The Junk Shop of the Soul: Spirituality in Silicon Valley

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw.

The body beautiful figures highly in this part of California. When the locals are not munching their 'organic' fruit and vegetables bought from vast supermarkets specialising in the stuff, incessantly playing with their smart phones or writing line after line of computer code, they are biking, hiking, trekking, climbing, skiing, running and otherwise torturing themselves as a way of  fending off age and the only end of age, that last exit in a fire chariot of pain.  Given that we are in the heart of the Silicon Valley and Stanford University is just up the road, not to mention the close proximity of Google, Apple and Oracle, one would suppose that the minds round here are pretty robust too. There must be more sheer intellectual horsepower in Los Altos and its environs than practically anywhere else in the world and it might be imagined it would be a centre of down-to-earth rationality. But there are certain anomalies coupled with a feeling of desperate yearning and rootlessness.  This is, after all, a world whose economy is built on what is essential modified sand.

The people I have met and the conversations I have held since arriving here gave me my first indications that the Bay Area is not quite as I expected. First, there was a charming and apparently sane computer engineer who revealed that he had recently visited England to investigate crop circles and South America to get to grips with ancient tribal wisdom: then there are my morning chats with a fellow smoker, something of a rarity in these dreadfully health conscious parts. He is a delightful and seemingly level-headed material scientist but tells me he has just found god (I hadn't realised he was missing) and that his life has been changed through through the Church of the Living River or Vivacious Puddle or something along those lines. Then there are the Meetup groups. Aside from the expected clubs who gather to 'network' and chat with near maniacal enthusiasm about IT related topics, Internet marketing or startup strategies, there are a host of others devoted to shamanism, the divine female, out-of-body experiences, the occult, mysticism and the like.

Some of the shops are pretty strange too.  While the streets are not exactly lined with them, palmists and tarot readers are to be found at practically every corner.  In the heart of Los Altos and nearby Mountain View there are stores where one can attempt to give meaning to one's life by buying dream catchers, prayer beads, statues of Hindu gods or books of eternal wisdom by somewhat obscure but, according to the blurb, massively enlightened gurus. The one thing missing is a spiritual cocktail shaker.  The Mountain View store boasts a shrine complete with a miniature waterfall and features a box for posting notes so that the staff can pray for you.  There is no charge for this service.

It sometimes seems that I have travelled some five thousand miles from my old home in Wessex only to find that I have arrived in Glastonbury, the epicentre of New Age spirituality in SW England.   This impression is undermined by the chatter in coffee shops.  In Dorset these are frequented by ladies of a certain age talking about their knees; here they are haunted by geeks discussing aggregated indexes.  It is all extremely curious.  

The Church of Self-Actualization

On the way to Palo Alto along El Camino Real, one encounters The Church of Self-Actualization. It seems to be a bizarre amalgam of Hinduism & Christianity - much of the iconography & rites being derived from Roman Catholicism.  However, it is almost as though though the body of one has been crudely eviscerated and the innards of the other shoved inside.  For example the Stations of the Cross are replaced by universal religious symbols - the Cross, the Star of David, sacred words in Arabic (well, one assumes this, but they might as well be trademarks for motorcycle companies).  In place of Holy Communion, the congregation stand in line to have pretty tea-lights waved over them as they kneel by the altar rail.  The somewhat chipper 'hymn' in the background adds to the general incongruity:

Aum Christ Aum

Aum Christ Aum

Just as in a normal church, a collection is held.  The other congregants fill the plate with high denomination notes and large cheques - it is surprising that they don't seem to have a credit card reader - and I surreptitiously chuck in a couple of coins as it strikes me that in the realm of Maya, or the unreal, there is surely little difference between 50 Cents and 5,000 Dollars. I receive a somewhat disapproving look from my neighbour.

