Children I Cry for You

Daughter's birthday party
     beautiful
Friends coming over for sleep-over
     beautiful friends
     beautiful children
Pulled out their iPods
     played the same songs
     jived the same way
Collective consciousness
     belongs to everybody
     belongs to nobody
Children most impressionable
     defenseless
     unwary
     naked
Salesman predatory
     carnivorous
     bloodthirsty
Let a vampire run wild in a home
     a generation gone
     a sanctuary imploded
God's children
     growing up but shall never outgrow being sold to
     constantly craving
     inconsolably lonely
     despairingly insecure
Another week's new flyers delivered to unguarded homes
     Click on this!
     Check this out!
     the measure of our days

Children I cry for you.

Like This!

There is a great opinion piece on CNN today: Facebook threatens to 'Zuck up' the human race.  Here is a sample of some good observations on the "social media":

"Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us there's a "shift" from an analog world in which our identities are generated from within, to a digital world in which our sense of self is intimately tied to our social media presence. But this shift to a Facebook world of incessant "friending," Professor Turkle correctly warns us, is a "seductive fantasy" which is weakening us both as individuals and as a society. The problem, she explains, is that a "capacity for solitude is what nurtures great relationships." But in today's always-on social media world, our solitude has been replaced by incessant online updates, which both weaken our sense of self and our ability to create genuine friendships. I call this shift from the private to the public self "digital narcissism." Behind the communitarian veil of social media, we have fallen in love with ourselves. But this is a super sad love story. Because the more we self-broadcast, the emptier we become; and the emptier we become, the more we need to self-broadcast(...)

Sultan, a parenting columnist at the St Louis Post-Dispatch, and Miller, a researcher at the University of Michigan, whose article was based on interviews with 4,000 children, argue that we've created what they call a sense of "normality" about a world where "what's private is public." Kids are growing up, they explain, assuming that it's perfectly normal to reveal everything about ourselves online. "And our children will never have known a world without this sort of exposure. What does a worldview lacking an expectation of privacy mean for the rest of society?" Sultan and Miller conclude with the eeriest of questions(...)

Yes, digital narcissism is a narcotic. But unlike online gaming or pornography, it is desensitizing all of us -- young and old, men and women alike -- to reality. Imprisoned in our delusional social media bubbles, our Facebook saturated world has become a self-referential stream of real-time updates about what we just ate for breakfast(...)

But the solution goes beyond leaving Facebook. Our addiction to digital narcissism can only be broken by a new regime of strict self-censorship. For many of us, perpetually high on the narcotic of self-broadcast, this won't be any easier than quitting smoking or kicking that online porn or gaming habit. But remember, the less we publicly announce about ourselves, the more mysterious and thus the more interesting our private selves become(...)"

What is most interesting is that, smart as we human are, most of us lack the imagination to foresee the effects of our own invention.  It is not until we have "expert" conducting "research" to tell us their "expert opinions" could we see what should always be apparent (What, rubbing my iPad too much will really hurt my neck?).  If parents were to look their kids in the eyes for who they really are, I cannot believe they couldn't tell something like Facebook is gonna fuck them up. Who needs to constantly sell oneself and crave to be "liked"?  People who are not healthy.  Unwholesome minds.  Facebook takes advantage of our afflictedness.

Related:  我在手機裏看見您的臉但那又如何？

Anyone Who Has Seen...

So let's revisit this long and beautiful sentence:

"Anyone who has seen the martins and swallows in September, assembling on the telephone wires, twittering, making short flights singly and in groups over the open, stubbly fields, returning to form longer and even longer lines above the yellowing verges of the lanes-the hundreds of individual birds merging and blending, in a mounting excitement, into swarms, and these swarms coming loosely and untidily together to create a great, unorganized flock, thick at the centre and ragged at the edges, which breaks and re-forms continually like clouds or waves-until that moment when the greater part (but not all) of them know that the time has come: they are off, and have begun once more that great southward flight which many will not survive; anyone seeing this has seen at the work the current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without conscious thought or will: has seen at work the angel which drove the First Crusade into Antioch and drives the lemmings into the sea." Richard Adams, Watership Down

Turns out the sentence is not so much of an architectural delight, as it has a very simple structure of Anyone who has seen blah blah blah has seen blah blah blah, a simple analogy to compare between two (or more) dissimilar things for the purpose of clarifying and interpreting what the author takes the reader to see at the moment.  Long as it is, it is not an ostentatious parade of the author's literary prowess; with a simple structure that cuts to the chase, it states the theme of the story concisely: Watership Down is an allegory, with the labours of Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and Silver "mirror[ing] the timeless struggles between tyranny and freedom, reason and blind emotion, and the individual and the corporate state." ("Watership Down". Masterplots II: Juvenile and Young Adult Fiction Series. Salem Press, Inc.. 1991)  Hence the analogy to allude to the First Crusade and the lemmings.

