The View from my Bicycle [COLUMN]

Pictured above: Roxanne Meyer. Click on the image to view more pictures on my Facebook album.
Knowing the backstory

It's very difficult dealing with subtleties and intangibles when people are used to seeing things in absolutes. I was wrestling with this, turning over in my mind the most intangible of intangibles. How do you begin to explain to, say, a Christian, those items of information that shift paradigms and stir up epiphanies? Because the David Bain case (a man who murdered his entire family, but was found 'not guilty' by a jury recently)proves that people believe what they want to believe instead of what is logical, or realistic. How do you begin to persuade people that their intangibles are off. How do they know what you know is the better information?

The answer is, I think, that you have to impress upon people to invest time in study. Go and study the information, listen to the various points of view. Provide time with the material. Because the truth, like geology, is sitting there simply waiting for someone to take the time and find it, pore through all the evidence and put it all together. It doesn't take a genius, it just takes some time to gather information. That's one option. But very few people do that. They're lazy. They get told what to think and then make up their minds and then have that message relayed over and over until it drowns out everything else. So when you come along, there is a lot of dogma to dig through. And it's easy to get lost in a lot of distracting responses on your way to the rocks in the desert that speak louder than any man.

The other is this analogy. At a very young age I was fascinated, intrigued and inspired by telling stories, and by the idea of being a writer. I loved the fact that books could 'talk' to you. That you could read people's minds years after they were dead. You could read the minds of scientists, experts, poets, beautiful actresses, legendary cyclists - all in their own words.

But I also didn't want to be the sort of writer who was a hypocrite - who wrote about superheroes but was a pale weakass sitting at a desk all day, or a fat, bald tub of horror that was writing about himself as some charming James Bond fella. I wanted to be genuine and from there write genuinely powerful - and thus true - statements about life. I know of sports journalists that cannot even walk straight, whose wives smoke like chimneys, yet they think they can express their opinions about Olympians and accompany these athletes on tour and then they think they have a license to know what they are talking about. I have know time for writers that in the public perception can render things spectacularly on paper, but who in real life are pathetic, egotistical jerks, who know little more than how to push people's buttons on paper. They're suck ups. Someone with grandiose opinions and important sounding comments, but who in reality lived a small, desperate smidgen of existence somewhere - would you really want to read about their contrived thoughts? I wouldn't. I'd rather read about someone who is living it. I'd rather read a book on cycling by Lance than by a journalist who has watched Lance, and whose favorite pastime in reality is collecting stamps.

I started reading up the autobiographies of people, and their biographies. Ayn Rand wrote epic stories, but was depressed and disconnected and forgetful in everyday life. Her character sought to achieve levels of power and control that were lacking in her own life. Is it good to try to sell those unhealthy visions to ordinary people? I'm not sure. If serial killers write stories about yearning to be free, and getting away with murder - and we know who they are - would we really be interested in their voyeuristic hopes and dreams, knowing they disregard the rights and freedoms, the dreams and desires of countless people they killed. No. It would be a hypocritical act, hence no one would be interested.

I wanted to have a life worth living and be able to write from a position of strength, not weakness. I think to some extent I've done that. In a way it's distracted from my writing, and I don't feel I am close to fulfilling my writing potential right now, but I am going up a few gears. Today the number 1 Reviewer (Jack Ramsay) on Authonomy, a Harper Collins website, backed HOLIDAY. That's quite a compliment.
But back to why writers write...In this sense the backstory is very important. What motivates the story? And as I've written more and more and read more and more and found out about the authors and their situation in life I've become very aware how life inspires art.

So what's really interesting is I bought a book on HOW TO READ THE BIBLE. Amazing book, slim and elegant. It's written by Richard Holloway. What's interesting is that in Holloway's attempt to understand how the bible was written, and why it was written, the former Bishop of Edinburgh realised that it couldn't be the divinely inspired word of God. It's here that a Christians is starting to throw epithets into the recycle bin. When they find they don't agree or that what you're suggesting is contrary to their beliefs it simply gets channeled away from the inbox.

