Hey, hey, the first of May

Today is the 1st of May, which together with the 3rd of May (Constitution Day, 1791) gives this country a good excuse for a long weekend. Protestant work ethic? Who needs it? :)

Underpass

Something very 1960s about this underpass sign. :)

Games

Could computer games be considered a replacement for other forms of art?

The musician and philosopher Brian Eno has an idea that 'art is a rehearsal for life', for our emotional responses to various situations; 'what would we do if we were in that position?' Can games replace that? Sims-style games could 'train' kids how to interact with others, raise families, take decisions at the work-place. In that case, of course, it would necessary to program those games very well, in order that they be able to replicate those situations accurately enough to teach useful lessons. Is that possible? Maybe the reverse effect would happen -- humans would become limited, being able only to deal w those situations that arise in games?

How to avoid becoming a race of otaku? TV was the first medium in history to permit that; cinema & theatre were involving, but required effort & cash to go out & go to see them, books were involving, but required literacy (both literal and cultural) & a certain degree of imagination. TV, however, can create an all-encompassing world, visual images are immediate and need/allow no interpretation or ambiguity. But you can change nothing, only receive what you're given. This frustrates some people, who still have a basic human need for some kind of interaction. Now, games are becoming much more involving than TV; they offer the narcotic visual fascination of TV combined with the possibility to interact - two basic human needs fulfilled. In the future, there will be two kinds of otaku; one sort who will be passive, just sitting and absorbing the input, and the other involved in active participation in their games -- but neither will be able to interact properly with real humans.

Emotional involvement with game characters; in the past we could fall in love with Julia Roberts or Brad Pitt on the cinema screen. We knew they really existed somewhere in the world, even if we were never likely to meet them. (Think about teens and their devotion to pop idols; grannies with soap-opera characters.) But what about virtual stars? Lara Croft was a beginning, though still visually too unrealistic for all but the most seriously depri/aved otaku. But new figures are ever more realistic in appearance, behaviour and virtual character; and, with the increase in female playership, these characteristics will be true of virtual males as well as virtual females. What will our emotional responses be when we 'fall in love' with such characters, who we know full well have no physical existence? As their programming becomes ever more complex, they will interact with us in ways pop & film stars never did. (Maybe E-mail/chat friends are an unconscious rehearsal for this?)

Can any medium take over an entire society, as intellectuals fear? TV has existed for 60 years, yet there are plenty of people (but probably no longer the majority) who watch TV only occasionally, choosing what they watch, or do not watch at all. But large numbers are undoubtedly addicts. Weak personalities with addictive natures have always existed; the medium of that addiction changes from age to age, but addiction itself remains. (Consider the kid who committed a murder on the basis of a Playstation game; others in the past did so on basis of books, plays, etc.)

Could any medium 'break through' and enslave an entire population? I personally think it unlikely; human populations are too diverse for them all to fall under one spell. Also, the diversity of economic levels around the world means that many will never get into games, being preoccupied with finding food, civil war, etc.

TV has long been the target of writers' speculation as a means for mass social control; could games go that way too? Is there any potential propaganda value in games? Unlikely; perhaps because of their non-passive, interactive nature, games will always function better as escapism, perhaps better even than TV ever could.

(based on conversations w friends in May & June 2004)

A nation of thieves

For those of you who believe your country is a unique breeding-ground of corrupt and dishonest people, check out this post from an Indonesian friend of mine living in London. I want to draw your attention to the fact that being sneaky, underhanded, double-dealing and untrustworthy is not the monopoly of any given nation - it's just good ol' human nature.

http://indres.blogdrive.com/archive/108.html

So I begin

This is going to be a 'proper' blog, which hopefully all can access. I have uploaded a couple of my posts from my MySpace blog, access to which was restricted to members. This provided insufficient self-gratification, as I wish to share my ego with the entire world, and not just a privileged élite. :)

May all who come here lead happy and prosperous lives, in which good things fall unexpectedly out of the sky into your lap. (Or laps.)

How long shall the land mourn?

I didn't see much point in watching the funeral. Everyone was watching it on television, or on projection screens in their local churches, but I would not have felt any more community with the people if I had been standing next to them. I let the air bring me the sounds. The combination of the church bells and the factory sirens at 10am brought forth a strange heterodyne sound, a note formed from the resonance of all the others, a mechanical song, an accidental processional hymn before the humans played their part. After that, I just waited; the occasional snatches of song from the nearby televisions, the birds, the wind. The spring morning; rain was forecast, but the sun poked through the light cloud covering, the usually obdurate Polish weather making an effort to put on a good face for this important day.

And this was an important day. No-one was going to let us forget it. The systematic, relentless TV coverage; the glutinously melancholic string quartets and slow-motion shots of the great man walking among the mountains or cheerfully leading a congregation in applause, the commentators and newsreaders, finding plenty of ground to mine in the broad territory between reverence and sentimentality, would have been considered risible in my own culture.
But there was - and is - no denying the reality of the emotion here. The day before, on Thursday, classes in my high school were interrupted by a kind of 'mini-mass', a short remembrance service partially prepared by the kids. All of them went; no-one took it as an excuse to sneak out for a cigarette or catch up on neglected homework. Down in the wooden gym, the barely-tuned piano lurking in the corner, a large portrait stood on stage with the traditional black band crossing the lower-right hand corner.

