Ten minutes on August 1, 2008
Ten things today:
1. I was supposed to run with Margann and so we drove to the Highway 1 cutout for Wilder Ranch but then we ended up walking the whole time talking. I felt kind of blue at the start, and the sky was blue too but a strong, vibrant planetary blue, and Margann asked me what I want to do when I am blue, and we compared feeling like you don’t want to do things you need to do, and feeling like nothing is very exciting or interesting for some reason, with feeling like there is a blanket over you that is wet. And then I saw a gopher poking his head out of a gopher hole, tentatively, then disappearing back in. Then out; then in again; then out; then in again; then out; then in again. Then out. Then in again.
2. We talked about all the couples we know, and how what keeps you together shifts changes morphs, and how happy each couple is or is not with the ways things have changed. It is one thing to stay together; it is another thing to stay together and continue to “push the noodle forward,” to create and recreate love and friendship. We talked about how as adults we get more freedom as our kids get older and we use that freedom to take care of ourselves, not necessarily out partners, and we thought about that back and forth as we walked the edge of the land and the edge of the ocean. Then we saw two big dragonflies, mating probably, flying along, one welded onto the other, buzzing and describing a slightly drunken arc.
3. I was walking between two worlds, the world of little ball golf with its green fairways and the click of iron shots, and the world of disc golf with its rough concrete tee pads and the sound of hard plastic discs cutting air and trying to make a landing on an island with a metal basket on it. I walked up the hill to the tee and heard a sound all around me, and shushed the others, and heard it again, uncanny, like a room of whisperers, or like corn popping, or like corn whispering about popping. It was the sound of hundreds of plants, seeds popping out of seedpods in the afternoon heat.
4. I thought about a conversation I had with Ramon about cell phone etiquette. When is it unutterably rude to take a cell call when you are not alone? When is it absolutely ok? How do you tell the difference? I thought about all the people right now taking calls in the middle of conversations, and how I did that to Crystal yesterday three times and he laughed at it. And I thought about how ring tones also mean “take this call” or “this one can wait just now” or “ooh…tough call.” Then I star 86ed and found a message from my mom that my own message to her had come across garbled and all she hears was “Peter…accident…lost…problem.”
5. I made lunch today out of a tortilla, rice and beans, a hamburger, salsa, and a grilled quail.
6. Kelsey told me that she felt done with school or rather that she wished she didn’t have to punch her ticket with college for so long just to get work. I commiserated and talked a little about the difference between getting good grades and coming across work, thinking, in college that excites you and makes you feel you are on a new level, a higher and more exciting level of thought. Then I told her that I told Margann the story Kelsey told me yesterday. I was shaking hands with Tony the plumber and his hand was absolutely huge, one of the largest hands my not tiny hand has ever disappeared into. She asked me if I felt emasculated and I shrieked “NO!” we laughed and then she told me about her friend at school, and how when her guy friends would tell her a similar story, she’d say, “Are you feeling emasculated? Do you need a boob hug?” Gesture of explanation here: head against the boobs, ensuing hug. I don’t know why but that cracked me up all day.
7. I grabbed a mountain bike and hauled down the hill to Cowells to pick up the car with frozen food and the dog in it while Margann Mahk and Jen swam around the Santa Cruz wharf and the bambini played on the sand and swam in the easy swells. Standing up on the bike pedals all the way down Bay Street hill, no headphones, just the exhilarating feeling of a bipedal human rolling along on prosthetic wheels, bike and rider a cyborg, brain now engaged in bikebody thinking. Jump the curb just before Mission, pass eight cars and make the light, pass ten cars waiting for the train to cross, hit the train just as the last of it is clanking across the street. Bikes rule.
8. I pulled a double espresso and poured it into a glass of Trader Joe’s chocolate ice cream and drank it off while reading Ellroy in the last of the afternoon sun. Kids were making a fort out of wagons and sun umbrellas; Blythe came by and I told her I’d stolen two eggs the other day and got home to cook them and found them hard boiled! The sun went lower in the sky, the light across the words grew less bright, and in retrospect I think of what a friend said about words and how nirvana for words might be the reader’s eyes, and that made me think that words are like seeds, dormant, and the eyes light upon them and the popping sound is the sound of meaning, of connection.
9. Mark and Amando and Rebecca and Bailey and Margann were eating pizzas and I was calling to activate my two new credit cards and each time the person was Indian and asking me what kind of day I had had or was having, and in each case the implication of the letter attached to the card was that the telephone activations would be automated. Instead I found myself in slightly arcane conversations about the virtues of Identity Theft protection ($12.90 a month) and the opportunity for me to sign up right now with of course the right to end this service whenever I pleased or lower APA numbers and…I found myself having pleasant conversations, no thanks I don’t need those things, and thinking of how in the modern world, sometimes we wish we had just gotten the machine, it asks little of us, there is less commitment involved, less investment of time and energy. Then I went downstairs and had a vegetarian pizza and we talked about the carbon footprint difference it makes to have one vegetarian meal a day instead of meat. And I thought about the hamburger and the quail, a little.
10. Amando and Rebecca live in Germany so we took them to the Saturn Café to have their first mud pie: ice cream pie with Oreo crust covered in chocolate. We wondered how many moons Saturn has, and Jupiter for that matter, and we had a table for ten and played cards and the other adults had adult conversation and Mark told us about being a DJ and having 1500 7 inch records and playing Abba’s “Super trouper” at parties, as that very song blared from the small but powerful speakers on the wall. And on cue, three members of the party began singing:
Tonight the
Super Trouper lights are gonna find me
Shining like the sun
(Sup-p-per Troup-p-per)
Smiling, having fun
(Sup-p-per Troup-p-per)
Feeling like a number one
Tonight the
Super Trouper beams are gonna blind me
But I won't feel blue
(Sup-p-per Troup-p-per)
Like I always do
(Sup-p-per Troup-p-per)
'Cause somewhere in the crowd there's you
Yup, powerful stuff. Blindness, depression, the stuff of Oedipus and Ibsen, and then suddenly, an insight into the human condition, epiphany, and we all troupe out to the pop rhythm, high on ice cream, feeling, each and every one of us, like a number, one.
