SERIOUS GRAVITY (A SANITY PRIMER)

So many utopias that never come into being - these ideal scenarios with the power of logic behind them....A society operating on visions of order and harmony, shared wealth, distribution of goods and services, civility, morality, respect for the common good - a  world that simply moves on from outworn,  useless, backward practices, from inequity and injustice... the excising of stupidity and irrationality... One assumes: If such a world can exist in principle, on paper, it will exist, it must exist, it will come to be under the right conditions....when the stars and opportunities align...Logically speaking ....because what is to stop it? Why should fear alone impede the advancement of humankind? ....Looking around however - we see not utopias, but the ruins of various attempts... And with such consciousness, a  contrary notion asserts itself, namely that if such a place could truly exist, we would have already seen a successful form of it... something would have gained a foothold...Vol

Growing up out west - we had what was known as the "endless summer" feeling - a moment in the summer when - not Time per se - but hectic, anxious, nerve-wracking time would come to a standstill. Change would still happen of course, things would continue moving, interacting, but at a slower, more predictable pace...the rhythms of summer would take over with sunny days giving way to balmy nights...a certain degree of repetition would lend structure to this seeming "pause" in the action...Clouds still move across the sky, waves still crash against the shore, traffic on the roads, people walking, biking, swimming - but all in a self-contained world over which one had some semblance of control..Long days at the beach, lying in the sun or playing tennis at the community college, watching the heat rise on the pavement, shooting baskets on the outdoor courts, sitting poolside at a neighbor's house, sitting on the lawn at dusk, staying outside on summer nights with no wi

  Historicity...Facticity...Thrownness... Temporality...Geworfenheit...the condition of having been born into a situation, thrown into a particular place and time - having one's Life conditioned by these unique, random, haphazard, non-repeating individual factors...Born into this year - this decade - the 1960s for example...growing up (for the most part) in this other decade (the 1970s) in a particular location, California, the west coast, in a particular milieu, the suburbs, with a stable family, on a quiet street (a former orange and walnut grove), with enough water and rain (or so we thought), on the edge of the desert, east of Los Angeles, a valley surrounded by mountains, a sleepy agricultural town with a college or two, during an uncrowded era of fast-moving freeways, a corner enclave of ranch homes, uphill from a dairy,  a familiar mountain, a horse farm and a dried out river bed, in a neighborhood full of kids on bikes and roller skates, during such and such a time, a postw

 I have spent much of my early life in the suburbs and after a brief stint in the big city - with its noise, crowding and cramped spaces,  I find myself immersed again in this familiar realm - an environment that seems part of my destiny. I've always thoughts of the suburbs as a place meant for children - where children can feel safe and protected - with non-busy streets and clean sidewalks - room to ride one's bike or go door-to-door selling cookies. To consider how many of our early impressions and sensations were spawned by this largely artificial world...How different such a milieu is from other places on earth, war zones, rain forests, Siberian outposts, tiny mountaintop villages or large sprawling mazes of high rise apartments in vertically-inclined mega metropolises...The suburbs are a place where a definite order and routine can be imposed...where regularity is king... lawns get mowed on time, shrubs are trimmed, garbage bins are placed at the curb and returned to their

I used to think that in matters of faith - where "ultimate truths" were concerned - that not-knowing was somehow wrong...Simple admissions of I don't know,   I'm not really sure or I don't have a good answer for that  had the distasteful whiff of agnosticism, resignation, defeatism. It seemed wrong, somehow, to be left in the lurch, with only ignorance as your crutch. We don't know and we can't know. We won't ever know. How dreary is that! Faith offered a set of assurances and clarifications which to a young, impressionable believer left little room for doubting.  If some matter of faith appeared fuzzy or confusing or unexplained - it was mysterious and complicated for good reason, not worth dwelling upon in the short term, certainly not meant to be a stumbling block.  There is a strange passage in the gospel of Matthew - chapter 27, verses 52-53 - to be exact - which talks about the bodies of dead saints coming out of their tombs after Christ's

The divide between faith and doubt in a secular world...There are those persons of faith who feel firmly grounded in their beliefs arising from to some powerful life-altering event, a conversion experience perhaps or a mystical encounter in Nature, a solid upbringing or otherwise from being grounded in a particular tradition, a faith-community - a way of reading scripture...Once your faith has been secured in this manner, it can be hard to grasp how others fail to find faith...Imagine the person who wants to have a religious experience of the kind that William James wrote about, but cannot find anything within his life-history that qualifies as a massively life-altering event. Or consider the student of religion who performs the requisite research hoping to stumble upon an overlooked yet compelling paradigm, who is nevertheless put off by what appear to be obscure or implausible claims, who despite their best effort is simply unable to "think through" these orthodox tenets or