It's interesting to see that Holloway, by spending time figuring out how and when and why the bible was written, discovered the true motive and the true message. It's really about the Jewish nations desperate yearning for their own land, and to inspire their own people to fight back against a series of overwhelming opponents. Their incredible resilience against all these enemies was based on an absolute fear of being assimilated. Because if you're God's chosen people and you mix with some other group, then how can you still be chosen, and how can you have a parcel of land with your name on it? Of course, these are also self-reinforcing beliefs. If you describe yourself as part of the human race, well, you're part of a family of nations that have fought for their land and own it. It's not a case of 'it's our land because God said so'.

As you see, it is easy to get sidetracked by intangibles, and even lost in them. Holloway didn't. He spent time painstakingly trying to understand his research. I did too.

I suspect that if the David Bain jury had spent enough time imagining, examining all the information, they would have reached a fairly obvious conclusion. When lawyers (or preachers, or editors) present a case, it is also easy for it to seem skewed in a slightly different way.

How do you may writing look like it is the divine inspired word of God? Well, you use a special type of writing. CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD employs this. More important, you may these sort of claims, as the gospel of John does. Once you find out that John was written about 100 years after Jesus died, and is entirely different to the synoptic gospels, you tender to wonder why they are so different. Then you find that the historical periods are different.

Another interesting point to mention is that in the year Jesus was born there was no census and also no mass killing of first born babies. No doubt in history there was a census at some stage, but there was not one when Jesus was born. The writers hijacked pieces of history to dress up their story. And over time, it seems less and less relevant whether it really happened or not. If it's disproved, then the excuse is that it's symbolic. If it's historical, we're told it's based on fact.

That tendency to make things up as you go along is how ordinary writers make movies and write novels. They use their fertile imaginings, they use snippets of real conversation, they base some people on real people. But in the end, it is still a story with a motive. That motive is personal to the writer. And that motive changes as the person's personal circumstances change.

Over the weekend I also watched Terminator Salvation. It is a movie that should resonate with audiences the way Dark Knight did last year. So far it hasn't, and I think the reason is because Dark Knight was far more symbolic. The powerful feelings associated with escalating anarchy in cities is more easily digested from a comic book interface. Terminator is very in your face in terms of the Doomsday subject. It has become more symbolic, but some audiences don't want something that is too close to home. Why? Because a lot of people rush to movies to run away, to escape from real world realities. When you're in that mode, it may be difficult to see the portent of these flicks, to see that they may have a pertinent message for you sitting there with your popcorn and the maxed out credit card in your pocket.

On Facebook recently I saw a message saying people can protect themselves against swine flu by getting a vaccine. It turns out the lady who says this is a qualified virologist and a pharmacist and many of her friends congratulated her on being so prepared and wise and helpful. It's an intangible all over again, since we don't have all the information, we don't have all the facts. But we have enough. To know that swine flu is a brand new, an exotic virus. So that already tells you that no one has natural immunity against it, and so there can't be any vaccines right now. Anytime you hear the word pandemic, the idea of a vaccine becomes...well...wishful thinking. Because you can't make billions of vaccines. You can't expect to vaccinate the entire population of a country. You might be able to do something with a percentage of it, say the political elite, doctors etc.

In realisitc terms if you wanted to make vaccines you would never be able to make enough. To advertise that vaccines are going to rescue people is setting people up to be resentful and distrusting and of course, sorely disappointed. If you tried to make enough vaccines for even half the population of each country, there simply wouldn't be enough resources. Chicken eggs are used to grow these vaccines. A special kind of egg. Then there's the fact that it's a constantly evolving, mutating virus. And then there's the expense of deploying these maybe-they'll-work vaccines en mass.

Here's the backstory, the analogy. If you're a pharmacist or a virologist, it makes perfect sense - vaccinate. You're unable to compute the practical reality and the motives of every other ordinary person. It's like someone who drives a car who says, 'everyone should have a car.' If you look at the numbers, there are 800 million cars in the world right now. There are 7 times more people. About 7 billion people. With 800 million cars we already face severe levels of traffic congestion, road accidents, and of course, urban pollution. Climate change also comes in their somewhere. By saying, 'everyone should have a car' the implication is that you want to double the current levels of traffic congestion, and pollution, and resource depletion, and then double it again and then double that number one more time?

See how a simple truth for you - everyone should have a car, people should get seasonal vaccinations for some protection - can be a profoundly stupid and dysfunctional reality in the scheme of things? If you don't see that, please never return to this website again.

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