How do you write about your “faith”?  How do you describe the indescribable, the ineffable, the otherworldly? the grief or joy or miracle or peace or disappointment that you have because of your faith?  Everyone can argue about the value or lack of value in “religion”–and it’s an easy connect-the-dots to create your own pictures of what organized religion has done in the world.  It’s harder to write about personal faith or your personal interactions with religion–what keeps you going, what happened to you that you know no one would believe, about the anguish of trying to live in a real, faulty, fragile world, when others ask you to strive for peace, patience, happiness, even joy.

This writing workshop will explore how people write about these very personal experiences, or their thoughts about faith and religion and its very real presence in their lives, or the lives of those around them.  We’ve had students write about their relationships with their parents, their children, their grandchildren, experiences in nature, in confronting others who aren’t on the same page.  We have had students who are believers, non-believers, unsure, people of various faiths.  All faiths are welcome–come with what’s important to you, open to what is important to others. This isn’t a dogma class.  It’s not a class to teach you from the top down.  It’s for you to teach us from the ground up through your experiences, your writing.

What you can expect:

While this is a 13-15 week experience, it’s done in modules, so that you can come and go as you have to.  We’d like to see a committed group of 15-20 people go through the writing education and the writing workshop so that we can have a core group.  However, this class has been taught before at WUC with a core of ten and some of them will be joining us again.  My hope is to build trust in the group, so that you will trust us with looking at your writing.

This will be my third time teaching this class–and it is always one of my favorite courses.  WUC is asking for a $50 course fee if you decide to take the course to reimburse the Herb and Dorreen Wahl Fund, a generous fund that allows WUC to bring affordable, creative experiences to the church and the surrounding community.

The first six or seven classes will be focused more on writing technique with fun exercises to get you writing and trying different methods.  We will read works by contemporary writers like Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Andre Dubus, Stephen Gould, John Updike.  (These are all inclusive writers, but for the most part seekers with an inclusive Christian background).Gradually, we will be looking more and more at your writing–as we hope that you will begin to share your stories, fiction and nonfiction.  In March, there will be Saturday afternoon opportunities for longer workshops for those who are ready to submit works to be workshopped.

Come Friday, Feb 10, to the Whitehorse United Church for an orientation meeting, with food.  We’ll have some brainstorming sessions, you can chat with prior participants, and get to know what the class will be like.  The official class will begin Feb 17th and run through Mid May.  A fully detailed schedule will be available that night. 

 

 

 

Jerome Stueart (the instructor) has his PhD in English (Creative Writing) from Texas Tech University, over 15 years experience teaching writing workshops, and this is his third time teaching Writing Faith.  His publications can be found on this website under Written Work.  If you have questions about the course, feel free to write him at jstueart@yahoo.com with the subject heading “writing faith”–or come Friday, Feb 10, at 5pm to the Whitehorse United Church for more information.

Filed under: fiction, literature, religion, whitehorse, writing, Yukon Tagged: christian, faith, united church, Whitehorse, workshop, writing, writing faith, Yukon ]]> http://jeromestueart.com/2012/02/05/writing-faith-workshop-begins-feb-10-5-8pm-whitehorse-united-church/feed/ 1 jstueart IMG_1046 I_Want_To_Believe_01 http://jeromestueart.com/2011/11/20/my-short-piece-in-geez-magazine-24-privilege-issue-on-coming-out/ http://jeromestueart.com/2011/11/20/my-short-piece-in-geez-magazine-24-privilege-issue-on-coming-out/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:10:00 +0000 jstueart http://jeromestueart.com/?p=1998 ]]> Ironically, my pastor at RBC suggested I write for Geez magazine.  I don’t think he imagined what piece I would eventually write for them.  But here it is, Issue #24, on “privilege”.  I wrote the fast version of my coming out at church.  I centered it on the idea of privilege–of the privileges I had as a single, white male Christian who had leadership potential and of the privileges I no longer had when I added “gay” to that mix.

The church has to change.  It has to.  It may not change from those fighting it on the outside, but it will have to incorporate change if it is to survive further.  It faces irrelevance, it postures with discrimination, it plays favorites, it values money.

