ORP: PKD again: LOA releases 3rd vol. in PKD series

I just finished reading the first of four novels in volume three of Library of America's edition of the definitive Philip K. Dick novels. This story was entitled "Maze of Death". The novel (really a novella by some standards) is a nice yarn about the dwindling crew of a colonizing starship marooned in a dead star system. With his insight into human psyche, PKD shows through the device of a virtual reality machine used on this starship originally for recreation and now used by the crew to escape from the reality of coming doom, how lost humanity turns in on themselves. We get this psychological exploration in many (if not all) of PKD's stories, but it is in sharp focus here in the final four novels by this writer. In this novel and the coming three of this volume we also get some interesting explorations of philosophy and religion. From what I have read so far of this author's novels, especially at the end of his works, I mourn the writer. To quote Maxwell Smart without the irony, he "missed it by that much," that is eternity. Man, I want to explore the multiverse, but I sure don't want to have lost heaven!

Though PKD lived completely within the drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s, he was quick to point out the lies told about where excessive use and abuse could lead you. This the overt message of his novel, "A Scanner Darkly".
But his analysis of madness is the best. Check out this passage from "V.A.L.I.S." (the second of the four novels in the LoA volume):

(p.190)...a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that--as if that weren't enough--but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.

Social Philosophy: Arbitrary Fortune & God's Sovereignty

I recently read an excellent post by Mark Horne on his blog about the nature of good and bad Providences and our response to the arbitrary position in life we each find ourselves in. The article (appropriately entitled "Notes from the Underground") was provoking enough that as I thought about it (not having time to make a comment right away), I decided to just make a blog entry. There are a lot of directions one can go with the thoughts in this article, and I want to make just a few observations, so read the article from the link above to understand why I make the few comments that I am making.

In thinking about having good fortune or not (comfort or suffering), and without regard to the underlying spiritual reality of our universe, I immediately thought of the lyrics to the Tracy Chapman song, "Mountains O' Things" which I quote here:

The life I've always wanted
I guess I'll never have
I'll be working for somebody else
Until I'm in my grave
I'll be dreaming of a live of ease
And mountains
Oh mountains o things

To have a big expensive car
Drag my furs on the ground
And have a maid that I can tell
To bring me anything
Everyone will look at me with envy and with greed
I'll revel in their attention
And mountains
Oh mountains o things

Sweet lazy life
Champagne and caviar
I hope you'll come and find me
'Cause you know who we are
Those who deserve the best in life
And know what money's worth
And those whose sole misfortune
Was having mountains o nothing at birth

Oh they tell me
There's still time to save my soul
They tell me
Renounce all
Renounce all those material things you gained by
Exploiting other human beings

Consume more than you need
This is the dream
Make you pauper
Or make you queen
I wont die lonely
I'll have it all prearranged
A grave that's deep and wide enough
For me and all my mountains o things

Mostly I feel lonely
Good good people are
Good people are only
My stepping stones
It's gonna take all my mountains o things
To surround me
Keep all my enemies away
Keep my sadness and loneliness at bay

I'll be dreaming, dreaming...
Dreaming...

You can see that this song reflects the psychological response of the people in our materialistic society.

I have felt myself, albeit on a much smaller level, the range of mental outlook that Mark mentions in his article. I have been at the bottom and have gradually moved up the socio-economic ladder, but I have had setbacks like my 40 month sojourn in the financial wilderness where I nearly lost my house. But it is true that it can all go away in an instant.

The other comment I wanted to make was that in the Church, I think that one of the (asymptotically close to) infinite purposes of God in the arbitrary elevation of some and denigration of others within the same body or within the same world, is that God wants to force us sinful humans to have to take care of each other. As we are drawn together, God's purposes are served in making us love one another. But since we are depraved beyond belief, we go through the mental gyrations that Mark describes. How many of you have seen a peer (or coworker, fellow student, etc.) once lifted up in life, completely forget where he/she just came from? How often I have seen the exploited, once lifted up only to join the exploiters themselves. We humans are so sick. {Shakes head.}

ORP: LeGuin's The Dispossessed part n+1

I am slowly moving back toward thinking and reading again. I picked up again the novel, “The Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin and in the course of the flashbacks to the earlier life of the main character and scientist, Shevek, we come across the following nugget of philosophy and contemplation concerning the nature and reality of suffering:

…They talked about what happiness was.
“Suffering is a misunderstanding,” Shevek said, leaning forward, his eyes wide and light. He was still lanky, with big hands, protruding ears, and angular joints, but in the perfect health and strength of early manhood he was very beautiful. His dun-colored hair, like the others’, was fine and straight, worn at its full length and kept off the forehead with a band. Only one of them wore her hair differently, a girl with high cheekbones and a flat nose; she had cut her dark hair to a shiny cap all round. She was watching Shevek with a steady, serious gaze. Her lips were greasy from eating fried cakes, and there was a crumb on her chin.
“It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we’ll die. That’s the condition we’re born on. I’m afraid of life! There are times I—I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn’t all a misunderstanding—this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain…If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could … get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where the self—ceases. I don’t know how to say it. But I believe that the reality—the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don’t in comfort and happiness—that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.”
“The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,” said a tall, soft-eyed girl. “Love is the true condition of human life.”
Bedap shook his head. “No. Shev’s right,” he said. “Love’s just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don’t have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.”
The girl with short hair shook her head vehemently. “But we won’t! One in a hundred, one in a thousand, goes all the way, all the way through. The rest of us keep pretending we’re happy, or else go numb. We suffer, but not enough. And so we suffer for nothing.”
“What are we supposed to do,” said Tirin, “go hit our heads with hammers for an hour every day to make sure we suffer enough?”
“You’re making a cult of pain,” another said. “An Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”
“What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to suffering—her own and others’?” Bedap retorted.
“But the whole principle of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering!”
Shevek was sitting on the table, his long legs dangling, his face intense and quiet. “Have you ever seen anybody die?” he asked the others. Most of them had, in domicile or on volunteer hospital duty. All but one had helped at one time or another to bury the dead.
“There was a man when I was in camp in Southeast. It was the first time I saw anything like this. There was some defect in the aircar engine, it crashed lifting off and caught fire. They got him out burned all over. He lived about two hours. He couldn’t have been saved; there was no reason for him to live that long, no justification for those two hours. We were waiting for them to fly in anesthetics from the coast. I stayed with him, along with a couple of girls. We’d been there loading the plane. There wasn’t a doctor. You couldn’t do anything for him, except just stay there, be with him. He was in shock but mostly conscious. He was in terrible pain, mostly from his hands. I don’t think he knew the rest of his body was all charred, he felt it mostly in his hands. You couldn’t touch him to comfort him, the skin and flesh would come away at your touch, and he’d scream. You couldn’t do anything for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were there, I don’t know. It didn’t do him any good. You couldn’t do anything for him. Then I saw…you see…I saw that you can’t do anything for anybody. We can’t save each other. Or ourselves.”
“What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You’re denying brotherhood, Shevek!” the tall girl cried.
“No—no, I’m not. I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins with shared pain.”
“Then where does it end?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”

Personal Update: Ephemera: Cultural Threads of '90's: "The X Files"

With apologies to all who twitter, I sometimes like to write about thought as it occurs. Time is the major constraint to allowing proper development of thought. And yet I just don't like to utter unformed thought, hastily said. So and since I like everyone, are time constrained, we don't post. To aggravate matters worse, I chose to burn some hours watching the Mythology Arc of the X-Files. I now feel as if I have listened to several years of that old radio show, "Coast to Coast". The series creators were reasonably creative and I enjoyed the characterization. It was a mine for ideas for stories. So thus I have given a twitter sized explanation in Jim terms.

Novo Visum,
Neue Ansicht.

Personal Update: general & on education

The various mental exercises, reading projects and the like, have all been disrupted recently. In the last month Sam finished his second year of high school at Covenant HS. We have decided to enroll him at Tacoma Community College in the Fresh Start program, and he started driver's training. Then Janie was gone for three weeks to visit her mother and attend her brother's wedding. All this activity and Janie's absence for this time period prompted me to spend some time gaming (mostly Civ.4) and real light reading, so consequently I have not taken any time to do some writing in this blog.

But, to get back to our decision to move Sam from Covenant HS to TCC, he really needed some help in some of his academics, but because our family is not a first tier family in the church, our requests for help fell on deaf ears. The community college, however, has excellent English labs and Mathematics labs that may give Sam the help that he needs. I have to ask the question, if it is so important to provide your child a Christian education, why is it that the proponents of sending your children to a Christian school are stuck in the same narrow box as the socialist public school educators in regard to the "one size fits all" false paradigm???

All of the children going to Covenant (and I suspect many other Christian schools) are expected to be of one major learning type and to have a narrow academic bent. What is there for children of other learning types and gifting? What of the artistic child? What of the mechanic child? I am so disappointed in the Christian school system as practiced. One would think that learning to walk with the Lord would be more important than mere academics. Anyway, it is sad that I have go to a secular institution to get help for my son when the Church should be leading the way in educating all children (not just the ones destined for high academics).

And another thing, why are there only "Liberal Arts" Christian schools and no Christian Polytechnic Schools in higher education and at the secondary level???

If our civilization persists, and I have my doubts that it will--another topic for another discussion, but how will the Church lead in the fields of technology and science? Or how will the Church lead in the necessary service fields like the trades or mechanics or fill-in-the-blank???

Or is the Church in America going to continue it's slow death and descent into irrelevance??