BSG - thoughts on the final episode

I wasn't fond of Baltar's soliloquy about god; it's not that I disagreed, per se, I just didn't think it was necessary to make it all explicit. Anyone who's watched the show should have already been able to see what the show's creators were trying to say, that god is inherently unknowable and it is ridiculous to get into a dick swinging match about whether your beliefs or someone else's beliefs are uniquely correct. So I thought it was overkill to come right out and say it. On the other hand, someone pointed out to me that this scene could be viewed as Baltar's redemption for his original sin. I'm still mulling that over. I thought his redemption came later in the show, on earth, when he told Caprica 6 that he knew a little about farming (from his father) and then started crying. But maybe that's just because I have my own kettle full of father issues.

I have mixed feelings about the fleet's decision to abandon all of their advanced technology and start from scratch on the new earth they found. On one hand, the series has been building towards that decision and arguing for it from the start; there was always a theme about the dangers of technology, that it is folly to think that our clever devices will save us. I have a great deal of sympathy with that point of view. On the other hand, could such a tremendous decision really be made without any sort of discussion and argument? Did no one object? The way that decision was made and played out just didn't seem realistic to me. Maybe a more interesting question, though, is whether I agreed with the decision. To which I say, well... sort of. There is definitely a strong anti-technological bent to my thinking. But if push came to shove, I really doubt I would be willing to walk away from all the tech and gadgetry. Most of it, yes. 99%, probably. But not all. Creative use of tools is part of what makes us human. So in that sense, I found the show's conclusion unrealistic and unfulfilling.

This is sort of a dull blog entry... sorry. I thought I'd have more to say.

Battlestar Galactica - penultimate episode

So, Adama has changed his mind, and he and his crew of volunteers (both human and cylon) are going to jump into the lion's den to try to save little kidnapped Hera after all. I like this. What an essentially human thing to do - risk the lives of many for the good of one. Courageous, irrational, hopeless, sacrificial. I know there's a bigger explanation given in the context of the show, but what I keep coming back to is many for one. This really highlights the difference between man and machine, which obviously has been a theme throughout the show. We can make decisions for emotional reasons rather than rational ones. We do this all the time. Actually, I have a theory that emotion is the driving force behind essentially all of our decisions; rationality and logic are thin veneers that we apply after the fact to keep ourselves from feeling vulnerable or foolish. The world becomes much softer and more plastic when one starts to look at it this way.

I am both looking forward to and dreading the final episode tomorrow night. There has been a lot of food for thought in this programme.

A Student of Weather - a review

I finished reading A Student of Weather by Elizabeth Hay last night. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I enjoyed her other novel, Late Nights on Air, but it was still quite good. Exceptional, in fact, for a first novel. It pleased me to no end that not only did a large portion of the book take place in Ottawa, it took place in a part of Ottawa that I know well - the square of the city bordered by Bank Street, Bronson Ave, the canal, and the Rideau River. This familiar landscape wasn't my chief source of pleasure in the book, but it was definitely a bonus.

The author's writing is strong and her story is compelling. Perhaps most importantly, the protagonist is a sympathetic character. Even at the points (there were several) when I groaned and said to myself, "She's not really going to do that, is she?" I could still understand and relate to her decisions. Love doesn't just make us crazy sometimes; sometimes it makes us wilfully ignorant or just plain stupid. We all know this, but it's hard to write such a flawed, human character without making her pathetic or one dimensional. Elizabeth Hay pulled it off well. Actually, now that I think about it, she did much the same with the protagonist in Late Nights on Air. H'mmm. I wouldn't have recognized that if I hadn't sat down to write this review. Oh, also - she's good at writing both male and female characters convincingly, which is an exceedingly rare talent and one I admire above almost any other fiction writing skill.

An excerpt from the ending that I'm particularly fond of:

She has worked her way into the heaven of her childhood. Ontario, and all it means. This is where it took so long to "make the land" - three generations to clear two hundred acres of trees and stumps and stones. This is where weary listeners fell for those mythical tales about the Canadian west - how you could plough a furrow a mile long without even striking a stone, how the feet of oxen were stained red by all the wild strawberries, how the light, dry, spicy air restored the feeblest person to health. This is the place they returned to, some of them, after drought and dust did them in.

