Craving Enchantment

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I really want to know, but just can’t figure out, how to write like Katherine May.  My wife and I read her book Wintering and now have added Enchantment.  In many ways I seem to be like May; we may be different shades of neurodivergent, but I understand what she says.  Indeed, at one point in Enchantment she talked me down from a writer’s dilemma that had me worked up for days.  But I can’t write like her.  I have times when my rhetoric for a blog post or two might come close, but I have tried to sustain it for an entire book, so far without success.  My background was perhaps too sullied by academic writing, although May is also an academic, so I may simply be making excuses for lack of talent.

That’s too bad because Enchantment is meant to improve your outlook.  Subtitled Awaking Wonder in an Anxious Age, it consists of life lessons the author learned during the pandemic.  I often, if I allow myself in this constant struggle for my time, experience the sense of wonder May describes.  I enjoy walking in the woods, watching heavenly bodies, staring into a river or pond, and trying to draw lessons from such things.  Lately, however, I find myself rushing through them because I have something else I have to do.  Daily, it’s the 9-2-5, of course.  That schedule overloads my weekends with things that have to be done even if I want to spend time appreciating the enchantment I can find, if I have the time.  Sorry, I’m letting the anxious part take center stage.

This is a wonderful book.  I admire the way that May is able to face down her own struggles with grace and remain open to possibilities.  I found such things much more readily when I was at Nashotah House.  There were moments between classes and there were semester breaks.  We lived in the woods.  By a lake.  There was wonder there, for the taking.  Having a young child to introduce to the wonders of nature definitely helped as well.  Children force you to see through new eyes (it’s not a surprise that May has a young son when writing).  Too quickly we grow up and let capitalism tell us what to do.  It takes so much from us and gives so little.  I’m looking out my window at nature, as I write this.  I know it has enchantment to offer.  I also know that work begins in fifteen minutes.

Think

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Those of us who write books have been victims of theft.  One of the culprits is Meta, owner of Facebook.  The Atlantic recently released a tool that allows authors to check if LibGen, a pirated book site used by Meta and others, has their work in its system.  Considering that I have yet to earn enough on my writing to pay even one month’s rent/mortgage, you get a little touchy about being stolen from by corporate giants.  Three of my books (A Reassessment of Asherah, Weathering the Psalms, and Nightmares with the Bible) are in LibGen’s collection.  To put it plainly, they have been stolen.  Now the first thing I noticed was that my McFarland books weren’t listed (Holy Horror and Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, of course, the latter is not yet published).  I also know that McFarland, unlike many other publishers, proactively lets authors know when they are discussing AI use of their content, and informing us that if deals are made we will be compensated.

I dislike nearly everything about AI, but especially its hubris.  Machines can’t think like biological organisms can and biological organisms that they can teach machines to “think” have another think coming.  Is it mere coincidence that this kind of thing happens at the same time reading the classics, with their pointed lessons about hubris, has declined?  I think not.  The humanities education teaches you something you can’t get at your local tech training school—how to think.  And I mean actually think.  Not parrot what you see on the news or social media, but to use your brain to do the hard work of thinking.  Programmers program, they don’t teach thinking.

Meanwhile, programmers have made theft easy but difficult to prosecute.  Companies like Meta feel entitled to use stolen goods so their programmers can make you think your machine can think.  Think about it!  Have we really become this stupid as a society that we can’t see how all of this is simply the rich using their influence to steal from the poor?  LibGen, and similar sites, flaunt copyright laws because they can.  In general, I think knowledge should be freely shared—there’s never been a paywall for this blog, for instance.  But I also know that when I sit down to write a book, and spend years doing so, I hope to be paid something for doing so.  And I don’t appreciate social media companies that have enough money to buy the moon stealing from me.  There’s a reason my social media use is minimal.  I’d rather think.