Ten things today:
1. I was supposed to run with Margann and so we drove to the Highway 1 cutout for Wilder Ranch but then we ended up walking the whole time talking. I felt kind of blue at the start, and the sky was blue too but a strong, vibrant planetary blue, and Margann asked me what I want to do when I am blue, and we compared feeling like you don’t want to do things you need to do, and feeling like nothing is very exciting or interesting for some reason, with feeling like there is a blanket over you that is wet. And then I saw a gopher poking his head out of a gopher hole, tentatively, then disappearing back in. Then out; then in again; then out; then in again; then out; then in again. Then out. Then in again.
2. We talked about all the couples we know, and how what keeps you together shifts changes morphs, and how happy each couple is or is not with the ways things have changed. It is one thing to stay together; it is another thing to stay together and continue to “push the noodle forward,” to create and recreate love and friendship. We talked about how as adults we get more freedom as our kids get older and we use that freedom to take care of ourselves, not necessarily out partners, and we thought about that back and forth as we walked the edge of the land and the edge of the ocean. Then we saw two big dragonflies, mating probably, flying along, one welded onto the other, buzzing and describing a slightly drunken arc.
3. I was walking between two worlds, the world of little ball golf with its green fairways and the click of iron shots, and the world of disc golf with its rough concrete tee pads and the sound of hard plastic discs cutting air and trying to make a landing on an island with a metal basket on it. I walked up the hill to the tee and heard a sound all around me, and shushed the others, and heard it again, uncanny, like a room of whisperers, or like corn popping, or like corn whispering about popping. It was the sound of hundreds of plants, seeds popping out of seedpods in the afternoon heat.
4. I thought about a conversation I had with Ramon about cell phone etiquette. When is it unutterably rude to take a cell call when you are not alone? When is it absolutely ok? How do you tell the difference? I thought about all the people right now taking calls in the middle of conversations, and how I did that to Crystal yesterday three times and he laughed at it. And I thought about how ring tones also mean “take this call” or “this one can wait just now” or “ooh…tough call.” Then I star 86ed and found a message from my mom that my own message to her had come across garbled and all she hears was “Peter…accident…lost…problem.”
5. I made lunch today out of a tortilla, rice and beans, a hamburger, salsa, and a grilled quail.
6. Kelsey told me that she felt done with school or rather that she wished she didn’t have to punch her ticket with college for so long just to get work. I commiserated and talked a little about the difference between getting good grades and coming across work, thinking, in college that excites you and makes you feel you are on a new level, a higher and more exciting level of thought. Then I told her that I told Margann the story Kelsey told me yesterday. I was shaking hands with Tony the plumber and his hand was absolutely huge, one of the largest hands my not tiny hand has ever disappeared into. She asked me if I felt emasculated and I shrieked “NO!” we laughed and then she told me about her friend at school, and how when her guy friends would tell her a similar story, she’d say, “Are you feeling emasculated? Do you need a boob hug?” Gesture of explanation here: head against the boobs, ensuing hug. I don’t know why but that cracked me up all day.
7. I grabbed a mountain bike and hauled down the hill to Cowells to pick up the car with frozen food and the dog in it while Margann Mahk and Jen swam around the Santa Cruz wharf and the bambini played on the sand and swam in the easy swells. Standing up on the bike pedals all the way down Bay Street hill, no headphones, just the exhilarating feeling of a bipedal human rolling along on prosthetic wheels, bike and rider a cyborg, brain now engaged in bikebody thinking. Jump the curb just before Mission, pass eight cars and make the light, pass ten cars waiting for the train to cross, hit the train just as the last of it is clanking across the street. Bikes rule.
8. I pulled a double espresso and poured it into a glass of Trader Joe’s chocolate ice cream and drank it off while reading Ellroy in the last of the afternoon sun. Kids were making a fort out of wagons and sun umbrellas; Blythe came by and I told her I’d stolen two eggs the other day and got home to cook them and found them hard boiled! The sun went lower in the sky, the light across the words grew less bright, and in retrospect I think of what a friend said about words and how nirvana for words might be the reader’s eyes, and that made me think that words are like seeds, dormant, and the eyes light upon them and the popping sound is the sound of meaning, of connection.
9. Mark and Amando and Rebecca and Bailey and Margann were eating pizzas and I was calling to activate my two new credit cards and each time the person was Indian and asking me what kind of day I had had or was having, and in each case the implication of the letter attached to the card was that the telephone activations would be automated. Instead I found myself in slightly arcane conversations about the virtues of Identity Theft protection ($12.90 a month) and the opportunity for me to sign up right now with of course the right to end this service whenever I pleased or lower APA numbers and…I found myself having pleasant conversations, no thanks I don’t need those things, and thinking of how in the modern world, sometimes we wish we had just gotten the machine, it asks little of us, there is less commitment involved, less investment of time and energy. Then I went downstairs and had a vegetarian pizza and we talked about the carbon footprint difference it makes to have one vegetarian meal a day instead of meat. And I thought about the hamburger and the quail, a little.
10. Amando and Rebecca live in Germany so we took them to the Saturn Café to have their first mud pie: ice cream pie with Oreo crust covered in chocolate. We wondered how many moons Saturn has, and Jupiter for that matter, and we had a table for ten and played cards and the other adults had adult conversation and Mark told us about being a DJ and having 1500 7 inch records and playing Abba’s “Super trouper” at parties, as that very song blared from the small but powerful speakers on the wall. And on cue, three members of the party began singing:
Tonight the
Super Trouper lights are gonna find me
Shining like the sun
(Sup-p-per Troup-p-per)
Smiling, having fun
(Sup-p-per Troup-p-per)
Feeling like a number one
Tonight the
Super Trouper beams are gonna blind me
But I won't feel blue
(Sup-p-per Troup-p-per)
Like I always do
(Sup-p-per Troup-p-per)
'Cause somewhere in the crowd there's you
Yup, powerful stuff. Blindness, depression, the stuff of Oedipus and Ibsen, and then suddenly, an insight into the human condition, epiphany, and we all troupe out to the pop rhythm, high on ice cream, feeling, each and every one of us, like a number, one.
Ten minutes on July 28, 2008
“The best political theory is in novels”
I recall arriving at Stanford University as a graduate student in English in 1976, fresh from Penn and East Coast weather and saying goodbye to my off-to-Harvard-Law girlfriend. I was questioning why I was still doing lit, which meant a lot of reading and then reading about the readings and then writing about the readings about the readings.
