Surprise! (Or Act Like It))

      Remember those moments, that unexpected gift or that opening of the door and being greeted by a room full of friends?  And who doesn't love a good mystery or a movie with a surprise ending?  Of course, surprises can come at the wrong times as well: the end of a relationship, the car accident, the shooting.  My wife and I just finished watching the 4-epidode series, Little Boy Blue, a true story of an 11-year old caught in a cross fire between gangs in England.  And as you may know, the penalty for having an unregistered gun in the UK is quite severe (just getting a permit to own a gun there is rather difficult and, as with Canada, is usually reserved for hunting; police there --at least those who are armed-- are limited and are required by law to verbally yell "armed police" whenever entering any home or facility in a raid).  What was so surprising to us, however, was the outstanding acting by all parties, the believability they put in the characters to convey the seriousness of the accident, even those who portrayed the parents of the gang members trying to protect their ruffian sons...all of that, and the lack of recognition by BAFTA, the British version of the Oscars.

     In today's world of TikTok and YouTube, as well as the many political figures and news outlets who cast doubt on the accuracy of reporting, it thus came as no "surprise" that there's been a substantial increase in the amount of staged surprises online and in the media as if to ensure more "views" are recorded to boost views and ratings.  Wrote William Davies in the London Review: This culture​ has generated a distinctive type of celebrity or influencer, who hovers in the ambivalent spaces between critical judgment and behavioral impulse, authenticity and studied performance.  Talent shows such as The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing revolve around the facial reactions of celebrity judges; figures such as Simon Cowell are specialists in the manipulation of an eyebrow or the spontaneous look of surprise.  Seasoned characters such as Piers Morgan are cynically aware that what will keep them in the spotlight is the force, distinctiveness and watchability of their knee-jerk responses, which are essentially designed to ignite reaction chains.  We have no term for this type of celebrity or authority, one who successfully maintains an influential public position through a capacity and willingness to react in spectacular ways.  The public reactor is in part a descendant of the Greek chorus, which would share the stage with the actors in a play, responding to events as they unfolded. An exaggerated capacity to react has been a significant factor in the fortunes of many unlikely political leaders in recent years.

     We don't watch such shows as a rule, but we have seen them since many of our friends have paraded through America's Got Talent and other shows, and shown us their favorite segments: the unlikely worker with an operatic voice, the acrobat climbing higher and higher, the child prodigy playing a keyboard.  As author Davies added: The extraordinary growth of reaction content is connected to a much larger transformation in the way we have come to view ourselves and our societies over the past thirty years or so...Anger and humor are parallel reactions to a world that appears to have lost the capacity to recognize genuine injustice, and has become fixated instead on phony injustices – a world that is ostensibly diverted by petty offences at the expense of real harms.  Yet while anger and humor collide publicly in the pranks and interventions of trolls, they can also reveal the deeply held conviction that justice and injustice have become confused, or even inverted.  What is held up as ‘real’ is actually fake, and what is dismissed as ‘fake’ is actually real.  We may not have a precise term for the celebrity reactor, but the lexicon of political ideologies does contain one entry that speaks to my concerns: reactionary.

     One interesting reactionary book series is the "what if" books where respected professors or specialists in their fields are presented with historical events that actually changed the course of history --from wars to plagues, to leaders' decisions-- and then asked to ponder how things would have possibly happened had there been a different outcome.  One of the more interesting questions posed in the 2nd book of the series* was this: Pontius Pilate Spares Jesus.  Without Jesus being crucified, would the Christian religion have evolved differently, if at all?  The question was posed to Professor Carlos M.N. Eire who chairs the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University: Rewriting history with a different Jesus is a daunting enterprise.  If you alter the central figure of the Christian religion, what might you end up with?  Religion is such an unpredictable factor in history, perhaps one of the most unpredictable.  It is not entirely rational.  Its very nature is to seek transcendence, and the coincidence of opposites.  Paradox is always key.  Sometimes, especially in the case of the Christian religion, the deepest and largest claims of truth are those that are the most radically paradoxical.  This means that if you deal with the wild card of religion in any historical narrative and try to rewrite history, you are balancing on a high tightrope, and often without a net.  Finding "facts" to tweak in religious history is not easy.  Even single events, which could be considered pivotal facts, such as the crucifixion of Jesus, do not lend themselves readily to a counterfactual approach.  This is because religion necessarily involves beliefs, and beliefs are among the fuzziest of "facts."...The minimal rewrite that kills off Jesus is impossible, since it is the fact that he was killed prematurely that started the Christian religion and remains the basis of an entire structure of belief, the cornerstone of thousands of institutions.