Therapy with Books

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I’ve been doing this for years and just found out there’s a name for it.  Bibliotherapy is a treatment method that uses reading to deal with anxiety.  It is closely related to writing therapy, which I also use.  Both have been self-moderated, in my case, and both have been part of my way of coping for decades.  I was actually surprised to learn that these are valid methods of treatment that some therapists use.  I knew about journaling (I suppose blogging counts), but the larger picture was never in focus.  We live in stressful times.  We went through a very stressful four years about, let’s see, eight years ago.  This time I’m intentionally using bibliotherapy.  Reading a book (eyes off the screen, please!) is a way of entering another reality for a while.  Already this year I’ve stepped up my reading, as much as work will allow.  (And now, proofs.)

Writing is therapeutic as well.  Both reading and writing engage your mind.  And can remind you that there are other things to life besides headlines.  I’ve been writing a lot of fiction lately.  That doesn’t mean I’ve been publishing a lot of it—that part’s still very difficult for me—but writers do it because that’s what writers do.  And it makes me feel better.  More balanced.  One of the truly difficult things in my life is when I’m on a roll, particularly with fiction, then I have to stop for work.  The whiplash is almost too much some days.  I realize that you can’t make a living out of pouring your soul into words, unless you’re very lucky.  And even then I suppose it might soon start to feel like work.  Maybe some day I’ll find out, but until then reading and writing will see me through.

I know I’m not alone in this.  There are other people out there who spend as much time as possible between the pages and/or with pen in hand.  There’s nothing like it.  These therapies can change your mood.  Give you hope.  Make you feel complete.  And this can happen whether something you’ve written gets published or not.  I admit to having seen therapists from time to time; I probably should do it more.  None of them, however, have suggested bibliotherapy.  It’s something I stumbled onto myself.  That’s probably no surprise.  I bumble my way through life most of the time.  We all know, I suspect, when our brains are firing properly, what makes us feel better.  The shelves that surround me most of every day certainly know.  And there is a name for it.

Call Me AI

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Okay, so the other day I tried it.  I’ve been resisting, immediately scrolling past the AI suggestions at the top of a Google search.  I don’t want some program pretending it’s human to provide me with information I need.  I had to find an expert on a topic.  It was an obscure topic, but if you’re reading this blog that’ll come as no surprise.  Tired of running into brick walls using other methods, I glanced toward Al.  Al said a certain Joe Doe is an expert on the topic.  I googled him only to learn he’d died over a century ago.  Al doesn’t understand death because it’s something a machine doesn’t experience.  Sure, we say “my car died,” but what we mean is that it ceased to function.  Death is the overlay we humans put on it to understand, succinctly, what happened.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Brains are not computers and computers do not “think” like biological entities do.  We have feelings in our thoughts.  I have been sad when a beloved appliance or vehicle “died.”  I know that for human beings that final terminus is kind of a non-negotiable about existence.  Animals often recognize death and react to it, but we have no way of knowing what they think about it.  Think they do, however.  That’s more than we can say about ones and zeroes.  They can be made to imitate some thought processes.  Some of us, however, won’t even let the grocery store runners choose our food for us.  We want to evaluate the quality ourselves.  And having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I have to wonder if “quality” is something a machine can “understand.”

Wisdom is something we grow into.  It only comes with biological existence, with all its limitations.  It is observation, reflection, evaluation, based on sensory and psychological input.  What psychological “profile” are we giving Al?  Is he neurotypical or neurodivergent?  Is he young or does his back hurt when he stands up too quickly?  Is he healthy or does he daily deal with a long-term disease?  Does he live to travel or would he prefer to stay home?  How cold is “too cold” for him to go outside?  These are things we can process while making breakfast.  Al, meanwhile, is simply gathering data from the internet—that always reliable source—and spewing it back at us after reconstructing it in a non-peer-reviewed way.  And Al can’t be of much help if he doesn’t understand that consulting a dead expert on a current issue is about as pointless as trying to replicate a human mind.

