works of wanderlust

Tag: philosophy

  • media: nostalgia summer mode

    Two weeks of blur, waiting for professional stuff to happen while July slips away into the heat. We went on a road trip to BC and I loaded up my device with a bunch of movies and books and it turns out I barely had time to read the news, let alone finish a novel. But I squeezed in some down time and stared at a screen when I got tired of the beautiful mountain views.

    The last couple of weeks I watched:

    films: all the matricies

    I was there in 1999. And again a few years later when the sequels hit theatres. Films were still events back then, and trilogies building on universes were rare and precious gems worth queuing up for at the local megaplex. And it’s not like I haven’t gone back and watched any of the Matrix movies in the intervening twenty-five plus years… but it has been a while, and never have I ever sat down and over the course of three days watched all four (yeah, even the 2022 Resurrections instalment.) Until recently. Summer. Vacation mode. Heat wave. Laziness on the couch. Call it whatever, I unplugged from life for the duration of four movies and plugged into the oh-gee mind-bender of philosophical cinema. This isn’t a review, of course. You can read opinions of any or all of them online, and like all online opinions many are shrouded in rage and bias and unrealistic expectations, particularly following the unlikely masterstroke of storytelling-meets-special-effects-meets-brain-melting-concepts that was the original The Matrix. Spoiler alert: what if we were living in a computer simulation? What would that tell us about free will and emotions and personal agency and choosing blissful ignorance over gritty realities? The Wachowskis were telling a story that was as open to interpretation as any piece of art, and I ate it up along with half the modern world fitting a skewered worldview though the lens of a reality that I would now forever question, even just a little bit. I recently heard someone suggest that the reason everyone hated the ending of Lost so much, remember that show?, was that the build up and hype did not align with the final result. I think the same could be said about other shows like Battlestar Galactica, another long run show that was dissected on the fly online and could never have filled the spaces of anticipation and imagination of eager viewers waiting to see the ending. The Matrix fell into the same trap, and even when the four-quel arrived in 2022ish it was met with a kind of collective what-was-that-groan. But The Matrix extended universe had already been scoped by the unbound imaginations of millions of critical viewers and fans leaving a space of expectation so big that no story could ever hope to rival the vague perception of what it should be. That same Lost theorist suggested that a modern “binge watch” of the show held up so much better because there was no anticipatory collapse: that it was just a good story with a reasonably solid (if weird) ending. And having just binge watched the four Matrix movies I think I would suggest the same for those films. Watching them all in a row with no expectations beyond it as a piece of interesting film and art, they are far from perfect, but they are interesting and entertaining and hold up.

    film: cast away

    I saw this flick for the first time in the theatre a few weeks before I moved to Vancouver. (That should put some dates onto my timeline for those of you doing research on the matter.) It is one of those sort of core memories stuck in my head because I had been hanging out with a small group of friends from my summer job of the year before and a few of us met at the theatre and went to see Tom Hanks yelling at a volleyball and a couple of the people were trying to simultaneously wish me well while selfishly suggesting that Vancouver was going to “eat me alive” and that I should just stay here and look for a job locally. I wont say that it made me upset, but those words always kind of haunted me, particularly three years later when (without much regret) we bailed on Vancouver and moved back and I always sort of wonder if those friends were astutely correct about my fortitude or just generally cynics about moving abroad. I can’t help but flashback to that conversation whenever I watch Cast Away so entangled are those two things, which is strange because the movie is a story of resiliency and personal fortitude in the face of overwhelming powerlessness and even creeping hopelessness. Hanks loses everything but anchors himself in the tatters of that hope and survives being stranded on a deserted island for four years only to return hope to learn that most everyone else lost hope about him long before he escaped and was rescued.  There is something parallel there to the journey I have been on personally lately wherein I ejected from the flight of my career and dropped into the wilderness of wherever I’ve been wandering for the last two years. I often feel like despite the seeming agency I imparted myself in pulling the ripcord and jumping that to do so from a burning plane is not so much agency as it is playing a forced move and convincing yourself it was a good choice. Hank’s character made choices to survive and fight against the powerlessness but those things were less choices as they were playing well the poor hand he was dealt and trying not to crack under the pressure when it seemed that all was lost, that he was lost, and when everyone back from where he came had assumed he was gone forever and so they had moved on. Nearly every time you take a run at the wave it is gonna toss you into the reef and mess you up, but you only need to break over that barrier once to get back to civilization.