Within about six months I was involved in political organizing against apartheid in South Africa with a group of Stanford students and a few faculty. In the next year I read a lot in political and economic theory, trying to get a fix on my own politics. The New Left was recently more or less deceased, but their theory and especially their rejection of older left positions was intriguing to me. And I found theory bracing, direct, laying out positions and interpreting historical events and trends, all of which I found relatively new. I read Hazel Henderson and E. F. Schumacher and Herman Daly and Jane Jacobs; I read a lot of feminist theory, and small and large M Marxist theory, and anarchist theory and history, and had a giddy sense of liberation from the world of literary criticism. I read Barry Commoner and an early ecology book (Our Synthetic Environment) by Murray Bookchin written under a pseudonym; I read Silent Spring and a bunch of texts on nuclear power and in so doing a lot of writing on how to move forward past oil and coal without going nuclear.
It is hard to express how it felt to read these things. First off, I was reading them alongside doing political work, so each reading seemed to help me get a fix on the organizing we were doing, short and long term goals, and how specific issues (anti-apartheid, anti-corporate, anti-nuclear energy and then weapons, El Salvador and Nicaragua support work) fit into a longer term, larger vision of social change. Second, the reading was shared among people I grew to admire greatly, who I felt were acting on their principles, using their Stanford-level intelligences to fight for things that were worth fighting for. Unlike in a classroom, this reading and discussion felt alive, timely, and energizing.
Ironically, as I swerved from reading novels and fiction to reading theory and history, I found that many of the people I was working and organizing with were reading books like Woman on the Edge of Time and The Dispossessed and The Female Man and Ecotopia and Herland; they were reading Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown and John Brunner and the Illuminati trilogy boys (Robert Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson). Don’t get me wrong: most of my friends were also reading biography and essays and political writing (Emma Goldman especially!) and taking classes in political theory and so on. But when the night came and the party ended up in the kitchen talking ideas and books and philosophy, it was more often novels that generated the most interesting conversations.
And so several of us came to the conclusion that novels are a better source of political theory than the alternatives, including of course political theory. Why?
This is all an indirect way of talking about a book I am currently reading, James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere. Set in Los Angeles in 1950, it is a social and political history of the city of angels, as well as a whodunit thriller. Here is the book jacket blub from the original hardcover:
Returning to Los Angeles a few years after World War II (the setting of his last novel, The Black Dahlia ), Ellroy has come up with an ambitious, enthralling melodrama painted on a broad, dark canvas. The novel's first half interweaves two stories of lonely, driven lawmen investigating the crimes of social outcasts. In the county sheriff's office, Deputy Danny Upshaw finds that his probe of a series of homosexual murders is unleashing some frightening personal demons. Meanwhile, DA's investigator Mal Considine is assigned to infiltrate a cadre of Hollywood leftists, knowing that in the red-scare atmosphere, any hint of Communist conspiracy he uncovers will advance his career. Impressed by Upshaw's intensity, Considine decides to use him as a decoy to seduce a powerful woman nicknamed the "Red Queen," and the two cases and their implications of corruption, deceit and past violence converge explosively. At once taut and densely detailed, this is a mystery with the grim, inexorable pull of a film noir, shot through with a strictly modern dose of extreme (though not gratuitous) brutality and a very sure sense of history and characterization.
What makes this good theory, or the opportunity for readers to theorize?
1. The characters speak in the ways LA cops and citizens would be likely to speak at the time. that is, their speech includes their politics: the casual racism and homophobia, the gendered observations, the spirit of the age cold war rhetoric, are all located in realistic speakers, not anonymous historical Thems. And the various levels of response to such talk is also crucial. One character spouts anti-Communist rhetoric; another sees it as overblown and irrelevant to the actual motivation of the speaker; a third and fourth see it as a way to play the game and make money and get promotions.
2. Connected to this, the institutional conflicts and motivations are crucial to understanding why people say the things they do, and keep silent on other things they might otherwise say. No one feels the need to restrain their racism or hatred of homosexuality (the latter is, lest we forget, massively criminalized, so everything from pederasty to consenting rich guys rolling around in private bungalows is both an affront to heterosexual decency AND massively illegal). The police department, the City and LA county governments and political machines, competing Hollywood unions and film companies, the newspapers and columnists, the jazz clubs and alcohol/drug rehab farms, the organized crime gangs and prostitution rackets, all circulate within an economy of information. Money buys protection but not always; the Cold War figures in private feuds and schemes to get promotions. People are regularly shaken down, braced, blackmailed, turned, broken with information; and all this happens with ‘squarejohns” and their wives taking out the trash and driving to work and knowing little about the realities taking place just beyond their perception.
3. Finally, these novels show the intersection of private and public. This cop is also probably a very closeted gay man, immersed in a murder case that involves all levels of the LA gay scene; this other has a complicated and ugly relationship with his Czech wife (a camp survivor) and her son, which inflects his compromise with hard-line Cold Warriors to more or less destroy the ‘Red” union so that the corrupt Teamsters can get their jobs. The personal, in these novels, is relentlessly political.
The Los Angeles that emerges from Ellroy’s "L.A. Quartet" (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz) is thickly described, and supports the notion that everything is indeed connected. Treatment of homosexuality is connected with a certain kind of damaged heterosexual masculinity; gays paying protection money to sheriffs and cops is connected with mobsters doing the same. And the political and persona pressures on each character tell; conflict is inevitable, it eats at your gut and causes you to do things that generate more conflict, either externally or internally.
So what theory can be derived from well written and well constructed novels? Theories that take into account the complexity of human motives, and the complicated way that the personal is political. The Dispossessed for example examines not only the difficulties in establishing a truly anti-hierarchical, anarchist society and culture, but also the embedded difficulties and contradictions within hierarchical social structures; neither is “realistic” or “ideal” but rather both are attempts to solve difficult, often intractable problems of human social organization.
As the novel unfolds, I felt amazement; I felt the complex multiple reality of 1950 Los Angeles, and in particular its toxic blends of racism, Cold War opportunism, homophobia, and corruption, come alive, so that when I would look up from the page, I felt vertigo at what has changed, and what elements have remained, changed in appearance but not necessarily in depth. That world changed partly because of political movements, partly because many individuals’ lives changed in small but important ways. And that world stayed the same – the race and class divides, the crime and drug running and protection schemes and ideologies of fake patriotism and paranoiac fear – because of political movements, and because many individuals’ lives did not fundamentally change in small but important ways.