The service is run by a carefully constructed charming couple clad in robes of an overwhelmingly tasteful matching egg-shell blue. She stands in front of a cross composed of saccharine sweet sentimentalised depictions of Christ and various gurus while delivering homely anecdotes involving camper vans, peanut butter sandwiches and her husband's lousy driving. The congregation laughs affectionately and is rewarded with a sheepish grin and a flash of the husband's improbably white teeth. The peanut butter incident then segues into a sermon on the importance of not passing on misery to one's fellows.  There is some common sense in what is said, but this is undercut by the context. Oddly juxtaposed readings follow from the New Testament and the Bhagavad Gita.

After the service I buttonhole the pastor and ask about his church's blend of syncretism.  After death will we merge into one universal whole or will we find ourselves standing before our maker? Are we reborn? Less than disposed to discuss such matters, he cites his wife's peanut butter story and refers me to the church's philosopher in residence who glibly fobs me off with a Buddhist anecdote about not enquiring into the nature of the arrow but simply addressing one's mind to the urgent  task of extracting it. This seems somewhat unsatisfactory, but perhaps I am being too demanding.

We socialise with the congregants over organic brownies and mugs of herbal tea.  None of them seem especially barmy; indeed, they all appear well educated and most are programmers. When we ask what on earth they are doing there, the response is invariably that it is a good place to meet people and the other parishioners are 'awesome'.

The next instalment: out of body/mind experiences

Rather less than a Summa Contra Gentiles

Reflections on the naysayers and the arid in spirit prompted inter alia by an overheard reaction to Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God. “Call that art! It is just a platinum cast of a skull covered in diamonds”.


“It is just ...” No, my friend, it is far from being just anything unless, say, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony or Mozart’s Requiem are just structured noises. It is a prompt to think and to feel, and you have been found wanting.

The question of intentionality, of whether or not Hirst intended to set up a group of resonating binaries – permanence/impermanence or the precious versus the disposable –  is entirely immaterial. Perhaps the richness of the work exists only in relation to the suitable equipped viewer, but this again is a matter of little import. The tree falling in the forest makes a noise only when heard? Esse est percipi as the good Bishop Berkeley has it? Whatever its ontological status, whatever the ‘site’ of the event - whether assigned to the mental or the physical or ascribed  to some Kantian category – the damn thing still makes a noise provided the auditor has a halfway decent pair of ears.

To divagate briefly, the absurdity of the 'it is just' attitude may be likened to taking outraged positions on Jastrow's hideously fecund figure, the duck-rabbit:

This is neither just a duck nor just a rabbit; its essence lies in its ambiguity. It is both and neither. To insist on one is clearly arrant stupidy. No one denies that For the Love of God has a material substrate - indeed, the vulgar glitziness of its materials is in itself part of its power - but to insist that identifying this substrate entirely and immediately exhausts the meaning of the image rendering otiose the need to think and feel and somehow exorcising the fearful spirit of art itself is equally fatuous.

What bothers me, of course, is not the need to defend this particular work but the hostility behind the question betrayed in the ad hominem overtones: “[You] call that art”. There is surely more here at stake than a question of whether Hirst is a great artist or even of whether the entire project of modern art has any inherent worth. What is ultimately at issue, one feels, is a clash between those who are on the side of the Good, the Beautiful and the True and the life-denying naysayers.

So, should one be concerned that for some – perhaps even the mass of men – the ears of their ears have not been opened and the eyes of their eyes remain resolutely shut? Well there are the demands of pedagogical altruism to consider; no man is an island entire of itself and it is surely incumbent upon the educated to cast some light into the wasteland inhabited by so many of our benighted fellows. The spectacle of an enlightened if effete aristoi selfishly sipping the nectar denied to others is in itself at least as grotesque as the tenebrous haunts of the modern troglodyte.

It is also an issue of self preservation. The howls of the damned are getting louder; the infernal regions more expansive. The barbarians are at the gate and their encampment, the shopping mall cum amusement park, starts just beyond it. We no longer have the luxury enjoyed by Pound and Eliot of simply wrinkling our noses in refined distaste:

All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall reign throughout our days.

In times of economic retrenchment and ‘tough choices’ with the arts coming to be regarded as inessential luxuries, we need to do far more than merely sneer at the proclamation of το καλόν in the marketplace. We need the uncompromising fierceness of Thomas Carlyle and the confident moral assertiveness of Matthew Arnold. Hirst’s skull is far more than just an incredibly expensive lump of diamond-encrusted platinum; it is an occasion for thought and, above all, a memento mori.
----
Post Scriptum:

1. Amused with myself at the passionate intensity of the above diatribe. Perhaps the best weapon is satire and humour. Earnestness is stupidity sent to college, to misquote P. J. O'Rourke.
2. Thinking of emerging from one’s ivory tower, a copy of Ich und Du gripped firmly in bellicose hand. Certainly, Martin Buber seems more pertinent than, say, Augustine’s City of God (things may be bad, but surely not that bad!). In Buber’s terms what we are witnessing seems to be a widespread inability to say ‘Thou’ and the ‘it-ification’ of Western culture.
3. There is a clear irony in the fact that those who embrace Hirst’s death's head do so in affirmation of life but then death is part of and gives meaning to life.  One could cite Søren Kierkegaard here, but one prefers to think of Andrew Marvell's use of the carpe diem motif in To His Coy Mistress. 
4. It is a curious fact that outraged defences of art seem to come from the most philistine of sources.  One well recalls the ‘Do You Call That Art?’ headlines in the British tabloids directed at Ms. Emin’s bed.   The press in this country is not otherwise known as a forum for aesthetic debate. 

On Becoming a Creature of the Night

The church clocks have just struck midnight and I am striding purposefully down the lonely, ill-lit lanes that surround Shaston. Such unwonted activity is a tribute to my lovely Romanian fiancée; I am determined to shed a few more pounds before our rapidly approaching wedding. Litheness is as alien to me as perspiration and five-mile nocturnal hikes, but the miracle shall be achieved.

Just as the final reverberation dies away, I notice a police car has drawn to a halt behind me. “Evening, Sir” says a youthful voice. “Out late?”

Blame it on the setting - I have just passed a rustic graveyard – and the hour, which is more calculated to bring to mind Bram Stoker than Thomas Gray, but this is an opportunity not to be missed and I simply cannot resist the urge to unsettle or, at least, to mildly discombobulate: “My Transylvanian bride has turned me into one who walks by night,” I explain entirely truthfully albeit in my most sepulchral tones.

Lourdes: A Den of Thieves

Everybody's faking it in Lourdes - everybody, that is, except for the thousands of sick pilgrims who converge on the famous town of some 18,000 inhabitants by the coachload.

They arrive desperately seeking a cure and depart clutching Virgin Mary-shaped plastic flasks filled with samples of the foul-tasting if putatively miraculous waters and with bags stuffed with other `made-in-Taiwan' relics. Amongst the hundreds of trinkets that the contemporary pilgrim can acquire in the crowded, tout-infested streets are glow-in-the-dark crucifixes, St. Bernadette ashtrays and drinks-mats, plastic snow-scenes and 3D viewers showing the miracle. There are even what look suspiciously like beer mugs and brandy balloons adorned with transfer-images of the ubiquitous saint.

What's more, it is not just commercialism aping piety; there is also religion passing itself off as modern consumerism. Take, for instance, the Pax Cinema offering as its current blockbuster "The Passion of Bernadette", not a film recently exhibited at Cannes (it has been off the circuits for quite a long time). One wonders if there is a free rosary given away with every bag of popcorn. It would, I think, demand a truly sincere faith or an equally profound lack of taste to find anything particularly moving in this place other than the pilgrims.

You approach the town with a sense of mounting expectation and the snow-capped Pyrenees that rise to greet you as you drive towards Lourdes enhance this feeling. It is only in hindsight that their majestic purity seems a mute reproach to the vulgar chicanery going on at their feet. However, as you drive into town passing the Rosary and Passion Hotels and forcing your way through narrow streets lined with bars and seemingly innumerable gift shops, this feeling of awe diminishes. Indeed, coming from Bangkok, one is almost reminded of Patpong, the only apparent difference being that here touts pimp for the Virgin and Bernadette. Reverence is rapidly replaced by macabre curiosity, and its difficult not to succumb to the temptation of playing `Spot the Terminal Case.'

