There’s a Star For You – RIP Mark Linkous

“There will come a time gigantic waves will crush the junk that I have made. When the moon explodes or floats away I’ll lose the souvenirs I’ve saved. La la la.” - Sparklehorse, Sunshine from “Good Morning Spider” -1998

Mark Linkous

Imagine a universe which was at the same time incredibly oppressive and overwhelmingly beautiful at the same time, where sex, death and insects each hold a special place of power, where horses symbolise the strength of loneliness, angels are the mothering of a loved-one, where other people are both distant and close. Imagine a universe where the sunshine and the water are living beings, so beautiful and terrible as to awe and reverence. Imagine a universe with more questions than answers, where the depths of depression and the highs of jubilation walk hand in hand.

This is the universe of Sparklehorse.

Sparklehorse

I first heard Sparklehorse in 1997 on a compilation “Diversion – A Slow River Compilation”, a CD my friend Stephen had given me, with the song “Heart Of Darkness”. In the context of the compilation, this song really stuck out as some of the most heartfelt and tortured music I had ever heard. Later, in 1998, Stephen also gave me a copy of “Good Morning Spider”. This album changed my life.

Listening to Sparklehorse, for me, is a place of perpetual twilight, floating on a boat in a lake at sunset, watching autumn leaves fall, sitting alone in a room listening to old scratchy 45s, the moments between waking and sleeping. The lyrics are full of opposing sentiments, and strange and surreal metaphors.

“I’m the dog who ate the birthday cake.

It’s a wonderful life.

It’s a wonderful life.” - Sparklehorse, It’s A Wonderful Life from “It’s A Wonderful Life” -2001

Sparklehorse’s songs, and Mark Linkous’ lyrics, can at times be so gut-wrenchingly painful as to draw tears, at other times so beautiful and romantic as to make your heart sink, so uplifting sometimes as to cause a deep sense of belonging to the universe, and so isolationist at times as to throw you into the pits of despair, right there along with him. He lived a life of the losses of others and rallied against that with anger and defiance (“Sick Of Goodbyes” -  from “Good Morning Spider” – 1998), and at other times as if reassuring a friend in need of comfort at the end of their life (“Hey Joe“-  from “Good Morning Spider” – 1998, written by Daniel Johnston).

Mark Linkous collaborated with some of the best, including PJ Harvey and Tom Waits, and recently in a duet album with Dangermouse, teamed up with Frank Black, Iggy Pop, David Lynch and Wayne Coyne among others for the brilliant album “Dark Night Of The Soul“. (The entire album is available to listen to here.)

Dark Night Of The Soul

Mark Linkous’ songwriting comes from a place deep within his tortured being. In his brilliant mind, he saw connections between things, patterns and meanings that the rest of us are unaware never know. It seems, in order for someone to make a real and profound difference in music and art, one has to live a lonely and tortured existence, one has to see the beauty, but is also intensely aware of the ugliness of the world. Mark Linkous lived this tortured existence, and, on March 6th 2010, died as a result of it.

RIP Mark Linkous. “You are worth hundreds of sparrows“.

Further reading:

New York Times
David Wm Sims
Rolling Stone

What an atheist believes

As humanity matures and grows, the universe we strive to understand has grown with us. Historically, as the human brain has evolved, our understanding of the universe has expanded, filling in the smaller gaps along the way with pieces of truth and knowledge. Where once our universes may have only extended as far as the eye can see, we now know that our universe is immensely vast, and stretches away into space AND time beyond our comprehension. You may have read about this previously in my blog.

Image from the Hubble Telescope

Science helps us to explain our physicalities, by using empirical observations of the world and universe around us. Over thousands of years, humankind has used physical observations, trial and error, repeated experimentation and rational deduction to help us understand our place in the universe. It is human nature to ask questions, and human nature to seek truth.

For all we know, humans are the only creature in existence to have a level of intelligence and self-awareness that allows us to ask questions about the nature of our existence. We are the only creatures living that have an innate need to understand our world and our universe further. We ask questions about our origins, and our destinies. We ask why we exist at all. You can’t be an intelligent human and not ask yourself these questions at least once in your lifetime.

