The Mystery of Consciousness

Pinker is definitely one of the most interesting thinkers around today.....

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html

Friday, Jan. 19, 2007
The Mystery of Consciousness
By Steven Pinker

The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.
So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness.
Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play?
The report of this unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken.

It shouldn't be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As René Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body's death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying." And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality.

To make scientific headway in a topic as tangled as consciousness, it helps to clear away some red herrings. Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home. Nor can consciousness be equated with self-awareness. At times we have all lost ourselves in music, exercise or sensual pleasure, but that is different from being knocked out cold.

THE "EASY" AND "HARD" PROBLEMS
WHAT REMAINS IS NOT ONE PROBLEM ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS BUT two, which the philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem. Calling the first one easy is an in-joke: it is easy in the sense that curing cancer or sending someone to Mars is easy. That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century.
What exactly is the Easy Problem? It's the one that Freud made famous, the difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. Some kinds of information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They must be in the brain somewhere because you couldn't walk and talk and see without them, but they are sealed off from your planning and reasoning circuits, and you can't say a thing about them.
The Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.

The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."
The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.

Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

THE BRAIN AS MACHINE
SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe.

And consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations. Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals that affect the brain, from caffeine and alcohol to Prozac and LSD, can profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.

And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. In September, a team of Swiss neuroscientists reported that they could turn out-of-body experiences on and off by stimulating the part of the brain in which vision and bodily sensations converge.

THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL
ANOTHER STARTLING CONCLUSION FROM the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Take the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios and got used to electric shocks."

It's not only decisions in sketchy circumstances that get rationalized but also the texture of our immediate experience. We all feel we are conscious of a rich and detailed world in front of our eyes. Yet outside the dead center of our gaze, vision is amazingly coarse. Just try holding your hand a few inches from your line of sight and counting your fingers. And if someone removed and reinserted an object every time you blinked (which experimenters can simulate by flashing two pictures in rapid sequence), you would be hard pressed to notice the change. Ordinarily, our eyes flit from place to place, alighting on whichever object needs our attention on a need-to-know basis. This fools us into thinking that wall-to-wall detail was there all along--an example of how we overestimate the scope and power of our own consciousness.

Our authorship of voluntary actions can also be an illusion, the result of noticing a correlation between what we decide and how our bodies move. The psychologist Dan Wegner studied the party game in which a subject is seated in front of a mirror while someone behind him extends his arms under the subject's armpits and moves his arms around, making it look as if the subject is moving his own arms. If the subject hears a tape telling the person behind him how to move (wave, touch the subject's nose and so on), he feels as if he is actually in command of the arms.
The brain's spin doctoring is displayed even more dramatically in neurological conditions in which the healthy parts of the brain explain away the foibles of the damaged parts (which are invisible to the self because they are part of the self). A patient who fails to experience a visceral click of recognition when he sees his wife but who acknowledges that she looks and acts just like her deduces that she is an amazingly well-trained impostor. A patient who believes he is at home and is shown the hospital elevator says without missing a beat, "You wouldn't believe what it cost us to have that installed."

Why does consciousness exist at all, at least in the Easy Problem sense in which some kinds of information are accessible and others hidden? One reason is information overload. Just as a person can be overwhelmed today by the gusher of data coming in from electronic media, decision circuits inside the brain would be swamped if every curlicue and muscle twitch that was registered somewhere in the brain were constantly being delivered to them. Instead, our working memory and spotlight of attention receive executive summaries of the events and states that are most relevant to updating an understanding of the world and figuring out what to do next. The cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars likens consciousness to a global blackboard on which brain processes post their results and monitor the results of the others.

BELIEVING OUR OWN LIES
A SECOND REASON THAT INFORMATION MAY BE SEALED OFF FROM consciousness is strategic. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has noted that people have a motive to sell themselves as beneficent, rational, competent agents. The best propagandist is the one who believes his own lies, ensuring that he can't leak his deceit through nervous twitches or self-contradictions. So the brain might have been shaped to keep compromising data away from the conscious processes that govern our interaction with other people. At the same time, it keeps the data around in unconscious processes to prevent the person from getting too far out of touch with reality.

