Mark Twain was a man who knew how to advertise. Would that I had access to a TARDIS, I think this lecture would be my first stop.
MAGUIRE'S ACADEMY OF MUSIC
The Sandwich Islands:
Hatuey, Texans, Kites, and other Memories from Guantanamo Bay
I had the opportunity to be part of something very special this summer. Through the Department of Public History at the University of West Florida (holla, alma mater!) I was part of a team of volunteer historians who interviewed various naval veterans who did tours of duty at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. These interviews were recorded and archived in their entirety for purposes of further research, as well as for incorporation into an upcoming nationwide exhibit.
Growing up, I always enjoyed listening to older people tell stories from their lives. Ironically, I know more about many people outside of my family than I do about my own grandparents' histories. While many of my peers were bored by the storytelling of various "old ruins," I enjoyed hearing tales of days gone by. Most recently, I have made it one of my personal goals to spend more time listening and documenting what my elders have to say.
History is much more than the headlines and the chapter titles. When someone says "Guantanamo," a million images might spring to an audience's mind. Castro, Soviet missiles, post-9/11 detainees; these things are common knowledge. But what are the people like? What do they do between the headlines, between shifts? Those "core elements" are what this project seeks. We want to understand the communities and their relationships. In the brilliant conversations which I had recently, I heard stories of everyday life in GTMO that spanned from as far back as 1939 to as recently as 2003. I met interesting men and women whom I never would have connected with otherwise, and I am incredibly grateful to have had these opportunities.
Here are some excerpts:
Oscar Wilde, the Numa Numa Kid, and Undergraduate Celebrity
I was thinking about Oscar Wilde the other day.
Years ago, I heard Stephen Fry give a wonderful tribute to Wilde’s skill as a writer, but Wilde’s influence began long before his celebrated literary career. In short-form, Wilde was a public figure as early as his college days. In 1878, the year he graduated, his poem “Ravenna” won the Newdigate Prize for “best English verse composition,” but even more than his academic achievements, he was known for his personality. Wilde was a pioneer of the Aesthetic Movement; known far and wide for his wit and unique style of dress. Gilbert and Sullivan even wrote a satiric operetta in response to to the Aesthetics, basing the character of Bunthorne on Wilde himself. Wilde, honestly, was the original collegiate non-conformist; a well-known personality before he ever left college. Once again, Stephen Fry said it best:
He became a famous undergraduate. Internationally famous. It’s an extraordinary idea, isn’t it? Even in the days of Web 2.0...I don’t think there’d been cartoons of undergraduates or skits or lampooning essays in Punch as there were of Wilde.
Being well-known simply for being himself makes Wilde remarkable, both for his day and in modern remembrance. In all seriousness, if you contrast the limitations of mass communication in the Victorian era against the present day's instantaneous transit of images and sounds via the internet, it’s astounding. Wilde didn’t lip-sync a Romanian love song in a cry for attention; he was a scholar who explored ideas of beauty and philosophy in both theory and practice, while still finding the time to distinguish himself academically. Wilde makes me wonder: do students revolutionize the world with their ideas any more?
Culturally, the latest trend in spreading ideas seems to be crowd campaigning, for "Arab spring” movements which celebrate the power of group activity. And to be fair, this method is not without merit. But the problem with collective ideas that lack designated leaders (and go out of their way not to have them), is that their true intentions risk never being communicated clearly and succinctly for the benefit of others. The power of the masses cannot be denied, but when individual voices are exchanged for communal shouts of protest, even the most powerful and eloquent communicator can be drowned out by the louder voice of the village fool.
The modern achievements of young individuals seem easier to find in the realm of business. Every couple of years, a student drops out of an ivy league school to pursue an idea with the goal of making a profit. These ideas tend to become startups which makes headlines for a year or two before being absorbed into golems like Facebook and Google, for obscene dollar amounts. These young idea people might be billionaires before they can legally purchase alcohol, but in the wake of their earnings, will they be remembered for their personalities or the strength of their principles? I doubt it. I suspect that they will be remembered as names and salaries on boards of directors; because, in the end, they have not fostered any lasting ideas; they capitalized on an idea and pocketed their returns.
I recently graduated college. I didn’t distinguish myself at school as anything beyond being a student. I kept good grades and earned scholarships on my ability to use my skills outside of the classroom (and write compelling letters about my experiences to the board)...but I never wrote a “Ravenna,” and I can’t recall anyone else who did, at my school or anywhere else.
Do college students still change the world, or have they settled for making grades and earning their awards within the tedium of academia?