Finally, theory to the Greeks was a kind of seeing. In Greek, theoria means "contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at," from theorein, "to consider, speculate, look at," from theoros "spectator," from thea "a view" + horan "to see." Often the Greeks seemed to connect theorein to the stage, in the sense of talking about what one saw dramatized. And so theory is born in dramatization and conflict; the playwright not only entertains, but embeds a story inside the entertainment about core conflicts in the society. Clever, eh? That way the entire citizenry can discuss what the play means, and put this discussion “in play” without having to have it be immediately political and real.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Novels are a kidn of play, a kidn of virtual reality, to rehearse stories about conflicts in our identity and culture and nation; they are models of what is, so that we can see the stories we are currently telling, and when necessary, change those stories.
A better story is possible.
“The best political theory is in novels”
I recall arriving at Stanford University as a graduate student in English in 1976, fresh from Penn and East Coast weather and saying goodbye to my off-to-Harvard-Law girlfriend. I was questioning why I was still doing lit, which meant a lot of reading and then reading about the readings and then writing about the readings about the readings.
Within about six months I was involved in political organizing against apartheid in South Africa with a group of Stanford students and a few faculty. In the next year I read a lot in political and economic theory, trying to get a fix on my own politics. The New Left was recently more or less deceased, but their theory and especially their rejection of older left positions was intriguing to me. And I found theory bracing, direct, laying out positions and interpreting historical events and trends, all of which I found relatively new. I read Hazel Henderson and E. F. Schumacher and Herman Daly and Jane Jacobs; I read a lot of feminist theory, and small and large M Marxist theory, and anarchist theory and history, and had a giddy sense of liberation from the world of literary criticism. I read Barry Commoner and an early ecology book (Our Synthetic Environment) by Murray Bookchin written under a pseudonym; I read Silent Spring and a bunch of texts on nuclear power and in so doing a lot of writing on how to move forward past oil and coal without going nuclear.
It is hard to express how it felt to read these things. First off, I was reading them alongside doing political work, so each reading seemed to help me get a fix on the organizing we were doing, short and long term goals, and how specific issues (anti-apartheid, anti-corporate, anti-nuclear energy and then weapons, El Salvador and Nicaragua support work) fit into a longer term, larger vision of social change. Second, the reading was shared among people I grew to admire greatly, who I felt were acting on their principles, using their Stanford-level intelligences to fight for things that were worth fighting for. Unlike in a classroom, this reading and discussion felt alive, timely, and energizing.
Ironically, as I swerved from reading novels and fiction to reading theory and history, I found that many of the people I was working and organizing with were reading books like Woman on the Edge of Time and The Dispossessed and The Female Man and Ecotopia and Herland; they were reading Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown and John Brunner and the Illuminati trilogy boys (Robert Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson). Don’t get me wrong: most of my friends were also reading biography and essays and political writing (Emma Goldman especially!) and taking classes in political theory and so on. But when the night came and the party ended up in the kitchen talking ideas and books and philosophy, it was more often novels that generated the most interesting conversations.
And so several of us came to the conclusion that novels are a better source of political theory than the alternatives, including of course political theory. Why?
This is all an indirect way of talking about a book I am currently reading, James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere. Set in Los Angeles in 1950, it is a social and political history of the city of angels, as well as a whodunit thriller. Here is the book jacket blub from the original hardcover:
Returning to Los Angeles a few years after World War II (the setting of his last novel, The Black Dahlia ), Ellroy has come up with an ambitious, enthralling melodrama painted on a broad, dark canvas. The novel's first half interweaves two stories of lonely, driven lawmen investigating the crimes of social outcasts. In the county sheriff's office, Deputy Danny Upshaw finds that his probe of a series of homosexual murders is unleashing some frightening personal demons. Meanwhile, DA's investigator Mal Considine is assigned to infiltrate a cadre of Hollywood leftists, knowing that in the red-scare atmosphere, any hint of Communist conspiracy he uncovers will advance his career. Impressed by Upshaw's intensity, Considine decides to use him as a decoy to seduce a powerful woman nicknamed the "Red Queen," and the two cases and their implications of corruption, deceit and past violence converge explosively. At once taut and densely detailed, this is a mystery with the grim, inexorable pull of a film noir, shot through with a strictly modern dose of extreme (though not gratuitous) brutality and a very sure sense of history and characterization.
What makes this good theory, or the opportunity for readers to theorize?
1. The characters speak in the ways LA cops and citizens would be likely to speak at the time. that is, their speech includes their politics: the casual racism and homophobia, the gendered observations, the spirit of the age cold war rhetoric, are all located in realistic speakers, not anonymous historical Thems. And the various levels of response to such talk is also crucial. One character spouts anti-Communist rhetoric; another sees it as overblown and irrelevant to the actual motivation of the speaker; a third and fourth see it as a way to play the game and make money and get promotions.
2. Connected to this, the institutional conflicts and motivations are crucial to understanding why people say the things they do, and keep silent on other things they might otherwise say. No one feels the need to restrain their racism or hatred of homosexuality (the latter is, lest we forget, massively criminalized, so everything from pederasty to consenting rich guys rolling around in private bungalows is both an affront to heterosexual decency AND massively illegal). The police department, the City and LA county governments and political machines, competing Hollywood unions and film companies, the newspapers and columnists, the jazz clubs and alcohol/drug rehab farms, the organized crime gangs and prostitution rackets, all circulate within an economy of information. Money buys protection but not always; the Cold War figures in private feuds and schemes to get promotions. People are regularly shaken down, braced, blackmailed, turned, broken with information; and all this happens with ‘squarejohns” and their wives taking out the trash and driving to work and knowing little about the realities taking place just beyond their perception.
3. Finally, these novels show the intersection of private and public. This cop is also probably a very closeted gay man, immersed in a murder case that involves all levels of the LA gay scene; this other has a complicated and ugly relationship with his Czech wife (a camp survivor) and her son, which inflects his compromise with hard-line Cold Warriors to more or less destroy the ‘Red” union so that the corrupt Teamsters can get their jobs. The personal, in these novels, is relentlessly political.
The Los Angeles that emerges from Ellroy’s "L.A. Quartet" (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz) is thickly described, and supports the notion that everything is indeed connected. Treatment of homosexuality is connected with a certain kind of damaged heterosexual masculinity; gays paying protection money to sheriffs and cops is connected with mobsters doing the same. And the political and persona pressures on each character tell; conflict is inevitable, it eats at your gut and causes you to do things that generate more conflict, either externally or internally.