  • retro post: what i learned on summer vacation 

    retro post: I wrote a blog for over 16 years at this very domain …and some of it is even worth reposting here again. This might be one of those posts.

    Perhaps it’s a little abstract… but then that’s the point.

    Everyone with whom I have had more than five minutes worth of conversation these days wants to know: “What did you enjoy most about Europe?” — and I stumble through the fragmented and chaotic answer that, simply, there was just so much to see and so much diversity that I can’t, honestly, pick one thing that I enjoyed “the most” without discrediting the rest of it. And now, nearly a week after my last bumbling moments through the dutch countryside, I still couldn’t put my finger on one precise moment in time when I said to myself: “Hey, this is THE moment. This is IT. This RIGHT HERE is my vacation at it’s peak.”

    Wouldn’t that just be too simple. 

    Thinking about this problem has led me down an interesting path, however. I think I could see it from afar even when I was racing through the multiple cities and countries, riding in a train or bus or driving a car, eating multiple gourmet meals, drinking a broad selection of beer and wine, retracing steps through cobble-stone streets or even just waking up each morning and pushing away the fog to recall what country I fell asleep in the night before. Perhaps even Karin and Ryan could pick out that moment when traces of the theme appeared literal in snippets of conversations or examples bubbled to the surface of contemplative moments in random locales.

    So, what did I learn on summer vacation? The exact words haven’t exactly ‘gelled’ in my mind yet, but I think — I think — it has something to do with the contrast between REALISM and IMPRESSIONISM — in art, in form, in function, in life. Everywhere. The contrast. The purpose. The deception. The truth. The pursuit. And even, as it were, the consequence — positive and negative — of following those paths. 

    Huh? 

    Though, of course, I can’t speak to the ineffable experiences of my travelling companions, near, close, or far, if I’m referring to the other two or the other fifty. It doesn’t even matter. Everyone gets something completely different from a so-called adventure through the world and I wouldn’t assume to enforce what anyone else got from their own wanderings any more than I would take (with good humour) having my own moments interpreted. But I need to solidify this (in as much as that is possible) so that I can go back to normal life and stop pondering the meta-purposes of vacation and just happily incorporate them into my humble existence.

    Life goes on, they say.

    One of the most literal examples that hangs in my mind is age — and what is REAL age? We saw some (arguably) old buildings. Commonly, buildings built as early as the 12th century (plus or minus countless generations). They were all over the place, with museums, restaurants, shops and stores, internet cafes, Pizza Huts, and storage rooms stuffed into their interiors. Eight hundred year old buildings being used to sell french fries or store folding chairs. But how REAL are those buildings? The bricks and sandstone is replaced every other decade. Some were bombed to rubble in the various wars, and rebuilt exactly as before on the same foundations. Wood rots and is replaced. Halogen lights dangle from medieval architecture. Are those REAL buildings? Or are they just IMPRESSIONS of old, long-since-disassembled structures for we moderns to enjoy?

    Or, consider the example of Prague. I’ve now been to Prague. At least, I think I’ve been to Prague. We saw the city and it’s life brimming from the seams of a tourist haven. We sheltered our visit by prancing through palace, stepping carefully across the Charles Bridge, buying tacky souvenirs and ice cream from abundant shoppes lining the narrow, winding, cobble-stone streets. I wonder: was this REALLY Prague? Or was this an IMPRESSION of Prague: an idealized simulation of what Prague might be if it were just an example of modern tourism: Beer, goulash, and “Czech Me Out” t-shirts in every store window. When the rain came and washed away all the tourists the square was uneven as if something was stewing below trying to gurgle out.

    Karin noted my third example: Language. There was only a single occasion over the course of three, widely-travelled weeks when English was insufficient. We ordered pizza in a small city in Slovakia and the waitress fumbled to communicate with us. We ate only because our fingers were adept at pointing to the menu in the appropriate places. But everywhere else — EVERYWHERE — I could communicate verbally in English to whomever I happened to meet. Some might insist that this is great. Sure. No effort on my part. Why complain? But was that REAL? Was it authentic? Was it something that represented an exact picture of the culture and people in who’s city I was a visitor? Or, what was it? An IMPRESSION? A feeling on the canvas that had been painted there to help me feel comfortable about my travels? An interpretation of Polish or Hungarian culture splashed across a North American theme.