The kids sang songs, recited fragments of his works. The emotion with which they did so was palpable, and affected everyone. Normally cheeky girls and smug boys had moist eyes and snivels in the throat; the much-feared biology teacher had her face entirely buried in her handkerchief. The school's priest gave a blessing; a somewhat colourless individual most of the time, he acquired a quiet dignity which a more extrovert or pompous prelate would have turned into yet more drama and theatre, which no-one present really needed.

The proceedings were topped and tailed by a communal singing of 'Barka' (The river-boat), apparently the great man's favourite song, a usually cheerful and optimistic exploration of the Jesus-as-fisher-of-souls metaphor. This time, however, there was something almost defiant, challenging about the way it was sung; defying the black shadow of death, and perhaps another, greyer yet deeper shadow of unbelief, trying to show that we, at least, were going to keep the faith he had wanted to bring us all, in an unbelieving and very unfaithful world.

This defiance had expressed itself in other ways too, before the funeral. I, like many other people here, had received plenty of E-mails, instant-messages and text messages calling for actions of solidarity such as putting candles in our windows; marching from one place to another in white, attending the almost daily mass-masses, and so on. This was reasonable; electronics, far from isolating us in hermetic worlds of mindless entertainment, seem in fact to act as a kind of extended nervous system, putting us in near-telepathic contact with our friends and acquaintances at a speed unimaginable twenty years ago.

But what I found surprising and somewhat distasteful was the tendentious and sometimes even belligerent tone adopted by quite a few of these messages, such as 'Send this message on to as many _good_ people as possible' (Przekaz te wiadomosc dalej, do jak najwiekszej liczby dobrych osób), '_If you love him_, send this message on, add your name, and pray!' (Jesli Go kochasz przeslij dalej te wiadomosc, wpisz swoje imie i módl sie!) or even 'If you don't send it and you don't give a fuck, well, take a good hard look at yourself, guy...' (jak nie wyslesz i masz to w dupie to sie czlowieku nad soba zastanów...). Where did this aggression and insecurity come from? Why the need to manipulate people's emotions, as if they hadn't been stirred up enough?

In the way of these messages, they were spread around between many people. The media coverage, of course, was omnipresent. And at every public gathering, the emotions and the tears were there for all to see. But there are those who have been objecting to the tone of the proceedings.

I know people who dared to answer those mails with equally brusque replies; people who boycott the TV; people who stayed away from the mass-masses.

I know people who, while respecting the Pope's intellect and compassion (even though he felt unable to extend this compassion to homosexuals or believing women), felt uncomfortable with loud public declarations of undying love from people who were not regularly seen in churches.

And, quietly, individually, a few younger people have been admitting to me in privacy that they no longer believe in God, and haven't done for some while.

But all of those people have felt unable to express what they feel in public. My discussions in class on the whole 'post-Pope situation' revolved around considering his legacy (the acceptable parts of it); the idea of commentary, of analysis of the whole phenomenon, seemed out of bounds. And it strikes me that there is a quiet underground of feeling - if not of resentment then certainly of discontent - with the whole atmosphere. One wonders what will happen with this underground resistance; how it will be reconciled with the surface expressions of emotion. Those who stay underground have to learn patience; usually, their patience is rewarded in the fullness of time.

My view is this. The assertive, blackmailing sentimentality has its roots in the genuine sense of loss in the population, the loss of a man who represented this nation to the world in a way no other has done in history, who gave them a national and international identity. Now he has gone, Poland must take its place in the scramble and press of the other European nations; the Pole who led the world's and Poland's Catholics is gone; and nothing will ever be the same again. There will not be another Polish Pope; I personally doubt whether there will be many more European Popes, as the focus of Catholicism shifts from educated, sceptical, prosperous Europe to the teeming, irrational, needy Third World, be it South America, Africa or the Philippines. (Christianity is nomadic; it moved from the Middle East to Europe in the face of Islam, and now goes to the Third World in the face of materialism. Where can it go after that?)

The aggression, the obsequiousness, the negative sides of the emotion of his departure reflect a deep, almost unconscious unease in the Polish nation. They will not be so prominent in the world again; the love they bore him as a man and as a symbol was not paralleled by an adherence to his teachings (the thing he himself would have considered most important); and his teachings, and the Church founded thereon, will begin to die in the land that gave birth to him. A period of history has ended this week, and everyone knows it. Many react with sadness, love and grace; others react with defensiveness, anger and crudity. All know that something has gone which will never return. This unites them; their reactions divide them. As in all humans, they are one and many at the same time.