Not all churches–no.  (When I say a statement like this I have to stop and say, Thank you, churches that are moving more towards inclusion, social justice, focusing on issues like poverty, the environment, civil rights.  You do exist, but I wouldn’t, yet, call you the “Church”–as the “Church” tends to be the monolithic Catholic Castle or the Evangelical Juggernaut.  One day, you will take on that mantle–you will be the “Church” and it will have a positive ring.  You will convince other churches that focusing on discrimination is not the answer.)

Anyway, there it is, in Geez #24.  If this brings you to Talking Dog, welcome.  There’s lots there, I hope, that will spark conversation.  If this entry leads you to Geez, welcome to Geez.  There’s lots there that will spark conversation as well.  It’s a valuable, important magazine carrying on “the” conversations we need to have happen.  It is intrepid, bold, and unflinching.

I would marry Geez magazine if it looked like a bear and loved me back.

*apologies to Kevin James, pictured, who is not gay.

Photo by Cathie Archbould

Friday evening, through with a long string of shows at YAC, I got to go on a mini-vacation.  I went to Boston Marriage at the Guild.  You’d think you’d be “show”ed out, with all the cool things happening in Whitehorse, but Boston Marriage doesn’t feel as if you’ve gone to a show.  It feels like someone snuck you into someone else’s living room to watch.  And it’s refreshing and touching and funny.

The Guild, after a few plays where characters yell at each other, comes up with a love story, where the leads may bicker at each other a bit, but who resoundly care for each other at their heart–and their sniping isn’t just regular sniping.  It’s David Mamet sniping.  That’s like the Caviar of sniping.  Okay, for comparison, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was hot salsa sniping. Sharp, angled, hook-like and a bit cruel.  Mamet’s language is so rich and perfect–it tastes way too expensive for your mouth (which is why hearing it from Katherine McCallum and Moira Sauer makes it even funnier–they know how to wrap their tongues around every word-morsel).

So I laughed, and laughed and laughed…(cringing) and couldn’t stop.  I was surprised that they didn’t stop the play to let me finish.  But they couldn’t–and when they went on, well, it compounded the laughter–and now I was laughing at new stuff, on top of the previous funny lines, and my laughter got worse.  I was very lucky I didn’t pass out, though I think Moira and Katherine both probably would have liked it if I lost just a teensy bit of oxgyen along the way.  Not that I ever covered up a line.  Not that I ever was so loud others couldn’t hear the jokes.  In fact, in FACT, others were laughing just as much as I was.  (But, they weren’t wearing red and they were sitting farther away–hence a more acceptable laughter.)  The whole room shook like puppies in Christmas box.

So, I’m just telling you that a) when you go to the show, don’t wear red and sit on the front row and laugh like a hyena, and b) notice the sets designed by Arabella Bushnell, who plays the maid, and who is the focus of some of the funniest lines –the whole Ireland business bubbles in my throat as I write, and c) don’t think of this as just another show–think of it as a chance to release all that tension from three weeks of heavy work, the crappiness of a whole Winter’s worth of snow and low temps, and a good chance to spy on some folks who are going through a rough patch but who seem to find ways of caring for each other while making it hilarious and d) revel in all that cool vocabulary (there’s a–LOL–glossary at the back of the program) which I dare say will make you want to talk in longer sentences with funny, bigger words.

Yes, yes, laugh like no one is looking (but do it on row 2).

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Costumes rented, we danced up and down Main Street.  We had a great time.  Sarah MacDougall was there, and captured us in a video and put us dancing to her beautiful song, “Sometimes You Lose, Sometimes You Win.”

I already love her CD.  And I was already looking forward to seeing her live in concert.  Now I feel deeply honoured to be part of her VIDEO!!  And I get to be the bear I always wanted to be. I think I was born to be a mascot–what do you think??

Tickets are still available (667-8574, box office).

I would go on and on about a) her music, and b) the existential moment of being a bear, but I’ll let you watch the video instead.

Find Sarah MacDougall’s CD, The Greatest Ones Alive here.

 

 ’Thoughtful, strong, and spiritual”- The Globe and Mail

“This is a real breathtaking and touching record from one of the greatest talents of this era.”- Rootstime, Belgium

“Sarah MacDougall (from Malmoe and now Canada) has become one of the few voices that is separating itself from the big choir of song poets”- Ystad Allehanda, Sweden 5/5 stars!

