Stung Eye

We're "home", by the way; or are we?

...we all subscribe thoughtlessly to many beliefs, the truth of which does not strike home to us until experience gives them reality. Wisdom may be rented, so to speak, on the experience of other people, but we buy it at an inordinate price before we make it our own forever.

Robertson Davies

That said, we are now in Montreal.

I'm sitting in my sister's new apartment using an Internet connection stolen from the Aether. I'm eating winegums. The past three mornings we ran around Wertheimpark. In the park are sheets of broken glass housed in more glass; shattered and transparent, the Auschwitz monument is covered in leaves. It is fall. They have fallen.

We are glad to be back in this city of brick and water. Our flight 'home' took 11.5 hours. We arrived at 9:00AM. To fight the jetLag I took a walk. The city felt empty and calm.

I walked by a office building. Duct-taped to a 3rd floor window was a painted canvas; the city is a gallery.

After wandering through a second-hand/nick-nack market, I stumbled upon Nijhof & Lee, a bookstore focusing on Design (with a capital 'D'). The typography section was particularly impressive.

Finally, I came across Droog Design [Image].

Droog is a brand and a mentality: design of products that do what they should and think about why they're doing it in the first place: function? fun? wit? criticism? All of the above?

Their website is a "100% hypertext environment":

This means that every word on this site is a link, which when clicked will generate associated information displayed on the right. A click on a sentence in this 'concordance' will open the associated text[.]

Droog is currently hosting a show by the Swedish design group Front. If Design turns you on, and you're in (or near) Amsterdam, I urge you to head over to Staalstraat 7a/b for a shot of inspiration.

The show features such items as: vases that (through mysterious photographic means) take on the reflections of their surroundings, hence displaying a visual history of where they have been; chairs created through explosions; metal lampshades perforated by bullet holes; tables that move (slowly) and collapse with time; a lamp that lies on the ground until needed; and wallpaper, hooks, and lamps, designed by dogs, rats, snakes, and rabbits.

Most interesting was their use of the video game Unreal Tournament. The game engine was exploited as a non-material design tool. (What can be designed when the constraints of the real world are abandoned? Can a designed object exist without being materialized?) Most of the physical designs from the show were present within the gameSpace, along with many others that could not exist in meatSpace.

I am going to miss Amsterdam.

We have returned to Vientiane after six days in the village of Vang Viang. There, we chilled on the banks of the Nam Song, kayaked, explored caves, and ate delicious organic food. In the evenings we ran through the villages along the hi-way. (The roads in this country would make even the most jaded Winnipegger think twice about their local pothole complaints.) While we ran the locals would give us thumbs-up signs, and the children would wave and shout enthusiastic hellos: SA-BA-DI!

Kayaking along the Nam Song river we were surrounded by limestone giants and jungles of Bamboo. Later we swam through an underground river and trekked deep into the heart of one of these giants. The cave was a massive labyrinth of waterways, and tunnels full of bats and spiders. One of the girls we were with slipped and fell down a hole. We had just been joking that it was bottomless, or that it lead to another underground river. When I heard her scream, and watched (in slo-motion) her body disappear, I thought she was a goner. But the hole had a bottom, and the top of her head was still to be seen. Dirty and shaken, she was pulled out.

Before we finished our trip we kayaked to a river-side bar, drank some BeerLaos, and swung on a crazy rope swing into the river. (Imagine standing on a swing attached to small mountain-side tree. You are hanging in the middle of a river. A long rope leads back to the shore. Strong boys grab the rope tug-of-war style and run until you are almost parallel with the river. And then you drop, swing, swear, jump, splash, laugh, swim, return.)

This afternoon we will begin our 16 hour journey to Bangkok.

And now for something completely different.

Stories written by a computer:

John became very lazy at work

John lost his job

John decided to get drunk

He started to commit crimes

John went to prison

He experienced bruises

John cried

He looked at himself differently

Mary went to the zoo

Mary learned about animals

Mary experienced enlightenment

Mary felt superior

Mary became a snob

Mary was disliked

Mary felt ashamed of who she was

From: MAKEBELIEVE - Using Commonsense Knowledge to Generate Stories [PDF]

At the border we changed 5 thousand Baht (Thai currency equivalent to 100 Euros) into Kip (Lao currency). The result was shocking. I was handed a stack of bills that did not fit in my wallet. The exchange form stated that I now had over 1 million Kip. Money, it is said, is power; however, I felt more uneasy than powerful. The bulge in my money-belt was daunting.