Prologue - > We are fortunate to live in a time, or so it is said, when we of the future no longer feel the burden of gender to such a degree as in previous ages; nowadays there is no pre-established norm or "role" for us to perform or hold onto like a chain about the neck. There was a time, of course, and not so long ago, when men were de facto expected to be  tough strong, resilient, athletic, assertive... and which to judge by the role models in movies and popular culture which we could add on silent, stoical, protective, while no great shock was registered if there should be a woman or more than one who in some degree was known (also through popular culture, movies, novels, songs, etc. in comparison with her male counterparts) as:  soft, demure,  flirtatious, sociable, wise,  and to which one might add on: practical, prescient, intuitive, gregarious, solicitous, nurturing and perhaps multi-tasking,  socially-aware, loyal, resilient .   With regard to the males, unfair

We had made our way down busy Palm Avenue towards the crosswalk. after zigzagging the usual route from busy Bandini Avenue to Tower Road to Rosewood Place. Bret was our wild-man companion - a fifth-grader with a take-no-prisoners approach to life. The local crosswalk, that most mundane of enterprises was soon to become the scene of spontaneous absurdist theater when suddenly out of nowhere came the random yelp: Hey...Hey...What do you want with us lady? -  What do I want with you? said the most predictably normal gray-haired woman by whose ever so brief guidance we measured our daily jaunt to school.  Yeah - where are you taking us? -  There's only one way kid - It's this way... -  You're not really a crossing guard are you? came the cheeky interrogative.  The slightly bemused, limping, beleaguered  woman was dwarfed by her bright yellow uniform as she held up her STOP sign - showing Brett. The other smaller kids walked by us single file in the middle of the road.   Brett w

  The year is 1977...We are traveling back in time to that forlorn, goofy, gritty, disenchanting, disorienting, stable, cuddly, much-maligned decade before the most recent wave of progress had swept across the land, decade of garish neon color and tupperware, decade of energy crises and foreign policy debacles, political scandals and failed assassinations, decade of ethnic pride and racial tension, fading hippie idealism and working class re-alignment, decade of divorce and singles-dating scenes, UFO's, bigfoot sightings, Bermuda Triangle, primal scream therapy,  fondue pots, blue jeans, rock concerts and Lawrence Welk show, decade of urban decay, hard hat riots and west-coast hedonism, youth culture, long hair, food fads, omnipresent television, consciousness raising, protest marches....As part of our deep dive and time travel, we are aware, for starters, of the glaring technological backwardness of this former era - a decade lacking in computer laptops, cell phones, copier machin

  I'm drifting back again to that earlier decade - sort of like inhabiting one of those flying dreams where we scan the clouds hurriedly and travel in some weird, angelic, time-lapse photographic way back to the year 1977 - the fulcrum year of my development - a year of brief hope before malaise and stagflation - standing as a wonderful marker between that "earlier time" of "before" which encompasses the 60's, 50's and 40's leading back to the War itself - and the afterlife of adulthood known to me as the 80's, 90's, 2000's up until the present now ...This decade that I have overvalued in so many ways and built-up in my nostalgic brain, but which for me because of my age and description - stands as the all-important portal...There I am again standing on the open green field, that seemingly infinite vista at Poly High School - playing catch with Ralph - and being overcome by a slew of overwhelming emotions...The fastball is coming at me b

 To believe that we have arrived at some kind of "final wisdom" and therefore have the prerogative of looking back at all prior history (not to mention all prior literature) with some absolute infallible insight is a very dangerous prejudice for the modern mind to hold...We should be constantly humbled by the creeping thought that many of our ethical assumptions are still flawed and our way of looking and evaluated skewed, but perhaps most importantly that our seeming rectitude covers over a multitude of potentially bad motives. We have outlawed every conceivable bad behavior (and improper thought) at least in theory - without having provided the means for people to avoid those behaviors...

 A relentlessly political mind should encounter at least one instance in Life that leaves it confused and sputtering...

  Early on that day an old friend from high school, Tren, came by and we went out for an early lunch...It's all of 9:30 in the morning and I hear myself muttering I need my burrito, I need my fix of international cuisine...a Korean burrito, yes, yes, a burrito with cabbage and rice and that substitute pork they have dipped in their special hot sauce  - Dude, you don't look right is something wrong? We spoke of music and the cost of rent...I believe in food trucks...I like the stability they offer us...And so it went...back and forth like that for the next hour? How is your aunt back in Hong Kong? What about Drake and Mya?...Have you seen them?  And yes my dude and no my dude...until we arrived at the food truck at the edge of the park where privileged, chic, impoverished, well-dressed bohemians pretended to be without permanent residence- and even then I felt a pang of guilt over the name Korean burrito - Would Kim Chi wrap have been the more proper wording...Was I fetishizing

 Literature creates a world with its own internal logic ...Can you simply "arrive" - dear Reader - with the sole purpose of imposing your outside logic on that imaginative world - without at any stage attempting to immerse yourself in a world and a logic that is - in part - unfamiliar to you? The question is to be asked internally - from within - what do the characters hope for or aspire to, amid the parameters defined by their world? What do they seek to do with their limited freedom? How real or illusory are the obstacles they encounter? And are their choices understandable?