     So if we can tweak history and surprised expressions, why not go a step further.  A piece in Scientific American asked this: Improvements in what's called machine learning have made deepfakes—incredibly realistic but fake images, videos or speech—too easy to create and their quality too good.  At the same time, language-generating AI can quickly and inexpensively churn out reams of text.  Together these technologies can do more than stage an infinite conversation.  They have the capacity to inundate us with a deluge of disinformation.  Machine learning, an AI technique that uses large quantities of data to “train” an algorithm to improve as it repetitively performs a particular task, is going through a phase of rapid growth.  This is pushing entire sectors of information technology to new levels, including speech synthesis, systems that produce utterances that humans can understand.  The "infinite" chat the author of the piece created was surprisingly believable, considering that all of this is considered to be in a beginning stage; wrote the author: ...it's already possible to generate a fake dialogue, including its synthetic voice form, in less time than it takes to listen to it...Just this past January, Microsoft announced a new speech-synthesis tool called VALL-E that, researchers claim, can imitate any voice based on just three seconds of recorded audio.  We're about to face a crisis of trust, and we're utterly unprepared for it.

     So what if some of our "beliefs" were to appear real, not so much those of technology and its altered images and voices, but rather those passed down through oral history, perhaps even that of Jesus and his crucifixion?  This was a question posed by the author Amish Tripathi: Shiva!  The Mahadev.  The God of Gods.  Destroyer of Evil.  Passionate lover.  Fierce warrior.  Consummate dancer.  Charismatic leader.  All-powerful, yet incorruptible.  Quick of wit -- and of temper.  No foreigner who came to India --be they conqueror, merchant, scholar, ruler, traveller-- believed that such a great man could ever have existed in reality.  They assumed he must have been a mythical god, a fantasy conjured within the realms of human imagination.  And over time, sadly, this belief became our received wisdom.  But what it we're wrong?  What if Lord Shiva wasn't simply a figment of a rich imagination but a person of flesh and blood like you and me?**  A similar question was posed by author Sean Russell in his series World Without End: What if a young naturalist, like Charles Darwin, was sent on a long voyage to distant parts of the earth, but instead of discovering a foundational theory of bilogical science, discovered that magic existed?...Anyone interested in history soon comes to the conclusion that a belief in science and scientific method superseded earlier belief systems, like magic, and even to some degree religion.  What I posited was a world in which rationalism and scientific belief did not just destroy people's faith in magic, they destroyed magic itself.  The power of magic was being eroded because people no longer believed.  One of the comforting things about science is it does not require a leap of faith.  Scientific theories can be tested.  Magical and religious beliefs...not so much.