I've since warmed up to the Kip. A coffee shake, for example, costs 3 to 5 thousand Kip. A large grilled fish, served with plates of fresh herbs and vegetables --like the one I ate last night-- cost around 30,000 kip. A pitcher of Beer Lao cost 10,000 kip, (that's under 80 cents). The stack has been decreasing in size.

It's standard in Thailand and Laos to bargain in the markets. If you are a foreigner, this bargaining is usually done via a calculator; the seller types in a cost, you smile, shake your head and type in a counter offer. The game continues until both sides are happy. I've discovered that the best deals are made when I joke around, laugh, or even do little jigs.

Yesterday, I thought I had scored big when the calculating finally stopped at 60 for a "Rolex". Like earlier bargaining that day, I assumed we were dropping the final '000' due to lazy fingers. Actually, we were both making assumptions; the watch seller thought I knew that watch purchases were made in US dollars. When I handed her 60,000 kip (around 4.70 Euros) she stared in disbelief. It was a very nice watch.

This is how we discovered the three-tire currency system. Although the Kip is the only true legal tender, Thai baht and US dollars are used for expensive items.

Final story on the money front:

We had a bit of panic today when we read in our Lonely Planet that there were no ATMs in Laos. How were we going to get more money? My first thought was my Mastercard, but on closer inspection we saw that it expired this month. My second idea was to wire money from my Dutch bank account. Luckily, when we arrived at the bank we were greeted by a sign announcing their newly installed ATM.

Oh technology, I am truly your grateful slave.

The beds on the train were comfortable. The A/C was chilly. The food was expensive and of low quality. We arrived at the Laos-Thai friendship bridge around 9:00AM. After buying our visas at the border we took a Tuk-Tuk into Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

This is a capital city like none I have ever seen. It has the look and feel of a small town. After lunch we went for a walk. After wandering around a few Buddhist Wats, we were invited out of the hot sun by a Tuk-Tuk driver sitting with a group of neighborhood kids. We sat with them on wooden benches under a tin roof, watching the Mekong river, laughing and practicing each others language.

One of the girls spoke English very well. Her English teacher is from Edmonton. She explained that everyday, all around Laos, neighbors young and old sit together in the afternoons and evenings, to talk, joke, and relax. She also told us that the Tuk-Tuk driver was a great joker, and that he was sad he couldn't speak with us. We spoke to him using the universal language of smiles.

Most Lao are Buddhist. They believe that Karma, more than hard work, sets the course of their lives. Our guide book mentions that a commonly held Lao belief is that 'too much work is bad for your brain.'

A French saying (from their colonial days):

'The Vietnamese plant rice; the Cambodians watch it grow; the Lao listen to it grow.'

Tonight (around 16:30) we've been invited back to the shaded hut to watch (and listen to?) the sun set.

Shannon's makeup bag was stolen during our overnight bus trip from Koh Samui to Bangkok. Silly thieves, used makeup is for losers.

Yesterday I felt homesick, or maybe just Amsterdam-sick; possibly, I was just craving stability, and angry at the makeup snatchers. The feeling has passed, pushed away by thoughts of our next adventure, and the knowledge that we will be back in Canada in one month. (Have we really been gone for one year?)

Tonight we board our night train to Laos.

p.s. Last night we witnessed our first monsoon rainstorm. It was short but intense. The streets flooded. We wore ponchos and splashed our way to dinner.

p.s.s. For those who haven't heard, my friend Jeff proposed to his long time gf Maureen. She said yes. In similar life-changing news, my friend Matt and his wife Casie are expecting a baby. Congrats all around!

When I travel I find and trade books. I read them passionately, pen in hand, scribbling comments in the margins, underlining text. Often I'll read two at a time: one story-book, one non-fiction.