So what about the First Crusade and the lemmings?  The author assumes the readers are familiar with these two references, or else he would not have made the comparison.  Let's start with the lemmings, the easier one to tackle.  Here is something from Wikipedia:

"Lemmings became the subject of a popular misconception that they commit mass suicide when they migrate. Actually, it is not a mass suicide but the result of their migratory behavior. Driven by strong biological urges, some species of lemmings may migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. Lemmings can swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat. In such cases, many may drown if the body of water is so wide as to stretch their physical capability to the limit. This fact combined with the unexplained fluctuations in the population of Norwegian lemmings gave rise to the misconception...Because of their association with this odd behavior, lemming suicide is a frequently used metaphor in reference to people who go along unquestioningly with popular opinion, with potentially dangerous or fatal consequences."

A very unambiguous analogy.  The comparison to the Siege of Antioch (The First Crusade) is just as direct and simple, yet one couldn't possibly grasp the scope of it by only visiting Wikipedia.  One must go to the books, many books, for this one.  I suggest The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon to children.

I often asked myself the question: where would I stand if I exist in the Medieval time?  Would I join the Crusade?  One day I may come around to write about it.  But I will need to use something other than rabbits for this one.

A Beautiful Sentence

My daughter once asked me, "How do you know if a book is any good?"  I told her there are many ways to know, but usually I'd just randomly open up a page and read one sentence.  One sentence might not do a whole book justice, but I do know a good book cannot afford one bad sentence.

My daughter was very much into the Warriors series, and I suggested her to try one of the best-loved animal adventures of the twentieth century Watership Down.  Today she came to me and said, "Check out this beautiful sentence!"

"Anyone who has seen the martins and swallows in September, assembling on the telephone wires, twittering, making short flights singly and in groups over the open, stubbly fields, returning to form longer and even longer lines above the yellowing verges of the lanes-the hundreds of individual birds merging and blending, in a mounting excitement, into swarms, and these swarms coming loosely and untidily together to create a great, unorganized flock, thick at the centre and ragged at the edges, which breaks and re-forms continually like clouds or waves-until that moment when the greater part (but not all) of them know that the time has come: they are off, and have begun once more that great southward flight which many will not survive; anyone seeing this has seen at the work the current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without conscious thought or will: has seen at work the angel which drove the First Crusade into Antioch and drives the lemmings into the sea."  Richard Adams, Watership Down

Yes, this is one sentence.  Something children would not find in Twilight or Hunger Games.  And mind you, the chapter that contains this sentence opens with an excerpt from Shakespeare's Hamlet.  My question for my daughter then was: What is the subject and predicate of this sentence?

To Youth

A long  and beautiful day.  Sumi is dog tired.  I am human tired.  Both are good tired.  Here is a song dedicated to youth.  When the rain comes tomorrow, not only I will not regret today, I will acknowledge and embrace the necessity of rain.

If you're traveling in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was the true love of mine

If you go when the snowflakes storm
When the rivers freeze and summer ends
Please see if she's a coat so warm
To keep her from the howlin' winds

Please see if her hair hangs long
If it rolls and flows all down her breast
Please see from me if her hair hangs long
That's the way I remember her best

I'm a-wonderin' if she remember me at all
Many times I've often prayed
In the darkness of my night
In the brightness of my day

So if you're travelin' in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine

Prayer in the Morning

I've heard people said, Start each morning with a prayer before you turn on your computer.  But I cannot see the boundary between the sacred and the profane being housed in that little circular on/off button, which, thanks to Steve, now does not even exist on many devices anyway.  When I first set up my wireless router only a few years ago, I asked a computer engineer friend of mine, "How do I turn this thing off at night?  I don't want it to consume any energy, however minimal I know it might be."  He said, "These things are made to run all the time."  The Devil is running around all the time.