“A downright intoxicating beauty!” 5/5 stars!- AltCountry.nl, Holland

“Like Ane Brun and Wendy McNeill, we’re not so specific about nationality when we  declare Sarah one of Sweden’s best singer/songwriters” Nöjesguiden, Sweden 4/5 stars!

“A near perfect collection of memories of love”- Allgigs.co.uk 4.5/5 stars!

Described by the magazine Rootstime in Belgium as ‘One of the greatest talents of our era”, and listed as the “2nd best gig” by the major UK newspaper The Independent,  becoming the #1 most played artist on Canadian Galaxie Folk/Roots radio, Canadian/Swedish Sarah MacDougall is an upcoming artist who is getting known for her honest and poetic songs, blistering guitar chops, passionate performances, and unique astounding voice. She has been earning rave reviews and topping major music writers top ten album of the year lists as a songwriter since her official debut album Across the Atlantic (2009), all the while producing and engineering her own music. Born in Sweden, 24 hrs Vancouver called her ‘one of the most promising exports out of Sweden since Abba’, Swedish magazine Nöjesguiden recently declared her “One of Sweden’s best singer/songwriters”. The debut Across the Atlantic got four-star reviews in such notable publications as Q magazine, the Irish Times, No Depression, and the recent album The Greatest Ones Alive has been gathering 4 and 5 star reviews since its release in August 2011.

Sarah’s songs have been chosen for onboard entertainment on Lufthansa airplanes twice, on the Fox TV drama ’15 Love’, on an ad for Roots Clothing , and she’s been a semi-finalist on the International Songwriting competition with her song Crow’s Lament. She has performed live on the Bob Harris BBC2 show in the UK, played several Canadian and International Festivals,  performed with such notable artists as Mary Gauthier, Todd Snider, Kimmie Rhodes, and toured with Po’Girl.

THE GREATEST ONES ALIVE was produced in Vancouver and in Whitehorse with the help of Matt Rogers (Mark Berube, C.R. Avery, The Fugitives), and Bob Hamilton (Kim Barlow, Gordie Tentrees, the Breakmen). It features ten melodic, beautifully written, epic, and touching songs that showcase the growth in Sarah’s songwriting and performance skills. It covers themes such as storms (literal and metaphoric), success, growing up, love, friendship, and dying. The album also showcases the musical skills of Tim Tweedale, Shawn Killaly, Patrick Metzger, and Matt Rogers, with guest appearances by Bob Hamilton, Meredith Bates, Annie Avery, Awna Teixeira, Kim Beggs, Kim Barlow, and Gordie Tentrees.
Sarah MacDougall is one of the hardest working Canadian artists today, and she won’t be stopping anytime soon. THE GREATEST ONES ALIVE proves that Across the Atlantic wasn’t a fluke. Sarah’s voice and songs have the power to ‘make stones weep’. (Q magazine)

(all quoted material from Sarah’s website)

Thank you, Sarah!  May our lives have many moments of dancing bears in them.  

Raven ordering McDonald's Drive-thru, photo by Jerome Stueart

Check out this photo taken yesterday, October 21, outside of the Whitehorse McDonald’s.  Ravens are getting so smart they’re ordering through the drive-thru. The Yukon has very smart wildlife. 

Of course, I’m not sure what this says about McDonald’s food considering what ravens eat. 

Check out this guy’s expression as he realizes what the raven is doing…

So I devised Hidden Histories. 

Hidden Histories is based on the premise that lots of histories have been hidden over time—and that gay history, while the most completely submerged, is just one of many.  The curriculum asks that you start off the new year with a framework, but that you don’t have to change any of your curriculum.  The framework, and subsequently turning your students into little detectives, will bridge the interim for you.

The hardest thing facing California teachers, in regards to this law, is that most people, including myself, have never heard gay history.  So requiring teachers to teach it will be difficult unless you teach them gay history first—and provide them some ideas, lesson plans, curriculum. And giving them only till January to comply is hard… I think you should rather that the schools devise a Teacher training day in the spring, to come up with curriculum.

Anyway, over there at the other blog, I gave my ideas–and hopefully people will feel free to use them.