Dangerous Driving

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It reminded me of the time my manager fell down into the basement.  It also makes me think I must be neurodivergent.  Yesterday we were helping my brother in New Jersey get some things in order in his house.  He lives about an hour and a half from us and when the GPS showed us our options to get home we decided to go shunpiking.  I find something atmospheric, and maybe a little haunted, about driving along roads next to a river.  We crossed into Pennsylvania just north of Trenton and followed “River Road” home.  This stretch of road, mostly highway 32, is almost impossibly quaint.  I’d driven sections of it before, but not the whole stretch.  It was a pleasant day but we’d just come off of a period of rain and high winds.  The winds were still up, and have been gusting for about a week now.

After somewhere over an hour on this pleasant drive, we saw a motorcycle stopped in the road.  I slowed way down, unsure of what I was seeing (this starts the neurodivergent part), and I saw a man staggering across the road to lay down on the berm.  I could see branches on the road.  Unsure what to do, I pulled up next to him and offered to call 911 (my wife actually suggested that, since I didn’t know what to do. She’s better in a crisis than me.).  By then the people in the cars behind us had gotten out and one of them indicated they had medical training and that help was on the way.  The man indicated he’d been driving his motorcycle and the branch came down on him, or right in front of him—he was pretty dazed and confused.  Not wanting to throw my own ignorance and ineptitude into the mix, I pulled over, and my wife and I got out of the car and started clearing branches from the road.  Kay and I, and by now others, had pretty much cleared the road and, unsure what to do, and since there were many people attending the man, I drove off.

Image credit: Doug Kerr, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license, some rights reserved, via Flickr

That incident made me very reflective.  When I worked at Ritz Camera in Brookline, Massachusetts, one day my manager didn’t see that the cellar door (inside the store) was open.  We heard a scream and a thud and I ran to the door and pulled it back open.  The door had to be held by a hook and eyelet being joined and while I was trying to do that, one of my coworkers brushed past and down the stairs to help our manager.  Later, my co-worker ribbed me for being more concerned about the door than the person.  I was actually trying to help our manager, but in my mind, going down the stairs only to have the door fall on my head made no sense.  It turned out the manager was fine; a trip to the ER showed nothing seriously wrong with her.  I don’t know about that man by the side of the road.  I was only glad that, as my wife noted, so many people had stopped to help.  I just hope he, like my manager, was okay.

Major Drum

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We don’t get out much.  Live shows can be expensive and these cold nights don’t exactly encourage going out after dark.  Living near a university, even if you can’t officially be part of it, has its benefits, though.  Over the weekend we went to see Yamato: The Drummers of Japan.  Our daughter introduced us to the concept while living in Ithaca, a town that has a college or two, I hear.  These drummer groups create what might be termed a sound bath, that is profoundly musical while featuring mainly percussion.  Now, I can’t keep a beat for too long—I’m one of those guys who overthinks clapping in time—but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate those who can.  The timing of the members of Yamato was incredibly precise, and moving.  At times even funny.  It’s a show I’d definitely recommend.

This particular tour is titled “Hito No Chikara: The Power of Human Strength.”  Now this isn’t advertising their impressively well-toned bodies, but is a celebration of human spirit under fire from AI.  The program notes point out some recurring themes of this blog: to be human is to experience emotion, and to know physical limitations, and to be truly creative.  Would a non-biological “intelligence” think to wrap dead animal skins around hollowed out tree trunks, pound them with sticks and encourage hundreds of others to experience the emotions that accompany such things?  I live in a workaday world that thinks AI is pretty cool.  Humans, on the other hand, can say “I don’t know” and still play drums until late in the night.  We know the joy of movement.  The exhilaration of community.  I think I can see why they titled their show the way they did.

