(no subject)

[tylik]

1. Other than the Big Bang theory, do you have any cosmological beliefs? (If you disagree with the Big Bang and my assumption is wrong, feel free to correct me.)

I don't particularly believe in the big bang, but I don't disagree with it, either.

I actually try to avoid belief. I don't really think there is much in the universe that profits from my believing in it, or disbelieving in it, for that matter. At one point, when I was about thirteen, I tried to write out my religious principles. It came down to something like this:

• We can not know Truth, not to completion, because truth is bigger than our heads and unknowable. At best we can strive for better approximations of truth.
  
• That having been said, the quest for Truth, or knowledge is still one of the few inherently worthwhile things.
  
• And we all, denizens of the universe, are party of a larger system, and interconnected in ways both subtle and apparent.

This wasn't really meant to be exhaustive, nor have I tried to stick to it, but it still fits me pretty well. I am very interested in lore and practice, but after many years of having a vague sense that I ought to believe in things, I finally sat down and worked out why belief never quite felt right. And while it seemed a little strange at first, eventually I came it accept that this worked well for me. I am personally called to mystical experience, but this doesn't have anything to do with belief, for me. I appreciate spiritual practice and creative works, both on aesthetic grounds (aesthetics is hugely important, and covers a rather greater territory for me than it seems to for most people -- for instance, it gets pretty involved with ethics) and on engineering grounds (I mean this in the internal sense that spirituality offers many techniques for living life better -- the social engineering sides of things generally squick me. I'm rather a spiritual anarchist.)

In this sense, ideas or theories or "knowledge" I might have about the world are mostly evaluated on how useful they are to me, both in a practical sense (do they help me model the behavior of the bits of the world I am in contact with) and in the more person sense of whether they enrich my life and my experience of interacting with the world. I don't see songs and stories as inherently less useful than say, the results of a well designed scientific experiment, just different. They are very different parts of the interface we have created between ourselves and our world.

2. What's the most surreal experience you've ever personally had?

Oh, dear. My experience of the world often tends towards the surreal, though not always in ways that are easily described. I think I will cheat, and mention three in passing.

1. Seeing a riot move at a sprint through some of the narrow winding streets in the old city in Istanbul, being bled on in passing by one of the runners, and then seeing the mass of people run head on into a number of riot police with batons and clear plastic shields... who as far as I could tell were trampled though I was mostly busy trying to find somewhere else to be myself and didn't get a clear view. And then a rush through back streets and vegetable markets that dropped me into a serene walled in smoking garden where a number of old men sat around smoking water pipes... and then emerging into the Hippodrome, to find it sunny and clear with only a bit of trampled grass and paper to give the impression that there had been masses of people through quite recently... but there were street lamps, old fashioned metal streetlamps with hexagonal or octagonal glass faced laternboxs with their metal posts twisted. Not just bent, but almost spiraling, or knotted. (And a man from the shop beneath the hotel told me "Oh, they were just happy to hear that the president was in town.")

2. Dancing late at night, off to the side of things at a festival, a friend sitting on the hillside drumming quietly, and me below in the flat space before the forest. And really liking being away from the fires, and the stillness, and the darkness and the sense of invisability and anonymity... and then turning to see a deer, with marvelous spreading antlers come just past the edge of the forest and stand there, watching.

3. A summer night out on red square, just past dusk so that the western edge of the sky lightened over the Olympics, and a thin sickle of a moon hanging in this glowing dark ultramarine sky, the empty expanse of the red bricks and buildings all around me and warm, moist air on my skin.

3. If you could popularize one obscure art form, what would it be?

I think I would like to revive some of the more neglected arts of cursing, both in terms of vibrant and creative use of profane language (I really wish I had learned how to cuss in Chinese, which seems to have a much richer vocabulary for such things than does English -- my cousin, K, always used Cantonese when she's really angry, as English is weak and spineless, whereas Cantonese is filthy) and in the crafting of subtle and yet potent personal curses. My criteria for the latter would be (though not necessarily limited to) as follows: they must be absolutely and inarguably true, if necessarily unkind, and each one must have an escape clause, an action by which the recipient can take on the curse and transform it... particularly an escape clause which, had the recipient the courage to take it up would be generally and usefully transforming for them.

I don't tend to have much cause to curse people, but if one is going to do it, it should be done right.

4. You can have one of any thing, for free. What one thing do you want?

After sitting on this one for a while, I'm still not getting a good answer. (I'm limiting the scope of the question to things for me personally, and things that more or less exist, as otherwise it just gets silly.)

My first thought was "my body, except not broken, and, y'know, me in it." And that isn't a bad answer, though... well, it's complicated.

My second thought is a letter of acceptance from a particular program that I suspect I will not get into, at least this year... er, and honestly, I'm a little afraid to want it that much. I can be pretty darned goal oriented, and I've found it to be a good policy to be careful about picking my goals.

A tree house on a little plot of land up on the Cascades. In fact, maybe just the land, and the time to build the treehouse myself.

5. What do you think is the most unhelpful habit you've got?

There are potentially rather a lot in the running, but the one I'm noticing right now is a tendency to sell my own desires short out of fear. Not that this would have anything to do with anything else I've written.