The prayer I have each morning is to ask God to help me

• To not face any digital device unless absolutely necessary
• To have the wisdom to discern what is really absolutely necessary, lest I set my standard too low and get used to the warmth of Hell fire
• To be resourceful to people and things around me, not in the way that Google is to those searching for fragments of truth only to pick up even more untruth along the way, but in simple, organic, tangible ways that acknowledge every living thing is sharing my same breath
• To ask tough questions and humbly seek uneasy answers.  Christ said,  If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.  Now, how does a person stumble?  What might cause a person to stumble?  Is it internet pornography?  Is there any other sin that does not involve ejaculation?  I think most don't.  I think most finish off in a much less spectacular manner.  I think some even appear angelic.  Once I've heard a comment on viewing movies with sexual content: Don't ask what is permissible; just say, if I love God enough, what am I willing to not watch?  What a retrograde, anti-intelligence answer that is logically flawed, manipulative in implying the guilt is in the asking, and, of course, evading the genuine question that is really not only about how to establish a moral standard but also, such as, the nature of artistic expression.  As a lover of movie and a lover of God, I will fight for every dirty sexy movie that shows more truths than feeble-minded drivels such as this. When an answer is way too easy, you know it is the wrong answer.  And I wonder if people would agree the more sensible suggestion should be: If I love God enough, what digital device(s) am I willing to not turn on, so that I can live a more healthy, vibrant, and beautiful life, resourceful to the world around me, honoring God's Creation by looking beyond the rectangles that do more imprisoning than liberating?  This should not be too hard; after all, it is way less painful than gouging out our right eye
• To find peace and restfulness in everything I do, even in the most restless moments which are many.  A heart without peace is the damnedest thing, makes one vulnerable to all sorts of attacks, amplifies the tiniest speck of a crack and brings down a sanctuary at the fleeting of a thought.  Peacefulness is not a Facebook status.  Those who have it do not find the need to declare on Facebook

The Chance of a Different Path

During some of my more choleric teenage years, there was a then young couple that I knew, or used to know, or used to think I know, and they were very close to my heart.  The man knew music, even made a living out of it.  How good he was, I wouldn't know; if his pedagogy looked assured, one wouldn't be able to tell from the results it generated.  Even then, the spectacle of music-making he created was something to behold.  When he led the congregation to ascend beyond the pews they laid their worldly bottoms on, his arms would swing dramatically like the wings of angels and his face would display an operatic solemnity most deliberate but appropriate and probably necessary to accentuate the gravitas of the sacred moment.  I have never seen a face more unconvincing in trying to convince; he did not doubt a single note and every word in the hymns he uttered were all his very own.

During those years of being close to them, I was too young to understand marriage and how a family comes about---like, how do people come together and decide this is the way it's gonna be for the rest of their lives?  How do you achieve something so beautiful, two people committing to each others in their pursuit of happiness, and with that, one or more bundles of joy would sprout, and---Ahhh, Ikea furniture!  They were the ones who'd first shown me the viability of happiness, comfort within reach, a life perfectly settled and wanting no more.  To me and probably to many others, they were the perfect Christian couple.

They are no longer together now.  The man's older sister called me up about a year ago to announce the couple's separation.  When she said I have something to tell you about..., I actually expected the news to be worse.  In a way I was relieved that reality proved me a worse pessimist than I need to be; it's all very sensible, I thought, wondering why it didn't happen sooner.  The pain of the marriage was unbearable.  I had a glimpse of its unraveling then, only to rationalize it away as some trifling hiccups on their path to attain a heaven that was legitimately theirs.  It was only years later when I started to trudge on the path they'd once shown me was I able to discern the quiet desperation in their midnight exchanges barely audible to me on the other side of the door then.