In an era when “mass communication” meant “book” or “printed leaflet,” Oscar Wilde set trends and broke molds. He grasped the helm of the Aesthetic Movement against the uniformity and lack of edification provided by the culture of Victorian establishment. And by proxy, Wilde and his fellow aesthetes took a stance against industrialism. In Wilde’s own words concerning the values of the movement: “the mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.” Wilde said this not long after a famous American writer who said that “there is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide."
Whether he was much aware of Emerson and the American Transcendentalists or not, Wilde embraced that philosophy as a personal credo. Wilde’s was lifestyle which bucked black-clad Victorian sameness and obstinately refused to imitate that which was modeled for him. In a famous quote, which is incredibly profound despite its frequent reduction to a Monday morning hurrah on Facebook, Wilde summed up his life in a single sentence: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
To be fair to my modern counterparts, it was much easier for Wilde to stand out in the Victorian era of blacks, pinstripes and class constructs. A wardrobe of colored satins and a devotion to art for its own sake would create much more of a sensation when they represented the exception to the norm. Today, it is much harder to be different, even for those of creative, non-conformist or artistic temperaments. It seems that, with no Aesthetic Movement to speak for them, it is the burden of the artist carry on the mission of beauty in the world for its own value.
Wilde could be identified in a crowd for his unconventional clothing, much like the artists of today. But while Wilde’s fashion sense was wholly new at the time, there is a stigma of tiresome sameness associated with artists who, for all practical purposes, look like artists in their stained, shabby clothing, vintage eyeglasses and tendency to worship at the literary altars of Kerouac and Bukowski. For all practical purposes, in their headlong attempts to be different, many self-proclaimed artists end up looking alike, and are grouped in with other subcultures which the mainstream loves to make fun of, like hipsters or Trekkies.
But this is unfair. Legitimate artists, those who actively work to pass on a reflection of themselves or society through the creation of something new, are often identifiable by a nebulous, uncertain quality. Tempura-stained clothes and unwashed hair aside, expressive artists have often known some form of personal hardship in life, and the resulting awareness of the contrast between happiness and sadness, difficulty and ease, gives them a unique perspective on the world. This is a strictly personal observation, but I have always seen a marked physical difference between the eyes of artists and those of the people around them. In the eyes of artists I’ve spoken to, from my hometown to Germany and back again, there is clarity, a capacity to perceive and interpret detail. This trait is foreign and sometimes unsettling to the rest of us.
The position of the true artist in a society is sadly undermined by imitators who undertake art for selfish reasons. In one of his podcasts (the exact episode escapes me), Stephen Tobolowsky remarked that the problem for artists is that many people want to identify themselves as “artists,” but do not generate the creative output necessary to validate their claims. As a result, the value of true artists and their contributions to society are cheapened by those apply the title of “artist” to themselves.
This brings us back to the question pondered by Mr. Fry:
Do college students become famous or change the world any more?
Is it possible for anyone to be unique when being a non-conformist is automatically perceived as conforming to a type?
Oscar Wilde set an uncomfortable precedent. Whenever I read about his life or his accomplishments made as an undergraduate student, I am unsettled. In 2009, I watched on television as Juan Martín del Potro defeated Roger Federer in the US Open at the age of twenty. I was about to turn twenty at the time, and I remember updating my Facebook status that afternoon to say “Juan Martín del Potro just defeated Roger Federer at the age of twenty. I turn twenty in three weeks. I better get busy.”
Wait..did I just stumble over my generation’s problem?
Potro’s athletic win was not in a college environment. His accomplishment was totally different than those of Oscar Wilde, but was nonetheless achieved early in life and to international fame. Outside of college, Potro set a goal, and through blood, sweat and tears, he won. Maybe it’s the college environment that has changed. It was my experience that college set its agenda for my personal time as well as my academic time, and instead of having the space to create ideas, I was forever trapped within the processes necessary to parroting lecture notes back to my instructors. Not being a complete slacker, it crossed my mind several times to attempt standout achievements, but I was always hampered by thoughts of "if I do "A" for me, that will leave me without time to do "B" for school, and if I fail to accomplish "B," I’ll lose my grade and my scholarship.
In the end, I would just shrug it off and tweet cleverly about being busy.
And that’s my generation. We are typified by expressing outrage on Facebook until enough people with signs start running in the same direction. Then we join the mob.
Sorry, Oscar, but you set the bar just a little too high.
Christians, Christianity and the Paleo Diet. Compatible or Not?
For your weekend consumption, I encourage you to read a rather unique article which I wrote on HubPages:
Christians, Christianity and the Paleo Diet: Are they Compatible?
