The Ghost in the Cloud Chapters 15 & 16

Reflections on why I'm writing "A Ghost in the Cloud"

Excuse me if I am redundant. Some people are aural and would rather listen, others prefer to read so I've written my thoughts more clearly and in depth below and tried to say essentially the same thing in the video. I'm not too comfortable yet talking to a camera, but I think a vlog, as opposed to a blog, might be more interesting in some ways. With this posting, I seem to be doing both.

I posted my original story, The Ghost in the Cloud in January of 2009, though I think I had written it shortly after I arrived in the UAE, but my memory isn’t so good. The first chapter was just a short story, written in response to a documentary I had seen called “Transhumans” about very real technologies and “fuzzy areas” of ethics in science. I realized that many of the individuals and companies who have access to the materials and knowledge to put into reality certain products that can alter genes, or enhance humans or select the most promising sequences of DNA for designer babies, do not share my sense of ethics about tampering with human beings. The original story was in response to a small number of people who are working on AI, who think they would like to transfer their consciousness in to cyberspace where they think they will be able to live forever.

Since then I have meandered all over the place in my story telling. But one thing I have noticed about these stories is that I am writing out of my introspective personality. I notice that I tend to use the words ponder and reflect quite often. Most of my characters are people who think about the meaning of things, wonder about who they are, what they are, and what might result from the choices that are being made now. My characters, of course, spring out of my own head and therefore are different aspects of myself, and since I am introspective, my characters tend to be introspective. Even Jack, the cyberspace AI, spends a great deal of time “processing” and trying to understand exactly what he is.

I realized today that I do not live in an introspective culture. I live in a capitalist culture and capitalism is far from introspective. All our thoughts in this culture are chained and directed to one goal: the making of money, because at the core of capitalism lies greed. Greed is the fuel that runs the machine of industry, not oil or coal. Greed is the prime motivator of all we do in this culture. Greed fosters competition, which capitalist see as good because it drives us to do our best—ignoring the fact that there are very few winners and this completion simply sifts out and rewards the sociopaths among us because they are willing to win at the expense of others whom they care nothing about, justifying themselves by saying, “nothing personal, it’s just good business.” It is this love of money that drives the thinking of our capitalist intellectuals, and greed doesn’t bother with introspection—doesn’t want to think about the possible problems, the needs of people, or the needs of the soul—what profit is there in the soul?

I have no problem with capitalism as long as our culture can chain the beast and make it serve the people. Tax it, regulate it, and force it to pay decent living wages and benefits, care for the poor and disabled. But understand that the beast, if unfettered, would eat the people who chain it and would ravage the land until all the resources are devoured and all the pristine lakes and rivers are poisoned and all the land is developed into crowded, dirty slums.

Excuse me. I got off into a rant there. My point is that I am not exactly in sync with my culture when I say that I am introspective. Our culture likes to elect leaders who don’t think; we like people who simply decide and move on. We value decisiveness and quick gratifying actions—even if those actions are wrong. We just want someone who looks strong and tough and tells us what we want to believe. We want people who lie to us, give us the illusion of strength and direction. Introspective people aren’t like that, and they seem weak to us—unsure of themselves, they question and doubt their own actions. This is really too bad. I think that now, more than ever, we need introspection in our leaders. The world is just too crazy and its problems are so massive that we need people in leadership who ponder and reflect on things before they act, or even when they do to look at the results and question if it is the right thing to do and back up if need be.

The world I am creating in my story—especially in Suri Sangala—is a vision of a culture that is introspective. I tend to read at a slow pace with the minimalist music of Philip Glass in the background. The teachers in that world have a tendency to elicit or draw out the answers from their students rather than simply dictate to them what is true according to dogma or tradition. There is a kind of assumption that truth is in them already; when they are ready to see it, they will see it. The role of the teacher is to simply ask questions which the student must think about or ponder.

Suri Sangala is a testing ground for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. There is no war, no politics, nothing to create stress. When all the external needs are met, people must begin to deal with what is in them. This sets them on a path to self-actualization. I’ve come to not like that term, self-actualization, because it means different things to different people. Here I mean a state of being where one is able to transcend the self and find a kind of realization that that we are connected to everything. Actions that an individual commits with that kind of state of mind or being are authentic and motivated by something beyond that individual; and something inside that person tends to bring balance, harmony, healing and peace where ever he or she may go.

The Lost Riddle

I call this "The Lost Riddle" because I lost it and found it in some old papers the other day. It is a different sort of riddle than so many of the others because the answer isn't exactly an object. And that's all the help I'm gonna' give on this one.

The first signs of spring

I'm a guy and all, and guys don't usually do flowers, but having lived through my first winter back in the USA after missing three of them in a row in a land of perpetual sunshine and warmth, I was feeling rather ready for spring, so you can imagine my thrill at seeing these things pop up in my back yard. I've never exactly thought of flowers as a sign of triumph before, but that is exactly what they are.

Mary Ann McCray

Taking a break from riddles this week and I thought I'd put together a ghost story. I wrote the words to this back in the 90's for a poetry class with the poet, Jared Carter who seemed to like all my poetry, and I, in turn, rather enjoyed his class, though others hated him because he could be pretty straight with the punches. I and a few of the other students went out for beer with him a few times and he cold talk. I remember him saying that after the end of the cold war, we would see a shift in our attention to having wars in the Middle East, since presidents often need wars to distract people from real issues at home. He may have been right about that, but he was also a big talker, with lots of opinions. I don't mind that with people as long as they laugh at themselves when their baloon gets popped, and as long as they are willing to tolerate other people's view points.

Anyway, I love a good ghost story--this one is kind of ambiguous as ghost stories go--I left it a bit unclear wheter Mary Ann McCray was really a ghost or not. She may never had died and may have been simply assumed into the court of harest maids. The Harvest Queen is a kind of Diana/Demeter goddess. The idea being that old gods and goddesses hide themselves in rual areas and have resorted to stealth in a time when people no longer believe in them except for certain times of the year when something in us remembers full moons and ancient festival days in spite of ourselves. I wrote this because my class was in the fall and Halloween was coming up. It is a time of year when my mind always turns to James Wibcomb Riley and "Little Orphant Anne" (the spelling is his). I've often thought we need more like them for the season, so I wrote one in a differen vein.

Riddle #13: Berry Lynn McCavender

Riddle # 9: I am old

I am old...

on a handle that you cannot hold.

And the sailor who is lost at sea

must stop and think and turn to me.

Around and around they go, the bear

and the woman in her rocking chair

The cross, the goose, the crown

All but I go spinning round

for I must keep my place

and let all others race.

The Ghost in the Cloud Chapter 14: Paradise Lost

I discovered the “Stats” menu on my blog site the other day and was surprised to find that I have quite a few more visits to my blog that I had thought. I was also surprised to find that people were listening to my Ghost in the Cloud series. In fact, the most frequently visited posting on my blog is Ghost in the Cloud Chapter Ten: Truth and Falsehood. I was also surprised that I have a small following in the Netherlands. Who do I know there? How did they ever find my blog? Here I thought that perhaps only four or five people ever even took a look at it.

At any rate, I decided to go ahead and keep writing and narrating my graphic-novel-without-the-graphics-part. It is a bit crazy, I admit, and meanders all over the world as part sci-fi, part fantasy, part philosophical/spiritual dialogue and part comic book. Myth, theology, philosophy, science, and the provocation of life in a postmodern world are all the clay that I’m toying with, and the story is a journal of thinking, and reflecting. I cannot say that I have worked out a systematic philosophy of life. I cannot say that I want to. It seems to me that once a philosophy becomes a system it becomes static and the mind closes and a personal systematic philosophy becomes nothing more than yet another fundamentalist system.

That said, I will say that Love is my prime value, however poor or imperfect I am at being able to Love, my code of ethics is based on the question: What is the response of Love? Right and wrong cannot be codified. There is no rule book, only Love. I cannot imagine any criminal court operating on the basis of the Loving thing to do, but what if it were? What if all law were thrown out and we made our judgments based on Love rather than law? At first glance this must seem like extreme idealism and highly unrealistic and that such thoughts ought to be relegated to the trash can marked “Utopian Foolishness” But I think it might make a good discussion all the same. What would a society look like if it really were based on Love—not Law, Greed or Self-interest? What I propose would involve considerable use of imagination—applied imagination! Now there’s a new concept. It is the use of imagination to dream and then make the dream a dream no more. It is to put flesh on a dream—to share the mind of God in this way—to dream a world and then create it.

To refresh the reader of the basic plot, after nearly—what—about a year or so? One of the main characters is a girl called Angelina, who, at this point in the story, is on a father quest and has gotten as far as Holyhead Island off the coast of Anglsey, Wales. She is visiting with an ages old Druid who wants to help her, but a druid who also wants to be done with his role as the keeper of the sacred ancient stories by imparting them to Angelina whose nanocells have given her the ability to remember everything perfectly, virtually forever. These Nanocells were given to her by an AI called “Jack” when she was a girl. Jack has been a kind of father to her in the absence of her own father who mysteriously vanished when she was a girl. She remembers him as a loving father and feels the need to understand what happened to him and why he left all those years ago.