Bowerbirds will create nests that can only be called intentionally artful.  Something in biological existence helps us appreciate what they’re doing and respond in wonder.  Theirs is an innate appreciation for art.  It spans the animal world.  Japan is one of many places I’ve never been.  I’ve never played in any kind of band and you don’t want me setting time for your pacemaker.  If a computer keeps such precise timing we think nothing of it.  It’s part of what humans created them to do.  When a group of people gets together, stretching their muscles and working in perfect synchronicity, we sit up and take notice.  We’ll even pay to watch and hear them do it.  Art, in all its forms, is purely and profoundly biological.  And it is something we know, at our best, to appreciate with our emotions and our minds.

Steve or Stephanie

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I know gender is a construct, and all.  I even put my pronouns (he, him, his) on my work email signature.  I haven’t bothered on my personal email account since so few people email me that the effort seems superfluous.  But I’m wondering if the tech gods, aka AI, understand.  You see, with more and more autosuggests (which really miss the point much of the time), at work the Microsoft Outlook email system is all the time trying to fill things in for me.  Lately Al, which I call Al, has been trying to get me to sign my name with an “@“ so people can “text” me a response.  No.  No, no, no!  I write emails like letters; greeting, body, closing.  People who email like they’re texting sound constantly disgruntled and surly.  Take an extra second and ask “How are you?”  Was that so hard?  But I was talking about gender.

So Al is busy putting words in my fingers and every time I start typing my closing name it autosuggests “Stephanie” before I correct it.  It’s starting to make me a little paranoid.  It does seem that men and women differ biologically, and I identify with the gender assigned to me at birth.  I’m pretty sure Dr. Butter said “It’s a boy,” or something similar all those years ago.  Now I’m not sure if Al is deliberately taunting me or simply going through the alphabet as I type.  Stephanie comes before Stephen (which isn’t my name either) or Steve.  The thing is, I type fairly fast (I won’t say accurately, but fast) and Al has trouble keeping up.  But still Al is autosuggesting Stephanie for me every time.  I’ve been using computers since the 1980s; shouldn’t Al know who I am by now?

Of course, when Al takes over such human things as gender will only get in the way.  I guess we have that to look forward to.  Gender may be something socialized, I realize.  For those of us approaching ancient, we had gender differences drilled into our heads growing up.  I recently saw one of those cutesy novelty signs that resonated with me: “Please be patient with me, I’m from the 1900s.”  I’m not a sexist—I have supported feminism for as long as I can remember.  But I don’t like being called Stephanie.  What if my name was Stefan?  That isn’t autosuggested at all.  I know of others whose names are even earlier, alphabetically.  Maybe Al is overreaching.  Maybe it ought to leave names to humans.  At least for as long as we’re still here.

Motorcycle Trip

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Among my introductory lectures to students was one that covered genre.  I recall saying something along the lines of “when you read something your expectations of genre influence how you understand it.”  Strangely, my own writing sometimes defies easy categorization, but I find it disorienting to read something without an idea of whether it’s fact or fiction or whatever.  I suspect I’m not alone in this.  When my wife suggested we read Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance together, I wanted to know what it was we’d begun reading.  The BISAC code (the category on the back cover of a book) simply said “Philosophy.”  I took almost enough philosophy in college to minor in it, so I had a general idea of what philosophy might look like.  Then I remembered reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and found myself back at the question of genre again.  Was this philosophy, autobiography, or a novel?  All of the above?

Now, I’ve known about this book from college days on.  It was in the college bookstore and I’m pretty sure it was assigned in some classes (not the ones I took).  What threw me was the autobiographical part.  Was this fiction?  The philosophy parts were pretty stout stuff.  And was Phaedrus real or imaginary?  Of course, you start getting some inklings that Phaedrus and the narrator are the same.  And that the latter isn’t a particularly good father.  The edition we read came with a helpful introduction that suggested that Phaedrus was the one with a correct outlook all along.  And an afterword that told how Chris died during a mugging when he was only 22.  There was pathos all over this tale.  Even when we finished I wasn’t quite sure what we read.  It’s sometimes classified as an autobiographical novel or philosophical fiction.