    We discussed the (literal) REALISM versus IMPRESSIONISM with Henk who’s bias leans towards interpreting emotions on canvas. His art is impressions of his inner thoughts and deepest beliefs. He expressed his disappointment at the abundance of REALISM in Canadian art. So many “Grizzly Bears” and “Mountain-Scapes” does not seem to compare with dynamic feeling evoked by interpretable art. I wonder about blogging: this is REALISM. This is life, scripted. This is a photographically concrete image of what happened today. This is a precisely painted Douglas fir standing beside a river with glistening salmon jumping in the currents. REAL. But I want to write more IMPRESSIONISM.

    I took photos of grafitti in Eastern Europe. When I was caught, my travelling companions spying me out of the corner of their eye snapping a digital recreation of some Polish spray paintings, there might have been a bit of a chuckle. But then grafitti is IMPRESSION isn’t it? Loosely? Culture art seeps from the hearts of the people and erupts onto repeating surfaces of granite and marble, sandstone or cobble-stone.

    I rode on a bus for two weeks with a cross section of North American and Oceanic personalities. We had all arrived at a small hotel on the fringe of central Berlin with passports in hand but very little else tying us to our true personalities. Names and birthdates, countries of origin, and anything else we dared to express of ourselves. What happens in Europe, stays in Europe? Maybe. But what is REAL? Who is REAL? Is that guy with the hangover every morning really a tea-totaling moralist? Is the outgoing girl at the back of the bus really just shy and reserved. Does the smart guy with his nose in his book really burn away his days at home playing video games? Or, is the quiet couple near the front of the bus really taking a break from being the outgoing centres of attention back home? Who can say? Did we all just become IMPRESSIONS of who we’d like to be when we get on a bus full of strangers? Or can we even change the REAL?

    And of course there was my camera. Thirteen hundred photographs slipped neatly onto a wafer-thin memory card, glimpses of fragments of cities. Extracting the essence of the life into pixels is what we all happened to do, each of us, toting around cameras and flashing the shutter open for fractions of a second for what? A glimpse of the REAL so we could bring those memories home and relate them to our families and friends who couldn’t travel with us. But those literal images are REALISM subject to IMPRESSIONS of our memories. Nothing more. I called my incessant snapping “photo journalism” wherein scenic shots were bracketed by reference shots, or foot shots, or people shots, or artistic elements to be pasted together later. It was all to refresh my own mind, to flash my own IMPRESSIONS into something concrete so that there might be a glimpse of proof to my memory. For what it is worth those captured moments can never be experienced again. I took those photos because the moment was interpreted as special — irreplaceable — a glimpse of a fraction of a second to be recalled for as long as I can make the image last in my head, on paper, or as data. There is nothing REAL about it.

    But then what’s the point? What DID I learn on summer vacation? We travel about the world, leaving our lives and our things behind (mostly) locked safely in our little homes. We walk out the door, we get on an airplane, and the next thing we know we’re barrelling across Berlin in a train, drinking red wine on the Danube, or frying schnitzel in a camping trailer in a small country village in the middle of the Netherlands. And then it all becomes just a memory. I guess I affirmed to myself both something obvious yet also something that lends to the further interpretation of life: REAL lasts for a fleeting moment, but as humans with minds and imagination we are left to give out IMPRESSIONS to the world. We express, that’s all. I hinted at this earlier, but maybe I’ve been a little hard on myself. I’ve been aiming for the REAL. I’ve been aiming for precise, exact, but fleeting moments when all I can do is provide impressions of it all. And that could be something elusive yet satisfying: art, words, thoughts, everything. Maybe this seems a little dissatisfying for you, I having travelled the world and come back with nothing more than a glimmer of philosophical existentialism. But then again, this is just my impression.

    original published date: Friday, June 9, 2006

  • raising calvin

    I grew up on a steady diet of Calvin & Hobbes. 

    The still-famous cartoon strip by Bill Watterson was a fixture in our local newspaper during the entirety of my teenage existence, one of the sole reasons I read the paper that I delivered door to door, clipping out my favourite strips and then later buying the collections in multiple formats of increasingly crisply bound volumes. You could say it was formative for me, and that would be an understatement by a mile.

    The Kid graduated from high school this week and tho they were not allowed to decorate or bedazzle their gowns, they were given free passes to flare up their mortarboard caps.  She spent a whole evening in the basement and emerged later that night proudly showing off a collage affixed to the top of her cap: it was a collection of Calvin & Hobbes comic strips, arranged and glued to her lid, spattered artfully with colour and sparkles, and ready for a quick stroll across the diploma stage.

    This was not a surprise to anyone who knows her.

