Week 11: Dust

The view from Henrich’s repair shop window is less than spectacular. Thick grime filters the passing headlights, and the stoplight’s carnival colours scatter and fade across rust, asphalt, and peeling paint. Dust cakes in thick sediment on the windowsills, disturbed only by flies. Henrich considers the creaky building and wonders when someone had cared enough to wipe up the dust.

From time to time, Henrich shakes his head and curses his poor judgement. Once, he had the opportunity to own this crumbling, dying building. He had been its sole tenant for some twenty years. Barred only by his own apprehension and pride, he watched the ownership change hands. Then he watched his earnings flow to the account of his absent landlord who never bothered to fix the drafts or replace the cracking windowpanes.

The dust covers everything. Old TVs and radios gather it like magnets attracting iron filings. Henrich knows that the lingering static charge in his pile of obsolete implements is a flame to tiny moths of grit and dirt and fine particulates. But he doesn’t bother to clean it up. An exercise in futility, he reminds himself. His workbench is clean, and his preferred tools are easy to discern – they aren’t filthy like the others.

Time is the undoing of many things. Dust gathers and seasons change. Things rust. The omnipresent acid of life-giving oxygen chews on machines like a scavenger picking at carrion. Gears fail and joints break. The spark fades. The energy dies out. Time has carried on for too long inside the walls of this building.

But time is a secondary curse in Henrich’s shop. The first is his pride. Pride is the dust. When the building sold, he resolved to do nothing further to extend its life. Perhaps he was cursing himself with a similar fate. As his surroundings decay, his fingers grow unsteady and his fine-detail work is shaky. He denies or ignores (which is worse?) that his arthritic fingers foreshadow the end of his career. The dust of age in his ligaments and tendons hardens.

Pride was taught as a virtue in his family. Henrich’s father was an enlisted man before the loss of sight in one eye forced his early retirement. An immensely proud and stubborn man, he refused to wear an eye-patch and spent his adult life terrifying small children with his scars. His sight was broken, and the whole world was scarred in his view.

Memories of his father holding a stopwatch as he raced around a dirt track creep into Henrich’s thoughts. He loathed those days. His father watched as he ran and lifted and pushed-up and sat-up and chinned-up and fell down into the dust of the empty lot every Sunday morning. His weekly physical, carefully documented. His father was determined to make a man out of him. Henrich was likewise determined to prove that such physical tasks were not the only measure of manhood. But not so determined that he would ever say so in front of his father.

Henrich had never been especially strong. His slight frame came from his mother – a petite but fierce woman. He did not inherit her ferocity. He was far more resigned to what he believed to be his fate. She did not accept such limitations and was soon rid of Henrich and his father, and their pride. Henrich’s physical weakness disappointed his father. It was only pride, and his need to appease his father, that extracted him from his books and his gadgets and forced him out to the field each week.

His father died of a heart attack while timing one of his rope-climbs. Henrich had just graduated from high school. The first round of acceptance letters from the country’s technical colleges and schools of engineering arrived the next day. Most of them he kept. They remain, unopened, in a small filing cabinet in the corner of his shop. A dense layer of grey and brown conceals the once black drawers and handles. Once there was a shine, but now everything is dull.

Henrich used his small inheritance to buy tools and supplies. These were meant to last until some imagined future in which his reliance on a few small contracts and the occasional passer-by with a broken appliance no longer meant the difference between eating and going hungry. He imagines such a future, but never realizes it.

Perhaps it was pride, he considers, that kept him from accepting the charity and well-intentioned offers from people who knew him and his father. Perhaps it is echoes of the same sin that keep him at his workbench until the small hours of the morning, long after the dust settles and the lights fade.

An outside observer might see a life spent well below its threshold of potential. They might see a life that is fading in dim quarters like an inmate sentenced to die at twilight. But they might only see the dust. Perhaps they would stop outside of the window, peek through, and try to imagine which came first – the dust, or the man?

For a brief moment, Henrich closes his eyes and leans back from his work. He replaces his tools in their cradles and breathes deeply, inhaling mostly impurities. Heat from his soldering iron disturbs the air. A small plume of smoke emits from the tip, acrid and harsh, though less so than Henrich’s thoughts. “I suppose,” he thinks to himself, “that I should have left this place some time ago.” He pauses for a moment to consider the dust, and the ashes (from whence he came), then returns to his task.

Week 10: Minesweeping the ideological landscape

“The most important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”  - Charles DuBois


The world is full of false dichotomies.  The right fights the left; the religious argue with the atheists; the streetwise abhor the academics; the pro-life and pro-choice camps are perpetually at war.  When sensitive political and social issues arise,  representatives of the most extreme views on the spectrum are given the most airtime and column space.  It is easy to be drawn in by impassioned, divisive arguments and their emotional attributes, especially if they seem to reflect - at least in part - one’s own views.

