Brains and Consumption

World War Z has been the latest dish on my menu. There's a movie of the same book coming out soon, so I picked it up to see if the movie will match up later. Not everyone deserves multiple awards and a whole franchise based upon the idea of zombies, but Max Brooks does. The book is set back in post-World War 2, just after the US was just starting to enjoy its world superpower status. Each chapter is formatted in the form of interviews, with the author being the listener and questioner, while the interviewees tell their elaborate story, often consisting of painful and horrifying memories of their parts in the Zombie War. In that sense, it's like a big book of short stories bound together by a central plot event.

All good books should make readers think and relate it to our world, and so World War Z has spawned the following for me. Could the zombie virus be a metaphor for the way people interact - the way vibes fit together to make a larger atmosphere - like the way a good musical artist's strong personality and stamina makes for her fans' night through an awesome concert? Or maybe it could be the way ideas can go viral if everyone buys into it enough - which, ironically, was how the more developed nations suffered the most in the book, because those people who saw it happen first didn't tell other people about it, in efforts to keep their own reputations intact and make it go away by pretending it wasn't happening?

For me, the book was a good commentary on the way information travels or doesn't travel, because I've recently taken a real interest in the information technology field, where systems are so specialized that what helps or functions in one doesn't really function in another. This may be akin to the way that consumers find technical support for any given company so frustrating, mainly because the technical supporter can only troubleshoot based upon what little information he can fish out of the person at the other end of the telephone line, who may not be trained to really understand the problem is enough to even give the right information or ask the right questions.

It's also a good commentary on how we as a human race - especially in developed countries, where each human only really needs to fight for a good honest living - are completely obsessed with the destruction of the world as we know it. We like to imagine these things, because we'd like to think that if it ever comes to that in our lifetimes, we'd be prepared, at least somewhat psychologically, to much more literally fight for our physical well beings and gather all resources in order to survive. This phenomenon is also true for any robot wars or giant monsters or natural disaster films.

Because zombies like to consume other people to either make more zombies or just to eat brains and kill things, I thought it was analogous to - final analogy, I promise - the way people learn and take in information. Every day, I see the teachers in the school I work for prepare their curricula for their students to consume, and the more the students are willing to consume, the more successful they are. Just momentarily thinking of this in video game form, why were there no super zombie bosses? Haha. People's brains take in information no matter whether people want them to or not, and only the more educated people are more discriminate about what they want to take in. This morning, I realized I could only stomach nature documentaries and children's shows - especially if they are geared towards middle schoolers and high schoolers - because I only really enjoy educational media. In the case of chick lit, though, that's more of an emotionally affirming media.

Anyway, yay for learning to be an information sponge! Now to continue consuming ...

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

This historical fiction novel is sweet. Vonnegut tells his tale through Billy Pilgrim, and the narrator's voice is very soothing, despite the horrendous happenings that it describes. Of course war is a terrible thing, but it feels muted through this voice. I imagine that the muted effect is from several factors: it was told in third person, Vonnegut's severely dark but very funny sense of humor, the time travel and the episodes with the Tralfamadorians. A reader can't help but like Billy Pilgrim for his perceived ineffectualness, and then pity him for his bad luck and all the memories that made up his life.

Every time someone or a group of people dies, Vonnegut writes, "So it goes." It becomes this stark deterministic acceptance of death, like it's something that just happens so it's nothing to become upset about. Even when Billy Pilgrim is put into situations where he must be angry at some point, and describes the characters around him in negative terms, it doesn't seem like he's blaming them. It's like the war removed him from any emotion except heavy depression, and it's probably mostly post traumatic stress disorder that the narrator sounds so numbed all the time, but it makes the story seem even more believable and objective.

I'm not so sure that this novel is scary enough to be antiwar. Yes, it tells about the people dying, all the sufferings and indignities that people suffered at the hands of people in power, who almost randomly decided that one group of people are unforgivable, so another group of people go to kill them for deciding the first group of people are unforgivable, but the book doesn't decry anything. Everyone in the book seems rather stupid, including all the people in power who decided all these random things, and maybe the book decries their stupidity and stupidity in general, but there's no anger in it, no outrage. Taking a step back, I'm not sure why I assume anger and outrage should be in an antiwar book - maybe that's because those two emotions are what I'm used to from people who claim to stand up for a cause.

Anyhow, the time travel and Tralfamadorians illustrate his inability to tell reality from his imagination at the end, but he doesn't even seem to mind. Reality is as unreal as any science fiction book in his mind, apparently, and not even a well written science fiction book, since the series that Krout wrote was to be found in a porn shop decorating the window and helping it pretend to be a legitimate bookstore. His juxtaposition of that scene with digging up and burning bodies is very transcendental and Buddhist, even - the idea that people are just bodies, whether they are dead or alive. That is also true of the Tralfamadorian idea that people who ever lived will always go on living in some form or another.