    To lay claim to some kind of parenting methodology that led us to this moment, my daughter walking across her graduation threshold literally wearing a comic strip that went out of print more than a decade before she was  born, that would be foolish of me. I mean it’s simple, really. She likes Calvin & Hobbes because (a) it’s a great and timeless cartoon, (b) I had numerous copies in the house, and (c) I read them to her frequently until she could read them on her own and then she read them frequently.

    Then, too, don’t forget that I even drew my own comic strip for a few years and you would not be the least bit surprised to read that one of my major influences for that effort was Calvin & Hobbes.

    That influence, it swirled through the rooms of our house for decades.

    Now, maybe it is that I may have internalized some of the lessons of a comic strips character who I adored because, truth be told, I was nothing like him growing up. Calvin was defiant of authority in a way that I could never muster. Calvin was wise and deep and whip smart with a purpose that I merely aspired towards. Calvin brought everything to a life lived with existential abandon that defied everything I understood about the metaphorical box in which I was raised and out of which I feared to step out. Deep down I knew that I was not Calvin, but that not just maybe, certainly, there was something aspirational in that defiant little character and his life of epic adventure and freedom.

    As we were driving home from the ceremony, I racing to get her back to the house so she could dress for prom, she was holding her cap in her hand and she turns to me and says something like “You know why I put this on my cap, don’t you? I’m basically Calvin, you know that right, Dad? You raised me to turn into Calvin.”

    And what does that even mean? Are you a mischievous troublemaker? Are you a socially misaligned youth? Or are you a creative soul unbound by rules? A philosophical genius wise beyond her years? A dramatic soul unleashed by existential undercurrents? Or maybe a bit of everything all rolled into one?

    Calvin & Hobbes was formative for me because while I was not Calvin, then too I could pretend to be that guy, act the part, read the strips and embody the spirit of this quirky kid, not so much unlike a neurotic rule-following father-figure guy in not but a mask and striped shirt.  But whatever I made of myself, there could be a chance—a risk—an epic possibility that I influenced something else. Did I actually parent my own Calvin into being?

    Formative, indeed. Formative squared. 

  • already not famous

    The one-wayness of fame has got me thinking this past week.

    Now, to be clear, I could all-too-easily frame this in a way that could come across as very sour grapes. I’m not trying to be sour about it, but rather just hold up an observation and say—huh, isn’t that a curious thing that we just sort of take for granted. Almost all of us do. Even me, mostly. Except when I get a thought stuck in my craw like: 

    Fame is unidirectional.

    —and weird and fickle and imbalanced in a million little ways and really a strange artifact of some aging post-democratic late-stage-capitalist hellscaape, if I’m being honest. But for my point today, fame is oddly unidirectional.

    And if you don’t make stuff maybe you don’t even notice.

    But chances are, and here’s the thing, you are almost certainly a person who exists and may be worthy of a certain share of attention for whatever effort it is that you make each day when you wake up and do whatever it is that you do to fill each of your days. Yet, chances are also great that whatever it is that you do—stocking shelves at a grocery store, helping people file their taxes, building kitchen cupboards, delivering hot food to people’s doors, or integrating complex banking software systems—no one is really paying attention.

    On the other hand, certain people—famous people—go for coffee and wear a fashionable dress and there is a societal tidal wave of attention thown upon them. They make something, anything, and we all watch the trailer or throw money at the thing they made or sign up for notifications about it and give it our raw attention even before we know if its worth that all because of fame.

    And like I said, you are sitting there reading that and thinking, well… yeah. That’s fame. That’s just how it works. 

    And I’m sitting here writing and saying that, well sure, I know… but have you ever thought about how incredibly weird and strange that is?

    And yeah, maybe you don’t even care that no one is paying attention to your life. Maybe even that’s an optimal outcome of your actions. No one fucking look at me, you’re thinking. 

    Now. to be clear. I don’t even want to be famous. (That’s me saying that, believe it or not.) I’m not aiming for some kind of widespread name recognition or the attention and adulation of strangers around the world. That whole notion creeps me the hell out and I’m actually a fairly private guy who would crumble under the pressure of fame and too much attention.

    Yet, there is a sweet spot somewhere between “literally no one notices or cares” and raw unflitered Taylor Swift ubiquity. I feel like with the quantity of effort that I’ve made over the years, the raw and unending production of effort that I put in—and here I want to tiptoe very carefully because I don’t want to say I deserve it or even that I’ve earned it, because I probably don’t and haven’t, but—there should be something more than nothing in this fame equation that we all take for granted. It’s just so unidirectional. 