What about the brain itself? You might wonder how scientists could even begin to find the seat of awareness in the cacophony of a hundred billion jabbering neurons. The trick is to see what parts of the brain change when a person's consciousness flips from one experience to another. In one technique, called binocular rivalry, vertical stripes are presented to the left eye, horizontal stripes to the right. The eyes compete for consciousness, and the person sees vertical stripes for a few seconds, then horizontal stripes, and so on.

A low-tech way to experience the effect yourself is to look through a paper tube at a white wall with your right eye and hold your left hand in front of your left eye. After a few seconds, a white hole in your hand should appear, then disappear, then reappear.

Monkeys experience binocular rivalry. They can learn to press a button every time their perception flips, while their brains are impaled with electrodes that record any change in activity. Neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis found that the earliest way stations for visual input in the back of the brain barely budged as the monkeys' consciousness flipped from one state to another. Instead, it was a region that sits further down the information stream and that registers coherent shapes and objects that tracks the monkeys' awareness. Now this doesn't mean that this place on the underside of the brain is the TV screen of consciousness. What it means, according to a theory by Crick and his collaborator Christof Koch, is that consciousness resides only in the "higher" parts of the brain that are connected to circuits for emotion and decision making, just what one would expect from the blackboard metaphor.

WAVES OF BRAIN
CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BRAIN CAN BE TRACKED NOT JUST IN SPACE but also in time. Neuroscientists have long known that consciousness depends on certain frequencies of oscillation in the electroencephalograph (EEG). These brain waves consist of loops of activation between the cortex (the wrinkled surface of the brain) and the thalamus (the cluster of hubs at the center that serve as input-output relay stations). Large, slow, regular waves signal a coma, anesthesia or a dreamless sleep; smaller, faster, spikier ones correspond to being awake and alert. These waves are not like the useless hum from a noisy appliance but may allow consciousness to do its job in the brain. They may bind the activity in far-flung regions (one for color, another for shape, a third for motion) into a coherent conscious experience, a bit like radio transmitters and receivers tuned to the same frequency. Sure enough, when two patterns compete for awareness in a binocular-rivalry display, the neurons representing the eye that is "winning" the competition oscillate in synchrony, while the ones representing the eye that is suppressed fall out of synch.

So neuroscientists are well on the way to identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, a part of the Easy Problem. But what about explaining how these events actually cause consciousness in the sense of inner experience--the Hard Problem?

TACKLING THE HARD PROBLEM
TO APPRECIATE THE HARDNESS OF THE HARD PROBLEM, CONSIDER how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer Lieut. Commander Data, and a furious debate erupted as to whether this was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life.
No one knows what to do with the Hard Problem. Some people may see it as an opening to sneak the soul back in, but this just relabels the mystery of "consciousness" as the mystery of "the soul"--a word game that provides no insight.

Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience.

The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem. Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem even a bit closer. Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they say, is a kind of "meat chauvinism" that would dogmatically deny consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn't have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.

And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.

Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame."

TOWARD A NEW MORALITY
MY OWN VIEW IS THAT THIS IS backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings--the core of morality.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.
And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.

Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that "life is short." It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate.

Say Never-Never

Was just browsing through Squidoo.com lenses. . . and stumbled upon Seth Godin' lens, with an excerpt from "Small is the New Big", which counselled businesses to "Do the Never". . .whatever's "always" done. . .don't do.

Okay, fair enough. Obviously, don't go mad and, say, "Okay, Seth, well, all airlines fly. My airline will tunnel underground."

Christ, but I've been an uptight human being lately. Always with the extreme scenarios.

It was very serendipitous that I came across this. . . I used to believe this fervently. Yeah, fervently....... a word I've been too uptight to use of late.

Peter Pan.

Never Never Land. . . .

Say Never-Never used to be my motto.

In fact, when I was 19, I even wrote a not-terrible poem about taking "the nevers and the gnarled forevers" and crushing them "like dead leaves" beneath my feet.

Oooooh, the romance of "dead leaves". Every true romantic knows.

What I've been saying a lot lately is "No More" and "Enough".

All the friggin' play has gone out of my life.

But I am making a mental note about Pan here, and I consider myself on warning...

"Do the Never", counsels Seth Godin.

Okay, so I don't have a product to market and I don't know how, exactly, I'm going to apply this, but I am going to remain conscious of all the ways in which I dutifully mimic the status quo, and without attempting to run an underground airline, I am going to shimmy outside of the box as soon as I identify an opportunity to do so.

Might be kind of hard: I've been stuck in my own counter-productive thought process for waaaaaaayyyy too long. The other night, I was asked if I had lost all sense of wonder. Had to seriously think about that. . .I've gotten so cynical.

Well..... fairy-dust, I suppose.

No one can fly unless the fairy dust has been sprinkled upon them. . . . . and, oh hey, off the top of my head-- what happened to The Lost Boys: "It is sad to have to say that the power to fly eventually left them. . . ."

Well, I don't want to lose that ability. But I've gotta lighten up.

I have to start defying my own mental gravity. You'd think someone as anti-authoritarian as myself would rebel against even my own limiting thoughts?

It is kind of funny that the picture I'm using here is a statue of Peter Pan-- that's practically sacrilegous.

No one could ever capture the spirit of Pan in stone.

But, it's a nice shot, and it was available on Creative Commons, and I didn't want to use a cartoon.

So, here's to paradox, and here's to Never-Never.

Stonereader

More and more, I am being drawn back into creative mode, and stories and inspiration keep coming my way....... someone recommended this docmentary to me today--- the very thing to restore my faith in the power of creativity, and art, and story to time-travel..... that is what art is, no? A tool for time travelers--- something created out of time, to which the normal rules of time and space do not apply....? This is what I need to believe.....

Welcome Elizabeth

Okay Liz,

Post a comment: what should I be talking about here?

I want ideas.

What news stories?

What issues?

Let's get a table talk going.

Help your girl. Pretend we're at a party.

Draw me out, yo.

Let's sow some seeds, my love...

Thought Provoking Book: The Rebel Sell

Here I am, the consummate, modern consumer. . .kinda dazed, in search of distinction but dressed-down, restless.....wanting, not wanting to want.....aaaah.....


For innately rebellious and cynical souls like moi, this book was extremely thought-provoking. For years now, I have really struggled with my own child-of-the-90s tendency to buck the mainstream and go green and be hyper-socially conscious, all while feeling my "beliefs" were just a little too black and white.... I have, for years, believed that big business could in fact be a very, very good thing, if only our consciousness would rise to meet the potential.....

This book has helped to kickstart my social thinking once again, and in a very productive way...

Please find it, read it.....argue with it if you must, but grapple with it.... check my store-thing (lol, ever the capitalist) to order it from Amazon.....

If I had the mental energy I would write a full blown review of it.... hopefully mental energy will come later this week..... for now.... I'm just endorsing it wholeheartedly.........as a starting
point for a new way of understanding our culture, minus the unhelpful, countercultural wail....

( god i still feel like a traitor to my own beliefs just typing that, so that shows how deeply embedded in my psyche the mainstream/alternative dichotomy is") Silliness.

Peak Art

Peak Art

I’m worried that art and literature have peaked along with oil, like separated twins expiring at the same moment in spite of time and distance. I’m worried that the definitive Canadian poem was written by Margaret Atwood in 1970, and that it pounds the final nail into the coffin of that grand old idea that art might be something more than a strictly commercial enterprise. Those interested in Canadian literature (or art, or what have you), its making and its consumption, often fret over what makes a piece discernibly Canadian. Love of the land, pastoral imagery, down-to-earthness, humility, sense of humor, the inclusion of a Mountie, a Horatio Alger-esque hero or heroine, a railroad track, ambivalence re: ethnic and cultural diversity or . . . what? Well, I’m loath to argue that the mystery-Canadian-ingredient we’ve all been hem-hawing about for so long may well be artistic disillusionment and complete surrender to practical and financial considerations, because I really hope that isn’t what it is. Or at least won’t be forever. But in Atwood’s poem “Later in Belleville: Career”, we’re given a glimpse of commercialized talent decaying quite comfortably no thanks to itself. The poem should be read in it’s entirety to be fully grasped, but here are the highlights. It begins with Atwood's depiction of Moodie's artistic beginnings, crafting trinkets for tourists by the light of an oil lamp so that her children might wear shoes, and concludes:

Now every day

I sit on a stuffed sofa

In my own fringed parlour, have

uncracked plates (from which I eat

at intervals)

and a china teaset.

There is no use for art.

The poem opens with oil burning conspicuously and ends with the obsolescence of art and the means of procuring warmth and sustenance rendered abstract, invisible, and waaaaay besides the point. In between, art is crafted with spendthrift tourists and hard-to-come-by shoes in mind. Just when she might have been free to write with true uninhibited candor, free from the threat of financial ruin and starvation, she falls silent, unable to speak a word regarding the society that has allowed for her survival and no longer feeling the need to deal in contrivances. Is art merely the province of the disenfranchised? Once licensed, is it still art, or is it prostitution, compromise, calculated reciprocity, a faked orgasm—beautifully timed to coincide with whatever public thrust, but just as fake nevertheless?

This poem may be read and interpreted on many levels, and it is not my wish to de-contextualize it from the exquisite collection it is part of, but the succession of images it employs are compelling, for me, on their own terms. First Susanna writes for survival, then for a slightly more comfortable survival, and finally not at all. Why bother? She has fringes now. Actual fringes. Isn’t that art enough? Knick-knacks, imported goods, an abundance of food. If one sits a little longer with this poem, it isn’t difficult to imagine the oil lanterns burning down to nothing, darkness closing the scene. Nearly two-hundred years later, we’ve grown into a nation teeming with optimistic and inspired artists turned business-savvy sales-pitchers. We are running low on fuel. Not a stubborn Keats among us. The neon lights are flickering. Even billboards, now, are flickering. The arts are industries like any other: stylized and slick, chock-full of posers and panderers to business-tripping buyers and investors, if not treasure-hunting tourists.

At this year’s Northrup Frye literary festival in Moncton, New Brunswick, I spoke with one of the authors, a university professor, briefly about the future of Canadian literature. He did not seem optimistic. In fact, he ever-so-slightly rolled his eyes at me and suggested I was optimistic when I professed my belief that inspiration is contagious, genius is contagious, the literary future still might be kind of a little bit maybe bright etc. . . He left me with the distinct impression that he felt a considerable percentage of up and coming young writers were on the megalomaniacal and empty-slick side. As an aspiring writer myself, I cringed, and silently agreed. I am all too familiar with the self-important blood that runs in creative veins, the temptation to colonize all that one sees and perceives, and weave it into a masterpiece of disillusionment and ennui. To re-invent the wasteland in our own image (which, of course, is sort of what I’m doing in this essay, but with good intentions, I promise). In the afterword to her Susanna Moodie poems, Atwood quipped that megalomania was supposed to be an American affliction (paranoid schizophrenia being a more apt Canadian illness). My friend Natalie writes to tell me about a creative writing student she knows who is “so arrogant, it’s impossible to have a conversation with him.” Alas. Or, not even alas. . .but just. . .uh-huh.

When did our country cease to simultaneously alienate and guilelessly enchant it’s artists and begin to flat-out piss them off so much that they pretty much forsake their art in favor of acquiring status and cash and corporate positions? I know I’m generalizing, but am I really? Why the well-known hegira from starving, sensitive artist to fat, mainstream, business-savvy sell-out? Could it be because any country so hyped for its natural resources simply cannot survive the transformation of those resources into products, raw talent into genius (in the old creatively brilliant but not necessarily a pop-star sense of the word)? Somewhere along the line, something gets adulterated, refined beyond recognition, over-processed. When every last bit of originality has been transformed into an oeuvre, an empire, a business, a franchise, a series of novels, a finished product, a highway: what then? Settle into the cozy living room you’ve purchased/inherited or else venture out into a brand new wilderness, a wilderness alive with parasitic art waiting to suck you into the souvenir shop, club, department store or charity it was created to promote? Go stand in line to sing a cover song? Not bloody likely. Not when you’ve acquired a stuffed sofa already.

I realize I’m not painting a pretty picture. My perspective as a small-town Maritime girl probably biases me from the get-go against pure commercialism. But I see far more interesting, intelligent and visionary work coming from Canadian journalists (who are usually a bit more assured of their paychecks, and who, for good or ill, belong to a community of their peers) than I do from its poets, artists, novelists and story-tellers (N .B. I exclude New Brunswick journalists from this praise—which is not to suggest that they lack vision or talent, it’s just that if they do have any, who would ever know it, what with the whole conservative media monopoly thing—which is neither here nor there, but of course, there it is all the same). If there is no use for art it is because society has determined there is no use for art, no training ground, no cradle, Creative Writing MAs and MFAs aside—although these programs are arguably far more like tiger’s dens than cradles—ah screw it, pay me no mind, Socialist or no, we’ve never been a nation of swaddlers—the wilderness, the wilderness, lest we ever forget. Why are so few voices really crying out in it though? I mean really crying out unapologetically and unafraid of doing anything other than echo? Teasets, I fear.

Mrs. Moodie was not sitting pretty because of her own literary or artistic work: her husband’s success in a political rebellion is what won her her comfort. What society rewards is what it will get more of. And it certainly has gotten us more politics, more billboards, more used car parts, more machines that need oil. Brave creativity and upsetting candor is still pretty much suspect, easy to perceive as megalomaniacal and anti-social: not things you get rewarded for. It’s up to us to start rewarding artists if we want to keep producing (yes, I said producing) them in all their rebellious and challenging glory. Like the natural resources they are. They have their uses. Like oil. Which, by the way, we’re almost out of. Although perhaps this is why we hate to encourage the independently creative. It would be such a shame to have to burn things people actually poured their hearts, souls and integrity into when the day for last-ditch fires finally comes.

2007: Little Preview

There's a lot to look forward to. Instead of making a list of futile resolutions this year, I decided to make a list of things to keep an eye out for--stories to watch, movies and media to anticipate, guesses at trends, etc . I most humbly submit to you a somewhat silly off-the-top-of-my-head list of things to be on the lookout for, and to look forward to in 2007.

Let me just get this out of the way:

Politics

Here in Canada we'll all be (okay, some of us will be) waiting with baited breath for a federal election call. With Stephane Dion in as the new Leader of the Liberal Party, it won't be too long.

Suffice it to say that in 2007 I will be watching for the return of the tolerant, no-nonsense, progressive Canadian spirit. Whomever's banner it happens under, it has to happen, or we're frikkin' doomed, eh? We should look closely at the culture wars currently being waged in the United States, and take heed.... and vote wisely.

Movies

• Spiderman 3 (ooooh yes, I think we all need to see one more time how the battle for the soul happens within...and the good guy's ultimate rejection of the oh-so-tempting and slickly stylized dark side....
  
• Rob Zombie's Halloween It's about damn time, and what better way to honour Moustapha Akkad's memory than this. Maybe people will even go out and track down a copy of Lion of the Desert in order to expand their world-perspective. As a matter of fact, I promise to write an entry very soon about how revelatory the Halloween franchise has been thus far, insofar as providing insight into terrorism and the Western world. We've always known that science fiction has a profound political aspect-- so does horror. Now more than ever. Do not avert your eyes, mes amis.....prend ma main.
  
• Grind House Tarantino and Rodriguez... this is gonna be bad, but I won't be able to resist it.
  

I think this gives you an idea of where my cinematic affinities lie...


Trends

• I think its safe to assume that the 80s will continue to come back. Axl Rose is ambulatory and out of hiding. Maybe, just maybe indicative of the rebellious American spirit finally seeing its shadow.
  
• I predict we're going to see a new wave of feminism emerge over the next few years. Its already starting to simmer. . .I can feel the lipstick feminists becoming capitalists, pure, and the grass-roots activists getting savvy and branded. Now that shows like Charmed no longer exist to anasthetize (albeit acknowledge) feminine spiritual longings and wisdom, we will begin to collectively draw down the moon. I can just feel it.
• Just for fun: I say Mozilla will make even more headway.
• Celebrities will continue to marry and procreate in an attempt to disguise their sexual orientations.
• Biden will tear a decisive strip off of Bush, once and for all.
• Stephane Dion will become Prime Minister of Canada
• Saddam Hussein will be spotted working as a gas station attendant in Texas.
• Heroes fans will begin to rival Trekkies

Yeah, okay, I think I'm done for now.

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This whole blogging thing involves a major learning curve..... I'm still so in awe at how much is out there!!!