The current non-fiction is The Mind's I, a collection of stories and essays focusing on consciousness and artificial intelligence, compiled by by Douglas R. Hofstadtler, Ph.D. & Daniel C. Dennett, Ph.D.

Is God a Taoist?, a dialogue from this collection, was written the year I was born. Not only does it cover some interesting moral and theological issues, it's also an entertaining example of the Socratic method. (In this case, God plays Socrates and leads the conversation by questioning a mortal.)

Spirit, by Allen Wheelis, is also worth a few minutes of your time:

We come into being as a slight thickening at the end of a long thread. Cells proliferate, become an excrescence, assume the shape of a man. The end of the thread now lies buried within, shielded, inviolate. Our task is to bear it forward, pass it on. We flourish for a moment, achieve a bit of singing and dancing, a few memories we would carve in stone, then we wither, twist out of shape. The end of the thread lies now in our children, extends back through us, unbroken, unfathomably into the past. Numberless thickenings have appeared on it, have flourished and have fallen away as we now fall away. Nothing remains but the germ-line. What changes to produce new structures as life evolves is not the momentary excrescence but the hereditary arrangements within the thread.

We are carriers of spirit. We know not how nor why nor where. On our shoulders, in our eyes, in anguished hands through unclear realm, into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation, we bear its full weight. Depends it on us utterly, yet we know it not. We inch it forward with each beat of heart, give to it the work of hand, of mind. We falter, pass it on to our children, lay out our bones, fall away, are lost, forgotten. Spirit passes on, enlarged, enriched, more strange, complex.

We are being used. Should not we know in whose service? To whom, to what, give we unwitting loyalty? What is this quest? Beyond that which we have what could we want? What is spirit?

A river or a rock, writes Jacques Monod, "we know, or believe, to have been molded by the free play of physical forces to which we cannot attribute any design, any 'project' or purpose. Not, that is, if we accept the basic premise of the scientific method, to wit, that nature is objective and not projective."

That basic premise carries a powerful appeal. For we remember a time, no more than a few generations ago, when the opposite seemed manifest, when the rock wanted to fall, the river to sing or to rage. Willful spirits roved the universe, used nature with whim. And we know what gains in understanding and in control have come to us from the adoption of a point of view which holds that natural objects and events are without goal or intention. The rock doesn't want anything, the volcano pursues no purpose, river quests not the sea, wind seeks no destination.

But there is another view. The animism of the primitive is not the only alternative to scientific objectivity. This objectivity may be valid for the time spans in which we are accustomed to reckon, yet untrue for spans of enormously greater duration. The proposition that light travels in a straight line, unaffected by adjacent masses, serves us well in surveying our farm, yet makes for error in the mapping of distant galaxies. Likewise, the proposition that nature, what is just "out there," is without purpose, serves us well as we deal with nature in days or years or lifetimes, yet may mislead us on the plains of eternity.

Spirit rises, matter falls. Spirit reaches like a flame, a leap of dancer. Out of the void it creates form like a god, is god. Spirit was from the start, though even that beginning may have been an ending of some earlier start. If we look back far enough we arrive at a primal mist wherein spirit is but a restlessness of atoms, a trembling of something there that will not stay in stillness and in cold.

Matter would have the universe a uniform dispersion, motionless, complete. Spirit would have an earth, a heaven and a hell, whirl and conflict, an incandescent sun to drive away the dark, to illumine good and evil, would have thought, memory, desire, would build a stairway of forms increasing in complexity, inclusiveness, to a heaven ever receding above, changing always in configuration, becoming when reached but the way to more distant heavens, the last... but there is no last, for spirit tends upward without end, wanders, spirals, dips, but tends ever upward, ruthlessly using lower forms to create higher forms, moving toward ever greater inwardness, consciousness, spontaneity, to an ever greater freedom.