Despite this, I feel that most hard-liners who represent right vs. left type arguments have a fatal flaw; they tend to present important issues as having two clear camps on polar ends of a spectrum, with no room for middleground.  Consider the classic line “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.”  This extreme view suggests a dichotomy that does not exist in most cases.  Those who support this view are encouraging alienating behaviour and perpetuating the damaging ideology that we all ought to be aligned with a particular camp, perpetually at war with its ideological enemies.

These types of arguments are obvious in mass media where the big issues of the day are debated.  I think that they also tend to filter down into the day-to-day lives of media spectators where they are pervasive, but perhaps less obvious, since we are unlikely to be wearing name badges and team colours.  It is therefore simpler to repeat the party line and to represent it as one’s own view without necessarily being identified as an official representative of any particular camp.

I believe that there is a way to navigate the path between extremes of opinion, even in the most important ethical and political debates.  It does not require soft-pedalling or indecisiveness, nor does it demand that passion for important issues be restrained.  I believe that the key is to change the language in our debates from exclusive to inclusive, and thus to allow for the Other to become familiar.

Inclusiveness anticipates the diversity that exists within every group, even if they all espouse similar ideals.  For example, every member of the Conservative Party of Canada - an organization with which I have many fundamental disagreements - arrived at their position within that party by a unique route and with unique intentions.  Their willingness to toe the party line notwithstanding, I have something valuable to learn from anyone who is willing to dedicate their life to representing the democratic needs of their community.

Likewise, I have never chosen to affiliate myself with a religion.  I dislike the enforcement of dogmatic principles, and I have no desire to unify and codify my beliefs to align with large groups of people.  Once again, though, it is difficult not to be inspired by the passion of those who are dedicated to a higher cause with honesty, humility and love for their affiliates, even if I find their reasoning to be flawed.  It inspires me to dig deeper for new paths towards the truth, and for new ways to achieve a greater consciousness of the universe.

Everybody wants to be supported in their beliefs, and I certainly include myself in that group.  But alliances do not have to come at the expense of others, and the rivalry that opposing viewpoints tends to create does not have to be rendered with such extremity and hostility.  When we make an Other out of an individual with an opposing idea, we are engaging in a violent act.  

Alienation strips the Other of their humanity, and with that goes the value of their voice and their position.  Thus it becomes a game of shelling one’s opponent with long-range artillery, aiming at the easiest targets with the intent of doing the most damage with the fewest shots.  The person simply becomes a vessel for an idea, which can be treated as ugly, worthless and simple.  Soon the vessel will take on similar characteristics, and become indistinguishable from the argument.

Inclusiveness can break a false dichotomy, and it can happen without driving the passion and eagerness from debate.  It is important to be passionate, and passion injects fun and excitement into life.  It also tends to drive people to learn more about their chosen position, as they will often encounter people who will challenge them.  I am not suggesting that we need to take all of the spectacle out of politics, religion and the media - it’s all part of the game, and there can be a great deal of enjoyment in it from all participants, actors and spectators.

I think that there are enough people out there already filling the role of angry leftist/rightist/whateverist.  There is no need for you or I to come to their rescue in the public sphere.  The figure who makes an enemy of their ideological opposite appeals to our base and emotional leanings, but is largely damaging to community as they identify and perpetuate false dichotomies in the pubic discourse of important issues.  There is no need for any of us to war with our neighbours, or to decamp into polarized groups over our chosen paths in life.  I think that a useful, general tactic is to look at the least affected ideals espoused by two polar opposite representatives, and to attempt to internalize the value of each of them, rather than discarding one system outright.

There is no right answer to many questions.  I think that if there was an innate truth to any sort of system, political or otherwise, that innateness would be revealed through the system itself.  There would be no need to force it on people; there would be no need for debate.  The quest to explore the opposing forces of life’s fundamental questions is unending, as is the quest to integrate their complexities into a cohesive pattern of thought and action.  With such a challenging task, why devote energy to creating enemies when you could be creating new worlds instead?

Word count: 1,023

Week 9: Thinking big

We all have a universe in our own minds.  Our brains are amazing.  A human neural net contains some 100 trillion connections of neurons and synapses.  There’s nothing to compare it to in terms of scale.  It seems exquisitely ironic that we lack the capacity to realize the immensity of that which allows us the capacity to realize.  That unfathomable network is the unique combination that makes us, and that makes our understanding of reality - our own universe.

