Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me

At last night's SKS meeting, Kenny showed an episode of Millenium, a supernatural/crime TV show from the mid-1990's. The episode is entitled, "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me," and it's been a staple of SKS meetings for the last ten years because it is one of the most extrordinarily philosophic pieces ever to appear on television. If you've never seen it, I would strongly encourage you to do so -- you can rent the Season Two DVDs from most video stores or NetFlix.
It's sort of a Screwtape Letters story -- four demons, disguised as old men, gather at local coffee shop to discuss their techniques for damning souls, and gradually realize that their is at least one person who can see their true essence. Follow the links to read a synopsis, if you can't stand to wait, as other fans have made much better descriptions of the episode than I could.

(Warning: Spoilers follow.)

I could write at length about each one of the demon's stories and it's implications, but I'll stick to what struck me about the stories last night:

• Kierkegaard, among others, have been critical of modern Christian churches for their relative apathy in regards to sin and salvation. The bar for salvation is set remarkably low these days: a simple profession of belief is all that is required to win eternal life, and while virtue is seen as a result of a lifetime's development, salvation is considered a gimme. Such casualness about salvation is in direct contradiction to Jesus' teaching, which stressed that it was a rare thing: "Many are called, but few chosen," (Mathew 20:16) not to mention "Straight is the gate and narrow the way that leadeth to salvation." These stories were the first suggestion I've seen in a long time in the popular culture that saving your soul might require extraordinary means. All the humans discussed by the devils led live dominated by inertia, continuing unvaried in their path until they met their untimely end. It was only those who made a conversion (literally, "to turn around"), who escaped the damnation awaiting those who live ordinary lives.
• This story almost trumps C.S. Lewis' vision of devilry for sophistication, because it has the audacity to actually sympathize with the demons as well as their victims. When Frank Black sees the demon Toby for what he really is, the most cutting, most true thing he can say is, simply: "You must be so lonely." No burning lakes, no hellfire and brimstone is required to punish these beings; their punishment is eternal isolation. The devils try to brush off the comment: "See? He just took you for the grieving boyfriend." After all, humans are the lonely ones. But when Toby repeats it again, "You must be so lonely," all the devils are silent. They all slink off, one by one, into the darkness, trying to forget.
• Most people who come to the SKS would not initially consider themselves to be "spiritual seekers." They usually have to sit through a semester or two before they start to see their life through a spiritual lens. What is it, then, that brings them to the meetings? "They want to know that they are OK, and that they belong," Lauren said. In some ways, you could define the spiritual impulse as an ever-deepening attempt to connect, to be accepted by God and man. This show takes the same position, seeing damnation as isolation, and salvation as communion.
• One of the demons' techniques is that of minor annoyances: he throws newspapers in puddles, gives undeserved parking tickets, verbally abuses coffee shop clerks. I thought it was ingenious to take such things seriously; it doesn't really take that much frustration to make us prone to evil acts ourselves. Most of my own unkindnesses are the direct result of "losing my cool," being overwhelmed by minor adversities just long enough to forget what's really important. I have often devalued disciplines like yoga or transcendental meditation that deified relaxation as a spiritual state, but there is a lot spiritual value in being able to remain calm.

The music of poetry

The Self Knowledge Symposium is developing a track record for filling up Duke Chapel with unlikely events. Ten years ago we packed in a standing-room-only crowd to hear Father Francis Kline play "The Spiritual Bach" on Duke's renowned organ. And tonight, the echoes of that event were felt again, as over 700 people turned out to hear Dr. George Gopan read T.S. Eliot's "The Four Quartets."

How rare and wonderful when all the random factors align to make a perfect event. A string quartet played a Beethoven (Or was it Bach? Jeez, where did I put that program? . . .) piece to begin the evening. That was nice, but only nice . . . until Joanna Childers delivered an introduction that put the music in perfect perspective and connected the music to the poetry. A little "aha!" bubble quietly exploded in the audience's mind, and suddenly everyone was in the right place to listen to a very long, very demanding poem.

And, thankfully, George Gopan delivered the goods. He has been reading the poem aloud, once a month, for several decades. His scholarly understanding of the poem was impeccable and perhaps peerless . . . and made all the better because he was in love with the music of the poem. And you could tell that he was moved, to have an audience of that size. "I would say it's a pleasure to look at all your faces . . . but there are so many of you, going so far back, I can't even see all your faces."

And all that was perfect before we even listened to the poem. I was struck again by how many different lines of the poem had worked their way into the SKS theology and tradition:

A condition of complete simplicity
(costing not less than everything)
...
Humankind cannot bear very much reality
...
Distracted from distraction by distraction
...
Raids on the inarticulate
...
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
...
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
...