That is the Ontario I know and love. It was the heaven of my childhood, too. Sometimes, in my depths of vulnerability and doubt, it still is.

WFMU

I finally pledged today, despite not being able to listen at home anymore (except online, which just doesn't appeal to me). Yay! Now I get to enjoy the unique fruits of smugness that come from donating to a listener sponsored radio station. Plus, I get a T shirt.

Happiness addenda

A few more things:

• Guilty pleasures, eg fashion blogs. The Cherry Blossom Girl. I'm not proud, but this does make me happy.


• The CBC.


• The simple pleasure and release of breathing through a vinyasa sequence.


• My girlfriend unexpectedly showing up with lunch.


• Nannerpus!


• 1990's Toronto music scene.

Happiness

The lousy mood I've often been in this winter has (shockingly) not been ameliorated by any of my navel gazing, hand wringing, woe is me posts, so I'm going to try something different, and list some things I'm happy about.

• Trees. In general, and also one very specifically.


• Radio drama. Afghanada (great), Canadia 2056 (okay), Monsoon House (meh)... even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.


• The hours between 8 and 10 pm, which usually find me lying on my couch, listening to the radio, falling asleep. Delicious.


• There are people who read this blog who I don't even know, and who have never commented. I don't know who they are, but Google Analytics tells me they are out there, and that's something that makes me oddly happy.


• The good people of New Paltz. I just took a walk to the library on my lunch break, and had four very different and interesting conversations with four very different and interesting people. This happens to me almost every time I step out my door. We have a great per capita of different and interesting people here.


• I have read some great books in the past year. Wall to Wall. Late Nights on Air. I Capture The Castle.


• Hiking, swimming, biking season will soon be here. Not to mention my CSA share.


• My old landlady still calls me and asks me what I'm cooking.


• My best friend in Ottawa knows I miss watching the Rick Mercer Report, and she thinks about me whenever she watches it. She even researched how to bypass the CBC's geoblocking for me.

Watchmen - a review

A review of the graphic novel, that is, which I finished reading this morning.

I should start by saying that I'm generally not a fan of the comic book / graphic novel genre, though Maus and Persepolis were both very, very good, and lived up to the hype surrounding them. But both of those titles used what is an essentially frivolous medium to look at deadly serious real world issues, and I think that's why they worked. Watchmen, on the other hand - well, vigilante crime fighters in skin tight suits of primary colours isn't exactly a big stretch for a comic.

Having said that, Watchmen wasn't half bad, and it did raise some interesting issues. The first, of course, is the question that is explicitly asked by the story: Who watches the ones who watch over us? This question has been asked to death, though, so I'm not going to devote any more ink to it. Or pixels, rather. I'll move on to some of the other questions that occurred to me: Do we, individually or as a species, need to have an enemy in order to define ourselves or establish our sense of identity? Deprived of such an Other, do we necessarily create one for ourselves? And, um... what if we didn't? How would that go?

I think the answer to the first two questions is probably yes. Perhaps a nuanced yes, but one way or another, for almost all of us, yes. The third and fourth questions? H'mmm. It just occurs to me now that those are the questions I'm asking by resuming correspondence with my father. Interesting.

frustration

I am REALLY looking forward to that day in the far distant future when I feel comfortable teaching a yoga class. I am sick of getting so nervous that I stumble over my words, can't remember the tune of the chant that I begin class with, silently berate myself all the way through class for not knowing what I'm doing.

It has been a long time since I've done something this... different. And challenging for me. Unfortunately, at this point I'm only getting tapped to sub about once a month, so I'm not getting enough experience to become more comfortable with it.

I wrote a few months ago about feeding the mind either garbage or gourmet. I've been feeding myself a lot of garbage lately, and I think it's more apparent when I'm teaching because, as I observed when I first started teaching, this part of my practice keeps me honest. I can't hide when I'm up there. I can't go on autopilot, because I'm just not good enough at this yet. I have to be there.

Oh dear, oh dear.

How can something so wrong be so... no, actually, this is just entirely wrong.

