Birth Mirror

    When he looked at her, he saw the whole universe.  He saw how the atoms in her body came from the salt of the Earth and the nutrients of its growth.  Every organ had once been part of a blade of grass, a piece of dirt in the soil, or the muscle of an animal.  Before that they'd come from the sun, which had given birth to all the complex elements interacting inside her, like sodium, potassium, and iron.  These in turn were born from the splitting of the fundamental two, hydrogen and helium, that burned so brightly in its core.  Both these elements had come into being prior to a supernova that had created the sun about five billion years ago.  Even before this they'd been part of a vast cloud that had condensed into the galaxy we now call the Milky Way.  They'd done this across the whole universe, back when it had nothing but gas everywhere.  The gas had expanded and cooled after the explosion of the Big Bang, proliferating itself to all corners of the obsidian frontier.  As he looked into the woman's black eyes, he saw the constituents of the first atoms forming in deep space, after they'd been taken apart from the whole during the birth of the universe.  You could say that when he looked at her, he looked at everything else that made up the cosmos, for everything was made of the same material when the universe was born.  She was a birth mirror, a being who contained the same mysterious elements that created life before reproduction existed. 

Bavarian Magic

Magic, that marvel of metamorphosis,
Drifts down the slopes of the Bavarian Alps,
Bringing wonder to the snow-laden forests of pine,
Enriching the village nestled in its valley
With gifts of mystery and mirth.
Children skate atop horizontal mirrors
That reflect an ocean of icebergs
Waltzing westward across the sky.
Their parents watch them with faces
Animated by the frostbitten gifts,
Which had blown between the houses
As they ate strudel, drank steins and danced
In the craze of beer gardens.
Barmaids and lumberjacks jiggle to klezmer,
Serenading the winter solstice
With tambourines that cling, kazoos that ring,
Bagpipes that blare all through the air,
All below trees decorated with ornaments
That glitter like the icicles that would have hung
From them had they not been replaced.
Castles crystalized by the coldness of crags
Shine in silence as the early evening
Welcomes the stars above to the crisp countryside.
The smell of grandma’s homemade cookies
Make the children rush inside their homes,
Where the warmth of a fire wraps them in comfort
Before the evening closes its chilly curtain.
The sun is down, Christmas is coming;
Lights are buried in the mountains,
Where whirlwinds of magic
Illuminate dreams in the darkness.

The Virus

    In times before the billions had perished, exponential functions filled a graph that all rose simultaneously: surface temperature, motor vehicles, CO2 concentration, deforestation, extinctions, ozone depletion, GDP, water use, foreign investments; all growing rapidly beyond our control.  Little did we know that an unknown variable resulted from the benevolence of technology, curing us of disease and lessening our ailments, helping us live longer and making our ability to spread stronger.  However much we denied it, four billion was the critical mass, and once we stepped beyond there was no looking back.  Now, standing in boxcars that take us to the sea, we see piles of bodies rotting in the haze of a junkyard that extends for a thousand miles across the plains.  At first, we thought they were mountains of garbage; just plastic shrapnel from all the gyres that spun out in oceanic currents the size of Texas that had been gathered up by pincers for the postindustrial economy.  Most of the functions that destroyed us flattened out after the purge, returning them to rates more familiar to the authority of nature.  Like a plague we consumed the hosts of every territory we occupied and moved to another place after we’d finished, to do the same thing all over again.  It was no surprise then, that the only way for the Earth to stop us was to give us a taste of our own medicine; to unleash a virus that modified the imbalance created by our vanity to control it. 

Layla's Dream

Layla’s dream paints a starry sunset of music.
Cherry blossoms in her hair, those pink orbs
Extended from the seed of her heart,
Exfoliate on the seashore where she waves her arms
Trying to capture butterflies inside her hands.
Her smile glows like the arc-bottom of the sun
Descending on the horizon out over the ocean,
Where each star makes its appearance
At the strike of a chime, so that all together
They tinkle and twinkle, in unison.
Suddenly the solar smile becomes blocked
By the Earth, showing only its top half,
Transforming it into a frown as night sets in.
She spins her feet around on the sand
Pretending she is a carousel that takes people away,
Its horses vessels of freedom,
Its lights traveling at the speed of laughter. 