Rejected over 120 times, the book became a national bestseller when one editor took a chance on it.  (That is how publishing works.)  Perhaps the most poignant part of the book is the author.  What’s more, Pirsig wrote the book by getting up and writing at the same time slot that I use, so he could work a regular day after.  And he had been in a psychiatric hospital and had received electroshock therapy for schizophrenia.  Clearly a lot was happening behind the scenes for this most unusual tome.  Among the academic publishing crowd it’s common to hear that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was a book that many bought and never read.  I did find that one a bit rough going too, but I do wonder how many engage with the philosophy in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  There’s heady stuff here to ponder.  And I’m glad for that one editor who thought differently from all his colleagues.

Philosophical Thoughts

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Please don’t read too much into this!  I read a lot of professors who spend their careers trying to understand a previous scholar’s thoughts.  I suspect this happens quite a lot in philosophy, but it fits pretty well in religious studies also.  And I wonder, what of those intellectuals where were grappling with pure ideas?  Did they know they’d become adjectival?  In other words, did Immanuel Kant know that he was Kantian?  Or was he just writing stuff, trying to explain how he understood being in the world?  Now scholars dedicate themselves to understanding Kant.  Or in more recent times, Derrida, Lacan, and Bakhtin, or whoever’s the flavor of the day.  The ones who were too busy being Derrida, Lacan, and Bakhtin to figure out what someone else was saying about things just wrote.

Image credit: Portrait of Immanuel Kant by Johann Gottlieb Becker, 1768, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

I often wonder about how higher education has shifted the way we do scholarship.  It’s not really a place to test out ideas that the world can evaluate, but more a place where specialists can discuss possibilities and what someone else might’ve thought of something.  I guess that’s why I tend to think of my last four books as being non-academic.  I’m not using the tired formula of reacting against what some theorist has said about my subject.  I’m simply observing and drawing inferences.  Maybe it’s because I wasn’t raised in an academic environment.  I remember reading Nietzsche for the first time.  How he didn’t footnote.  How he didn’t argue against what some prominent others had said.  He simply wrote.  And he did so brilliantly.

Perhaps it’s yet another example of having been born early enough.  Tech has made it remarkably easy (for those without families to feed) to become writers.  No agent or editor required.  And things like Book-Tok can make those who publish outside the Big Five famous.  What would Kant have done?  That’s a nice Kantian question.  In fact, the whole reason I began this post was that I’d run across James C. Taylor’s A New Porcine History of Philosophy and Religion on my shelves.  Just seeing it reminded me of the Kantian pig refusing to lie to an axe-wielding maniac.  That got me to thinking of Kant and what it must’ve been like to see him being Kantian.  I’m no expert.  I took a lot of courses in philosophy and religion back in the day, but I have a book about philosophical/religious pigs on my shelf.  Somehow I suspect Kant wouldn’t have appreciated his page in this book, even though it gave me philosophical thoughts to start the day.

Shocking Story

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Much of life, it seems, we got right in childhood.  We “grow up” only to learn that others are always right about any multitude of things.  Then you reach an age when you realize, “I was right the first time.”  All of which is to say I’ve been thinking about my childhood.  It has some commonalities with horror writers who are well known, but even us obscure, private intellectuals experience similar things.  I was a middle child of three for about a decade.  My father was of the absentee variety and my mother, like most women, had greater coping skills than she realized.  But the fact is, with three kids there’s no way to keep an eye on them all at the same time.  I always felt my big brother got the privileges first and they were sometimes forgotten when it was my turn.  And my little brother got special attention for being youngest.  I developed that middle child mental map.

