this quote came from Emily Dickinson is also interesting because, as a poet, everything she writes has a strong poetic slant to it. The poetic slant approaches the truth from a much different angle that what I discussed in the previous paragraph. Poetry, depending on the interpretation, can always be the truth at a slant, prose on the other hand is ether slanted truth or just completely slanted with some truth interspersed throughout.

Which brings us to our next question: What is truth?

Is truth beauty? Is it something tangible, that you can show and prove? Is it your feelings and emotions? How we define truth determines how we tell it and therefor how we slant it.

I personally don't have a concrete definition for truth, so I have no idea what truths I might tell.

Retellings and Avatar

The idea that every story is a retelling of another story is something that this class has made me appreciate. Generally I graciously accept that most of my favorite stories are shameless ripoffs of another story. I'm OK with that idea, I've come to accept that thats how the world works.

For some reason however, James Cameron's Avatar drives me up the wall. The fact that the plot is so blatantly derivative of so many stories that came before it infuriates me. I'm not exactly sure why the movie makes me so angry. It might be that it has been so successful despite obviously taking a formulaic approach to story telling.

The move hits all of it's emotional cues, dazzles the viewer with a rich visual presentation, ham fistedly drives home its environmental message and delivers a happy ending. It's just like hundreds of other movies I've sat through in my movie viewing life. Yet I can't help feeling used when I walk out of the theater at the end of Avatar.

Maybe it's that I feel like a small cog in the giant machine that is Hollywood, where crappy scripts are fed in and money shoots out the other end, back into the hands of the bad script writers. The idea that a film maker feels that they can get around a bad story by just making it pretty to sit through goes against the spirit of storytelling. The world created by a film maker is an intergral part of the story they are telling, but when the visual elements become a crutch for a tired story the film becomes a failure in my book.

Storytelling through film has the advantage of creating a rich world for your story to take place in but I believe that a film maker is responsible for making sure that story is worth telling. James Cameron created a fantastic world for his story to take place in, he just told a crappy story.

Found Poem

Sealed by the Manufacturer

Universal torque assemblies

drivelines out of phase

snapping the same matchmark

a Y-shaped spider

A spun slip joint

the U-joint revolves

a smooth flow of power

the needle roller type

tubular transmissions

designed and built with vibration

absorb speed

a total cancellation

the spider is shaped like a cross

I pulled the elements for this poem from a Chilton's automotive repair manual that I have become very familiar with.

Look Back

In class we discussed the story of Lot's wife, more specifically the idea that she had to turn back to look at the destruction that was being wrought. The professor mentioned that a certain author had said that he “loved her for turning back” despite God's warnings not to and the horrible fate she then experienced. He loved her because someone had to turn back, and it had to be Lot's wife, the story wouldn't have nearly the impact if she hadn't.

People doing what they're told not to do is what drives our literature. In this case it is a cautionary tale, warning believers to listen to God's word when it is given (granted this is old testament God who really enjoyed smiting stuff). In other cases people not doing what they're told means that they are changing their situations for the better. In 1984 Winston begins to resist Big Brother and changes his situation for the better, if only for a short time. Qui-Gon Jinn goes against the Jedi Council and tells Obi Wan to train Anakin Skywalker in the first episode of Star Wars. If these people had done what they were told they would have lived boring, realativly uneventful lives, but by dissenting against authority they set in motion a series of events that could never have been foreseen.

This idea can be carried over into our lives. By breaking the mold and going against what we know we can create new story arcs in our own lives. Do something different today, break the monotony and you'll never know where it'll take you.

Star Wars

As the reader may have noticed I frequently use Star Wars and it's characters as examples in my discussions on literature. Some may not consider the Star Wars Saga literature in the classical sense but it fits the bill quite nicely for me. Needless to say that when professor Sexton mentioned that George Lucas set out with the intention of taking classical elements of heroic archetypes and making an modern space epic I felt vindicated. Not only did the professor lend credence to my go to story's legitimacy, but he also said straight out that the entire saga is a grand retelling of all things past.

Through the story both Anakin and Luke go through Heroic story arcs, Anakin's ends with heroic self sacrifice to save his son and Luke's story remains unfinished by the films leaving his future bright and exciting. Well defined villains and damsels exist throughout, with an ever present wise old man watching over the exploits of the main characters. Star wars is truly the quick reference hand book for all archetypes having a variety of well developed examples for each.

Dreams of a deeper consciousness

I found myself in a nondescript, white, glowy room, as most dream rooms are depicted in TV shows and movies. In that room were several of my close friends. We were all talking, laughing and generally enjoying each others company. As our time together went on I began to vaguely understand that I was having a dream. In my dream we began talking about dreams and all came to the conclusion that each of us were dreaming, separately from one another, in our own consciousness but together in the same place.

I woke up with my mind truly blown.

A dream like this makes you think about your perceptions of reality, weather things that we "know"to be true are actually true. I thought that it was entirely likely that the dream was all created by my subconscious just to screw with the conscious part of me.

Then we started talking about Carl Jung and his idea of the universal unconscious and I got really excited. I started to wonder, is there really some underlying connection between all of us? Something that links every conscious being on the planet together like the Matrix or something?

So on a whim I asked the great Google what the "odds of living in a computer construct" were and the first result was a paper by one Dr. Nick Bostrom, a professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Dr. Bostrom says that, barring the extinction of humanity, someday we'll have the requisite computing power to not only simulate one human brain but to simulate all of them. As in simulating entire planets of people and the entire universe that they exist in. Basically like the Matrix but without all the bodies.

Now why would humanity build a computer that would carry out these sort of operations? Because we're naturally curious. The discovery of nuclear fission didn't happen by accident, the time came when humanity had both the knowledge and the technology to make nuclear energy a reality and we went ahead and did it. In the same way, the people of the future will have the ability to simulate entire planets of people through the constructed planet's entire lifespan, so why not see what happens?

Dr. Bostrom describes computers with enough power to simulate the lifespan of each human in the history of the earth in .00000001 seconds. That is the entire lifespan of every person that has ever existed in a fraction so small that it is generally rounded off to zero.

The implications of this idea are tremendous. The idea that the entire course of our universe, from the big bang to the eventual cessation of all molecular motion with universal heat death, could be simulated in a fraction of a second with a computer is staggering.

But the most profound idea, the capstone of this whole concept, is that we could be existing inside one of these simulations. Not even as humans plugged into a machine, but as machines with artifical intelegence sufficient to emulate a human brain. In fact, the probability of our universe existing inside a machine is higher than not. If we accept the ideas presented by Dr. Bostrom then billions of simulations could be initiated and carried out in a matter of seconds. When that is compared to the random chance of human life evolving from an unknown source on earth the apparent odds of us being machines rises dramatically.

The best part is that we'll never know the difference. If we do exist inside a simulation then the construction of the system makes it impossible to discover the system. The computer is advanced enough that it can generate data and images for our "brains" that gives no evidence of a "construct."

Even if the computer did make a mistake, it could just rewind time and fix it. You and I would be none the wiser.

All of this leads to the greater philosophical question: Does it even matter?

If we get to pick our "Neo" I nominate Chuck Norris