And by the way, there's more.

use your illusion

There is a good number of dichotomies that are discussed in yoga philosophy - effort and surrender, which I wrote about quite a bit last year; matter and spirit (prakrti and purusa); self and Self. One of my teachers talks a lot about concealment and revelation. She's been talking about it for years, actually, but I never really heard what she was saying (maybe because a lot of her discussion has had to do with our innate divinity, which is not an idea that resonates with me). Well, I've been giving more thought to this duality over the past few days. I can't count the number of times I've been absolutely certain that something (usually wretched) was going to happen; I'd read the tea leaves, and all the signs pointed to calamity. Yet almost invariably, at the moment when concealment is replaced by revelation, my worst fears don't come to pass. There's always some crucial element of moderation that I fail to see or which I dismiss. "The worst things in my life never happened." I think Mark Twain said that.

What do we do when we can't see what's coming next? When the horse blinders are on and we're hurtling down the track, hell bent on an uncertain fate? It's no secret that I aim for the bottom and assume the worst. Hell, even when I can see that everything's going to be alright, half the time I still assume that I must be missing something, and everything will go south in the end.

As effort and surrender deal with action, concealment and revelation are attributes of perception. It's a subtler schism, easier to overlook, and harder to talk about. I'm curious about the role that faith plays here. Part of me chafes at the use of that word, with its suggestion of showy displays of religiosity. But devoid of those unpleasant connotations, faith is simply a belief that is not supported by evidence. It does not have to mean a belief that flies in the face of evidence. What we believe when we have no reason to believe one thing over another says a lot about who we are. So what do my beliefs say about me? And what would it mean to believe something else - something less apocalyptic? Why is that such a struggle for me?

East meets West

Three things:

• After teaching class on Tuesday, I had the Buddhist chant "Gate, gate, paragate" stuck in my head (which is weird, because I didn't play it or chant it during class). "Gone, gone, gone beyond." Later in the week, I was listening to the Wizard of Oz soundtrack, and I had the out of the blue revelation that when Dorothy sings "Somewhere over the rainbow," she's expressing much the same sentiment. Or is she? She wants escape; absolute anathema from the point of view of the middle-way; but what she ultimately discovers is that if she can't find what she wants right where she is, she's not going to find it anywhere. The value of her fantastic travels is that they allow her to experience and value home differently (something I reflected on in Guatemala last summer). H'mmm. Buddhist perspectives on American show tunes. If I still had any inclination towards the upper echelons of academia, I think this would be a gold mine thesis title.



• Another realization from this past week: The weird otherworldly vocals in the beginning of Battlestar Galactica? Sanskrit. It's a Sanskrit chant. I recognized one of the words, then I remembered which chant I knew it from, then I recognized the rest of the chant, and then... well, then my head pretty much exploded. I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it. It's the Gayatri mantra. In English: "The dawn, the day, and the dusk, those three most excellent daughters of the Sun, the radiant forms coming from the Gods, I meditate upon you and reach out to you. That is my offering." I am ridiculously, overwhelmingly, embarrassingly pleased with myself for recognizing this.



• I participated in an "Eye of the Tiger" Anusara yoga practice last night; two and a half hours of asana. We started with twenty six sun salutations. It was WONDERFUL. I haven't worked that hard in a long, long time. My only disappointment was that the teacher didn't play the Survivor song at any point in the practice.

There is no mat.

I started writing a post about cookbooks yesterday, but two paragraphs in I decided that it was stupid and I'd probably already made all of the interesting points anyway. Short version: we'd have a lot more quality time for ourselves if we'd get rid of all of our labour saving devices and "helpful" gadgets. But, well, I think everyone more or less knows that already, so I won't go into further detail.

In the intermediate/advanced yoga class I taught on Tuesday night, I incorporated a great deal of pranayam (breathing) instruction. Actually, pretty much all of my planning for the class focused on pranayam. I know there's a school of thought that says advanced yoga practice involves well choreographed vinyasa and complex poses, and there's definitely something to be said for that, but I don't think that that's how I want to teach at this point. There's another school of thought that says that in advanced practice, the more basic practices (like asana) are used as a launching pad for subtler work. The physical practice is used to prepare the body for breath work. Breath work is used to prepare the mind for meditation. And meditation is used to calm the fluctuations of the mind, which is the whole point of the practice. In the most advanced yoga practice, of course, as I've written elsewhere, the mat disappears. But most of us aren't ready for that. We need to keep getting on our mats as a reminder, if nothing else.

Magic 8 ball says...

...this is how I feel today: