Once upon a time, Nas Who met a man from the future who told him everything was going to be alright. He’s practiced magic, met demons, talked to gods and counts a quartet of superheroes among his personal guard. Or maybe none of that stuff happened. Either way, he’ll be bringing you his perspective on things every Monday from here on out.
So Stevey just does his casual mic-dropping thing on my facebook wall this morning, writing nothing but “Fractal Brain Theory” on my wall before leaving to go save the Earth or whatever it is he does. My usual linguistic trick of simply reading each word slowly and separately till my brain makes up what the whole term means worked out alright, but I followed that up with a quick Googling to find out more on the subject. This led me to an almost 2-hour-long lecture on the subject by Wai H. Tsang, and something other than the usual electronic disco stuff I’ve got looping through my headphones while I work.
If you’ve ever wanted to know more about the brain, about how you think and why you think what you do, and about your relationship as an individual organism to the grander holographic universal structure, look no further. If you don’t wanna know about this stuff, we have a movie reviews section for a reason.
This week’s been a sort of wordy one for me. It may have something to do with me fixing my bio to say “writer” again. And as much as it may veer off into the realm of the esoteric, I figure I’d like to further address my beliefs about words and the way we use them.
In my reading cycle I’ve encountered a lot of references to magic, or the transformation of what’s imagined into what’s real. When you get down to it, this is pretty much the one thing all humans from all ages, cultures and even realities have in common. Ancient tribesmen are said to have rehearsed for their hunts by drawing the action itself on cave walls, as if predicting future successes as much as explaining them to others. Jules Verne described the rudimentary elements of interstellar travel to the moon a hundred years before we basically proved him right. Bill Gates said there’d be a computer in every household and then eventually there was.
All of these are examples of how humanity renders an idea symbolically, and then ultimately turns that symbol into reality. At its core, this is magic: the original human art.
There’s so goddamn much I want to say about this man, and about our country, and about the things he had to say about it and its people, and about people in general, that still resonate with me today.
It started about a month ago. People would turn and ask me – and these are people I’d just met and people I’ve known for ages – they’d ask if “Nas Who” was my real name. It’s a ridiculous question to get asked when you know the answer, but people by and large err on the side of their fears, and hey, who knows what sorts of crazy new age names folks are calling their kids (my own brother and sister have named their kids things I’d never heard before they were said in the context of hospital waiting rooms). The candy-flipping hippie kid standing in the dark and the dust smiled when he said my full name because, he explained, his kin liked calling people by their true names. A healer I saw a few weeks later also asked, innocently enough, and then a psychic did again just two weeks ago.
Basically, “What’s that short for?” is the new Ryan Gosling, and since I’m a guy whose obsessed with patterns and cycles in our socio-developmental sphere, I tend to notice maybe more than anyone else would. There’s something to a name though. Something magic.
WARNING: This post deviates slightly from the tone you might expect from Another-Day in an effort to shed light on the fact that we need to make a whole bunch of changes in order to have another day, one day.
My friends call me Captain Planet, or “Sustainable Steve”, or a host of monikers aimed at ridiculing the fact that I’ve dedicated a portion of my life to saving the world. I haven’t, but that’s what they assume. Besides, girls dig guys that give a fuck about pandas, so I’m not correcting anyone anytime soon. They don’t understand what I do for a living. That’s probably because I couldn’t find anything meaningful to do as a profession in the conventional sense, so I invented my own job. After learning how to design buildings and things, I thought about the future, and about our Earth and arrived at the conclusion that it would be a pretty good idea to spend my days designing a new future for it, ‘cos the present isn’t such a great place to be when you look at it closely.
In my forthcoming posts, I’ll try my best to debunk some of the myths about what is actually going on with our planet and add some perspective to the actual state of affairs regarding the challenges we face as the only species which needs an app to communicate with each other.