Particles become animate. Spirit leaps aside from matter which tugs forever to pull it down, to make it still. Minute creatures writhe in warm oceans. Ever more complex become the tiny forms which bear for a moment a questing spirit. They come together, touch; spirit is beginning to create love. They touch, something passes. They die, die, die, endlessly. Who shall know the spawning in the rivers of our past? Who shall count the waltzing grunion on the shores of ancient seas? Who shall hear the unheard poundings of that surf? Who will mourn the rabbits of the plains, the furry tides of lemmings? They die, die, die, but have touched, and something passes. Spirit leaps away, creates new bodies, endlessly, ever more complex vessels to bear spirit forward, pass it on enlarged to those who follow.

Virus becomes bacteria, becomes algae, becomes fern. Thrust of spirit cracks stone, drives up the Douglas fir. Amoeba reaches out soft blunt arms in ceaseless motion to find the world, to know it better, to bring it in, growing larger, questing further, ever more capacious of spirit. Anemone becomes squid, becomes fish; wiggling becomes swimming, becomes crawling; fish becomes slug, becomes lizard; crawling becomes walking, becomes running, becomes flying. Living things reach out to each other, spirit leaps between. Tropism becomes scent, becomes fascination, becomes lust, becomes love. Lizard to fox to monkey to man, in a look, in a word, we come together, touch, die, serve spirit without knowing, carry it forward, pass it on. Ever more winged this spirit, ever greater its leaps. We love someone far away, someone who died long ago.

***

"Man is the vessel of the Spirit," writes Erich Heller; ". .. Spirit is the voyager who, passing through the land of man, bids the human soul to follow it to the Spirit's purely spiritual destination."

Viewed closely, the path of spirit is seen to meander, is a glisten of snail's way in night forest; but from a height minor turnings merge into steadiness of course. Man has reached a ledge from which to look back. For thousands of years the view is clear, and beyond, though a haze, for thousands more, we still see quite a bit. The horizon is millions of years behind us. Beyond the vagrant turnings of our last march stretches a shining path across that vast expanse running straight. Man did not begin it nor will he end it, but makes it now, finds the passes, cuts the channels. Whose way is it we so further? Not man's; for there's our first footprint. Not life's; for there's still the path when life was not yet.

Spirit is the traveler, passes now through the realm of man. We did not create spirit, do not possess it, cannot define it, are but the bearers. We take it up from unmourned and forgotten forms, carry it through our span, will pass it on, enlarged or diminished, to those who follow. Spirit is the voyager, man is the vessel.

Spirit creates and spirit destroys. Creation without destruction is not possible; destruction without creation feeds on past creation, reduces form to matter, tends toward stillness. Spirit creates more than it destroys (though not in every season, nor even every age, hence those meanderings, those turnings back, wherein the longing of matter for stillness triumphs in destruction) and this preponderance of creation makes for that overall steadiness of course.

From primal mist of matter to spiraled galaxies and clockwork solar systems, from molten rock to an earth of air and land and water, from heaviness to lightness to life, sensation to perception, memory to consciousness-man now holds a mirror, spirit sees itself. Within the river currents turn back, eddies whirl. The river itself falters, disappears, emerges, moves on. The general course is the growth of form, increasing awareness, matter to mind to consciousness. The harmony of man and nature is to be found in continuing this journey along its ancient course toward greater freedom and awareness.

The crowd at the full moon party consumed many buckets: mickeys of whiskey, served with a can of coke and a bottle of red bull, in a child-size SandCastleBucket. The following day, we travelled by long-tail boat up the coast to explore a more secluded part of the island.

We have since hopped islands to Koh Samui. Our beach-side hut resides in a town with one main street; taxis file back & forth, honking at potential fares. We soon grew tired of this game. HONK!

Today we rented a motorbike and drove to a waterfall, where we met elephants and played with monkeys. (No monkey paw for you Moser.) We had one motorbike incident; it began with a parking-lot: deep sand and first gear do not mix. Yes Mum, we wore helmets, and no, we were not hurt. Shaken, not stirred.

Eventually, we need to reach Laos.

The power is (temporarily?) up. I'm sweating and the sun has been down for hours.

Before I left Amsterdam, I started work on a new website. It's called BeeBytes, and will be devoted to interpreted programming languages like Ruby, Processing, and JavaScript. Right now, it's just a collection of links, but that will change once I return to Canada this fall/winter.