Religion used to attempt to answer questions of our existence. It also once offered guidance for those who otherwise were without it. And religion was a great tool to unify people, to create a common bond between people where they could share in their beliefs about life. Religion was also a way to fill gaps in our understanding, a way to educate and pass information from one generation to the next. Religion uses stories as metaphors to illustrate situations, then by means of an outcome, illustrates how it is recommended that humans act in different situations. Unfortunately for religion, when a metaphor is taken literally, it causes problems in belief and understanding of our universe.

That and the fact that religion is peppered with inaccuracies, and the whims of the people who wrote the texts. Can a person believe one paragraph of a religious text and ignore the next? Can a belief system which is based upon what it claims to be “the word of god” be believed at all if parts of the very same text are no longer relevant? What parts are correct? How literally should it be taken?Who is to say? You can’t say a religious text is “the word of god” then say that parts of it aren’t to be taken literally and other parts are to be ignored. That defies logic.

And when it comes down to it, a story is just a story. Without proof, anything can be claimed to be truth, but until proof is offered up, it remains a story. And the problem with religious stories is that they are so fanciful and bizarre, and take huge leaps in the face of logic, that it all becomes farcical. One may as well believe that Harry Potter is real than believe that Jesus walked on water, or Allah spoke exclusively through Mohammed. Just look at Scientology, and the stories spun by the latter-day prophet L. Ron Hubbard, and tell me that the sci-fi that is based upon isn’t fanciful.

The best tool we have to make sense of the universe is logic. Wikipedia defines logic as “…examin[ing]  general forms which arguments may take, which forms are valid, and which are fallacies,” whereas Richard Whately defined it as ‘”…the Science, as well as the Art, of reasoning”. We all use logic daily, and when something isn’t logical we tend to ignore it, or reevaluate it. Why is it that we treat religion so differently?

I’m not saying that science can explain everything. It can’t. Yet.

But it does a much better job than religion.

So what DOES an atheist believe?

I asked this on Twitter yesterday, and the best response I got was this:

“An atheist believes in anything that can be proven, accepts as likely anything which has considerable evidence for it.” @LaceySnr

Indeed, this is a good summary of what could be widely accepted as a definition, especially given the 140 character limit of Twitter. However it IS different for every atheist. The only one defining characteristic that all atheists have is a belief that there is no God, no divine creator, no omnipotent benefactor. All else is up to the individual. I know atheists who believe in ghosts, atheists who believe in the power of Reiki, atheists who believe in UFOs. I know atheists who believe in telekinesis, ESP and government conspiracies. There are atheists who read their horoscope daily. Me? I don’t go for any of that. Using logic as my guide, reason as my co-pilot and rational thought as my platform, I make my evaluations of my existence. Proof and evidence are my best friends.

If I was asked “What is one thing you believe that is without proof?” it would be this: I believe that all things will eventually be known, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves. And I’m not saying in our lifetimes, but I’d like to think that we as a species will be around long enough to make sense of our universe. Fanciful, I know, but I am a humanist, and would like to think that we are capable of doing that.

There ain’t no Devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk

The human mind is amazing. It’s ability for complexity and abstraction of thought, for problem solving and creativity, has not been matched by the brain of any other creature humans have encountered. From the incredible amount of information presented to us daily, from the millions of colours, smells, sounds and sensations we encounter, our minds can make sense of all this, put it into some sort of perspective, manipulate it, evaluate and order it. We have the ability to remember important moments, and the ability to forget the junk we encounter. We can use information given to us, abstract it into a new way of thinking, and re-present this information in new ways.

Take for example, the mind of an artist, who sees the world physically much as you or I do. His or her mind is able to not only to perceive the world, but also to then represent this on paper in a way that you and I can then recognise as coming from the original. The artist can also deliberately abstract something, using a different method or approach, to make representations which draw upon the brain in new ways.

Pablo Picasso, between 1907 and the 1950’s, made incredible abstractions of the world around us, with the premise that objects could be seen from more than one angle, that all objects have a three-dimensionality, and was trying to represent this in a 2 dimensional space. The results are stunning, and in most cases, our brains can decode Picasso’s work, and recognise the objects within the paintings as a skull, leeks, a pitcher, a person, a bull or whatever.