     Author Katherine May questioned this about herself in her book, Enchantment: ...something is there, something vast and wise and beautiful that pervades all of life.  Something that is present, attentive, behind the everyday.  A frequency of consciousness at the low end of the dial, amid the static, a stratum of experience waiting to be uncovered.  It is the "oceanic feeling" that puzzled Freud, "a feeling of something limitless, unbounded" that existed in some people, but not in the father of psychoanalysis.  Freud thought it was likely a function of the evolved mind, certainly not a perception of the numinous.  I share his discomfort, but I can't agree.  I have been trying to suppress the feeling for years.  I kept telling myself that I was seeking a humanistic delight in the natural world, but that never felt quite like the truth.  Slowly it expanded to become an uprising in me: fervent, persistent, seditious.  It massed outside my walls, shouting and waving banners.  I couldn't put it down.  When I try to understand what it is that I believe, I'm like a child caught in play.  There is no solidity.  Sensation gathers in my peripheral vision, but dissipates when I turn to look at it directly.  It does not survive my scrutiny, any attempts to systemize or analyze.  It is a different kind of belief, a different kind of feeling.  It requires faith, and I have always been short on that.  My meditation practice asks me to soften into receptiveness.  It has taught me to receive difficult thoughts in quiet and stillness, and to digest them before I rush to a response.  But now that every element of my life feels passive, this feels passive, too.  I need to talk.  I need a repository for the dark little notions that skitter about my brain like biting insects.  Preferably something that would cremate them entirely, but failing that, something that would offer a balm to soothe their stings.  I want to learn to pray, but I don't know how to pray.  I want to put my hands together, but I don't know what that would mean.  I don't want intermediaries.  I don't want interpretation.  I want to speak plainly and directly to an entity that I can't quite perceive, and I don't have the language for that.  

     Speaking of language, do watch the winner of 2022's Best Picture, CODA (which is an acronym for Children Of Deaf Adults)...amazing and yet far from fantasy.  To watch an entire language happen before you, one equally expressive and yet seemingly unrecognized before our eyes, gives us pause to think that other worlds and languages may also be right in front of us but that we simply aren't "slowing down" or letting ourselves "believe" something else.  Perhaps as May wrote, we simply don't know how.  As she noted: We are not offered any definite conclusions, only the continuing quest.  Certainties harden us, and eventually we come to defend them as if the world can't contain a multiplicity of views.  We are better off staying soft.  It gives us room to grow and absorb, to make space for all the other glorious notions that will keep coming at us across a lifetime.

     In the coming days and months, the Lyrid meteor shower, one of the oldest "showers' from the comet Thatcher, continues and Smithsonian gave a bit of background on what exactly makes them special and also the best way to view it: The comet Thatcher, which left the trail of debris responsible for the Lyrids, makes an appearance in our solar system only rarely—it takes 415.5 years to complete its massive orbit around the sun.  The last time Thatcher approached to pass around the sun was in 1861, and its next passage will not be until 2277, Vereš (Peter Vereš, a research scientist at  the Minor Planet Center) says.  The Lyrids have been observed for 2,700 years, with the first record of them dating to 687 B.C.E. in China.  But yet another insight came, again from author Katherine May: ...the meteor is particularly bright and fast, and has the reputation among starwatchers of putting on a good display.  I have never seen it.  Have you?  There are twelve regular meteor showers reliably happening above our heads each year, and yet few of us ever make the effort to watch.  I know, I know: it's hard.  They happen late at night, and when it's dark and cold, and we live surrounded by light pollution and can barely see the sky at all.  And there are clouds and rainstorms, and there's work in the morning.  But still: meteors.  Shooting stars.  Those streaks of light we find so magical that we invest them with our wishes.  Surely that's a sight worthy of effort?

     There'll be another display of shooting going on, although perhaps not one to our liking, that of the violence depicted in the opening of this post, another child being killed in a cross-fire.  Said the Pew Research Center, "Gun deaths among U.S. children and teens rose 50% in two years."  And yet the NRA convention goes on with more than half of the GOP attendees saying that existing gun laws are good enough, said PBS.  Thus, according to the Giffords Law Center: Though the US House of Representatives passed legislation in 2022 to renew and strengthen this assault weapons law, that legislation has not passed the US Senate and there is currently no federal law restricting the sale, manufacture, or possession of assault weapons (emphasis is mine).  What's the difference if someone has an assault rifle?  Here's how the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation put it (the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting marked the "beginning" of children being randomly killed in mass shootings): The shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School had an assault weapon and ten 30-round magazines in his possession.  In 4 minutes, he shot 154 bullets, killing 20 children and 6 adults.  When he had to pause to reload, 11 children were able to escape.  Do the numbers: that comes out to firing almost 40 bullets per minute...at animals, shoppers, church-goers, even children!  To add some balance to this, I must add that nearly half of my friends are GOP devotees, and likely half of them are gun enthusiasts; but even they are starting to question this loosening (or dropping entirely) of background checks (currently only required if buying from an authorized gun dealer), or requiring that guns be in a locked area inaccessible to children.  If the polls are correct and fully half of the attendees at 2023's National Rifle Association --especially the leading candidates for President-- feel that no such "restrictions" are needed, well, I'll need to do some "softening up," as author May put it because such a line of thought is difficult for me to grasp.***