Best reason for this teaching LGBT stuff in classrooms:

“Within the typical secondary school curriculum, homosexuals do not exist. They are ‘nonpersons’ in the finest Stalinist sense. They have fought no battles, held no offices, explored nowhere, written no literature, built nothing, invented nothing and solved no equations. The lesson to the heterosexual student is abundantly clear: homosexuals do nothing of consequence. To the homosexual student, the message has even greater power: no one who has ever felt as you do has done anything worth mentioning.” -Gerald Unks, editor, The Gay Teen, p. 5.

On stage, there is a sense that Mump, a bit rule-bound and dictatorial, is trying to be a mentor to Smoot, or a father-figure.  Smoot, on the other hand, is young, innocent, full of whim, silly even, more uncontrollable–like a child.  His voice even sounds a bit like Elmo from Sesame Street, though he can easily scowl at the audience and berate them just as much as Mump.  But the two clowns cry together, miss each other, play together, and are true friends–even if they play doctor and (unintentionally) hurt each other.  It’s not Laurel and Hardy I think of but Abbot and Costello.  Or even George and Gracie.

Our audience was completely charmed by these two–and I laughed through the whole thing—there’s really only a few moments that you can stop laughing.  Sometimes you are laughing at what the clowns are doing to other members of the audience.  The Audience serves as the fourth member of the show, and completely unpredictable.  John and Mike, afterwards in the talkback, referred to what the Audience does at their shows, as “gifts.”  They don’t know how the audience will react, but they take whatever the audience does and uses it in the show.  This is why the show is different every night.  Sure there are several “acts” they go through–but the audience determines paths they will take in the act.

Yes, there are some grotesque moments, but comedy and the grotesque have often gone together.  Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein comes to mind as comedy exploring inside Horror.  We all still laugh–in fact fear makes us want to laugh all the more.  Movies that play with death, or that use a dead body as a running gag, or that find humor in zombies (see Sean of the Dead). Saturday Night Live’s spoof on Julia Child severing her own finger while doing a live cooking show–this is what they mean by grotesque, or even horror.  Mump and Smoot really don’t go beyond that barrier towards horror.  There is nothing so realistic that it makes you gag.  Thug, played by Candice, is perhaps the scariest of the three, and she doesn’t say a thing–which is why she’s kinda scary.  She’s completely unpredictable.

However, they take some roads in other directions that I don’t recall seeing in other clown shows, or comedic duos: Clowns with spirituality.  Mump and Smoot have a home world of Ummo, speak Ummonian, and worship Ummo, their god.  They have a strong belief–and in this they speak about belief and spirituality in society.  Mump and Smoot are believers, and I like the way they reflect on spirituality.

I like the way they reflect on love and friendship too–how these clowns care about each other–even if they do it grossly.  They are friends together in a nightmare–and their world is weirder than ours, but their care is authentic and real.  If these had been horrific clowns we could not have bonded so well with them. We cared about them.  We tried to save Smoot from his own curiosity, calling out to him from the audience–yes, you get so bonded with the clowns that you are calling out from the audience as naturally as you would call out to your friends; we chastised Mump for his treatment of Smoot, and he snackered at us from the stage.  We worked together as an audience to be part of this wonderful show.  I loved being a part of this show, and I think you will too.

“Mump and Smoot are the latest wrinkle on the existential fall-guy, the Everymen buddy-buddies alone at the edge of the world. With their horned caps, bulbous noses and pancake eye masks, however, they are closer to big-tent Laurel and Hardy than new-age Vladimir and Estragons…” – New York Newsday

Edmonton Sun called Mump and Smoot a “national treasure.”  And I think they’re right.

They are in Whitehorse for two more nights—I urge you to not let this one get by.  You’ll have a great time in the audience.  For its use of blood, children will not understand what’s going on, but teens will LOVE it.  Teens get in for $5.  Adults are loving being a part of the show.  It’s a great uplifting night out with friends or partners.  This show definitely has a heart, and if you wait for it, they might show it to you, even if it is a bit wet and dripping.

There are maybe twelve dances in the 80 minutes, and each one provides a chance for the viewer, the audience, to participate by bringing their own meaning to the dance.  Perhaps this was intentional; perhaps not.