We all make our own universe.  The way that we interpret the world and how it came to be is defined by parameters that we create in our own minds.  A combination of heredity, evolutionary history and life experience maps out the network.  Ideas and interactions make new neural connections, and repetition and reinforcement of experiences strengthens the pathways and solidifies those aspects of our thinking.  When we reach adulthood, most of our neural net is mapped.  The rules of our mental universe have been set in place.  How we see and define the world and the rules that we teach ourselves to explain what we see are a lot like the laws of physics for our private universes.

I look at the world through a lens of numbers.  I see mathematics and equations everywhere.  The strong nuclear force in the physics of my private universe - the glue that holds the paradigm of my reality together - is made up of numbers, logical sequences, graphs, patterns and probabilities.  It’s how I make sense of the immensity of this experience.  I like to read about technology, cosmology, and other interpretations that reinforce my viewpoint.  It’s the type of reasoning that “speaks” to me and aligns with my understanding of reality.

When we make our universe and define the rules that give it a structure, we’re forced to evaluate the veracity of many viewpoints.  We are all confronted with claims of “The Truth” of very specific paths within science, religion and politics.  When we choose a path and internalize it, we begin to access those neural pathways over and over again.  We seed those ideas deep in our consciousness and in our sub-conscious minds.  

We have access to a powerful tool of logic and reasoning - our frontal lobe.  But when we’re confronted by ideas that challenge the private physics of our mental universe, we’re flooded with emotion as the deep-seeded feelings and sentiments that we attach to the guiding principles of our lives are accessed by more primitive parts of our thinking.  Before we activate our frontal lobe, we’re already responding to the world on an instinctive, emotional level based on the rules that we’ve defined in our neural net to explain the universe that we see.

Consider the laws of physics in your universe.  How did you define the rules?  It’s extremely difficult to alter those powerful, heavily reinforced neural networks once they’ve been established and strengthened.  We are all guilty of dismissing ideas - even thorough, scholarly research - when they do not conform to our rules.  Perhaps it’s an instinctive need for self-preservation.  We all need to feel that our universe is real, and an affront to our conception of reality is an attack on our whole universe.  No wonder that our brains are designed to preserve the comforting rules that give our lives structure and allow us to make sense of our surroundings.

It’s comforting to believe in what’s familiar.  When I make my day, I see familiar things, read familiar books, and seek out familiar entertainment that tends to reinforce the rules that I’ve already established and that seeks also to discard challenges to those rules.  Finding validity in the ideas that I hold to be the foundation of the world is part of everyday life.  

Our vast and unique brains tell us how the world is unfolding before our eyes.  The neural net defines the pathways of our reasoning and understanding in a completely unique fashion inside the brain of every individual.  Seven billion humans on earth, each with 100 trillion connections, have a virtually infinite combined capacity for thought and interpretation.  No two brains are alike, and we still haven’t managed to download our consciousness into computers for interpretation (more on this subject in upcoming blog entries, stay tuned).  Yet somehow, we share this experience and we agree that there is some sort of reality unfolding in front of us.  Despite the shared nature of our experience, there is no agreement on a fundamental paradigm that defines the whole of the experience.

It seems that the search for Truth - a fundamental, absolute definition of reality - is a valid pursuit, even if it can never be attained.  How utterly depressing to think our universe is based on a falsehood.  But how can we discover a shared Truth of our existence when we cannot network the private universes that we all create to explain reality?  People fight for the truthfulness that they see in their universe.  There is endless conflict caused by people who try to force the truth of their paradigm.

But there is also hope and understanding.  I feel that it’s important to remember that in the physics lab of our brain, variables are not kept constant.  The rules that make my universe are not exclusively verified by exacting measurements and rigorous scientific standards.  Some are in formative stages, some feel very concrete, and others are based more on assumptions and hypotheses than actual, carefully evaluated research.  The measurements, the test subjects, the source material is biased, incomplete, unreliable, and tends to weigh heavily on emotional constructs and gut-reaction type thinking as opposed to more objective measures.

To me, the ultimate goal of life is to break the walls that contain my private universe.  I know that they are artificial.  I like to visualize the universe by thinking about every atom, every photon, every joule of energy as a single fiber in an infinite tapestry that expands in every spatial dimension.  All of the atoms and all of the energy in my body make a visible thread.  The way that it interacts with the whole tapestry is irrelevant in wide-shot, but when the focus narrows to a tiny point, it’s possible to see the way that it weaves through the billions of other strands in my local corner of the tapestry.  The greatest objective of my life is to expand my frame of reference.

Word count: 1,072

Week 8: Heavy metal parking lot

I had a good conversation with my friend Adrian this week.  He’s a crazy talented artist who’s seeing some legitimate success with his work, and nobody deserves it more.  Check out his blog here, pictures are worth 1,000 words: http://ajalouden.blogspot.com.