    And to be fair, that’s not even really what got me thinking about this.

    I got to thinking about it because I was thinking about a piece of so-called advice that fluttered across my feed on social media suggesting that blah, blah, blah engagement in building a larger network of people was all about engaging back—and I thought to myself: you know what? The hell it is. Famous people, and here I mean truly famous people, don’t engage back. They are swamped by attention automatically. The rest of us claw for scraps.

    I mean here’s the thing: I watched Pedro Pascal’s dystopic sci fi zombie show but has he ever done me the honor of reading any of my dystopian science fiction? I listened to Rainn Wilson’s podcast and he seems like a great guy and would probably have enjoyed listening to a bit of mine in return. Did they tho?

    Tho even as I write it, and you read it, the whole premise sounds beyond absurd. Of course they haven’t—we’re both thinking it. That’s my point. The whole equation is unidirectional and we just take it all for granted. We don’t even question it, and you are likely shaking your head at the obnoxious notion I’m presenting. Who the fuck does this hoser think he is?!

    Brad, you’re yelling at your screen. These people we adore have worked their whole lives on a craft that has elevated them above the rest of us, they are the faces of industrial complexes of creation that have systematically built empires of high quality content for the masses to consume. It is their very purpose and they have earned our adoration and attention, you say.

    Sure.

    And I’m just asking why we are taking all of that for granted.

    Why haven’t we aspired to a meritocracy, even with the internet. Why haven’t more of us sought out unfamous voices with regularity? Why don’t we have systems that draw attention away even a little bit more strongly from the firehose of ugly fame and let a dribble escape for the rest of us? Or, if when we have made those systems in the past, why do we let them devolve into just another outlet for the already-famous. Arguably, social media could have been that but The Algorithms now decidedly shift attention to those who already have it, bootstrapping the pre-amplified voices into furies of inescapable commericalized, advertizing-laden sound so imbalanced that beyond a lottery of rare chance no one else can ever hope to be heard above it.

    That’s just how it is, you say.

    I know. I get it. I just—don’t.

  • Welcome to the Fediverse

    please note: This is an archive of a post that the author has flagged as containing a site feature or technical update that may no longer be active or in use.

    December 16 of 31 December-ish posts

    I think it’s fair to say that for anyone who has been online this year, 2022 has revealed itself as another parade of madness in the growing poli-cultural mishmash that we call modern society.

    I’ve decided to take a year long break from corporate social media for my forty-sixth year on this planet. Understanding that (a) blogs are social media and (b) I write a blog, it becomes obvious pretty quick to most readers that I’m not taking a break from ALL social, just the big, morally-terrible ones.

    Y’know. Instagram. Twitter. Reddit.

    I was active on all of them before and into most of 2022, but then…

    Describe your 2022 in politics, culture, and the universe?

    This is supposed to be a blog about uncomplicated things, right?

    Last year I wrote on this topic about my massively inconsequential place in the universe and how that shaped most of my purpose-seeking mentality in 2021.

    This year, here I am again ranting about social media.

    Tho, I be ranting because it’s worth being ranty about.

    And the cray-cray for the nay-slay, as my teen daughter would put it, has me thinking more and more about how I can use this space over the next year to focus in on the stuff that brings joy and meaning to my days, and not focus on the absurdity of politics, culture, and the universe.

    To that end, I’ve been dabbling in other ways to connect with people out there in that universe through platforms that are not owned and operated by lunatic billionaires. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what the content I put here is going to look like in 2023.

    I may have started all this to write about running and cooking, but those are foundation stones for a life that has a lot of interesting stories to tell… I think so, anyhow.

    While I should have spent the last ten days or so doing what I promised, which was, y’know, reflective writing and posting here, I’ve actually spent that little bit of free time doing something a bit more promising. I’ve written some software, I’ve built some networks, and I’ve drafted a script for a weekly comic strip that I’ll be launching here in 2023.

    (I even have two weeks off work, starting tonight, to start drawing!)

    I’ve also plugged this blog itself into that great big interconnected not-twitter network called the fediverse, so you should be able to search for @bardo@castironguy.ca on your favourite platform, for example, Mastodon, and you’ll get updates from me right there in your feed.

    Politics and culture might be crazy right now, but I think my newly-remeasured reaction has been to start adding my less-crazy contributions to the mix, to attempt to balance things as much as I can help do that.

    A million rational voices whispering wonders about the amazing universe in which we live might just drown out the thousands screaming madness.