The dancers, part ballet-part something deeply, bodily organic–they tiptoe, launch, lurch across the stage, always flowing in rhythm to the music.  They are all lovely to watch.  For the first few numbers we feel as if we’re seeing the birth of a civilization, a whole society; toddlers walk across the stage, learn to laugh and cry together, have first few sleeps; ensemble pieces involving the whole company break up the solo, duo and trio dances.  I was most captivated by the two dancers who seemed to be acting out a first relationship—a man who dates the pliable woman, the one he fits into any shape he wants; he is aggressive, demanding, sexual, and she is passive, not quite even awake in the dance.  He discovers how wonderful it is to slide her hand down his face, his chest, his groin; and she starts to fight him, pushing away, and they twist each other back and forth, as she starts finding her own inner aggressor.  They have tortuous sex, or the dance version of it, always moving, stretching, twisting and flexing those dancers’ bodies.  I was captivated too by the narrative I was creating out of the dance–the story I gave that dance, that I’m even giving that dance now in this essay.

We can’t help it.  Human beings, when we see two or more humans interacting with another, we come up with a narrative, a voice over, maybe, but at least a set of actions, reactions, motivations, based on the expressions, the movements that we see in front of us.   Try it at your local mall.  Watch people for any length of time and you give them a narrative.  You can’t help it.

I saw two dancers later in the work, one crying, one laughing, exchanging their emotions, never ever happy at the same time.  They seemed, one at a time, to delight in the other one’s misery.  I thought—man, Chouinard knows human nature.  Some couples just can’t let each other be happy—they trade off the miserability, laugh at the other one in some revolving-door schadenfreude.  They can never be happy.

But in some ways, for me to tell you the narrative undoes the dance.  So I’ll stop that.  The dance is without narrative so that you find what you want in it–but it is beautiful.  Their bodies slowly shed more and more clothing; their faces take on different masks, those of elderly women, those of babies.  One woman wore a four-faced mask and kept turning her head and I swear I couldn’t figure out which mask rested on her face… she just flipped faces as she pivoted and walked across the stage…finally picking up a read book, turning the pages as she turned her faces….  as if every face sees only a part of the narrative, never the whole.  But we all read it together.

The moment when the troupe was nude came with a most disconcerting set of masks–the mask of babies, forcing the audience to see these toned and beautiful bodies as children, and therefore part of a cultural taboo to think of sexually.  Even though the adults had attractive bodies, those baby faces completely squelched any sexual interpretation.  I settled for Innocence as the last act.

The masks–you couldn’t take your eyes off them.  When the faces of the elderly or the babies’ faces were placed on those bodies, you couldn’t help but read them as the face of that body.  It was very funny and surreal.  It’s the eyes.  We hone in on the eyes–and no matter what body is below, we will believe the face.

After the dance was over, the dancers had a talkback and we discussed the idea of Narrative.  At first, they talked about the spontaneity of the dance, that they script themselves new moves and moments based on their day, their own thoughts.  But even they admitted that there is some linear, motivational leap they make themselves in their own heads to get from one action to another, especially in the ensemble pieces.  They hold their own inner narratives about their dances.

We discussed how the dance does invite the reader to create meaning.  I’m reminded of Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”  Keats can’t help himself but make a narrative out of the figures on the urn :

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

“Thou silent form dost tease us out of thought….”  Exactly, Keats!  I felt as if the dance teased out a thought, a narrative, out of each person.

And this, I think, is the brilliance of good modern dance.  Good Dance allows us all to have a collective experience in beauty, and allows us, simultaneously, to find our own individual truths and experience them privately.  It slips in perfectly between our firewalls and gets at our deepest held emotions and truths.  Against our own wills even, we weave a narrative out of beauty.  It is dangerous then to see it–it is an act of courage to watch it.  And it is an emotional act of community to sit and let the dance pull these narratives from us, in public.

While the first Star Trek communicator, in its ST: TOS format, certainly looked like a cellphone and sort of acted like one–it actually worked like a CB.  Citizen Band Radio was open and easy to use–you picked up a small palm-sized black speaker, pressed a thumb button that turned a microphone on, and spoke the name of your party into it, and they answered back.  “Breaker One Nine, this is Foxtrot.  Are you listening?”  And Foxtrot would answer if he were listening.  On TV, nobody dials a number, nobody speaks into the Star Trek devices in a tone suggesting they are talking to a computer:  “Commander Riker,” Picard says–AS IF speaking TO Commander Riker, not accessing his number.  Even ST:TNG Picard and crew were using little more than CBs on their shirts to communicate with each other.  They would bang their chest, making it chirp, just like you would press the button in on the CB, and then announce who they wanted to talk to.  Officers would look up at the ceiling, as if that was where the sound was coming from, and announce that they were, indeed, coming quickly.  To say that it used name recognition software is ludicrous because no one ever spoke into their communicator like we do into our telephones when the “menu of choices” voice comes on to ask us to specify what we want.

Further, no one used their communicators for much more than a quick call.  They used the interstellar version of SKYPE in all versions of Star Trek.  For short calls they used this CB on their chests.  But the CB didn’t come with any apps, any cool devices, games, nor was there any social media.  People used the device simply.  Except for the Enterprise computer, each technological device seemed to have one simple function.  They had an episode on ST:TNG devoted to computer games–and it was the villain of the story–or at least the addictive brain-altering drug in the hands of villains.  Think about it, though.  No one in the 24th Century had a cellphone that took messages or that vibrated.  No one looked on their phones for scheduling.  (We’ll come back to those iPad things in a moment).  No one got a text message.  Computers did not command the social life of the crew, of any of the crew.  In ALL of its incarnations from 1964 to 2009 there is a HUGE lack of the presence of any social media, any social life that is facilitated by computers.

The iPad things on ST:TNG were always work reports, instructions, wikipedia (when Data wasn’t functioning as a walking wikipedia), or a novel.  They were never iPads.  They were never used to communicate, nor go beyond a simple data storage device–with the exception of Jake Sisko who writes Anselm on it–making it a word processor.  I can’t think of a single episode where the pads ever worked as anything but a flat page of data.   I’ve seen characters look through the “profiles” of personnel when considering assignments, yes, but that’s still a data storage device.  The pads themselves never were used to interact with other people.

Yes, I can hear you say–” in Star Trek, people did work with computers a lot.”  But those computers ran the ship--they were little more than automated engines and microwave ovens with brains.  The computers were things that people went to in order to do their jobs, not for fun.  They were processors with tons of data, none of it used for social media.  And none of it used for fun.   Well, the ship did have a library of music—like iTunes–but this was little more than a huge CD collection.  Most people didn’t share songs—they were all for private enjoyment.  Characters turned on their “stereos” only when they were alone in their room.

What about the Holodeck?  Yes, a virtual reality that could envelop a person in a completely different plot or setting.  Why would anyone have Facebook when they could have a Holodeck?  But the Holodeck was more about privacy, not interaction.  People went on the holodeck for their alone time, mostly.  A few people tried disasterous dates on them—(most characters had bad dates using a holodeck program), but rarely did people meet more than one other person on the holodeck.   Holodecks were merely a re-creation of a REAL environment where people could interact physically with that environment.   Making it–actually–the outdoors.  The holodeck was never used as World of Warcraft–to link up thousands of users.  Or Second Life.  (Granted many characters form friendships with holodeck characters, even love interests–but they don’t meet real people in other places as multiplayer venues)*.

Computers never signaled to people that they had meetings coming up, never pinged them, no alerts.  They didnt’ have your calendar on them.  People seemed to remember who they were going to interact with.  For that matter–who had a watch on?  How did they tell time?  Star Trek visually reflected a future, but philosophically and culturally reflected the past.  Those adults on the Enterprise are living like people born in the fifties, using computers more as things to serve us rather than things that we absolutely have to have–on which our very relationships are built.  Having computers that do what we have them do now would have changed the plots of Star Trek dramatically.

Why is it that there wasn’t CONSTANT updating of new information as people from multiple galaxies discovered new things?  The way new discoveries were made was either when a) a crazy scientist testing out a theory came on the Enterprise to “borrow” it as a lab, or b) when characters were going to conferences.  When Wikipedia changes daily, when New Scientist can barely keep up with innovation today, Geordi LaForge kept saying that old people’s textbooks were still “required reading at the Academy” and Data never got overwhelmed with the amount of new information being discovered per second by gazillions of great minds all over the galaxy.  Ways of transmitting new data in Star Trek had 1970s highways—either people came onboard, or someone phoned in. People were either on the verge of discovering, or they discovered it years ago.  But as we know with the information culture–new data, new discoveries, things that completely change our way of thinking–don’t seem to be a part of a Star Trek future.  Star Trek still relied on pre-80s ways of dealing with information: storage and retrieval.