Think about the processes involved in this: the artist sees, evaluates, re-evaluates, and recreates the outcome; the viewer sees the artwork, evaluates, and deciphers the meaning. Each step along the way involves a massive amount of brain power, and a huge series of underpinnings and foundations of learning, linking one to the next, making leaps from seemingly unrelated topics, consolidating these thoughts and coming to a conclusion, all with in seconds. Astounding.

Pablo Picasso "Still Life with Skull, Leeks and Pitcher (Nature morte avec crâne, poireaux et pichet)" 14 March 1945

We use our brains to decipher the world around us, and we also keep with us the information that will be useful down the track. If we had to reevaluate everything from scratch ever time we encounter it, we would do nothing else than be rediscovering. We build our knowledge of the world based on our actions of the past, what we’ve learnt and been taught by others, namely those who have learnt these thing before us. We do this so that every person doesn’t have to re-learn every situation from a blank canvas. This advantage that we have allows humanity to move from generation to generation, and build upon the collective knowledge of our ancestors. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, and those giants were mere men. We are the giants of the future.

Historically, before the advent of written language, humans had no way of recording our learnings but by word of mouth. Word of mouth was great because it was engaging, and gave people something to do while sitting around fires at the end of the day, after meals. It was a way to teach the histories of people and culture, to pass on rules, and by using parables, metaphors and stories, help others make decisions about their own lives. The problem with word of mouth is that it can so easily get muddled up, with metaphors and stories quickly becoming truths and not examples. Anyone who has played the children’s game “Chinese Whispers” can attest to this.

When we as humans come across something we don’t understand, we do one of 2 things: we try to understand by using lessons from the past; or we ignore it. (Of course this will depend upon the nature of the new thing, if it were a tiger and we were to ignore, we would surely perish.) But imagine this scenario:

Two men are out hunting at dusk, as this is the best time to catch antelope. They hear a rustle in the bushes to their right. Having heard this in the past as just being the wind, they chose to ignore it, and continue to hunt. Suddenly a great lion leaps from the rustling grass and takes one of the hunters as is prey. The other hunter, having never seen a lion, surprised and terrified runs back to the tribe empty-handed. He relates the story of the dusk and the rustle in the bushes and the great lion that attacked and took the other hunter to the other tribe members. He’s in a state of shock, and relates the story badly, forgetting some details, and distorting or exaggerating others. The tribe members try to reason as to what the lion is, but having no prior knowledge of the animal in question, they name it “the big yellow spirit that rustles in the grass like the wind”. The next time the tribe’s hunters go out at dusk and hear a rustle in the bushes, they fear it. The story gets passed down from person to person. There are more stories, of finding dead antelopes ripped apart by watering holes, of a man who heard the rustle in the bushes and ran for his life, feeling the breath of “big yellow spirit” on the back of his neck as he ran, of children being visited by “the big yellow spirit” in their sleep.

The story is passed from tribe to tribe over generations, each tribe adapting the story to suit the environment the live in, adding and removing parts of the story that don’t relate to their situation. “The Big Yellow Spirit” is also told of having spoken to a man from a tribe far, far away, telling him stories of how the world was formed. Others tell stories of being whisked up into the air by “The Big Yellow Spirit”, only this time he came as a large eagle. Eventually, anywhere you travel to you can hear stories of people hearing the rustle in the grass or bushes, and knowing that “The Big Yellow Spirit” was watching them.

This is very overly simplified, but what I hope it does is illustrate and example of how a naturally occurring event such as a lion attack could, over time, be distorted into folklore, especially when passed by word of mouth. These stories still served their intended purpose, and were coloured by tales of great journeys and battles, both to make them interesting, and to fill in gaps where information might be a bit thin. But along the way, stories have a way of gathering information, and unintended meaning that was not there in the original telling.

In age, where EVERYTHING is recorded, and by multiple sources, information is much more scrutinised. This means that we can quickly sort fact from fiction, especially when we look at things of a supernatural nature. With so many worldwide trying to discover the mechanisms and workings of the world around us, my hope is that one day all things will be better understood, that the mind and spirit can be explained in a way that doesn’t involve the fanciful and mythological. Some say that an understanding of all things will take the magic away from life, that “without the unknown, what is there left to live for?”

I answer this. “Just because we know that chemical makeup of water as H2O, does it take away the magic from swimming?”

Carl Sagan, again, has had thoughts about this.

“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”

Carl Sagan, Interview with Charlie Rose, 1996