Last night I went to see Carmen at the Lyric Opera with my mom, Howard, and Howard's friend Chuck. Oh Carmen. The most passionate character in opera, and that says something given that opera, at least late 19th century opera, is all about passion. Carmen is a seductress, a tease, a talent beyond measure, and also a woman whose driving ambition is true, honest emancipation. I've seen this opera twice and I've had the pleasure of seeing Denyce Graves sing it both times, though it seems her voice has improved the past five years so much so that now it cascades into the auditorium and tumbles right into you.

Graves's Carmen is luscious and irresistable, and so in the end when she's left one broken heart and the cards have read death, death, death, condemning her and her broken lover to die, we root for her, the one who wronged, when he comes for her with a dagger strapped to his boot. Even as she taunts him and denies him in her falling lace mantilla, as she shifts across the bullring gallery gesturing to her new lover, the star-studded toreador, we want her to live even if it means Don Jose will die. She was cruel until the end, and yet we still love her.

There were half a dozen Carmens at the opera house, women in blood red flamenco skirts and laced-up corsets, their hair pulled back in buns with silk roses and just enough locks of hair loose from their moorings. This expression of passion unleashed, uncontrolled, and completely free of constraint, makes sense right now when it seems it's the 'passion of the christ' that more Americans care about.

Before the opera we met for dinner at Cyrano's, a charming French bistro on Wells in River North that has the best pommes frites this side of the Atlantic and homemade ketsup that once tasted makes eating Heinz impossible. Over dinner Chuck told us about his main passion, nanotechnology, which coincidentally is featured in Salon this month. Chuck is burning with hope for this technology, in part because he sees it as the actual fountain of youth, a way to make disease, and perhaps even death, obsolete. I questioned whether if we made old age and death things of the past we'd have to make birth also, since quickly we'd find our little planet even more serried. He answered that with nanotechnology we'd be able to populate the moon and other celestial bodies, making the issue of overpopulation obsolete as well.

With the example of Deep Blue and its slapping about of Kasparov in the late 90s, Chuck said that by 2045 nanotechnology will be to a point where there will be no separation between man and machine, but rather a melding of the two, not unlike the nightmares of Philip K. Dick. It is no nightmare to Chuck, though, who sees a future made brighter when we're all, regardless of race or class, implanted with miniscule chips holding all the knowledge of the universe, leading to breathtaking advances in knowledge and technology, advances so fast that we reach "singularity" when the changes happen at the same pace as time itself. The potentials for good are incredible, of course, but there are also potentials for bad, as the articles in Salon discuss. I pointed out how impossible it seemed that everyone in the world would have this nanotechnology within my lifetime given that most people live in mud-brick homes with packed dirt floors and no running water let alone electricity. I wondered, too, how we'd manage all this when we can't even get a handle on chronic hunger or AIDS or genocide or corporate-driven wars, and Chuck said that with nanotechnology there would be enough food for everyone and disease would be something of history. There is enough food for everyone right now, at this very moment, I told him. We're just lacking the political will and cooperation to get it to the people. The desire, the passion, for power is extreme enough that politicians across the world leave millions to suffer if it means fatter pockets for them.

I can see how intoxicating the hope of this technology could be, and how much more comfortable it would be to deny how this same technology could take us down an even darker road than the one we're already on. The lessening of human suffering has always been the promise of technology. The Salon piece points out, though, that right now most of the money being funneled into nanotechnology research is for the military (surprise!), including the creation of uber soldiers with artificial muscles and uniforms that could mend wounds on the battlefield. Sad, isn't it, that we can imagine a suit that performs surgeries but we can't imagine a future without war.

One of my hopes about this cyber-future is the role of the arts. I said that perhaps, finally, the arts would be valued as they should be because they would be the one area of human experience and intelligence that computers couldn't compete with. Chuck said that they could, and that in fact one day computers would create better art than humans are capable of, including poetry. I can only think this is because Chuck doesn't know much about poetry. How can a computer replicate passion when it is passion that is the most unpredictable, most irrational side of us? I'm not sure I want to live in a future without decay and death (we could alleviate suffering without turning ourselves into meaningless machines, couldn't we?), and I'm completely certain I don't want to live in a future without passion, especially a future peppered with "perfect" wars.

Chuck is an optimist, sees only the good and not the bad that can come of our out-of-control technology, and perhaps it's a reflection of my state of mind these days that I see possibilities in all of their dark and somber shades. But his optimism is also pragmatic and admirable. Besides the nano-obsession, Chuck is a real estate developer and all of his upcoming projects are "green," buildings that will sell electricity back to Com Ed's grid and will be built with eco-friendly materials. It sounds so exciting that my mom may buy one and move. She's been thinking about moving for years, and here is this, a green condo in the middle of the city. His other project is to do large-scale affordable housing, again all green, that will be targeted to low-income families and former public housing residents. There are vacant lots scattered across the city -- some neighborhoods have more vacant lots than full ones -- and the thought of them being green, sustainable (no utilities!) houses for our most vulnerable neighbors is truly exciting.

So then it is passion that drives all of us, even the nano-developers who see passion expressed in deathless soldiers and encyclopedic minds.

I've had such a culture-rich week: an opera, two plays (including Tennesse Williams' "Orpheus Descending" -- miraculous!!), and a couple of books. I'm working through a stack of new memoirs. I read Persepolis Vols. 1 and 2 by Marjane Satrapi, and also Satrapi's Embroideries, three memoirs in the graphic novel form about Satrapi's life as a progressive Iranian woman during the height of the Islamic Revolution. The books chronicle her life and give insights into the paperclip-curved shifts from dictator to intellectual revolution to religious overthrow that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The books are matter-of-fact and quick, but also funny and heartwrenching. And just yesterday I finished Jason Christopher Hartley's Just Another Soldier, a blog-turned-book by a former national guard soldier who spent a year in Iraq as an infantry soldier. I'd read Hartley's blog a little before it was taken down by his commander (which led to his demotion) and so I expected the book to be more than just a recantation of events, but rather a true memoir with insights into his heart. Instead, it is a recantation with only hints at that heart, more a blueprint for a future book than a book itself. I kept thinking about Tobias Wolff's In Pharoah's Army and how he needed more than a dozen years to process his war experience and turn it into a book. I don't think everyone needs that much time, but in this case I'd have appreciated a little more time and a little more depth. I think he's got it in him so perhaps the next book will be better.

In sharp contrast, I've just begun reading The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's memoir of the death of her husband in December, 2003. I've only read the first few chapters and already it's full of insight, superfine prose. She finds the meaning in every last detail and the passion along with it. I think I will zip through this book because it's so easy to read, even if what she's writing about is so painful.

S is back at his tiny fire base, the special forces outfit that is fully equipped with wireless internet even though it's in the middle of nowhere. I talked to S tonight briefly via Skype and he thinks I should write a novel about this year, and perhaps he's right. After tonight's JOT writing group at the library in Uptown, I'm in the mood to write poetry again, inspired by the writers I met whose lives are complicated beyond measure. One writer is in hospice, dying of leukemia, and still he writes. He submits work each week to be critiqued by the group and returned to him by the workshop leader.

Perhaps passion is enough. At least for the Carmens of the world.