Star Trek didn’t reflect, really, the reality that we have even today: with information exploding everywhere, with our lives being lived online, where information is King, and networking is like breathing.  It skirted around the social media explosion by ignoring it–and making it irrelevant to the lives of Star Trek characters (or making it metaphorically, the Borg–see below).

Do we really credit ST for the inspiration of cell phones and iPads or should we credit them with the size and ease of technology in our hands?  What we’ve done with these devices far outstrips anything created on the show in its history.  And without the cultural changes that information culture brings, Star Trek technology is merely smaller, faster, more efficient–making things more powerful–but not groundbreaking or life-altering culturally.  Certainly computer and information culture has made us think and act differently–more globally, more networked than ever before.  Where is the inevitable consequences of that?  Did Star Trek writers miss the inner changes of culture during the 90s and beyond?  Did they fail to capture the different mindset of information culture?

Perhaps so.  But I find it strangely comforting that they don’t have social media in the future.

People interacted with other people.   The number of times I heard characters say, “Meet you in Ten Forward” or “Are we still on for that game of Kadiscat?” or “You’re with me, Number One” speaks to the fact that characters on Star Trek relied on meeting each other in real time to communicate.  They didn’t rely on devices.  They spent time together.  The computer through the Holodeck recreated real places to interact.  They didn’t send each other texts, or messages.  None of them ever refer to messages they sent from their pads, or their computers.  Computers didn’t facilitate more than vocal messages, like a phone, and they didn’t eliminate or diminish personal time spent with a person.  The Technology, for all its innovation in inspiring wireless and palm-sized devices, never seemed to answer a list of needs greater than the 1970s:  they had a big stereo, a big car, a neat phone, and light reading.

Now, realistically, a TV plot can’t have people communicating through social media…that would be boring.  As a writer, I know many of the conventions of the genre require character interaction, no cell-phone interruptions, or Will Wheaton having 2 million friends.  But it made me think.  Whether or not a Star Trek plot called for actual interaction, we can at least say that it showed us that life requires more human interaction.  We can survive on less computer interaction in the future.  We don’t need all this interaction.  Characters are allowed their own thoughts (sorry, Counselor Troi).  And breathing time.  They can put the pad down because, really, it’s only a book.

If there was a comment on social media in Star Trek, you might find it in the characterization of the Borg.  In fact, people have said before that the Borg seemed to symbolize man’s dehumanization by its complete integration with computers.  Borg were always in social media, per se.  You could take Seven of Nine’s transformation from Borg back to human on Voyager as someone being weaned off destructive Facebook.  Borg have a million friends.  Like.  They don’t have to communicate verbally or even meet together to communicate with everyone simultaneously.  They are efficient.  Seven of Nine was the only character I can remember who had a daily iCalendar.  She referred to her pads full of scheduling.  She would have been loved by both IT people and those that sell Networking Management software.  *Unimatrix Zero was the closest to Second Life that the Star Trek Universe got–but again, it was Borg escapism.  It was their version of Facebook that launched a revolution.

We’ve always assumed that, of the characters and races and social structures in Star Trek, the Federation is our future.  What if that isn’t the case?  What if Star Trek is positing that we might just be the Borg already–and that we too must be weaned from our reliance on the social network.

Because when it comes to who is more efficient and more socially networked, the Borg clearly win.   But the Federation needed no Facebook in their organization.  To get to their future, they Boldly Went Without.

The Tree of Life is many things to many people.  The film doesn’t concern itself with a complicated, or even clear, narrative.  It has a simple one.  At the opening of the film, the death of brother/son sends the characters reeling.   What follows is a montage of scenes recalled from the mind of a surviving brother, now grown up (Sean Penn) as he tries to figure out what happened to “allow” this death in God’s great scheme of things.  The Tree of Life, for me, was a calling out, a plea, a requiem to God for our personal tragedies–asking many times of God, Where were you?  Why did you let this person die?  Was he a bad person?  The film is loosely tied together with scenes from a Texas childhood–a paradise of sorts–with a scary center, a frustrated musician father (Brad Pitt) who takes out his anger, at having to put away his music, on his three boys.