So what theory can be derived from well written and well constructed novels? Theories that take into account the complexity of human motives, and the complicated way that the personal is political. The Dispossessed for example examines not only the difficulties in establishing a truly anti-hierarchical, anarchist society and culture, but also the embedded difficulties and contradictions within hierarchical social structures; neither is “realistic” or “ideal” but rather both are attempts to solve difficult, often intractable problems of human social organization.
As the novel unfolds, I felt amazement; I felt the complex multiple reality of 1950 Los Angeles, and in particular its toxic blends of racism, Cold War opportunism, homophobia, and corruption, come alive, so that when I would look up from the page, I felt vertigo at what has changed, and what elements have remained, changed in appearance but not necessarily in depth. That world changed partly because of political movements, partly because many individuals’ lives changed in small but important ways. And that world stayed the same – the race and class divides, the crime and drug running and protection schemes and ideologies of fake patriotism and paranoiac fear – because of political movements, and because many individuals’ lives did not fundamentally change in small but important ways.
Finally, theory to the Greeks was a kind of seeing. In Greek, theoria means "contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at," from theorein, "to consider, speculate, look at," from theoros "spectator," from thea "a view" + horan "to see." Often the Greeks seemed to connect theorein to the stage, in the sense of talking about what one saw dramatized. And so theory is born in dramatization and conflict; the playwright not only entertains, but embeds a story inside the entertainment about core conflicts in the society. Clever, eh? That way the entire citizenry can discuss what the play means, and put this discussion “in play” without having to have it be immediately political and real.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Novels are a kidn of play, a kidn of virtual reality, to rehearse stories about conflicts in our identity and culture and nation; they are models of what is, so that we can see the stories we are currently telling, and when necessary, change those stories.
A better story is possible.
Ten minutes on July 23, 2008
The Zombies are playing on the café stereo, and the young woman next to me is humming along and seat-dancing as she types away on her iBook. I imagine she was about negative eighteen when the song came out. There is something primal about those Hammond reed organs, and about the sixties psychedelic sound. The lyrics are even more than usually banal, but as they plunk along in time to the way cool sounds, the singer gets to croon “Tell you what? I really want to knooo-oow.” Sometimes that is worth the price of the ticket. We all really, really want to know. And therein lies the genius of pop music, such as it is. Catchy hooks, and lyrics general enough to cover a vast array of human experience.
Jem, Nick Drake, “Crazy Love” by Van Morrison…I write by the side of a babbling brook, a clear stream, a slow and lazy river of music, with the occasional warble of customers (“English breakfast tea”) and passersby just outside the window (“So I really will call you…”). Just below consciousness, the cricket sounds of keys, five laptops rubbing their legs and chirruping and occasionally emitting buzzes or whistles or chimes, electronic insects.
Once again I sat down determined to write about one thing – in this case, my four day, hundreds of miles, six guys in a van disc golf tour of Stockton, Orangevale, Auburn, Grass Valley, Penn Valley, Toney’s Mountain. And certainly, a number of wild images stand out in my mind, and the fragments make for a possibly interesting collage: Zack’s amazing day, playing oh hell until two in the morning, my partners in doubles twice dropping their drives literally on top of the drives of our opponents, taking away their advantage on the hole. Playing Penn Valley on a hot-as-coals day and then stripping everything off but shorts and sliding like an animal into the blessedly cool water next to the course, feeling my head so hot it had a halo around it as I dove under and felt the cold cold water sculpt me as a skin-covered consciousness. The big old dogs up at Toney’s Mountain who would uproot stones, then huge boulders, and nose them down inclines, so that on hole #5 Will had to evade a cartoon-size Wiley coyote style rock crashing down the mountain at him, the sound of it impossible to adequately express, the sound of severe and insane injury and at the same time the joy of stolid stones achieving movement and speed.
Eating pizza outside the Round Table after ordering 2 minutes before they closed, the mall empty except for us and employees planning the rest of their night and a clutch of teenagers watching us throw long backhands across the empty lines of the parking lot…and then looking up as two cars drove past on their way to the Dark Knight opening at midnight, all ten of the inmates staring out at us with perfect Joker faces, white with long scary painted-on grins, framed by the car windows. And the way something you do many times, such as the tour, takes on a structure of its own that holds everyone, a four day fiesta and ritual that smooths out highs and lows, crappy shots and miraculous shots, into the general tired happy sunburnt selves that crowd into the food- and clothing-strewn van at fourth day’s end.
And of course there was the sound, just outside of West Sacramento, of the top of the rocket box lifting up and tearing off its hinges and 65 mph, flying up like the rigid model of the Batman’s wings and smashing down on the highway, taking with it Z’s coat with his cell phone and Peter’s computer bag with more or less his whole school life in it.
But what I really felt called to write about – now that my ten minutes is up – is something slightly different. Or rather, something which is the general to the specific of the Tour, which began with bringing my nephew Jeremiah back to Nevada City back how many years ago? Eight? And now it ends with us throwing a disc with Jeremiah’s name on it, and staying at the hotel where I stayed six months ago when Jeremiah’s mom was waiting for us in a casket, and both of them dead and me not.
And that thing is: the passing of time means that we don’t step in the same river twice, and yet we do the same things over and over and over. And so the sheer element of repetition somehow kills the spirit, and the great experiment we are all involved in pursuing is: if repetition is dulling, and yet essential, and inescapable, then how do we repeat and still stay alive to the life in the repeated?
And if time takes away things we once had, people we once knew…as it will, then do we carry them, and ourselves as we were, and the things we did earlier, with us, down the road?
The sheer freedom of existence is, as the existentialists wrote, terrifying, dizzying, even nauseating. And so we create stories, rituals, family networks, organizations, religions, to balance this tension between what is repeated and what is alive, present, meaningful. Just now, in the circles I run in, these are all in question, all up for grabs, all questioned as to their authority and usefulness. Like software, our versions of Meaning are often radically redesigned; like software, if our version of meaning is not compatible with our operating system, doesn’t work well or is not robust enough, then…we experience Problems up to and including psychological Blue Screens.