Damn, but we've taken a lot out of these poems, over the years. I'm so glad we got the chance to share it, so well, with so many.

And all shall be well

THE FOUR QUARTETS
A reading of T.S. Eliot's spiritual masterpiece poems, with live music
Tuesday, April 17
7:00 pm
Duke Chapel(Duke University campus, Durham)

* * *

"A condition of complete simplicity(costing not less than everything)"
-- from The Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot

* * *

You haven't lived until you've heard The Four Quartets.

In the world of spiritual poetry, T.S. Eliot is right at the top,rubbing elbows with Lao Tzu and Rumi. Not only are his four linked poems beautiful and profound, they are packed with hidden meanings and a lifetime's study of philosophy and religion. No wonder the dude won a Nobel Prize.

Like most great poetry, you need to _hear_ it to fully appreciate its power. Dr. George Gopen, Senior LecturingFellow in the English Department at Duke University,combines both depth of understanding and dramatic energy in his reading. A reception will follow, so youcan hang out and talk poetry afterwards.

If you really want to impress your date with your how cultured and deep you are, you can't go wrong withthis event. Go on, just try saying it: "Would you careto join me at a reading of T.S. Eliot?"

Peace and carrots

I stayed up late last night working on my long-neglected financials so I'll be able to file in time. Quicken fulfills a need for compulsive orderliness, and I couldn't bring myself to stop until I had reconciled the last transaction.

Anyway, I'm running behind today, so I'll just do what I thought I would never do: share a YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0wQnVy5lqE&mode=related&search=

Puppetji is a rare creature: a parody that understands the truth and is still able to make fun of itself.

Catch that Confluence

Occasionally, you meet someone new that you really like, and come to realize that they are friends with a lot of your friends, and you never even realized it. The network of shared likes and dislikes and mutual acquaintences creates an instant friendship that feels fated, even though it should come as no surprise that in a six-degrees world, such clusters of connections would exist.

I’ve had the cultural equivalent of that experience listening to Dan Zanes. With my cultural critic hat on, I should refer to him as “Zanes” for the rest of the post, but it seems almost impossible to call him anything but “Dan,” as he exudes such a friendly approachableness. I first thought of Dan as a niche folk singer, as I first heard him a couple years ago when my wife bought me his recording of Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag. I’m a huge fan of Carl Sandburg’s poetry, and his dedication to preserving folk music was a strong influence that lead me to an appreciation of the whole genre of folk.

That was connection #1. Anyone who likes Carl Sandberg is ok in my book. And when I listened to the album, I discovered a really enlightened, eclectic music collection, almost like the soundtrack of “O Brother Where Art Thou” in its depth and breadth. Many artists, as great as they may be, sound too much like themselves, song after song, so that you can barely get through a whole album without hitting Shuffle. But Dan, tapping into an artery of traditional music without any pretense of old-timey-ness, has an inexhaustible variety.

I thought, “He’s really good, he’s the kinda guy you’d expect to here on Back Porch Music.” And darned if I didn’t start hearing his songs on the WUNC radio show. (Maybe he was there all along I just started to recognize him.) Connection #2. And then one day I was wandering through the cultural desolation that is the toy section in Wal-Mart, and I found Dan Zanes name emblazoned on a CD in the (tiny) kids music bin. Ahh, I thought, he’s just like “They Might Be Giants,” a musical act of genuine talent and originality that has found a niche playing to young people. So I got it for my son’s birthday.

And then I listened to Catch That Train myself, and I had more shocks of recognition. Hey, that’s Natalie Merchant! Hey, the Kronos Quartet! How is it that someone I barely knew is playing with artists that I’ve known and loved for years? And then I check out his bio online as I’m writing this post, and more shocking connections. Suzanne Vega! Aimee Mann! This is spooky. By modern iTunes standards, my exposure to music is tiny, and this guy is working with all my favorites. I had a similar experience when I listened to Sandra Boynton’s Dog Train, another kid’s hit that pulled together name-brand talent.

I can see now a trend, hopefully a good one: music for kids used to be a barren, almost empty landscape dominated by a few Raffis and the occasional Free to Be You and Me collections. But modern artists are discovering that what kids like to listen to is (gasp) just good music. Remove sex and violence and heartbreak and cynicism, and just play good music: that is the new formula.