There’s a lot of whispering in this movie.  Be careful when you cough.  You’ll miss them.  Often the whispered pleas begin with “Father” or “Mother” or “You”— as the man, who speaks as the boy, tries to figure out whether he was more worthy of death than his brother.

God appears in this movie, but not as Christians typically think of him–he is a bit distant, but consistent with the book of Job.  There is the other “Where were you?” to consider:  the movie opens with an epigraph from Job, asking Job–in the voice of God–”where were you when I created the heavens and the earth?”  And there is stunning cinematography that takes a viewer from the beginnings of creation through to the moment the son is born.   Through this, the pleas and the questions cry out— “God, are you there?” plays over a volcanic planet being birthed.  The magnitude of the event of creation overshadows the magnitude of the personal tragedy.  It is almost as if Malick is answering for God: I was worried about much larger things.

But to make that the only statement Malick makes would be to miss his emphasis on the importance of love and forgiveness in the face of the cruelties of life and death.

The mother (Jessica Chastain) tells us that there are two paths in life–the path of nature and the path of grace–and that she is going to try her best to live by the path of grace, of always giving the benefit of the doubt, of learning from others, of accepting and enjoying others, and the moment.  The path of nature, she says, is selfish.  It is her path of grace that gives a heart to Sean Penn’s childhood–a magical quality that shields him, partly, from the more cruel aspects of life.  His father, I’m afraid, chose a different path, for believable reasons and has so much taken from him that it slowly eats him–and his children, rather than being his art, become those things that echo the cruelty of his life back to him, the lack of respect, the loss of control. Her path is challenged though with the death of her son–it doesn’t add up why the path of Grace should have tragedy happen to it too.

There is grace in the film, I think.  In Penn’s looking backwards, as he wonders why his own “sins” were overlooked, and why his brother’s sensitivity and bravery seemed unconsidered in God’s decision to take him, we see Penn come to terms with the twists and turns of life—amoral in their happenings.  Humans have to provide the compassion and the grace because life doesn’t give it.  Or does it?  And is God responsible for every life taken–is there some accounting of God that must be done for every one of life’s cruel moments?  Is he responsible only for the tragedies–the famines, the floods, the tsunamis, the earthquakes? Is he not also the one who gives us such beautiful moments too–and can you accept the beautiful moments without also accepting the ugly ones?

These are the questions Job struggles with as he loses his whole family at the beginning of his book, Job.  Did I do something wrong?  Job knows that he has not.  But then why has life been so utterly cruel to him?  He doesn’t understand.  And neither do the characters in this film–they wander around trying to piece together who’s at fault.  And the filmmaker takes us through a catalogue of beautiful summer days showing us the characters interacting in scenes that seem not to connect to each other except that these are moments they go through together as a family.

I thought this was a beautiful contemplation on life.  The Tree of Life gave out eternity in the garden.  Adam and Eve miss eating of that tree–instead only eating of the Tree of Knowledge.  The Tree of Life is then quickly sequestered away as Adam and Eve are thrown from the garden–with God heaving a sigh of relief that Man never ate of that tree, lest he be eternal and sinful.  I think these summer childhood moments are a garden that the oldest boy ruminates on, investigates, replays, so that he can find what moment sent R.L. to his death.

I think this movie shows a really unique narrative structure too.  It’s unusual to see such a loose narrative that relies so much on an audience to piece it together–or not.  We don’t have to all piece it together the same–Malick is less concerned with the specifics of these characters than he is about making them represent humankind, family, us.

After the film was over, there was healthy discussion in the parking lot under the northern lights about the nature of the film, of God, of the messages that Malick was giving, and of the stunning scenes and pictures of creation.  I have never seen creation done so well–of course it is creation as evolution, a combination which doesn’t need to eliminate either option, but which works them both together.  It is grace that we developed on Earth, grace that God created it in the first place, and grace that God provides us the consolation of forgiveness–a power that we bestow on each other every day.

The Tree of Life plays Wednesday, September 14, 7:30 at the Yukon Arts Centre.

For another review of the film, consider this one from the New Yorker.