Our chat got me thinking about art and the question that’s launched a thousand essays: what is art?  Who gets to carry that mantle and call themselves an artist, and what separates the artist and his or her work from someone who strives to be an artist but lacks a certain element that gives their work legitimacy?  Is art, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?

I am constantly on the hunt for music that captivates and transports me to a higher plane of thinking.  Every once in a while, an artist comes along and creates a piece that changes the way I think about music, art, and even life and the possibilities that it offers to people who are creative and disciplined.

Music is most compelling when it is revolutionary; true artists push aside constraints of genre and structure and advance the art form in innovative ways.  In my view, the greatest musical artists create works that - very broadly speaking - fit three key descriptors: progressive, outstanding and challenging.

Here are three songs by three exceptional heavy metal artists that have recently blown my mind.  They exemplify the best of each of these requirements and everything that I love about heavy music:

Step 1: Progressive
Artist: Leprous
Song: Thorn ft. Ihsahn
Album: Bilateral

Progressive is a generic tag that’s often attached by default to music that incorporates, or blurs the boundaries between, numerous genres.  Heavy metal and jazz are a common crossover.  There is more to progressive music than genre blending, though.  The key is the “progress” part.  The greatest progressive artists like Leprous and their ilk stand as a testament to the importance of paying homage to the masters who came before them, then building great musical structures on the earlier foundations.  

The progressive tag on music is the antithesis of derivative, band-wagon hopping musicians.  Bands that are lacking in passion and knowledge of their musical forebears become especially evident when they are unable to evolve past the “fad” phase of new or popular styles.  Forward thinking musicians like the members of Leprous are pushing boundaries of genre, song structure, and definitions of music just as progressive painters experiment with form, texture and themes and media to create new artistic movements.

In this song, influences from classical and jazz, and even some nods to European folk music, are audible in the textures and modalities of the song.  It also features nods to modern metal stylings - the riff/pattern first heard @ 2:28 - and pays tribute to the giants of Norwegian black metal, as Ihsahn of the legendary band Emperor features on vocals @ 3:14 of the track.  All the while, Leprous manages to create a unique sound that sets them apart and makes them easily identifiable, which leads me to my next category...


Step 2: Outstanding
Artist: Meshuggah
Song: Dancers to a Discordant System
Album: ObZen

When an artist creates a piece of music that forces the evolution of the genre from which it emerged, there will invariably be copycats who grab hold of the idea.  This is especially common in heavy music today, evident in the glut of bands with slavish attachments to the stylings of trending genres.  The outstanding artists of any breakout style quickly become apparent.  They are easily distinguishable because they have a great deal more to say within the contexts of music history and pushing the paradigm of their niche.

For those unaware, “djent” is a recently named genre of heavy music.  It is the first that I am aware of that was named by onomatopoeia.  It features extremely low-tuned 8-string guitars and odd time signatures.  Due to the decreased tension on the low 8th string, heavy picking combined with heavy distortion causes a slight pitch bend with each pick attack, that (apparently) sounds like a “djent,” hence the name.

This term was retroactively applied to Meshuggah, considered by some to be the founders of the genre and by many others, myself included, to be well outside the constraints of a silly-named label.  A horde of bands with tremendous technical abilities but lacking great songwriting skills quickly followed in their wake.  Time signature trickery, complex riffing and staccato rhythmic playing is impressive for a moment or two, but Meshuggah is worlds apart in terms of style and substance from almost every similar band.  Their guitarists were instrumental in designing and popularizing the 8-string guitar for heavy metal, and they are still the masters of the challenging rhythmic style of extreme metal, which leads me to my final category...


Step 3: Challenging
Artist: Behold...the Arctopus
Song: Canada
Album: Skullgrid  

Since I became involved in the recording process for music, I have a much greater appreciation for competent music played by talented people.  Despite advances in technology that allow copy-and-paste performances, real musicians who have truly  mastered their craft have used the avails of music technology, both in hardware and software, to challenge the limits of human capability in instrumental performance and recording.

Behold...the Arctopus might not be the most listener-friendly trio, but their abilities as musicians are beyond simple technical mastery.  They are a brilliant example of how to own an instrument through study and practice, then use it to say something absolutely unique, rather than to simply apply familiar sets of chords, modes, tempos and time signatures in faster or more technical displays.  They readily challenge the notions of conventional songwriting, and do so with jaw-dropping skill.

Art in heavy music comes from the extremities of human emotion.  It allows for music that carries real weight (see what I did there?) which is noticeable above the din from the massive explosion of music that has taken place online in the past decade.  Behold...the Arctopus represents a group who have come nearer to the absolute apex of artistic capability than almost anybody else in terms of painting pictures with sound.

Word count: 1,027