In Veritate Victoria

 

In 1492 Columbus did not sail the ocean blue. At least, that is, not according to a group called the International Flat Earth Society.  Consisting of 3,500 members who live all around our allegedly disc-shaped planet, the Flat Earth Society exists to "promote and initiate discussion of Flat Earth Theory and provide a venue for free thinking and debate."  That's right, there's actually a group of individuals whose personal mission it is to convince other people that the Earth is flat and that we've all been duped into thinking it's round.  May I invite you to sip on kool-aid cocktail? You're in for a real ride. 

In a small town on Lake Michigan in the mid 1800s, a Christian fundamentalist decided that the only correct interpretation of certain passages of the Bible made it impossible to believe the Earth is round. An ugly step-child of the Second Great Awakening, what started as an apostolic church became a society whose contemporary members no longer know which passages of scripture were in question, but who faithfully promote the society's major tenants nonetheless. Their website is so serious that it seemed possible it's merely satire, but with extensive descriptions of perspective, physics, high altitude photographs, and one highly questionable definition of modern scientific theory, I'm forced to take them seriously (insofar as I know they're seriously insane). What intrigues me about the group is how seriously it takes itself and the extent to which it stubbornly refuses to believe anything that the last 500 years of science has taught us. There's poetry in their story, and wisdom to be found in their utterly nut-job beliefs.

Consider this illustration: a depiction of the Earth as the Society sees it, you'll notice the North Pole at the center of a ring of continents, with an "Ice Wall" around the perimeter.  They claim that the reason ships never fall off the earth, as was assumed by the ancients, is because the pull of the North Pole and magnetic north necessitates that all directions are circular around a central axis.  Thus, if one is sailing east, one will always sail in a circle around a fixed point. In my continual struggle to figure out how to be a grown-up, this got me thinking on two levels. Aren't we all sailing around a fixed point? And aren't we all a member of our own one-man society that occasionally rejects rational explanations in favor of holding on tightly to some desirable belief?

To be even more melodramatic (bear with me), the metaphor continues: the world according to the above paradigm rotates around and is hemmed in by ice where nothing grows, nothing changes, nothing moves. The society's own illustration is a microcosm of the way they view the world and rational, scientific thought: remain in the past, stay safe behind a 50 meter wall of ice that protects us from what's outside, stay fixed as ice in an anonymous ocean. 

If I've learned anything over the last three years since I graduated/died, it's that I have a definite defensive shield, a picture of the world that looks much like this one, a metaphorical wall of immovable matter protecting me from anything new or unfamiliar. The icy axis I seem to rotate around is the belief that I'll inevitably end up like my parents, and that I should pull away from love before it has a chance to trap me. Nearly every decision I've made throughout my life speaks to this "truth" I've held onto. I was a huge flirt who wanted attention from men, but who never committed to a relationship.  When I finally started a relationship, I'd always find a reason to get out of it. Now that I'm 25 and have found someone worth having, it makes me nervous to the point of incapacity because even his sweet blue eyes remind me that my father had his own frigid, immovable quality.  

But I have to make a choice. I have to keep making a choice about the kind of person I want to be. I can be afraid forever and I can, like the Flat Earth Society, go on ranting into the night with circular logic and photoshopped visions of truth. Or, I can keep choosing to hope for a three dimensional picture of reality, one that includes love and hard work and sacrifice for the sake of staying together happily.  I don't know how to do that, and I'm terrified.

What are you keeping out or sailing around? Despite their insanity, the society's motto rings true, "In Veritate Victoria," in truth there is victory. We get to decide what will be true for us,  how many dimensions we want to inhabit, and what victory we're brave enough to achieve.

Hanson: Some Things Never Change

This morning while putting together another camp brochure for FOCUS I was listening to an episode of This American Life, appropriately titled, "Stories from Camp." The program talks about the emotional component of an all-girls summer camp, about how during "color wars" girls aged eight through fifteen actually scream, cry, sing, and shout to such an extent that one little girl physically couldn't handle all the emotion. The eight year old had to stand away, watching her team as she trembled and wept despite the fact that her team won. It was just too much.

The best part about the program, apart from its insights into the hysteria of young people in contrived, semi-wilderness experiences, was that it ended with the song "Mmm Bop." Apparently it had been produced in 1997 and was only recently replayed. The melodious strains of Taylor Hanson's pre-pubescent voice washed over me and bore me on its waves to my twelve-year-old self when my own emotions were quite as volatile and hysterical as the girls on the radio.

I once had a dream about Taylor Hanson- I remember it vividly- in which we were playing together on my street, riding bikes and sitting on the gazeebo. I remember the acute, physical reaction I had to his "presence" in my life. My dream-self thought "He loves me, he came all the way here. Me, out of every girl in America." As if my love for him were strong enough to summon him, he came, and I was fulfilled. I woke up the next morning understanding that the sensation was just a fantasy, but having no less strong a reaction. I had a crush, and it was a force to be reckoned with. Even though I had complete rational understanding that such a relationship was impossible, I continued to love him from afar. At least until Penny and Me came out as a single, and I lost interest.

My emotional life was no less volcanic in other aspects of my existence. As a tween I hated everything my mother said, I despised the horrible jokes my father made, and thought my sixth grade History teacher should be drawn and quartered. I was serious in all of these feelings, and reacted to each party accordingly. I recount all of this now because as a twenty-five year old woman, I'm not sure anything has changed. I dress better, I don't have braces, and I know not to profess my love to every male I see on the street, but by and large I am the same person I've always been.

Julie Snyder, on This American Life, makes the point that girls at the aforementioned camp can revel in the emotional pandemonium because camp has a different set of expectations for behavior and conduct than does the outside world. She argues that girls are not only permitted to scream, cry, shout, sing, laugh, dance, etc., but encouraged, whereas normal society expects them to grow up and become something else with each passing year. We all knew "that girl" who went to some summer camp year after year, well into her college days, and who talked of nothing else. I've always suspected that the draw of camps like these rested in the latent lesbianism of its participants. But perhaps the appeal is in this all together foreign set of expectations? Perhaps girls need a canvass for an emotional palate whose colors continually paint pictures that are explosive and unpredictable. But what about women who are upwardly mobile, self-aware, and in their 20s?

The conclusion I'm coming to isn't earth shattering: we need some kind of community in which to express ourselves. The problem is that it's easier when you're thirteen. You ask your parents to send you to camp and you go. You join a youth group and sing emotionally about Jesus. You end up in Drama Club. You become an inwardly focused, self-obsessed nitwit who makes other peoples lives miserable: the point is that there are options for teenagers. Women in their 20s have friends from college, partners, trashy romance novels, and blogs. Assuming one isn't the type to go to a Yoga retreat or a self-help seminar, there are few opportunities to be emotionally authentic where you don't feel like you're going to wear someone else out. I say "authentic" here because what I would like to do even more than analyze my feelings is to just to experience my feelings: scream, cry, dance, shout, mourn the loss of my youth, complain, and be a child. Maybe people have children so they can go through life's experiences again vicariously through their offspring. The idea isn't half bad.

I wish there were a camp for adults where I could shoot bows and arrows and write letters to my parents. I wish I could make a leather key chain with my initials on it. I wish a lot of things, but it's not cute to be idealistic as an adult the way it was when we threw pennies from our mother's change purse into a fountain. That is sad and it's also real, and I don't have any sort of solution that makes me less whiny and more insightful.

My real question is this: can you believe that Hanson went from this:

To this:

Did they know how prophetic their words were when they said "Can you tell me? You say you can but you don't know. Can you tell me which flower's going to grow?" Did they have some sort of  self-actualizing secret?