The man's wife is a person I wanted to know all these years but never really did.  I was a boy then, probably a bit infatuated by her beauty and her youth--imagine the possibility of one day having a wife just like her when I grew up!  When the man's older sister tried to blame the marriage's failure on her--She insisted on buying expensive brand-name handbags even when they were stony broke!--I just simply blew my short fuse in a split second.  The sister might want to attribute my irascibility to my usual knee-jerk reaction to defend the underdog, but it was really more than that.  I might not know the woman but I know the man.  I told the sister, "Your brother is about one of the most undisciplined, self-indulgent human beings I've known personally in my life.  It's a miracle his wife stayed with him for so long.  You are a woman yourself, for heaven's sake please have a heart and do not be unfair with her.  You and I will never know the whole truth, so let's just leave it at that!"  The truth is the man had gotten lost a long long time ago already, among the city lights, during the many trips to Ikea to find his gods, in front of computer screens that used to only display alien-green lines on a dark-lime background and now in full HD glory.  But you can't blame people around him for not noticing his pain: who can tell when you were swinging your arms like that?

The wife used to write for a Christian magazine.  Her writing was passable, I guess.  She was not an original thinker.  Or maybe I just never knew what was really on her mind.  For a while she was reading a couple of books by a Christian "environmentalist", and for that while I recalled her trying to reflect on what she had read in those books.  One time she told me about the drawbacks of using paper napkins.  I can still recall the exact words she spoke.  I wonder if she'd talked about this with her husband at all.  I wonder what kind of a response she'd gotten for the "reflection" she published.  I wonder if she'd dreamed about a different way to live her life, and if she had shared the vision with her church pastor, her Christian friends, had they dismissed and slighted what she saw as a mere "lifestyle variant", something peripheral to a person and a family's "spiritual" growth, ultimately insignificant in shaping a life to become one way or another, an idea that one cannot find in the Bible and thus frankly couldn't be part of God's grand scheme of things.  I wonder if anyone had really attempted to read between her lines.  I wonder for the couple if the chance of choosing a different path was ever there.

I am Getting Restless Here

Yesterday I talked to a man.  He told me life in HK is hectic, in constant motion, restless, and people restive, fractious, and the few short hours he spent weekly in church seemed to be the only solace and refuge from the frenetic madhouse of a world "out there".  He articulated the above as statements, factual observations of the reality, not as a set of questions.  I wondered if he realized he was holding his life's biggest conundrum--right there--in his hands, and if he were to frame the observations as questions they could become springboards for him to rise above a fate that only is one because he allows it to be.

So the world is crazy, and the four walls of a church creates a refugee camp.  Questions:

1. Why is the world hectic?  Where do we experience the restlessness?  Has the world always been so restless?  When, where and how did we experience the restlessness?  Would it surprise us to learn even at this very moment of history, as we humans are so determined to plunge headfirst and wholeheartedly into complete destruction of ourselves and annihilate everything else with us, the "world", the Earth that we inhabit and objectify as an "environment" that is not part of us and thus is justifiably exploitable is still surviving--in fact, thriving--with its calm, resilient, and peaceful strength?  The "world" is not hectic.  It has never been either.  It is not created to be.  
2. Is it a good thing that the church provides some transient moments of solace and refuge?  Is this the proper, ideal function of a church?  Should those who run the churches be happy with such good customer service feedback?  In my church, the pastors always end the Sunday service with this line: Now, take what God has given you (or what you have learned today, etc.), go into your world, and practice your faith.  I must admit I have a huge problem with this line.  I know the intention is good, but it epitomizes a dichotomy in how we see the "world" as something different from the "gooder" goodness, the "other-worldliness" that a church is supposed to house.  Many times when I heard the line I was ready to raise my hand and ask: So where have I been for the last two hours?  Where am I standing now?  Is this not "my world" where I am standing within these four walls of a church?  Are the iPads that people used on the pulpit not the same notorious iPad that I know to be responsible for the downfall of many of our finest young men and women? Am I standing on holy ground?  Should I take off my shoes?  Do shoes serve no function when I am holier and if yes, then where is the physical boundary where I should start to put on my shoes again so that when the holiness cease to be powerful I shall again need to have my feet protected from the harms of "the world out there"?  And if the dichotomy is so very precise and the boundary so very clear, why does something like the iPad that is born out of injustice and breeds more evil than good make such an easy migration and assimilation into the holy land of God?  Does it matter that the non-recyclable wastes we created on our way to church and after leaving church and our activities throughout the Sabbath bring more harm than good to "the world" on this holy day of rest?  When we sing "This is My Father's World", does it matter if we do not really understand "the World" as God created it and do not care to? When we praise God for the stars He had created, does it matter if we cannot recall the last time we had really looked up the sky and contemplated on and be humbled by the mystery of life?  Or are those lines in our songs only so-to-speak poetic licence we take, in case we might sound mundane if we have only our self-created problems to reiterate in our utterance to God and to the person mumbling beside me?  When we proclaim "the power within me is bigger than anything in the world", may I ask exactly what "power", what "world", and what "anything" we are talking about here?  What exactly in my daily living do I want to overpower with this "biggest power" I am supposed to possess?  Does the list of items to overpower include the frogs in the ponds, or should we leave something so trivial out of this spiritual equation?

