Reality is a Bowl-Shaped Sky

One of my science teachers said something along the lines of "the sky looks a bit like a flattened bowl, but it's actually a round dome." Yes, he was talking more about mapping the visible sky than the actual nature of space, but you know? I never thought it looked anything like a bowl. It looks like empty space to me, occasionally interrupted by things like clouds and stars and birds.

Our ancestors thought it looked like a bowl, though. An upside-down bowl with holes poked in it so the light outside comes in. Now that we know that the sky is actually empty space, it's more difficult to see the bowl – just as it's more difficult to imagine a flat earth when we know we live on a round planet. I've seen people scoff at the ancients, incredulous that they could be so dense as to believe what we know is false, because it goes against what we can see with our own eyes. But what do we see with our own eyes?

Who here thinks of time as linear? Anyone having a hard time imagining a three dimensional space as being bent, without reverting to a two-dimensional mental image? And can anyone really wrap their mind around the idea of a particle that is also a wave?

Is it so ridiculous that ancient minds could not imagine a round earth, or see a sky that goes on forever?

People often mistake perception with reality. The problem goes deeper than you might assume. I've discussed topics like philosophy and theology with friends who are intelligent, creative, and imaginitive, with an uncommon capacity for thinking outside the box, but even they – and I – have fallen prey to perceptual egocentrism.

I asked a friend about the possibility of God having a self-concept, and her reply was "one would think that, as a being more intelligent and aware than man (who has self
knowledge), God would also have self knowledge." It makes sense, even if the "god" in your mind is purely hypothetical. But why the assumption that a superior being would have self-knowledge just because we have it? I suppose because we are superior to lower beings who have no self-knowledge. But where did this artificial scale of superior and inferior beings come from, and why are things placed the way they are?

Humans think they know what makes a higher being high and a lower being low, and generally their scales put humans pretty close to the top – and everything above us is divine, which is convenient because divine beings are not visible to us and we can't actually ask them whether they would have arranged the scale any differently.

I said to another friend: "we only think of it in terms of 'lower' life forms giving rise to 'higher' forms because we're egotistical enough to think of ourselves as best, and we think of ourselves as the last/latest model of creation simply because the future hasn't happened yet."

My friend replied: "Are you saying maybe we were better before? Or that there is better consciousness somewhere out there?"

And I said: "You misunderstand. The idea that one form is 'better' than another is the illusion." And she agreed.

Where did we come up with the ideas of good and bad, higher and lower, superior and inferior? Is it beginning to look a little like a bowl-shaped sky? That's what it looks like to me.

Figuratively speaking.

Logic. Faith. Reason. Memory. Reality. Instinct. Have you ever really seen infinity? Can you really comprehend matter? Which way is up? The sky is up, but the sky is also down. So how do we figure that we're any better than the dirt under our feet?

Someone else's poetry

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I water'd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree. 

-William Blake

We were wrong about Venus (the prehistoric one)

Remember this lady on the right?

Many like her were made in prehistoric times, all with creepily similar proportions, and they've been a mystery ever since they were first dug up. The prevailing assumption has been that they're depictions of an ideal female figure, faceless because she is not an individual but an embodiment of all women. Her breasts and belly are so huge because those are the most important parts of her - she is valued not for her strong legs and arms, not for her capable fingers, but for her ability to make babies and feed them, and her stores of fat that will help her survive the winter.

While weight-conscious modern women can appreciate that a flabbier body type was more accepted and appealing back then, I was never quite satisfied with the above interpretation. I accepted it, though, because nothing better was offered and I was not in a position to posit theories of my own even if I had any. (Gosh, I sound like such a writer. Too many college courses.)

But wait! There is a better explanation, set forth in this study. I found out about it just a few minutes ago, and immediately stripped down to see for myself if it was true.

It's a self-portrait.

The Venus's head is always tipped downward, as if she is examining and contemplating her own body. The breasts, closest to the eye, are seen as huge, as is the belly below them. Even a non-pregnant woman with just a little pudge will see her own belly as proportionally similar to the carving's, and not just because she's self-conscious. It just looks that way. Check yourself.

(According to the study, "direct comparisons between the original artifacts or their casts and one's own anatomy is the ideal procedure. Caution is urged to avoid injury to joints and muscles unaccustomed to such maneuvers.")

The legs seem abnormally tapered and short because that's what they look like from a sharp downward angle. The hands are tiny - well, anyone who has tried figure-drawing can tell you that a beginner almost always draws hands way too small for the bodies they're attached to. Even the peculiar position of the butt makes sense when you consider the perspective of a woman looking down over her own shoulder. And she is faceless, not because she is an abstract archetype of womanhood, but because the artist could not see her own face.