One day I was playing with the cheap microscope my mother had bought for us.  As kids, one of my fantasies was that I’d grow up to be a scientist.  Probably because of the Professor on Gilligan’s Island.  In any case, this microscope had a “reflection mirror” that was made of authentic plastic coated with something somewhat shiny and slightly metallic.  It illuminated nothing even in the strongest sunlight.  There was also one of those night-light bulb attachments you could use to provide weak, artificial light.  I plugged it in and tried to see something enlarged (I don’t recall what).  All you ever really saw through the eyepiece was your own eyelashes backlit by a yellowish circle of night light.  I went to unplug the bulb but accidentally grabbed the metal prongs.  I felt my body jerking and couldn’t control my hand to let go.  It probably lasted only a second, but felt like eternity, before I forced my fingers open and pulled away.  I don’t recall ever telling my mom about it, but I probably did.

That moment, one of the many scary parts of my childhood, comes back to me now and again.  It was a potentially fatal situation, which is pretty heady for a seven- or eight-year-old.  I knew that even as it was happening.  What stands out to me about it was that I was all alone when it occurred.  The childhood lesson I learned, to which I’d had introduced many times before, is that life is scary.  I came a long way in the next half-century to overcoming my fears.  But they still lurk.  And I realize that I have quite a bit in common with horror writers who’ve been better able to make use of their childhood fears.  It’s worth thinking about.

Hungry Eyes

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They’re watching.  All the time.  I may be a quasi-paranoid neo-Luddite, but I have proof!  Who’s the “they”?  Technology nameless here forevermore.  So my wife and I attend Tibetan singing bowls once a month when we can.  It’s the night I get to stay up late even though it’s a “school night” and get bathed in sound.  Our facilitator is a kundalini yoga instructor.  To those of you with experience, you know what that means.  At the end of each session we sing the “Longtime Sun” song.  Each and every month the next morning I groggily look it up.  I know it’s a recent song (hey, I’m in my sixties) but I can never remember by whom.  So for the record it was written by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band and it’s part of a piece called “A Very Cellular Song” on the 1968 album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.  (Now I remember!)  Okay, so I’ve got that out of my system. (I must add that this is disputed, with some claiming it’s an old Irish blessing. But note, AI only complicates the issue because it doesn’t do actual research.)

Incredible String Band: Image credit—Bert Verhoeff / Anefo, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, via Wikimedia Commons

So how’s that proof?  Well, there’s an unconventional website I check daily.  Are you surprised?  Really?  To get headlines I have to reload it daily and the ads sometimes refresh.  I checked this site a mere five minutes after searching “Longtime Sun” for maybe the fifth time and the ads in the refreshed page were for singing bowls.  Just five minutes earlier I’d been searching a hippie tune and already they were preparing ads for me.  You see, “Longtime Sun” is a standard of many (I gather from the interwebs) kundalini yoga classes.  So much so that it’s commonly said that this is a traditional Tibetan song.  Well, I suppose to call it “Very Cellular,” or even “Hangman’s Daughter,” might harsh the experience a bit.

Kundalini yoga is very esoteric stuff if you read a little more deeply.  For me such reading is an occupational hazard, so I’ve read enough to know that many respectable people might be a bit shy upon hearing the details.  That’s not to say that it’s ineffectual on the level of singing bowls.  I have great respect for esotericism, although Hinduism isn’t in my background.  But if “they” know what kundalini teaches, what kinds of ads might begin to show up on the websites I visit?  What’s truly amazing is that a web search for a specific song brought up an ad for something that would be puzzling, were a reader innocently wanting to find out about “A Very Cellular Song.”  For academic purposes, for instance.  Of course, they know, you can merch anything.  You can trust the internet only so far. And they are watching.