'How long shall the land mourn, and the herbs of every field wither, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein?' Jeremiah 12, v. 4

John Paul II

Earlier today, about 10am, I decided the saturation TV and radio coverage was enough. As on all such occasions, after a certain point the biographies and interviews start to repeat themselves; all the TV stations were showing either live broadcasts from the Vatican, interviews with the great and good, or documentaries, the radio was either playing the usual 'solemn music' (it struck me as odd when they played Bach, here in a Catholic country) or the same round of interviews and reportage. So I went out, into the bright morning sun. The sun, anyway, was not in mourning.

There's a church opposite my place here in Warsaw. (Not that one usually has to go far to find a church in this country.) The people were standing by the doors; others were sitting or standing, silent, in front of the grotto with the statue of the Virgin Mary. The church was full, of course. I didn't go in. I am neither Catholic or Polish, and it was not my place to interfere. I didn't have to go in to perceive what was going on, though.

I couldn't hear what the priest who was presiding said, even though there were loudspeakers; by the door, the noise from the traffic was loud enough to make most of what he said inaudible. Also, a baby in its mother's arms was obviously in discomfort; you could see the usual flickers of irritation on the faces of other people, who forget their own children, or that they were once children themselves. Some phrases emerged; 'in the memory of the Holy Father', 'an end to suffering', but the words weren't relevant. People were being together. A woman next to me seemed to be smiling; then she removed her glasses and dabbed at her eyes. She was crying, but quietly, trying to be strong, perhaps. Her husband and their four- or five-year-old moved towards her; their presence seemed to calm her. After a moment of eye contact, they looked together towards the altar inside, as everyone else was doing.

I have the fortune to live on a tram-line which leads straight to the heart of the Old Town; riding the big shiny new tram to the centre, dominated by the old plague column erected by King Sigismund. The trams here, like the buses, are liveried in yellow and red, the city's colours. From windows and buildings hung little groups of flags; the white-and-red horizontal stripes of Poland, the yellow-and-white vertical bands of the Vatican, and the yellow-and-red of the city. Often, the flags were accompanied by thin black strips, signs of mourning; the buses and trams had them, as did the police wagons in the city centre, as they escorted dignitaries and monitored the crowds.

On the tram, a woman next to me sneezed; in this country, the equivalent of 'Bless you' is to say 'Your health', which I did. She turned briefly to me and said, 'Thanks... but I don't know if it's much to do with health.' Her watery half-smile was surmounted by shining eyes; she blew her nose, and I could see it wasn't a catarrh caused by the warm, sunny weather. A man in the seat in front of me was staring straight ahead, his face set, fists clenched, big working man's hands, not wanting to release anything, to let anything go.

It's funny how people choose where to go in these situations. Warsaw's Old Town doesn't lack churches or basilicae to go to; large, pompously imposing in that combination of Habsburg-looking baroque and post-Communist grey dirt which afflicts the buildings which haven't had a lick of paint for some big civil occasion. However, everyone seemed to be heading for the church of St. Anne. It wasn't particularly because the Pope had been there; he had, of course, and there was the commemorative plaque on the wall to recall that. But there are other places in the city with such plaques. The people were heading for St. Anne's, though; the television crews were there too, reporters and cameramen milling around, men in grubby jeans moving cables and spotlights around. Beneath the plaque, a mass of flowers and candles. Someone was moving the barriers around them, to expand the space they could be fitted into. A woman saw that one of the postcards with the Pope's face had caught alight from a candle; with great delicacy, she stepped into the mass of flowers, rescued the card and placed in it the safety of a bouquet of tulips.

Some people had put on something black, as a sign of mourning; I saw one or two middle-aged women, unaccompanied, wearing black dresses of an oddly child-like cut, maybe the kind of dress they wore when they went to church as children years ago. A tall young student had a black tie dangling loosely and incongruously around his sweater. Every so often, you could see an elderly couple with an air of pre-war sophistication; the man in a dark fedora and well-cut overcoat, looking like it was made of mohair or something equally old-world elegant, his arm in the crook of his large-hatted wife's elbow, proceeding slowly down the street. No-one was hurrying; everyone knew where they had to go.

As the morning went on, it became apparent to me that more and more people were going in the direction of St. Anne, as I walked away from the centre, back towards the trams; at one point I was almost literally walking alone against the tide of people as they headed for the centre. There was nothing special about them; the vast majority were normally dressed; all ages and classes were there. This was society; this was the people. No-one had told them to come there; no-one had to.

As I walked around, I heard brief snatches of conversation; 'the next Pope might be black', 'and what if he hadn't been so ill?' Free copies of the daily newspapers were being distributed; one vendor was getting rattled because she couldn't give them out fast enough. The headlines read, 'John Paul II has departed', 'He has returned to God', 'He stands near the Throne', 'Ready for the journey.' A common theme of the tributes inside was that people considered themselves fortunate, blessed, to have lived in his times.

At midday, the traffic stopped and the police cars' sirens were all started simultaneously. An eerie sound, so many of them making a weird, hieratic harmony. A young man had his arm around his girlfriend, who had quietly hidden her head in his chest. She was carrying a bunch of tulips in her hand; they hung limp, like a flag without the wind to blow it.