The extent of the tide of human misery in Lourdes is almost overwhelming. Streets are crowded with processions of the aged, the crippled and the infirm all making their way down to the Grotto. You follow as what else is there to do? Even if one could afford the horrendous price of a drink in one of the cafés, it would be virtually impossible to get a seat, and it would take remarkable determination to fight one's way into the unspeakable shops. In any case, there remains a hard to acknowledge longing to find ones cynicism disproved, a vague hope of discovering some kind of spiritual reality behind the crass commercialism. Of course, one is to be disappointed.

On entering the grounds of the Grotto, tourists are warned against smoking, picnicking, littering and unseemly behavior, such as holding hands. The sign warning against the latter offence brings to mind depictions of Adam and Eve leaving Eden, the slash across the figures bearing a not too indistinct resemblance to the angel's sword. Passing the rather somber complex of 19th Century chapels, one is confronted by row upon row of candles, the price of lighting one being from 10 francs up. At the approach to the Grotte de Massabielle itself, there are more signs, this time requesting silence. A long queue of people stands behind a line of railings. There is a feeling of selfish intentness, with each pilgrim regarding the others as obstacles to his progress towards the cave. Shuffling along with the others, I found myself unconsciously reciting some lines from Eliot's Waste Land:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

This fragmentary recollection was more than a little unfortunate as the lines are generally taken as an allusion to the Inferno.

During the walk through the town, it is sometimes hard not to regret the fact that Disney does not have the rights to the Bernadette legend; at least there would then not have been quite such a promiscuous proliferation of unauthorized images of her. However, on eventually reaching the Grotto, you feel that old Walt must have a hand in it all somewhere. How else can one explain the insipid, doe-eyed statue of the Virgin that stands in pride of place? Surely, this rather vulgar statue cannot be the product of genuine piety. Surely, whatever vision the fourteen-year-old miller's daughter may have seen back in 1858 could have borne no resemblance to this overgrown cake decoration. One thing, however, seems distinctly `un-Disneyish': the collection of a couple of dozen rusting crutches suspended on a line above the Grotto. Given their obvious age and the lack of more modern devices, like pacemakers, they can hardly inspire the pilgrims with much feeling of hope.

You stand beneath the statue at the Grotto, a little uncertain about what to do next, there being, I believe, no standard ritual laid down for such situations. Some pilgrims touch the moist wall and cross themselves; others stoop down and kiss it. Their faces express sentiments ranging from grim determination to piety. Few appear ecstatic, but then as far as I can see no one in the queue has been granted a miraculous cure. A non-believer but sensing that something is expected of me, I gingerly pat the wall and quickly make my way to the line of brass taps to taste the waters, feeling a little out of place. A sense of anticlimax descends. So, that's that then. After all the buildup, after all the pious stories of ones childhood, after all the expectations raised by a Roman Catholic education, to find a small, damp, empty cave at the heart of it all is a trifle disappointing.

Lourdes is a place saturated with signs. Billboards, directions, advertisements, warnings, interdictions and so on confront the visitor at every turn. Then, of course, there are the signs that so many of the pilgrims bring with them: the all too visible symptoms and ravages of their various terrible illnesses. Still, there is one sign that is conspicuously absent for most people: a unequivocal sign of some divine purpose; a sign that behind all the misery there is an omnipotent and beneficent will. This, perhaps, is the point of it all. Miracles not taking place everyday, Lourdes demands immense faith; without it, all you have is a garish statue and an empty grotto.

Copyright ©1995, 2010 Mark C. Squire

Eat your heart out Hilda Doolittle

Whilst walking
in your orchard
I stepped
upon
a cow-
pat

Sadly the stain
on your white
shag pile
car-
pet
cannot be
removed


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