So sometimes it is blessedly reassuring to go back to things that repeat. Grab disc; stand still; center mind in/as body; see the throw, already thrown, in your mind; step, step, crossover step, turning torso, shoulders, hips, head now looking not up and forward but sideways, even down a bit; feel the moment of limit and begin the uncoiling; bring the arm fast across the chest; at the last moment, nanomoment, the wrist adjusts to the throw and the disc leaves the hand at just this angle, just this speed, just this amount of rotation. But the body is not done: hand and arm continue through the motion, final step is completed, as the body finishes becoming a machine, an interface with an object round and sharp and tapered like a jet wing, so that the body ends as a sculpture of a discus thrower from ancient Greece and the object flies out into air and travels fast and its spin moves it as it must, through air and time accelerating and then slowing and then turning back and then hitting the ground, way way out there, in the future, part way to a goal, but perfect in the moment of marriage of body and tool, all the various parameters of the body disciplined not grimly but ecstatically.
Each throw a prayer, repeated endlessly, until the end.
The Zombies are playing on the café stereo, and the young woman next to me is humming along and seat-dancing as she types away on her iBook. I imagine she was about negative eighteen when the song came out. There is something primal about those Hammond reed organs, and about the sixties psychedelic sound. The lyrics are even more than usually banal, but as they plunk along in time to the way cool sounds, the singer gets to croon “Tell you what? I really want to knooo-oow.” Sometimes that is worth the price of the ticket. We all really, really want to know. And therein lies the genius of pop music, such as it is. Catchy hooks, and lyrics general enough to cover a vast array of human experience.
Jem, Nick Drake, “Crazy Love” by Van Morrison…I write by the side of a babbling brook, a clear stream, a slow and lazy river of music, with the occasional warble of customers (“English breakfast tea”) and passersby just outside the window (“So I really will call you…”). Just below consciousness, the cricket sounds of keys, five laptops rubbing their legs and chirruping and occasionally emitting buzzes or whistles or chimes, electronic insects.
Once again I sat down determined to write about one thing – in this case, my four day, hundreds of miles, six guys in a van disc golf tour of Stockton, Orangevale, Auburn, Grass Valley, Penn Valley, Toney’s Mountain. And certainly, a number of wild images stand out in my mind, and the fragments make for a possibly interesting collage: Zack’s amazing day, playing oh hell until two in the morning, my partners in doubles twice dropping their drives literally on top of the drives of our opponents, taking away their advantage on the hole. Playing Penn Valley on a hot-as-coals day and then stripping everything off but shorts and sliding like an animal into the blessedly cool water next to the course, feeling my head so hot it had a halo around it as I dove under and felt the cold cold water sculpt me as a skin-covered consciousness. The big old dogs up at Toney’s Mountain who would uproot stones, then huge boulders, and nose them down inclines, so that on hole #5 Will had to evade a cartoon-size Wiley coyote style rock crashing down the mountain at him, the sound of it impossible to adequately express, the sound of severe and insane injury and at the same time the joy of stolid stones achieving movement and speed.
Eating pizza outside the Round Table after ordering 2 minutes before they closed, the mall empty except for us and employees planning the rest of their night and a clutch of teenagers watching us throw long backhands across the empty lines of the parking lot…and then looking up as two cars drove past on their way to the Dark Knight opening at midnight, all ten of the inmates staring out at us with perfect Joker faces, white with long scary painted-on grins, framed by the car windows. And the way something you do many times, such as the tour, takes on a structure of its own that holds everyone, a four day fiesta and ritual that smooths out highs and lows, crappy shots and miraculous shots, into the general tired happy sunburnt selves that crowd into the food- and clothing-strewn van at fourth day’s end.
And of course there was the sound, just outside of West Sacramento, of the top of the rocket box lifting up and tearing off its hinges and 65 mph, flying up like the rigid model of the Batman’s wings and smashing down on the highway, taking with it Z’s coat with his cell phone and Peter’s computer bag with more or less his whole school life in it.
But what I really felt called to write about – now that my ten minutes is up – is something slightly different. Or rather, something which is the general to the specific of the Tour, which began with bringing my nephew Jeremiah back to Nevada City back how many years ago? Eight? And now it ends with us throwing a disc with Jeremiah’s name on it, and staying at the hotel where I stayed six months ago when Jeremiah’s mom was waiting for us in a casket, and both of them dead and me not.
And that thing is: the passing of time means that we don’t step in the same river twice, and yet we do the same things over and over and over. And so the sheer element of repetition somehow kills the spirit, and the great experiment we are all involved in pursuing is: if repetition is dulling, and yet essential, and inescapable, then how do we repeat and still stay alive to the life in the repeated?
And if time takes away things we once had, people we once knew…as it will, then do we carry them, and ourselves as we were, and the things we did earlier, with us, down the road?
The sheer freedom of existence is, as the existentialists wrote, terrifying, dizzying, even nauseating. And so we create stories, rituals, family networks, organizations, religions, to balance this tension between what is repeated and what is alive, present, meaningful. Just now, in the circles I run in, these are all in question, all up for grabs, all questioned as to their authority and usefulness. Like software, our versions of Meaning are often radically redesigned; like software, if our version of meaning is not compatible with our operating system, doesn’t work well or is not robust enough, then…we experience Problems up to and including psychological Blue Screens.
So sometimes it is blessedly reassuring to go back to things that repeat. Grab disc; stand still; center mind in/as body; see the throw, already thrown, in your mind; step, step, crossover step, turning torso, shoulders, hips, head now looking not up and forward but sideways, even down a bit; feel the moment of limit and begin the uncoiling; bring the arm fast across the chest; at the last moment, nanomoment, the wrist adjusts to the throw and the disc leaves the hand at just this angle, just this speed, just this amount of rotation. But the body is not done: hand and arm continue through the motion, final step is completed, as the body finishes becoming a machine, an interface with an object round and sharp and tapered like a jet wing, so that the body ends as a sculpture of a discus thrower from ancient Greece and the object flies out into air and travels fast and its spin moves it as it must, through air and time accelerating and then slowing and then turning back and then hitting the ground, way way out there, in the future, part way to a goal, but perfect in the moment of marriage of body and tool, all the various parameters of the body disciplined not grimly but ecstatically.
Each throw a prayer, repeated endlessly, until the end.
Ten minutes on July 12, 2008
Yampa, Part 2
Of course, for every object in light, there is a shadow, and often it is in the shadows that we find the rest of the story, or another story altogether. So, for example, I could mention the complexity of the organizing of the Yampa trip, in which our intrepid and charismatic organizer invites his close friends to come, hoping to make numbers for the tour, and ends up with too many people, and drama ensues. Before the moment when we put our things in dry bags and hop into the rafts, easy peasy, there is energy expended getting people interested in the trip, money to be asked for and given, plane tickets to buy early or later (with the resultant unpleasant surprise about the cost of plane tickets these days), bags to be packed with things appropriate to camping at some altitude, rides to be arranged or offered, lodgings to be reserved or hoped for…and this doesn’t include the actual trip planning by the Holiday people.