Phasebook

Nothing makes you feel quite so old and un-hip as new media. As a professional techie who had spent most of my youth working with then-cutting edge technologies – email, desktop publishing, the Web, etc. – I thought I was immune to the normal process of technoscherosis. I never thought there would come a day when I said, “I just don’t understand young people with their (technogadget goes here)s.”

Cellphone? Check.
Smartphone? Check.
iPod? Check.
IM? Check.
Blog? C’mon.

But now I keep running into the world of web-based social networking, where I remain a hopeless dork. When we were distributing publicity for the SKS Prison Sutras event, I was told in no uncertain terms that we needed to get something up on Facebook. Not only had I not thought of that, I did not even entirely understand what that meant.

I have had similar so-square moments when SMS texting was mentioned or used. My free 25 text messages on my cell plan remain unused after the last two years. I think I tried it once, and it didn’t work for some reason, and I never felt compelled to figure out why. Jeez, I sound so much like my grandmother when I say that.

My only comfort (at least, the one that I’m clinging to) is that some of these phenomena are not really technological breakthroughs so much as youth-culture phenomena. An interview in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal with 22-year-old Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed it. The author did an informal survey of Facebook users and found that the primary, and often exclusive, use of Facebook was to keep tabs on prospective romantic partners and their current availability. Phew. It’s not that I’m square, necessarily: it’s just that I’m happily married. (Ok, let’s just assume, for the moment that the two are not inextricably linked.)

Text messaging was similarly dispelled for me once I saw people use it in its most common circumstances. “Oh, now I get it,” I said. “The only people doing lots of texting are stuck in boring classes or boring business meetings that they can’t escape. Or maybe hanging out in bars.” (While laptops are cool, laptop use in bars remains totally uncool.) And again . . . thank goodness I don’t feel the need to use those technologies.

Of course, some saavy adult user of these technologies is still going to slam me for my backwards ways and Luddite prejudices. They’ll tell me about Zaadz, or some other social network that might transcend mating applications. But those networks just don’t seem to have experienced same growth that solidly youth-oriented sites like Facebook or MySpace enjoy. There is only one niche of networking, personal-profile posting sites that has had the same growth, and it is quite honest about its intent: online matchmaking sites. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Brave New

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's futuristic novel about a society that had simultaneously eliminated all suffering and all meaning, has always been high on my recommended reading list. But there were parts of it that I always thought were a little far-fetched. The people of the future had such super-attenuated attention spans that they couldn't begin to tackle a full story; their entertainment consisted of hyper-abridgements, Hamlet in 60 seconds and such. "Ok, he's exaggerating for effect," I thought. "Surely people wouldn't really subsist on minute-long entertainment."

And yet the future is here, and about 500 years ahead of Huxley's timeline. The cover of this month's Wired blares: "Snack Culture: Tasty Bits o' Fun!" They chronicle the inevitable progression of cultural condensation: the rise of abridgements, Cliff's Notes, and most recently, the emergence of YouTube and other one-minute-media. People don't have the patience to sit through a whole hour of TV anymore; they watch one-minute clips on their iPods. Even a ten-minute piece of music is deemed too long, and services now rip them down to about two minutes. Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube is seen as the death-rattle of old media, full-length content vainly struggling against a sea of snippets.

And who am I to scoff? This blog is representative of the same trend. I don't have time to write a novel, so I content myself with 500-word essays instead. Nor is anyone interested in reading more than 500 words at a go. . . mine or anyone else's. I was seduced by the power of instant entertainment last year by Scrabble on a cell phone . . . it's amazing how many hours you can kill five minutes at a time.

The only bright spot that I see, the one place where our society is not following Huxley's script, is the realm of user-generated content. We are not merely soma-doped cows consuming government-mandated entertainment. More people than ever before are creating the content. A five-minute blog reading can take an hour to write, and a five minute video can take days to create. So there's the sliver of hope that the interactive, participatory nature of the new media will engage more brain cells than it kills.

Honey, I Shrunk the Journal

I've been a loyal reader of the Wall Street Journal for the last fifteen years. (I'm still young enough that it boggles my mind to say I've been doing anything for fifteen years.) But I'm not a stuffy old-school businessman who reads stock tables for fun, or who keeps tabs on who is merging with whom. As a (ahem) younger, hipper, more technologically savvy reader, you would think I would be the most flexible when it comes to changes in media.

And yet here is the new, redesigned Wall Street Journal in front of me. Now, I was entirely copacetic when they put a highlights banner above the masthead, and started using color, and even (gasp) put advertising on the front page of the bottom fold. It was still the Journal, it still felt like the Journal, just a more modern, younger, hipper Journal, one that was accommodating to modern business trends without selling out.