Being Somebody

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I am deeply honored, and a little puzzled, to have been recently selected to appear in Marquis Who’s Who.  It came out of nowhere. (Actually, LinkedIn.) As far as I can determine, inductees are chosen for having an impact.  In my case that means having stuck with it for so long—about 15 years of being a professor, 15 years of being an editor, and 15 years as a blogger (with some overlaps).  I’ve not seen the bio that will appear, but I suspect it will say little of my fiction writing, but it may mention the nonfiction books I’ve had published.  From my perspective—and I told the interviewer this—my life has been a long series of struggles and not giving up.  When you’re raised in difficult circumstances the temptation to give up is all around.  But I would be disingenuous if I didn’t point out that my siblings also pushed through as well, and I’m proud of who they’ve become. Three of them are over sixty.  Maybe Who’s Who should be a family thing.

All of us depend on those around us.  Although I tend to work alone—my blog, my books, most of my YouTube videos, these things I do largely by myself—I have the support of my family, both birth and marriage branches.  I have friends, the vast majority of them remote and seldom seen.  They support me in quieter ways and if you’re one of them, you know who you are.  Nashotah House, it is true, discarded me like a used diaper.  They also, however, gave me my professional start.  I was also tossed aside by the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Gorgias Press, Rutgers University, and Routledge, all in their own ways and for their own reasons.  I would not be who I am, however, were it not for all of them.

I don’t mean for this post to sound like I’ve just received an Emmy or anything, but the situation has made me quite reflective. And humbled.  I work hard, and I have worked and struggled for many decades now.  I’ve received very few awards along the way, so this is like a bolt from the blue.  I doubt it will make any difference in my day-to-day existence.  I still work 9-2-5, struggle to meet unexpected expenses, and write.  Always write.  But being chosen is a rare feeling for me.  I suspect that’s true for most people who are, like me, just trying to get by with what they’ve got. We get by.  We face four rough years ahead, but we’ll get through them, because we’re all in this together.  Everybody’s somebody who deserves the notice of others.

Eating Conscience

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Elections notwithstanding, people—at least many of them—are becoming more accepting of those of us who are different.  Or so it seems on the ground, in some places.  A couple of weekends ago we attended the s’MAC DOWN in Bethlehem.  In case you’re not from the Valley, s’MAC DOWN is an event where hundreds gather to compare vegan macaroni and cheese prepared by area restaurants.  I don’t think that when I was younger—and vegan could’ve been considered a protected category—that there would’ve been a healthy line to get into such an event.  But there was just a couple weeks back.  Even after those who paid extra had been already allowed in and had been given a complementary glass of wine.  It helps, as my family reminded me, that mac and cheese is something people tend to like in general.  Being a vegan myself, I do miss cheese the most but vegan alternatives are getting better all the time.

People are slowly becoming aware that industrial farming of animals simply isn’t sustainable for our environment.  It’s one of the largest pollution-generating capitalistic practices.  It contributes to global warming as well as deforestation.  And how many e coli outbreaks and animal diseases leaping to humans will it take until we realize we’re going about this all wrong?  I became a vegan because it’s very clear that animals suffer as they’re being “processed.”  I don’t want to be part of that.  I understand that others differ in their opinions, which is one of the reasons I don’t write about this often.  But attending events like this can be an eye-opening experience.

It’s safe to say that if eaters didn’t know, they wouldn’t be able to tell that this food was vegan.  Things have come a long way on that front.  Cheese and milk are fairly easy to substitute.  (As is meat, it turns out.)  Butter goes without saying because people warmed up to margarine decades ago and some margarine makers are now putting “vegan” on their packaging.  I’ve been vegan going on a decade now.  There are still places you can’t eat without violating your principles, but events like the s’MAC DOWN show that even non-vegan restaurants are willing to give it a try.  And by and large they do it well.  Of the nine samples we had (in compostable cups with compostable “plastic ware”) there was only one I really didn’t care for.  A couple would’ve been very difficult to pin down as vegan at all.  And then there was the fact that hundreds of people had paid to give this a try, and not all of them were young folks.  It’s good to feel accepted, even when eating by my conscience.