Other war books and movies speak of the act of war removing the humanity from a person. Maybe it's because Billy Pilgrim wasn't a real soldier - he never actually killed anybody, and that's why it doesn't seem like his humanity was ever removed. He feels very detached from everything - "unstuck in time", as he says - but his telling of this story reveals that he's still very much human despite not feeling the same as he did before, despite being completely unable to relate to anyone except for others who were in the war and not seeking glory, like O'Hare. He's broken, dead inside, but still human.

It was an easy read. Vonnegut uses such simple language. I would say the only difficulty in reading this book is that, after hearing his numbed voice in my head for hours at a time, I would lift my nose away from the book and feel his numbness for a while even after having closed the book. That's the only thing that prevented me from finishing the book in a jiffy, because it made me feel temporarily as dead inside as Vonnegut had been feeling for decades after the war, probably all the way up to his death a few years ago. So it goes.

The Way of Korean Zen, by Kusan Sunim

This book took a very long time to finish. It's not for the casual reader, because it has a very authoritative and stark voice. The material is aimed at those who are truly interested in Zen Buddhism, and all other readers may find it a bit dry and textbook-like. The book is divided into two parts: the first illustrates the history of the ideas of Zen Buddhism, along with tales of men who have lived their lives according to these ideas, and the second part talks in detail about the ideas themselves.

I bought this book during the first part of my stay in South Korea as an ESL teacher (refer to my other blog Lily Internationally) and I have to say that these ideas really helped me to accept more ideas in the Korean culture than I could have without this book. After all, Zen Buddhism is about changing oneself to attain enlightenment. Changing oneself often involves accepting oneself, which indirectly leads to the acceptance of many situations and people in one's surroundings as well. Judging by the author's English name, I dare say that the original must have been in Korean, which explains the somewhat awkward language at times, and why it seems so dry as well.

The chapters on the history of Buddhism and the life of a monk in Korea were necessary because, whenever an aspect of culture travels some place else, it changes. That is also true of Buddhism - you would not find the same Buddhism in India as in China, nor in China as in Korea. Or even between South and North Korea. Korean Zen Buddhism relies heavily on the Buddhist community, where if you become a monk, the only people you would interact with from that day on - except to beg for alms or to lecture about Buddhism - are other Buddhist monks. They also eat only vegetables, and no meat is allowed. It is a life based upon discipline: all activities are purely utilitarian, including sleeping and waking, meditation, copying texts, cleaning and traveling.

Aside from the Spartan lifestyle, the other reason this book may be a bit dry is because it's meant to be a user manual of sorts for those interested in becoming a monk or nun, to live their lives for this religion. It doesn't lie - becoming a monk or a nun, having to give up all that a layman is used to and dedicating one's life to the study of attaining enlightenment, is not easy. There are instructions on how to meditate, and it distinguishes between focusing on hwadu (which means mental and spiritual silence) and the mind (we assume that this means one's thoughts and sometimes mental noise) as well as the Buddha (which means the deity, as well as a person's purest soul).

There are plenty of metaphors and poems to illustrate the author's points, and those can be hard to understand at times. The idea here is similar to the reason I write, where if you see a situation in a certain way - and poetic verse is kind of like portraying a situation and rearranging it as a puzzle - then it may be easier for you to understand, and therefore accept. Or even the other way around, accept and therefore understand.  Most of these poems use natural scenery and events in nature to illustrate the point, which makes for beautiful pictures in people who have a versatile third eye. It also tries to say that reality is often made of circumstances that people cannot change, and therefore the only thing that a person can change is his or her mind. In that way, a person's perception becomes an adaptive tool instead of a defense mechanism.

That being said, I am nowhere near agreeing with everything that was said in this book. For example, it emphasized the soul over one's body, and I feel that a person should take care of her body first, because otherwise hunger and illness get in the way of a person taking care of one's soul. It also encourages people to give up their families and lives to become Buddhist monks or nuns, and I tend to think that a person should be able to adhere to a faith while still living their own lives. There's also the not eating meat - meat is delicious. Of course there can be substitutes for the protein like beans and tofu, but it's not the same. Anyone who's ever enjoyed barbecue can tell you that. Also, there is no discourse on how to become a nun, or actually anything about being a religious woman in this book at all - women just exist as wives who prevent believers from being faithful to Buddhism, like distractions.

I agree with cultivating a strong mind which can accept reality. However, this book would probably not convince me to go to a Buddhist nunnery and try that life, because enlightenment and being detached from the world doesn't seem to be worth it to me. However, if you are interested in Buddhism - and particularly Korean Buddhism - you should still read this book to see if this cultural viewpoint of this particular faith suits your idea of happiness and or enlightenment. It's an informative read.