But this time they made the Journal physically smaller: it's about an inch and a half narrower. Of all the things they could do, this one is inescapably obvious and difficult to overlook. I heard an NPR story on the change, so I heard all about the rationale for having a smaller paper: saving trees, saving a lot of money, and making better use of the Web. If anything, I breathed a sigh of relief to find that they had moved the stock tables to the Web; those pages and pages of arcane listings just screamed last-century, and after all, when was the last time you looked up a stock price in a newspaper? I agree with all those changes, and it was obviously the right thing to do.

And still . . . the world is out of joint.

Take a look at the really well-made play-money that preschoolers use in their play supermarket cash registers. It might be exactly the right shade of green, and have the same visual texture, to the point where it is unmistakeably supposed to be money. And yet it is always significantly smaller than real money, and that's the queue to your subconscious: "Oh, this is play-money, not real money." Looking at such stuff is always a little jarring, with your brain quietly muttering, "money, not-money, money, not-money, money, not-money". And I swear to God, I look at the new Journal and feel like I picked it up at the preschooler checkout line with my play money. My very own play-Wall-Street-Journal.

I know that's overly harsh. I know that inside of a month I will have forgotten about the difference. But I'm fascinated with how the mind "gestalts" things, picking out essential characteristics. And one of the essential features of a newspaper has always been its size. Until now. But that shows the creativity of the publishers, I suppose, to break out of that mold. I remember the first time I saw the London Financial Times, with its eerie pink color looking exactly like rose quartz, and a similar gestalt feature exploded in my head. So someday, maybe, my kids will be reading the journal and will be amazed to see that the Journal was ever a different size.

It also gives me a clue as to where to look for really creative changes in other venues. What characteristics are a part of the subconscious gestalt, but still not essential to the character of a thing? What changes might we be overlooking, just because it defied our mental categories?

The (not-so-thrilling) conclusion of Buffy

One of the greatest joys in life is turning one of your best friends on to something that you really, really like. I managed to do that a few years ago, when I convinced my friend Kenny to check out Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After years of dedicatedly absorbing the DVDs, he finally came to the end of the series. Here were his comments, and my response.

* * *

Well, we have arrived at the end of Buffy. Still a fair amount of Angel to go...still, it's the end of an era.
I have to say, I found the last episode both puzzling and disappointing.
Let me start out by saying what I was *not* disappointed by. Buffy didn't die. No one really died, I suppose, except Anya and Spike: the original Scooby crew made it out alive. That was pretty cool if only because it was so totally unexpected.
My biggest disappointment is the hardest to articulate: it just wasn't great. When Joss Whedon listed the top ten episodes, the last episode didn't make the list; it probably would not make most people's lists.
I can also say that the idea of turning every potential slayer into a real slayer is problematic in all sorts of ways. First, if it was that easy, why didn't they do it centuries ago? (Here I can imagine Joss Whedon holding up a picture of a ghostly-white Willow and saying "You call that easy?" Well, yeah.) Second, with no Watchers left, who is going to train all these suddenly super-powered girls; do they amount to a new super-race with no guidance and no reason to suppose they won't go all Kahn Noonian Singh on the rest of us, etc? Third, it turned out in the end to be irrelevant. Everything they did--the slayage, the super-weapon, all of it--turned out to be irrelevant.
All that mattered was Angel showing up and saying "Here's a pretty cool amulet, if Spike wears it it will wipe out all of Sunnyvale."
I looked at all the special features on the DVD (which I never do) hoping to find Whedon talking about the last episode, explaining it in more detail, but nothing. Does he have any writings on the subject?
I feel like it needs a whole lot of explanation.
Anyway, just so I don't end on a grumpy note, I can certainly say that it was one of the strongest TV series I have ever, ever, ever watched.
It was powerful and interesting and I'm going to miss it.
-k

* * *

My response:


The only thing that I recall ever hearing Joss say about the last episode is that he liked the idea of empowering lots of young women -- it was a good bookend to how the series began, with the supposedly "helpless young woman"suddenly being the superhero. In terms of the plot arc, it was essential that Buffy no longer be THE Chosen One, just one of many, so she can free from the burden of being the sole saviour of the world. She has a chance at a somewhat normal life now, which seemed to be the only way she could escape the usual Slayer fate of burning out and dying young.
I was slightly troubled by the last-minute, out-of-nowhere conclusion as well. Only slightly, though, because I knew that Spike had to die, and he had earned the right to have a really spectacular hero's death, and burning up in a pillar of fire that wipes out all your enemies is pretty freakin' spectacular. Spike remains my all-time favorite TV character.