So much of the built landscape of the Australian bush stinks of what might have been, even some areas quite close to major cities.
It’s like we lost the fight against a harsh unforgiving environment, and an almost genetic apathetic indifference. It seems that for most Australians okay is not only good enough, it is the absolute height of their ambition.
Let this frustration temper our ambition, not lower it!
I have had my blog for over three years and have posted iregularly whenever I was inspired by something I’ve read, seen, heard, or thought but taking on the A to Z April Challenge meant writing 26 posts in one month.
The concensous is that writers write everyday and don’t wait for inspiration
When I decide to try something I do it wholeheartedly and for me and the A to Z April Challenge that meant that I approached each post as stream of consciousness, with little or no preparation apart from a list of A-to-Z with potential topics. I know that some people have prepared their posts in the weeks before April and although I admit that I may have finished on time if I had taken this approach I am unsure if I agree with it.
I tried to write each post in one session, dropping my thoughts almost unedited from my heart/mind and on to the page/screen.
This doesn’t mean that I was flippant in my writing but it did teach me to edit once and then let it go. I did fix typos in the minutes and hours after each post.
Although I’m tempted to claim the highlight of the month was having my “B” post promoted on the WordPress Freshly Pressed page but it has actually been the amazing blogs that I’ve discovered and the wonderful and inspring comments I’ve received, especially when posts have been re-blogged.
Thanks to everyone at A to Z Challenge, to all my followers, and the the blogs I now follow and am regularly inspried by.
Thanks again…
This is my final post in the A to Z Challenge for 2012…a few days late, but better late than never.
Zo Boone is one of the POV character’s in the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. She is the granddaughter of John Boone; the first man on Mars, and (spoiler alert) was killed in a human flying accident. But in the Twenty-second Century humans can “back themselves up” and she features again later in the series. But…is it truly her?
There are quite a few passages in Hugo and Nebula award winning author Kim Stanley Robinson’s books that have “the stench of Zen”. The one below was a particularly enlightening one for me, it “stank” of the following “popularised” Zen Koan:
After that they hiked down the spine of the buttress in silence. Over the course of the day they descended to Bottoms Landing. Now they were a kilometre below the rims of the chasm, and the sky was a starry band overhead; Uranus fat in the middle of it, the sun a blazing jewel just to one side. Under this gorgeous array the depth of the rift was sublime, astonishing; again Zo felt herself to be flying.
“You’ve located intrinsic worth in the wrong place,” she said to all of them… “It’s like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty three degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth.” – Blue Mars (Pages 435-436).
This rainbow analogy pays forward in so many ways and is reminiscent of many Aikido teachings of Koichi Tohei‘s:
Aikido: The Art of Self Defense by Koichi Tohei (1976) (Photo credit: daninofal)
Do not think that the power you have is only the power you ordinarily use and moan that you have little strength. The power you ordinarily use is like the small visible segment of an iceberg. When we unify our mind and body and become one with the universe, we can use the great power that is naturally ours. – Koichi Tohei
and merging it with the rainbow analogy:
A greater thing is formed at the intersection of mind and body.
Returning to the character Zo, the capability to back up and retrieve ourselves that Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts will be possible this century raises the question of identity to another level.
What if you are thought to be dead, and a recent backup copy is used to retrieve you, and then months or years later you are found alive and there are now two of you?
Who is you? Is the retrieved you, who has lived and grown as a separate entity, now terminated? I think the technological advances approaching us will shatter our society if we do not begin to address them in the near future.
So is this Zo Boone that went on an Eco-Holiday to Miranda the real Zo? Does she have the same rights?
This is doing my head in, and a new modern-day Koan is born:
Who is the real Zo Boone?
Theorists are divided on whether nationalism is a result of our evolutionary tendency to live in communities or tribes, or it is a more recent behaviour caused by the way modern society is structured. Either way ethnicity tends to incorporate itself in some manner, whereby you may live in the nation from a geographically extent but are excluded from “nationhood” as a result of ethnic, cultural, religious reasons.
Then there is xenophobia. Dictionary.com defines this as:
“an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange.”
This human trait manifests itself in sport too. Sometimes this is acceptable for example a cross town rivalry between teams, or old nation “friendly” competitions between nations such as cricket’s “Ashes” battles between England and Australia. In these though there is a at least a small commonality; either a shared heritage or at least a common love of a particular sport.
Why do we need to have “our” team though?
The Brisbane Lions win their first premiership in 2001
A couple of years back I wrote a short, sharp post “The rising sun as an analogy for nationalism” to highlight its absurdity:
The notion of a rising sun is a misnomer. The sun itself does not rise or set. If I am on the east coast of Australia and see the sun rising over the Pacific Ocean, it is the same sun a person in the United States would see at midday. The difference between my “rising sun” and that observed by my American cousins depends solely on the location on the surface of the planet on which we stand. To an observer out in space, looking at our pale blue planet, the concept of a rising sun is absurd; it is rooted in our past when we believed we were the centre of the universe.
Nationalism is like this; it only exists when we allow our perception to be limited by our location. If we let go of this outdated notion, our minds can break free from their terrestrial bonds, allowing us to focus on solving the real issues of our time.
It turns out that both nationalism and xenophobia are key themes of the novel I’m writing so I’m trying to come to terms with the subtle differences.
I’d love to hear what you think about them?
We look at the past through the wrong end of a telescope, he thought one day; eventually the things we can see in there become simply too small to hurt us. (Character: Peter Clayborne) – Kim Stanley Robinson, The Martians Pg. 316
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series the expected lifespan for humans is extended by a “longevity treatment” to at least several hundred years if not thousands of years. Through this he is able to explore issues and limitations of the human brain for storing and retrieving memories. In one scene, Maya Toitovna is now around 150 years old has returned to live in a city she had previously lived in 70 or more years before.
Maya found herself trapped in a déjà vu of a déjà vu, Where was she?
It wouldn’t come back to her. It wouldn’t come. A horrible sense of tip-of-the-toungeism made her dizzy, then sick, as if she would get it out by vomiting. She sat down on the steps. On the tip of the tongue, her whole life! Her whole life! She groaned aloud, and some kids throwing pebbles at gulls stared at her.
…
It hadn’t really been gone; just a momentary lapse in her thinking, while her attention had wandered elsewhere. To another life.
A strong memory had its own integrity, its own dangers, just as much as a weak memory did. It was only the result of thinking that the past was more interesting than the present. Which is many ways was true. But still…
Later Maya saw her daughter Jackie, who she… lets say despised, sailboard on the open oceans of Mars:
Events would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now [when they lived for at least several hundred years]. No sailboard would keep you up with that wave… – Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars.
A word of caution here, Maya suffered from severe depression so don’t get drawn too deeply into her neurosis.
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