You have to click through to HubPages to read the article, but I would like to provide some background on it here.
I have made my position as an advocate for the paleolithic style of eating and exercise very clear. I have researched the subject for the past year and have seen remarkable results in my own life from adopting it as a complete lifestyle. Simultaneously, I also do not shy away from letting people know that I am a Christian.
People are fond of reminding me that grains are in the Bible. Fair point. Furthermore, the science behind the Paleo diet is almost entirely based on evolutionary biology, so aren't I compromising? How can I live the way that I do without compromising my beliefs or subjecting myself to ongoing cognitive dissonance?
These were questions which, after a long enough period, I had to ask myself in a structured manner. So I poured myself a cup of strong coffee, settled in with my Bible and my old friend, Google, and did as I always do when I want to educate myself on a subject: I read, researched, assimilated and typed out my findings.
This article was the result. I would appreciate your reading the full story, but here is the CliffsNotes abridgment if you are pressed for time.
- Nutritionally, the Bible and the paleo diet give the same advice. (Genesis 1:28-29, 9:1-3).
- Christ used grains and bread as a metaphor because that is what his audiences understood when he spoke to them, 2,000 years ago. The grains of today are much different than the grains spoken of in the Bible, and now contain many harmful anti-nutrients.
- The paleo diet's reliance on an evolutionary model is rooted in its desire to express why a pre-agricultural diet is most beneficial for the human body. Evolutionists in the paleo community state that we evolved to our physical and mental apex through a diet free of grains and other products of agriculture. However, this fits in very well with the Biblical model as well, only in this paradigm, it simply means accepting that an Intelligent Designer created us to eat this way, and we messed it up.
I go into more detail on each of these points in the article. You really should read it.
The trouble to begin at 8 o'clock...
MARK TWAIN
(Honolulu Correspondent of the Sacremento Union)
Will deliver a lecture on
THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 2
In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics of the natives duly discussed and described. The great volcano of Kilauea will also receive proper attention.
A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA is in town, but has not been engaged.
Also
A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS will be on exhibition in the next block.
MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned.
A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please.
Dress Circle, $1.00 | Family Circle, 50c.
Doors open at 7 o'clock. The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock.
"Touch" and the raising of a prophet.
Touch is an intriguing television show.
If you haven't seen it yet, Touch is about a father, Martin Bohm (Keifer Sutherland) with a son, Jake (David Mazouz), who possesses the unique ability to perceive numeric patterns behind everyday events. Jake doesn't speak, and cannot abide physical touch.
The treatment is sentimental, but the themes and the implications of Touch's evolving story, are much deeper than than just a melodrama.
Touch explores humanity and its desire to know and be confidant in its purpose. Through its character's connection to numerology, be it a cognitive ability or a supernatural one, Touch dissects the human experience to expose the core elements which tie us together as a species. The show is actually very refreshing, because instead of going out of its way to be a "gritty drama," it tries to give its audience hope.
As human beings, we want our lives to have purpose. If something happens that we do not (or cannot) understand, we desire to know that even things which are out of our control are not random, cosmic hiccups, but part of a plan. And even if there is no divine plan, can't there at least be a larger purpose? This enduring question, what is the point?, is confronted in different ways by different individuals. Some people surrender to confusion and drown in sorrow or self pity. Others are more constructive, seeking their answers in science and the tangible comfort of empirical evidence. Those with the capacity to place trust in the unseen turn to faith for their answers.
Most television networks restrict their programming to increasingly desperate reinterpretations of legal, medical and police procedurals. But, now and again, a show comes along that attempts something different. However, in just its inaugural season, Touch is investigating the meaning of life itself, exploring themes of hope, cause and effect, chaos theory and the consequences of small actions. It is going so far as to attempt synthesis the answers provided by both faith and science to the deep, unsettling questions surrounding human purpose. I am hard-pressed to imagine any other show, past or present, which would open an episode with a child's voice reciting an opening monologue like this one:
Numbers are constant. Until they’re not. Our inability to influence outcome is the great equalizer. Makes the world fair. Computers generate random numbers in an attempt to glean meaning out of probability. Endless numerical sequences lacking any pattern. But during a cataclysmic global event — Tsunami, earthquake, the attacks of 9/11— these random numbers suddenly stop being random. As our collective consciousness synchronizes, so do the numbers. Science can’t explain the phenomenon, but religion does. It’s called prayer. A collective request sent up in unison. A shared hope. Numbers are constant, until they’re not.