Randy's Diamond

 We like to git ourselves in sticky situations too, hawhaw!  Out east, yonder the plains o’ the heartland, we scurried them Blue Ridge Mountains- what the Cherokee natives called Sha-con-age!- minin’ those caves a’ North Carolina diggin’ for treasures where the original gold rush a’ America took place, back even before California got its honors.  You folks might not know it, but that Blue Ridge belt contains all kinds a’ riches only the local folks know about.  Golds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies with good asterism, and mica- Lord knows, tons of mica!- are all up in them foggy mountains, all the way from the Chattahooche to the Shenandoah.  Paintin’s o’ destiny smeared ‘cross the landscape.  You ain’t know nothing about it, aha!  Yep, we climbed up n’ down those caves, all freestyle.  Don’t need no stinkin’ rope in them teeny caves like they do out west.  But listen, you wanna know why we’re really out here?   It ain’t for farmin’; that’s just prep work.  We’re fixin’ up for a real treat, somethin‘ nobody’s supposed ta‘ know about.   When I was in the Great Smokey mines, rumor came ta' me that the largest diamond in the world was hidden away atop Grand Teton, left there by a man with a broken heart who climbed it only to leave it there.  It was after his wife died that he swore, by heaven’s oath on her grave, that he’d never let anyone else touch that diamond, so he had to put it where nobody could find it, as keepsake for his wife.  Not only that, but his wife’d wanted that diamond as close to heaven as possible, which is why the man decided to put it on one of the most unreachable summits in America.  Now, ain’t that romantic?

The Written Word

A single book can change our lives, our dreams, our aspirations.  It can show us things in our imagination that we’d never been capable of seeing.  When we read a book, we are seduced by a world where intangible things have the power to mold who we are and what we believe in.  No single book has the power to change who we are permanently, but they all have the ability to re-shape our ideas and conceptions throughout the course of our lives.  The only requirement is that our minds be open enough to allow their words to cast these spells on us, spells that may only be temporary as we grow older.     

The miracle of reading is that the author takes us on a roller-coaster of thoughts that span the entire realm of the cosmos.  Great chapters are similar to moving speeches: their soliloquies take us on journeys to places we've never been; and, being without any of the interruptions of shared communication, for once allow us to escape from our heads and let the possession of another’s evolve the matrices of our minds.  While the conceptions in our heads may not be identical to the author’s, each individual conception of the same story or idea is like a never-ending cycle of creation.  Each of these conceptions are like little stars on a big black night, glowing with delight among the darkness of despair and ignorance.  They may appear to be the same from a distance, but from up close they are subtly different in ways that define the type of star they are.  Our reason for interpreting a piece of literature (and all art, for that matter) the way we do is largely dependent on the environment we were raised in.  It can also be due to pre-conceptions about what we already know or believe.  Therefore, every star in the universe of a book's pages can be likened to being born out of the interstellar dust that is generated by the minds reading it.   

Reading requires patience, concentration, and a genuine interest in the subject being read about.  When we are spoon-fed what to read, whether by our parents or our teachers, then the words spill off the page, drained by tears of boredom.  We should never be told what to read; we should be allowed to choose for our own pleasure, or else the words won’t stick in our minds and our opinion of literature will be tarnished.  The greatest minds the world has ever produced were minds that explored the written word with ceaseless abandon. 

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

In the Alps of Bavaria there is a place of wonder and wisdom. Its remoteness welcomes those that are ill, both from treatable diseases and psychological malaises brought about from living in industrial civilization. Hans Canstorp is a member of this latter group, and he visits the mountains initially to see his cousin, but finds so much peace and comfort in their solitude that time slows down and swallows him inside their location. 

The Magic Mountain is a meditation on time, elevation, genius, sociology, biology, and metaphysics at the beginning of the 20th century, just before the thunderbolt of World War 1 went crashing down across Europe. It’s the coming-of-age story about a young man caught between the ideologies of two talented debaters: Settembrini, a poster child of the Enlightenment, and Naptha, a fascist Jesuit. Like the lost corridors and unpredictable weather patterns of the chaotic mountains, their discussions dish up a storm of contradictions that rattle our minds with the ambiguity of confusion. But somewhere lingering inside the ongoing war between love and reason, a magical philosophy breaths clarity into the minds of those patient enough to persevere through the novel’s length. The mountains know this philosophy, and it is the destiny of our protagonist to find it. 