     But maybe grasping the easy and the difficult, the stark and the sublime, is just part of the fairy tale, the fantasy, the magic.  We, each of us, can choose what we do and don't want to see, or to hear, or to read, or to learn.  Maybe instead of scanning the headlines or watching the TV I should brave the cool night air and step outside at 2 AM when the world is quiet, all to look up at this 415-year event passing above me.  And even if I miss it, there's always another night, and another, because it's that changing of direction in my head, that shifting of what I feel is more important, that choosing to sail on open waters with an open mind.  Author May summed it up this way: ...Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things, the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes.  The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time.  It is transformed by our deliberate attention.  It becomes valuable when we value it.  It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning.  The magic is of our own conjuring...I have gone looking for one thing and found another, not something rare and celestial and beyond my control, but something that was always within my power to find.  The act of seeking attuned my senses and primed my mind to make associations.  I was open to magic, and I found some, although not the magic I was looking for.  That's what you find over and over again when you go looking: something else.  An insight that surprises you.  A connection that you never have made.  A new perspective...  Even on a random night, I need only peek up to find he brightest star up there, Vega...it's where the Lyra constellation sits and where we get the astronomical term, Lyrids...but during this week especially, when you look up and "wish upon a star," may that "star" sail past you like a bright wand and grant your wish...just as if it were magic.

Image of the Lyrid meteor shower: Adventure_Photo/Getty Images...Space

*Even if you perhaps find that history is somewhere along the lines of math in interest, these books are worth a peek.  The format of each question is to have a respected professor or leader in that field present the actual version of the event as we should have learned it, one example being the American generals Patton and Bradley, and the British general Montgomery and their successful strategy of blitzkrieg which caused the: highly respected Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt, German commander in the west, to answer a desperate query from Hitler's headquarters as to what course to take (wrote) "Make peace, you fools! What else can you do?"  But the Supreme commander at the time, General Eisenhower, instead ordered all troops to stand down and to hold their position.  The nearly-defeated yet surprised Germans took the opportunity to regroup, restock, and continue the war for another eight months with enormous costs in lives and outcomes (the beginning of the Cold War and the splitting of Berlin; the Soviets were advancing from the other end and viewed the taking of Berlin and Hitler as a priority).  Other instances abound: why bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended up with the fewest number of lives lost (American intelligence had vastly under-reported the number of planes and troops waiting at the southern end of Japan, the next planned attack for the US); how Churchill, during a visit to New York, looked the wrong way when crossing Fifth Avenue (the British drive on the opposite side of the road) and was hit by a car and almost killed; how FDR chose to stay seated in his parade car and avoided an assassin's bullets (others were killed during the attempt); and also how Hitler, by the time of his suicide, was showing apparent signs of advanced Parkinson's, his:...extremities trembled.  His left arm and leg occasionally shook so much as to be useless to him.  He began to stoop and shuffle as he walked.  It's a quick way to see history and its key events summed up by scholars, and also history as was rarely taught or discussed (even to this day) in schools.

**The series by author Amish --The Immortals of Meluha, The Secret of the Nagas, and The Oath of the Vayuputras-- has sold over a million copies and will soon appear as a trilogy of movies.

***I am reminded of the Apple TV series, Black Bird, the true story of serial killer of young girls whose intelligent mind hid behind a damaged psyche that fooled prosecutors and judges alike.  Excellent acting all around; Paul Walter Hauser played the killer and received a Golden Globe for his efforts, one well-deserved.