The proportions aren't due to a preexisting abstract notion of what a woman is for, and what's her most important attribute. They're due to the limitations of the best and only reference the artist had: herself. She had no mirrors or photos. She could see other women, but she wasn't trying to carve another woman. She was carving her own body, and carving it with amazing accuracy.

Now why would so many women all over prehistoric Europe decide to make sculptures of themselves? According to the study, "As self-portraits of women at different stages of life, these early figurines embodied obstetrical and gynecological information and probably signified an advance in women's self-conscious control over the material conditions of their reproductive lives."

In other words, it's feminism. Like the authors of that classic, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and creators of countless other artistic celebrations of womanhood, these women were taking charge of their physiology and their identities. The "ideal female figure" theory, that the Venuses are objective statements of what a woman should look like (or what men found attractive), now seems foolish and arrogant, and frankly sexist.

A prehistoric woman, relying on her own and her community's strength and ingenuity for her very survival, needed a keen awareness of who she was both physically and socially, of her abilities and strengths as a human being who every day needed food, needed to feed her children, needed to contribute to the needs of the group. And she accepted that identity as her most important reality. She was not comparing herself to anyone else's view of what's right and proper; that's a new development. Abstract ideals are a construct of fairly modern times, invented around the same time as things like personal property and sexual repression. (Here I'm basing my statements purely on my own unfounded, shamelessly illogical opinions, so don't take them as true. Please.)

Now I'll have to add one more item to my long list of creative projects to undertake in the future.

Love and Politics (or, a short break from 41,000 words)

I can be very dense sometimes when it comes to literature; I can listen to a wonderful song for years and never realize what it really means until one glorious moment of epiphany. A recent example of this has been The Couch by Alanis Morissette, which I was listening to on the way home from the shrink this past week. (Duh!)

I've been discovering Vienna Teng, a beautiful singer whose songs reach into me and rearrange my insides so that they feel much more comfortable and joyful. Some of my favorites have been Cannonball, Daughter and City Hall.

I had listened to City Hall several times before recognizing that it was about marriage, and then several more times before I realized that it was about a specific sort of marriage whose legality has been fiercely contested lately. It makes no direct references to gender, not even a single pronoun: only the joy of being finally allowed to marry.

You can listen to City Hall here: http://www.myspace.com/viennateng
The lyrics are at the bottom of this entry.

It reminds me of a time many months ago when same-sex marriage became legal in certain places, and one news source made the derisive observation that there was a huge jump in the rate of marriage among gays, followed by a drop - concluding that gay marriage was really a fad, only popular because it was new.

But of course there would be a jump followed by a drop! The marriages which occurred directly after they became legal included those many couples that had been "married" in every way but legally for years or even decades. Literally, generations of catching up had to be done. The infernal stupidity of the media is the biggest reason that I seldom watch or read the news. That, and the commercials usually offend what little morality I have.

But before I drive my blood pressure further into the danger zone, here are the lyrics to City Hall by Vienna Teng:


me and my baby on a february holiday
'cause we got the news
yeah, we got the news
500 miles and we're gonna make it all the way
we've got nothing to lose
we've got nothing to lose

it's been 10 years waiting
but it's better late than the never
we've been told before
we can't wait one minute more

oh, me and my baby driving down
to a hilly seaside town in the rainfall
oh, me and my baby stand in line
you've never seen a sight so fine
as the love that's gonna shine
at city hall

me and my baby've been through
a lot of good and bad
learned to kiss the sky
made our mamas cry
I've seen a lot of friends
after giving it all they had
lay down and die
lay down and die

10 years into it
here's our window
at the Vegas drive-thru chapel
it ain't too much
for 'em all to handle

oh, me and my baby driving down
to a hilly seaside town in the rainfall
oh, me and my baby stand in line
you've never seen a sight so fine
as the love that's gonna shine
at city hall

outside, they're handing out
donuts and pizza pies
for the folks in pairs in the folding chairs
my baby's lookin' so damned pretty
with those anxious eyes
rain-speckled hair
and my ring to wear

10 years waiting for this moment of fate
when we say the words and sign our names
if they take it away again someday
this beautiful thing won't change

oh, me and my baby driving down
to a hilly seaside town in the rainfall
oh, me and my baby stand in line
you've never seen a sight so fine
as the love that's gonna shine
at city hall