Although we must go through long stretches of disinterest and inactivity, we are served several golden nuggets of literature scattered in between them. “Research” is what I believe to be one of the greatest chapters ever written- a meditation on the parallels between biology and the cosmos. “Walpurgis Night” is as seductively memorable as “The City of God” is intellectually stimulating. “Snow” is the most famous of them, an atmospheric skiing adventure that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality. Finally, the book ends with “The Thunderbolt”, an invasion of the senses from the Underworld. 

Fans of plotless literature and challenging structures should enjoy this. If you’re looking for a light read filled with bare-chested warriors, flaming dragons, and cheap romance, then stop what you’re doing and run. 

God Wants You to Evolve

Eons ago, we were nothing but stardust in space.  All our atoms were dispersed among celestial objects that drifted through the universe without any sense of direction or form.  When God created the Earth, He made the conditions right for these stellar remnants to arrange themselves into the building blocks of life.  We were given electricity to move our bodies and consciousness to think for ourselves.  Thenceforth, every modification of His became a stage in His desire for all creations to become greater beings.  It didn’t end with fishes; it didn’t end with birds.  Nor did it end with the dinosaurs, the roaring lion, or the crafty human.  We are only but a link in the chain of His design, the result of a systematic blueprint that changes under the laws of nature and the blemishes of destruction.  By the limits of the natural laws He creates, a wild platter of disorder re-arranges the puzzle that keeps us together.    God wants you to evolve.  He wants you to glorify His image in a being greater than you already are.  He wants you to adjust to your environment and adapt with the shifting sands of eternity.  Nothing is ever preserved in time.  We are like pieces of clay that are constantly being remolded and improved upon from the generations that stood before us. 

Hark, ye bells of the future!  Look to the glory of God, and that is beauty.  All creation is beauty, whether it be in the heavens or upon the Earth.  Look to the sky, that fabled interior of God's mind, and that same malleable expanse can be found in the mind of your own, bursting with the same powers of creation that He cast you with.  The same stories drawn in the heavens can be imitated in the heavens of your own.  You were given this power, and you must do what you can to govern it well.  Make beautiful things and waste not in excess, for the path of excess only leads to the tower of wisdom when you are able to balance the order and the chaos within you. 

When looking at a creation of your own, does it not seem to you that your appreciation of its beauty is an admiration for the wildness that accentuates the symmetry of design?  And doesn't this symmetry, this order, make the untamed details of it all the more pleasing?  Look at an icy mountain, like that of Denali in Alaska, or think about the most beautiful woman you ever laid eyes on.  A single stain on the face of these symmetries can render them unworthy of your praise.  Likewise, the asymmetry of a ship, or the uneven tiles on a marble floor, can spoil even the most well-maintained objects.  Beauty doesn't care how hard you tried to create an excess of something.  Beauty is the perfect balance between order and chaos. 