During cataclysmic global events, our collective consciousness synchronizes. So do the numeric sequences created by random number generators. Science can”t explain the phenomenon, but religion does. It’s called prayer. A collective request, sent up in unison. A shared hope, fear relieved, a life spared. Numbers are constant--until they’re not. In times of tragedy, times of collective joy--in these brief moments, it is only this shared emotional experience that makes the world seem less random.
Maybe it’s coincidence. And maybe it’s the answer to our prayers.
- Touch Season 1, Episode 7 - "Noosphere Rising"
In every episode of Touch, Martin Bohm is challenged on his ability to be a "good father" to Jake. His success or failure as a father is questioned because very few people understand what Jake really is, and therefore focus entirely on the wrong thing. Martin's antagonists continually make the faulty assumption that Jake is simply a disabled child with a talent for math, basically equating him with autistic children who excel at music. They further assume that Martin cannot possibly be a good father to Jake, because his responsibilities as a widowed breadwinner preclude him from "providing a suitable environment" for a boy the system has marked off simply as having "special needs." Such naysayers are repeatedly and frustratingly incorrect, because they never even consider Jake's true identity.
Jake Bohm is not a child; he is a fully-formed prophet in a child's body.
Touch is about a man realizing that he is the steward of a prophet.
Martin's primary role in relation to Jake is not to provide a "caring, nurturing environment." In their unique relationship, Jake sets the rules. The pilot episode's entire point was that Martin had to accept Jake's rules if he wanted anything like relationship with him. Jake doesn't "need" Martin in the conventional sense of a son needing father, but Martin's desire to feel connected to his boy helps Jake expedite the delivery of his prophecies.
Martin was responsible for helping to bring Jake into the world, but he has no control over Jake's divine purpose. His conventional duties as a father end at provision. As long as Martin fulfills his voluntary role as mediator between Jake and those who are affected by his numbers, Jake will maintain a relationship with him. But at the end of the day, it is not because Martin is Jake's father, or even special in any other sense; Martin is merely one of few people on the planet who has accepted Jake's authority and is willing to listen.
Furthermore, Jake does not require "therapy;" his intolerance of physical touch is not as quantifiable as an autistic "sensory defensiveness." Touch never shies away from a spiritual reference or metaphor, and in this spirit Jake's refusal to be touched is an echo of the Biblical Nazarites.
In historic Judaism, Nazarites were consecrated individuals, devoted to purity of mind and body. Their identity in modern times has been carried on to a certain extent in the Rastafari practices of uncut hair and a strict, Levitical diet. Many of the famous spokespeople of the Bible, such as Samson, Samuel and John and the Baptist, were Nazarites. Their personal lives were marked by complete abstinence from grapes, grape derivatives and all forms of alcohol. Publicly, they could be identified through their hair, which was to be left uncut for the duration of their vows, which could be as short as thirty days or as long as a lifetime. They were also to have no contact with corpses.
Why do I see a correlation between Nazarites and Jake Bohm? Both crave purity in order to fulfill an ultimate purpose.
Jake exists as a strictly cerebral being. Call it a divine plan, call it the will of the universe, Jake passes on glimpses of some ultimate plan to a fresh group of people every week, helping them understand that everything happens for a reason. Just as the Nazarites sought a closer connection to God by not allowing alcohol to cloud their minds, Jake's intensely focused mind cannot by distracted by touch. His manifestation as a child is inconsequential to his ultimate purpose, which is to provide hope to individuals.
The idea of a prophet requiring purity shouldn't be so unfamiliar. Even James Bond dealt with the subject in Live and Let Die. The character Solitaire loses her ability to read tarot cards after Bond takes her virginity. Again, purity of one form or another is necessary for a prophet to perform his or her function.
Historically and in entertainment, prophets always separate themselves from the rest of the world. It is not a petty declaration of superiority, nor is it an expression of some disability of which second sight is a coincidental side effect. Purity is necessary to a prophet's fulfillment of purpose. This purity requires some kind of separation.
For Jake Bohm, this separation is physical touch. Jake looks like a child, but he is not a child. His abilities simply manifested themselves at an inconvenient time. Jake is a prophet, and a prophet's identity is not constrained by age or appearance. Jake knows his purpose, and as long as he is given the space to work, his purpose manifests itself.
There are so many possibilities for a character like this. There is an unimaginable level of depth to which the show's writers could explore Jake's identity in the context of history, religion and mythology. I wonder if the writers are even aware of this themselves, or if they will take the easy way out and and pause at the lower common denominators of father/son sentimentality and easy explanations.
External Links:
Touch, "Noosphere Rising" - IMDB
Nazarites - JewishEncyclopedia
Live and Let Die - Wikipedia
Solitaire (James Bond Character) - Wikipedia