But in this case I will allow those details to remain in the now semi-shadows. (Watch this space for possible musings on the dynamics of organizing small groups to vacation together; process junkies, you know who you are!). Instead I want to explain why I named my trip the Kindness of Strangers Tour.
In preparing for the river trip, I think I used about 4% of my brain. This, strangely, is exactly the amount of knowledge that the theory of the Law of Attraction asserts we harness without using the miraculous knowledge contained in the workshops, life coaching, and books promulgated by those who believe in the Law of Attraction. The other 96% of my brain/attention were being spent on: figuring out where Bailey was going to be for the days I’d be gone; worrying about Margann’s daughter Liz and her two dogs on their way to Los Angeles and suddenly housing-bereft when a water main broke and flooded their home-to-be; watching Euro 2008 soccer games; seeing big-ass wildfires break out approximately every couple minutes in my county, including smoke rising directly over the hill that rises from our cohousing community up toward UCSC and Martin Road, smoke then drifting on winds blowing more or less at us; hanging out with my B daughters, just home from college (watch this space for what a B daughter or son or parent might be, and how you yourself can be one for fun and profit); walking my dog Cliff and wondering when more people will come up to me and tell me I look like my dog, who looks like a cross between a skunk and a prospector; trying to spend time with my lovely but overworked tri-wife, and succeeding at about the same rate that our government succeeds in taking bold steps to reduce global warming; and so on.
So packing was successful to the extent that I had a tent (brand new, with the mesh through which you can see the night sky), a sleeping bag, warm clothes, new Tevas specifically named Star Gazers, and so embedding a vision of walking with my new product and talking knowledgeably about constellations.
At the start of the Kindness of Strangers tour, I called Wanda to beg a ride from the airport and a place to stay on the back end of the trip and a ride to the river. I think I threw in a promise to be (attempt to be?) amusing. I got off the little Delta puddle jumper jet and collected my bag and found Kevin and Wanda deep in conversation about the Law of Attraction. At first I hoped they were talking about me specifically, but soon I learned that this Law of Attraction discourse is one of those New Age crossed with Madison Avenue type products:
“Breakthrough Discovery Reveals
The Revolutionary ‘Secrets’ About
The Law Of Attraction And How To Manifest Anything You Want
In Life... Like Magic!”
Long-Lost Secrets Never Before Explained
About How To Apply The Law Of Attraction
To Create The Life Of Your Dreams
Finally Revealed In Startling Materials!
Neither Kevin nor Wanda was enthusiastic about this discourse. I felt happy to be picked up from the airport and even happier to be in a car where two of my favorite people in the world were tossing a hapless set of ideas back and forth and whacking it with verbal tennis rackets. The mountains were out and snow capped, the traffic was light, and it was fun to listen to ideas like:
1. Why any belief in lack, scarcity, or limitation is false, and the many ways in which such a belief
can hold you back in achieving your dreams.
2. Discover what cause and effect really means. Most people get this all wrong. But if you know
how to really apply this to your life, you'll be able to reap the benefits much more effectively.
3. Learn about the #1 secret you need to be aware of if you want to avoid fooling yourself into
believing you’re doing things right, while actually you're doing things wrong entirely.
We drove to Wanda and Howard’s Salt Lake neighborhood, which is lovely and tree lined and reminiscent of the America of television in the 1950’s, and Kevin and Claire and Lina packed and left for the river, and Paul and Anna came and picked up Wanda and me, and we drove to Vernal, where we would spend the night and then wake up early to drive to the put-in.
Originally Wanda and I were going to camp near town, but we got a late start and with one thing and another, including eating dinner with our friends, we ran out of light and so asked Paul and Anna if we could crash in their hotel room. Little did I know that this would be the theme of the trip for me.
The next day we drove in vans to the put-in, went through the PFD talk (personal flotation devices – I guess “life jacket” was too much of a buzz-kill in terms of marketing, implying as it does the possibility of death), floated down the river for a short time, decamped on a beach a couple hours down the river, set up tents, drank Nora’s Lemon Drops and Kevin’s gin and tonic with nice fresh lime juice, at a dinner that couldn’t be beat, fought the First Battle of the Mosquitoes, and went to sleep.
Here I discovered, in rapid succession:
1. It can get cold in the mountains on a river.
2. I had purchased a tent to look at stars through, and so chose to omit the fly; it turns out that mesh walls are to cold what the straw walls were to the Little Pigs’ wolf.
3. I had cleverly left my warm Patagonia jacket in my car at the airport in San Jose.
4. I had left my cozy long underwear in Paul and Anna’s car back in Vernal.
5. I had not brought my three season down REI sleeping bag under instructions from friends who said it made no sense to bring down to a river; what if it got wet? Instead I had grabbed what can only be described as a zero season bag, polyester, thin and aged, good for a sleep over in a warm house with wall to wall carpeting.
6. The combination of two gin and tonics, one lemon drop, dinner with salsa, and the extreme shivering of my body in the Antarctic conditions I’d prepared for myself, were unkind to my poor stomach.
7. Walking to the portable bathroom on the beach at 2 a.m. was a revelation; a dense pattern of bright stars in a sky cut out like a jigsaw puzzle piece by the canyon walls hovered over the rafts, the sand, the tents and brush and water.
8. Sleeping for ten to fifteen minutes at a time, waking up shivering for twenty minutes, and repeating, allows for a wide range of topics to be mulled over: eternity, prayer, the living conditions of the first, unhoused humans, the high quality of contemporary camping clothing and equipment, nostalgia for poly pro and things with the words REI and Patagonia on them, the hallucinatory possibilities inherent in sleep deprivation, Homer’s description of rosy fingered dawn and its relation to the present glacial rising of the pale Utah canyon sun.
