Martha Mihalick » believing

Belief

Martha — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 06:02:30 +0000

I’m a believer. I know that there are things I cannot see, or prove, or taste, touch, hear, or smell that undeniably exist. And tonight is a night when you can sense those things perhaps a little more than any other night of the year. It’s important, I think, to believe in the magic of a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, and to listen for sleigh bells chiming or a hoof pawing on the roof. There is nothing like being a kid on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning. And because we can believe in this myth, we can believe in so much else–like, say, a baby being born under a star in a manger.

As the famous letter says, how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. We have to believe in the intangibles.

I believe in light in darkness.

I believe in family.

I believe in friendship.

I believe in generosity.

I believe in God.

I believe in magic, science, creativity, and inspiration.

I believe in joy.

I believe in the power of stories.

I believe in understanding someone without words, in connection, in empathy and sympathy and support, in companionship.

I believe in dedication and in trust.

I believe in laughter.

I believe in knowledge.

I believe in love.

I believe in goodness.

I believe in people.

And I most definitely believe in Santa Claus. I always have and I always will.

Science=Magic

Martha — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 05:45:47 +0000

About a month ago, I read two articles by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times that kind of blew my mind. I keep thinking about them. And now Dennis Overbye’s on my list of must-read columnists/reporters.

The thing is, science is fascinating. (Hence, my love for RadioLab on WYNC.) Physics is especially fascinating, because it’s also a little crazy. I never got to take a physics class in high school or college, though I would’ve liked to, but what very, very, very basic knowledge of it I have seems to say that it’s largely based on the question “What if?” Which is the question that leads to the most interesting answers, and stories.

One article, “Setting Sail into Space, Propelled by Sunshine,” is about an organization that’s planning to launch satellites that will sail on sunlight once it is in orbit. Like boats sail with wind. Because “light carries not just energy but also momentum–a story told by every comet tail, which consists of dust blown by sunlight from a comet’s core.” Tell me that is not super cool.

The other is an essay about the Large Hadron Collider, “The Collider, the Particle and a Theory about Fate.” This is the one that I kind of can’t get over. It talks about how the hadron collider–an experiment in Switzerland that is trying to cause protons to crash and show how the Big Bang may have occurred–is basically sabotaging itself. Through time travel. Which is a legitimate vein of research. For reals. There are scientists who say that these particles colliding “might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.” So because what results from the particles colliding might be so bad, that result is somehow traveling through time to stop itself.

I can’t quite wrap my mind around it, and yet I also can’t get it out of my mind–and so I guess it makes sense that A Wrinkle in Time and The Time Traveler’s Wife have had the same effect.

In school science classes, the general take on science always seemed to be that it’s the opposite of magic. It’s orderly. It’s explainable, and classifiable, and cut and dry. But I never really bought that. Sure, we can go smaller and smaller from organism to cell to parts of a cell to atoms to protons and neutrons and electrons. We can give everything a name. But does that really explain anything? We can ask “Where did the protons come from?” And maybe we’ll even have an answer to that eventually, if the hadron collider stops sabotaging itself. Still…will we ever truly know why one thing happens instead of another? Why one molecule forms instead of another? It’s all still magic, even if we put a name on it.

Even time is fluid. That article quotes Einstein: “For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

I think maybe I like physics because there’s a sense of wonder, and a sense that a crazy theory just might be the right one. It reminds me of a quote by Roald Dahl that I’ve always liked:

Above all, watch with glittering eyes the great world around you, because dreams are always hidden in the most unlikely of places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

Oh, What a World

Martha — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 01:54:00 +0000

Ever since my morning in the Magic Kingdom last month, I’ve been thinking a lot about world-building. Walking around by myself made the experience very much one of observing, rather than goofing around, as I expect would have happened had I been with a group of friends.

Part of me–my inner child–was delighted by the whole place. The way every last detail has been planned out, that you never see a “mistake” or false move–it’s so complete. That’s so impressive, and it’s such a total experience.

And yet…

Maybe it’s because I’m a grown-up, maybe it’s because I’ve lived in NYC for nearly eight years now, but the other part of me was wondering things like, “But where’s all the trash?” “How do they stay so perky all the time?” “What happens behind the Cast Member Only doors?”

The last is the most intriguing. Because I bet that’s where the real story is. Where the “cast members” gripe and complain and trade funny stories and, well, live. Everything else is a facade. An expertly detailed one, but one that only stands because of all the inner workings, and what happens behind the closed doors.

I wish I were as smart as Ira Glass.

Martha — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 03:39:00 +0000

During some blog reading in the last week or so, I was lucky enough to come across this video of Ira Glass speaking on stories. I’ve heard him once before on this topic, and he has such a sharp view of what makes a good story, and articulates it so well. Though he’s, of course, speaking about making stories for radio, what he says about stories is universal for any medium. I transcribed a number of things, including:

“Narrative is like a back door into a very deep place inside of us, and a place where reason doesn’t necessarily hold sway.”

“When a story gets inside of us, it makes us less crazy.”

He also talks about taste, about surprise, about the structure of telling a story. And about how a story is most satisfying when the audience knows what the bigger, universal “something” of the story is.

Ira Glass at Gel 2007 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Stories and Believing

Martha — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:05:00 +0000

I’ve taken to listening to podcasts at the gym, and two of my favorites are This American Life (obviously) and Radio Lab. I am not at all orderly or timely about listening to them, so I’m always behind and out of order. The Radio Lab I listened to over the last 2 gyms visits was from January, the “War of the Worlds” episode.

There’s a lot about the topic that’s intriguing, but what I’ve taken away is the question of why people can fall for this sort of thing again and again. After conversation with a psychologist Robert Krulwich said:

“People are suckers for stories; we just cannot help ourselves. . . . The thing is we do go in, we all fall into these stories, he says, it’s just the way we are built. For hundreds of thousands of years, our memories, our friendships, our sense of family, our kinship, we build our identities form stories. Stories that we tell, and stories that we hear.”

We seem to be built to believe in things. Because it’s hopeful. Because who wants to go around not believing? Even if it’s believing in small things, not big ones. We’ll fall for things because we learn so much from the stories that saturate our lives, perhaps. Stories show us that there’s always something to believe in.