Ideological Amnesty: The Philosophical Parallels Between Science and Religion

    It’s hard to find a moral person that isn’t bound by dogma.  Nor is it easy to find a rational person that isn’t bound by science.  A moral person shouldn’t need the restrictions of religious thought in order to be courteous to others, and a rational person shouldn’t need the rigidity of academia in order to understand the world.  It’s a shame that most humans seem to need to sacrifice one of the two- love or reason- in order to be complete in the other.  The only groups of humans that seem to accept both hemispheres of being are philosophers and artists.  And yet, many of these people feel more comfortable without being labeled as such- and labeled anything for that matter.  Labels are constricting.  They only apply to men who desire to be a part of an entity that puts them in competition with others.  Men of faith and science are both guilty of inspiring opposition on their respective fronts, and respond to disagreements by calculating the proper cliche preached by their doctrines.  If you truly weren’t an argumentative person and you weren’t a member of any ideology, then you wouldn’t have any labels to associate and defend yourself with.  You would open your heart and mind to all factions of the world, question all information coming to you, and be free of all the associations that divide you from others. 
    Few men of science believe in the intangible implications of love and art.  They have accepted the cynicism of a dog-eat-dog society and can only see what is in front them.  Their inability to value the virtues of faith, whether it comes naturally to them or is simply innate, blinds them from maintaining healthy relationships, and they are unhappy as a result of it.  Likewise, few men of faith believe in the freedom of theoretical thinking and non-traditional practice.  Their narrow thinking has isolated them inside a box that is dominated by their preconceptions and expectations.  All the information that doesn’t comply with their faith is filtered out and ignored, for fear of an Almighty voice castigating them into the pits of Hell, or the mental breakdown they must face when confronting disillusionment.  Both of these routes are detrimental to personal growth.  As spiritual beings, we are invited to taste the fruits of all nations and ideologies, so that we may gather the most wisdom from all sources of life.  If we are to narrow our points of view inside microscopic filters of perspective, then we’ll never reach higher stages of development.   The common ingredient both of these legions of thinkers have is a fear of loneliness.  Men who seek the solace of like-minded individuals, without questioning the logic of religion or the uncertainties of science, do not possess the courage needed to think for themselves.  They need an idea to think for them- an "ology" or an “ism” (including atheism)- so that they can feel like they are a part of a social group, no matter how absurd its tenets are.
    The suffering of those who are fearless enough to embrace their originality has created the greatest artists and inventors the world has ever seen.  At the expense of their social lives, they’ve isolated themselves in order to formulate new paradigms of thought for the world to embrace.  They have sacrificed acceptance for reclusion.  It takes a strong mind to do so, especially if their train of thought is so strange that nobody wants anything to do with them.  Ironically, their originality may eventually attract followers to their ways of thinking- such as disciples or those inspired  by their work- and new social groups may be created out of their resolve to be alone.  Unknowingly, these innovators have attracted billions to their methods and crafts, often posthumously.  Most of them were not religious or scientific, and if we see them as being so today, it was not true during their lifetimes.
    All of the greatest thinkers, artists, and inventors have embraced suffering, not run away from it and hid behind the conventions of dogma and tradition.  Much of that is represented in their work, as a form of escape from the constrictions of thought that they couldn’t tolerate.  Dostoyevsky said that “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.  The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.”  You don’t have to be religious in order to be more pious and possess morals that are superior to even the highest priests.  You don’t have to be a scientist in order to be the most brilliant thinker in a certain field.  The most brilliant thinkers and the most moral of individuals are the ones that broke away from the mold and revolutionized the way we look at the world.  Conversely, the most awful tyrants and repressors are the ones who beat their ideologies into people without regard for the sacredness of life or the freedom of individuality.
    This is why love conquers fear and liberality defeats conservation.  Conservation wants to hold onto the past and hold time at gunpoint, which is against nature and the dimensions that our universe constructed.  Liberality lets us evolve into the timeless beings we were meant to become, and is not afraid of losing things that we cherished so strongly in our past that we are too weak to let go of in the present.  Jesus himself was more liberal than conservative, and it is uncanny that modern Christianity, which pretends to preach all his ideals, hypocritically denies progress and holds onto conservative values.  He knew that evolution really meant a convergence with God, and he is arguably the greatest teacher of morals in the western hemisphere.  The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was not convincing the world that he didn’t exist, but that he convinced those who believed in God to be his true disciples.

Cloud Atlas Revisited

     I saw Cloud Atlas again.  It’s still as powerful now as it was when I first watched it, maybe even more so.  In fact a couple of times while watching it it felt like I was having a religious experience, which is something I’ve never experienced watching a film (although in books and music I have).  In addition to all the connections I made eight months ago I noticed a few I hadn’t seen before. 
 
1.  When Sonmi was in prison she made eye contact with her father (Hugo Weaving) from a past life.  Then he backed away from her as if he had deja-vu.  It was right after he gave her a similar lecture during the “multitude of drops segment” with her husband Adam in timeline one.  It was as if the disinherited daughter was reminding him that she wouldn’t yield to his philosophy or threats even after centuries of being apart.  When I realized that it sent chills down my spine. 
 
2.  The Cloud Atlas Sextet can be heard twice near the beginning of the film.  The first is in the introductory Luisa Rey segment, when a rock interpretation can be heard playing from the balcony.  The second is in the introductory Cavendish section, which is a jazz interpretation and is also being played on a balcony.  You have to listen carefully both times to hear them.  What’s also interesting is that Dermot Hoggins throws a critic off the balcony in his timeline and Luisa Rey wants to throw a guy she interviewed off the balcony in her timeline. 
 
3.  When Robert Frobisher commits suicide, the future Sixsmith asks Sonmi if she believes in the after-life in timeline 5.  It's interesting how it's the future Sixsmith who's the first to believe in Sonmi.  In this segment he seems to be wondering what happened to his long lost love, Robert Frobisher, whom he (presumably) never meets in his future lives because of the way Robert left him.  You can see it in his eyes when Sonmi talks about meeting HaeJoo* in "another world".  It's almost as if he redeems Robert by simply believing in another world for them to exist in, the same way Sonmi does, which in turn changes the course of history after he leaks the interview and propels all her other beliefs.  Robert's own opinion in his letter supports this; "I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith, and you will find me there." 
 