To me, these are worthwhile questions that demand worthwhile answers.  I am not a theologian so pardon me for being shallow and frankly ignorant.  All I know is if we can only feel brief moments of peace within the church and not "out there" in "the world", then there is no peace at all in our hearts.  And our restlessness shows in the songs we sing to God.  Sometimes I looked at the projection screen during Praise and Worship and wondered why I must yell my lungs out and be convinced the peace in me is no peace at all because I am not disturbed enough to realize there is only one kind of peace and my kind is the wrong kind.  I just felt like sitting down for the next century in complete silence to protest in peace.

How Did We Get So Useless

From Maclean's magazine:

Life with help: how did we get so useless? 
We’ve outsourced our lives. Now we can’t do a thing for ourselves.

Here are some insights on the good life from an interview with Wendell Berry, titled How can a family ‘live at the center of its own attention?'

Usefulness stands in opposition to the frivolous. John Synge wrote about the Aran Islands where the people were poor and yet all the useful things in their life were beautiful. The issue of usefulness has a kind of cleansing force. If you ask, "Is it useful?" probably you’re going to have fewer things you don’t need. You are useful to your family if you’re bringing home the things they need. Beyond that, maybe you are useful to other people by your work. The corporate world is much inclined to obscure this usefulness by making and selling a lot of things that people don’t need. For instance, a lively and important question is how much light we use at night and what we use it for and need it for. I’m old enough to remember when the whole countryside was dark at night except for the lights inside the houses, and now the countryside at night is just strewn with these so-called security lights. How much of this do we need? How much of it is useful? We have a marketplace that is full of useless or unnecessary commodities. I don’t want to be too much of a crank, but there are many things that people own to no real benefit, such as computer games and sometimes even computers...


I think you have to begin with an honest assessment of the value or the possibility of personal independence. What is the limit of individualism or personal autonomy? Once you confess to yourself that you need other people, then you’re in a position to look around your neighborhood and see how neighborly it is, starting with how neighborly you are yourself. The question of stewardship naturally follows. How careful is your neighborhood of the natural gifts such as the topsoil on which it depends... 


The issue here is the extent to which a family is like a community in its need to live at the center of its own attention. A family necessarily begins to come apart if it gives its children entirely to the care of the school or the police, and its old people entirely to the care of the health industry. Nobody can deny the value of good care even away from home to people who have become helplessly ill or crippled, or, in our present circumstances, the value of good daytime care for the children of single parents who have to work. Nevertheless, it is the purpose of the family to stay together. And like a community, a family doesn’t stay together just out of sentiment. It is certainly more pat to stay together if the various members need one another or are in some practical way dependent on one another. It’s probably worth the risk to say that families need to have useful work for their children and old people, little jobs that the other members are glad to have done...


...I think this starts with an attempt at criticism of one’s own economy, which may be the same thing as good accounting. What are the things that one buys? How necessary or useful are they? What is their quality? Are they well grown or well made? What is their real cost to their producers and to the ecosystems in which they were produced? Almost inevitably when one asks these questions, one discovers that they are extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to answer. That frequently is because the things we buy have been produced so far away as to make impossible any stewardly interest on the part of the consumer. And this recognition leads to an even better question: How can these mysterious products brought here from so far away be replaced by products that have been produced near home? And that question, of course, leads to all manner of thoughts and questions about the possibility of a better, more self-sufficient local economy. What can we neighbors do for one another and for our place? What can our place do for us without damage to us or to it?

Today

On a day like today
When there is so much living to be done
The sun will never go down on you
The thought of the possibility of sadness
Is all but a thought