Paranormal Religion

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I remember well what it was like to be an evangelical.  Measuring everything by what I thought the Bible said, fearing those things that seemed to come from outside.  Being very concerned with salvation and its opposite.  At the same time, I was fascinated by the paranormal.  As I child I was teased for these interests and subsequently buried them.  Then I had a slow, protracted, and continuing waking from dogmatic slumber.  So it is natural that I would want to read R. Alan Streett’s Exploring the Paranormal: Miracles, Magic, and the Mysterious.  I didn’t know how he would approach the subject, and I didn’t know where on the evangelical spectrum he fell.  Still, I’m always interested to see how others handle what we all know—strange stuff happens and there is no real explanation for it.  Scientific method may one day be able to address some of it, but at the moment it generally falls outside the bounds.

Streett’s book is somewhat autobiographical, from his non-religious childhood, believing in parapsychology, through seminary and having an evangelical awakening, to the point that he stopped supposing such things were demonic, and on to where he stands at the moment—thinking that most such things can be explained by brain science and alternative states of consciousness.  There are a number of interesting situations and concepts described in this book; I learned quite a bit when he discussed different brain states.  I understand his theological rejection of potential realities behind the phenomena he discusses (mostly mediumship, but also reincarnation and faith healing) but don’t always agree with the conclusions.  There is much in the world that theology can’t explain.

Something that is perhaps overt between the covers, is that the paranormal is something that happens to evangelical, liberal, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, and none alike.  What differs is the interpretation, based on various faith traditions and their tolerance for that which is outside.  Evangelicalism is a worldview, perhaps more so than it is a theological position.  Non-divine miracles, or whatever you want to call paranormal occurrences, don’t fit comfortably into that worldview.  Other interpreters, also raised in Christian traditions (Catholicism, for example, is quite open to mystical happenings that can fall into the paranormal category), might approach the question in a different way.  Dialogue is important, however, and trying to make sense of this world we live in, in my humble opinion, has to reach outside the reductionistic view that brains alone account for human experience.  Streett’s account offers a reasonable perspective on the issue from an evangelical outlook.

Consciousness Conscience

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Not so long ago—remember, I read old books—living to 60 was considered a full life.  I’ve passed that and while I’m in no hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil, I often think of how improved medical practice has prolonged many lives.  This is a good thing, but it does make death a more difficult fact to deal with.  If there is any good that came from my Fundamentalist upbringing, it was that it taught me early on to think about death with some frequency.  I’m not a particularly morbid person, but since we all have to face this, avoidance seems to lead to grief, shock, and acute mental pain.  I tend to consider watching horror movies a spiritual practice.  Little reminders, in case I forget to consider my own mortality today.

Our faith in science is a little bit misplaced.  Sure, it helps enormous numbers of people live longer, healthier lives.  But it may also detract from the necessity of attending to our spiritual lives.  I don’t care if you call it consciousness, your soul, psyche, or mind, but we have a life we’re accountable to, and it’s not all physical.  Since consciousness feels neutral enough, let’s go with that.  We don’t know what happens to our consciousness after death.  There are plenty of theories and ideas about it, but no certain knowledge.  There may be faith, and there may even be some evidence, but it is always disputed.  It does seem to me that facing death squarely on may help take care of at least some of the anxiety.  Fear of the unknown is probably the greatest fear our species possesses, so pondering it may take the edge off a bit.

Some people claim to remember past lives.  Sometimes I wonder if they might be tapping into the great unknown: consciousness.  Perhaps consciousness survives without a physical body.  Perhaps it’s large—expansive—and encompasses far more than we can imagine.  Maybe some people can access part of that consciousness that includes the past lives of others.  We have no way of knowing, but it seems worth thinking about on this All Souls Day.  Of course, I have the advantage of having lived what used to be considered a full life.  In it I have set aside at least a little time each day to consider what happens after this.  Do I have a definitive answer?  No.  I do have faith and I do have beliefs.  And I’m always reflective on All Souls Day.

Frans Hals, Young Man holding a Skull (Vanitas), public domain via Wikimedia Commons