 *HaeJoo is Adam Ewing in a future life, and Sonmi was his wife Tilda in a past life (yes, that red-head really is Doona Bae).  Their reunion is illustrated beautifully here, and when people first see this connection they are often enamored by the power of the film. 
 
4.  Most importantly, I finally gathered up all the influences each story must have had on the others.  In the Frobisher story I noticed that after shooting Ayrs, the bullet from the Luger rolls on the floor in the direction of a torn book that is holding up a corner of the bed.  On the binding, it says The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, which means that it was the second half of the journal Frobisher was trying to find.  This is important because I think Frobisher’s despair was influenced by Adam Ewing’s story.  We are shown that he never read the second half of his journal and therefore must have assumed that Adam Ewing eventually died from the poisoning of Goose.  Before his suicide he’d written a letter to Sixsmith saying, “I feel as hopeless as Adam Ewing, blind to the fact that his friend is poisoning him.”  If he’d read the second half of Adam’s journal, would he have taken a more optimistic outlook on life and not killed himself?  What does this say about the influence of each story on the one following it?  Luisa Rey asked herself, “Why do we keep making the same mistakes over and over?” while reading Frobisher’s letters.  To me that translates into telling herself not to give up the way Frobisher did.  It wasn’t until Cavendish was reading the Luisa Rey Mystery that he got the idea to spend the rest of his life with his long lost love.  As he was reading Luisa's manuscript he got the notion that he’d been here before, in another lifetime ago... Ursula.  Reading his previous wife’s story (Jocasta was Luisa Rey, both played by Halle Berry) must have softened his heart and made him remember his true love.  Also, if it weren’t for Cavendish’s heroics, Yoona wouldn’t have persuaded Sonmi to think about the outside world.  Cavendish's outburst, “I will not be subjected to criminal abuse!”, may have inspired the whole fabricant revolution.  Even with Zachry, the orison of Sonmi revealed to him the truth about his home, which is why he ended up leaving with Meronym.  I guess this whole domino effect is another way of tracing Adam’s single act of kindness that rippled through centuries.  Originally I’d thought that the slave who’d saved him inspired him and his wife to make Sonmi into a martyr centuries later, thus becoming the embodiment of good in Zachry’s soul- a person whose decisions prolonged human life on another planet.  I’m now thinking it’s a combination of both, that both the heroes finding the stories and their subsequent actions- that fate and free will- are what shaped the future stories.  The bottom line is that if you do good things, you might indirectly save the world centuries from now.  That’s what Adam is talking about when he says, “What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?”  Even though he didn’t directly save humanity on Earth, his drop is connected to the one that did, Zachry’s, because his actions centuries ago changed Zachry’s thinking in his timeline.  It means that all the drops in an ocean blend into one another, and all our thoughts are mirrored by actions in the eons coming before us.  In the preface Zachry said, "Wind like this, full of voices... ancestry howlin' at ya, yibberin' stories... old voices all tied up into one."  The stories are all part of a chain reaction in which all of them together round out Zachry's tale.  He must have had mystical powers, since he was able to hear the voice of Old Georgie and had dreams in which he had visions of the other six stories. 
        Now I also understand what Frobisher meant when he said that "the boundary between noise and sound are conventions... all boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended".  It's a metaphorical reference to Adam Ewing's "multitude of drops" quote.  We are born as drops and once we enter the ocean we are boundless.  Therefore we are subject to Oneness, transcendence, and the integration of other drops so that we may break free of all barriers, including prison, truth, social pressure, poison, forbidden love, and death.  "Nay the dead never stay dead.  Open your ears and they never stop a yibberin'", says Zachry.  Like currents in the ocean, we are clouds drifting on an atlas that is as unpredictable as it is orderly.  Free will is one variable and fate is the other.  The direction of the cloud is predetermined but the shape it takes is not, just like a drop in the ocean.  Is that all we are, clouds and drops... dust in the wind?  Free to shape our lives yet bound to the stories of ancestors and our actions in the past?  Sonmi said, "We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness we birth out future."  That seems to be Cloud Atlas' most powerful message, and a profound one it is.  All of the greatest quotes in this film are a part of the same message, which makes all six stories more complete as a whole and not a random mess when separated.