Note: searching the internet I found a free essay from a site called 123helpme!.com, addressing the needs of Western civ students struggling with writing on Homer without having read much if any of the original. In this essay we find that “throughout Odysseus' journey, the metaphor of the dawn symbolizes his odyssey from immaturity, maturity, and fulfillment.” I love this sentence, since it is both terrible (odyssey from fulfillment?) and, therefore, also sounds authentically like the kind of thing a mediocre undergraduate might write, not something cadged from the internet. The essay goes on to argue, if argue is the word I want here, that rosy fingered dawn represents Odysseus as inexperienced ruler, to be replaced by later epithetis like "gold-throned dawn" and "bright-throned dawn." My favorite parts of the site? The big button that says “report plagiarism” (you can say if you think one of these abysmal free essays was written by someone other than 123helpme!) and the small print below the essay:
Important Note: If you'd like to save a copy of the paper on your computer, you can COPY and PASTE it into your word processor. Please, follow these steps to do that in Windows:
1. Select the text of the paper with the mouse and press Ctrl+C.
2. Open your word processor and press Ctrl+V.
Company's Liability
123HelpMe.com (the "Web Site") is produced by the "Company". The contents of this Web Site, such as text, graphics, images, audio, video and all other material ("Material"), are protected by copyright under both United States and foreign laws. The Company makes no representations about the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or timeliness of the Material or about the results to be obtained from using the Material.
Suffice to say, my camping is at about the same level as the Material produced by the Company and pasted into countless word processing pages by countless inmates of the Educational-Industrial-Complex. I was watching the rosy fingered dawn and wondering, how on earth am I going to gather life-sustaining warmth to myself in the next black-fingered nights?
Hence the Kindess of Stranger tour. I woke up in an amazingly good mood, my stomach took in nourishment without complaint, the sun warmed me nicely, just as it warmed those proto-humans I felt I had come to resemble. By using those handy little things I call “words” I let my nearest and dearest know I was in grave need of basic survival gear. In so doing, I found myself engaged in research on what extra gear various people brought, and it turns out, everyone brought at least one extra bit for outliers such as myself. And so by nightfall I found myself with:
1. Warm wooly hat from Morgan our river guide;
2. Cozy poly pro long underwear from Wanda;
3. A sweet fleece jacket from Dirk;
4. My tent fly, from myself to myself.
Obligingly, the weather was much warmer, almost balmy, that night, so my zero season bag couldn’t suck all the delicious heat out of my body and give it to the ground. And as I lay there that night, with a full stomach, encased in things that said REI and Patagonia, I felt like I embodied, literally, the kindness of strangers. Well, perhaps not strangers, exactly, but you know what I mean.
For the rest of the trip I noticed all the ways people did for each other. Some people had clearly spent a great deal of effort preparing for the alcohol and mixed drink needs of their comrades, and spared no effort in inventing new drinks (Nora’s Gin Flip with macerated wild juniper berries) and in the laying on of social lubricants. Laura brought Wizard, the card game that became the kid-and-adult joining activity of each evening; Tycho brought both superior insect repellent AND, crucially, an aloe-lidocaine cream. Each night people would approach him, beg in various ways, and then stand while he sprayed them, or go off with handfuls of insect-bite deadening goo and slather their angry bites with it. Three of us had the foresight to buy quantities of Double Shots, which doubled as a kind of legal tender, and I found all the kids approaching me when word got out via Lina that my soothing spray spf 45 Neutrogena sun block was the bomb.
Full disclosure: when I moved to Santa Cruz in 1979 I got interested in Tarot readings. Not that I felt these were somehow magical; I just liked the excuse to make up stories, and to play the role of soothsayer. Try saying sooth sometime; it is quite enjoyable. Anyway, forever my own card has been The Fool (I can hear you guys snickering out there, so stop that immediately!!). The Fool is the first card of the Major Arcana; he is shown in the Waite deck as a young man dressed gaily with a bag on a stick over his shoulder and a little dog by his side, walking blithely over a cliff. The first card signifies the power of innocence; not knowing what dangers surround him, he simply goes forward, and improbably, the universe supports him. He hitchhikes with his girlfriend to a concert, sleeps on a porch, and the next day hitching he meets a woman who takes the couple to her house and lends them her car for two days. The Fool card is first, and last is the Mage or Magician, who has learned to know and manipulate the principles and powers in the world that the Fool, in his folly, simply experiences through lack of fear.
You may notice, in this last description, an amusing element. My folly results in my being taken care of, which results in a knowledge of my friends that could not have happened if I had come prepared, which results in more love, affection, and appreciation of the social economy of gifts. It’s like an O Henry story, like the Gift of the Magi, but where you get to keep the comb and the watch.
It’s like the new law of attraction.
Yampa, Part 2
Of course, for every object in light, there is a shadow, and often it is in the shadows that we find the rest of the story, or another story altogether. So, for example, I could mention the complexity of the organizing of the Yampa trip, in which our intrepid and charismatic organizer invites his close friends to come, hoping to make numbers for the tour, and ends up with too many people, and drama ensues. Before the moment when we put our things in dry bags and hop into the rafts, easy peasy, there is energy expended getting people interested in the trip, money to be asked for and given, plane tickets to buy early or later (with the resultant unpleasant surprise about the cost of plane tickets these days), bags to be packed with things appropriate to camping at some altitude, rides to be arranged or offered, lodgings to be reserved or hoped for…and this doesn’t include the actual trip planning by the Holiday people.
But in this case I will allow those details to remain in the now semi-shadows. (Watch this space for possible musings on the dynamics of organizing small groups to vacation together; process junkies, you know who you are!). Instead I want to explain why I named my trip the Kindness of Strangers Tour.
In preparing for the river trip, I think I used about 4% of my brain. This, strangely, is exactly the amount of knowledge that the theory of the Law of Attraction asserts we harness without using the miraculous knowledge contained in the workshops, life coaching, and books promulgated by those who believe in the Law of Attraction. The other 96% of my brain/attention were being spent on: figuring out where Bailey was going to be for the days I’d be gone; worrying about Margann’s daughter Liz and her two dogs on their way to Los Angeles and suddenly housing-bereft when a water main broke and flooded their home-to-be; watching Euro 2008 soccer games; seeing big-ass wildfires break out approximately every couple minutes in my county, including smoke rising directly over the hill that rises from our cohousing community up toward UCSC and Martin Road, smoke then drifting on winds blowing more or less at us; hanging out with my B daughters, just home from college (watch this space for what a B daughter or son or parent might be, and how you yourself can be one for fun and profit); walking my dog Cliff and wondering when more people will come up to me and tell me I look like my dog, who looks like a cross between a skunk and a prospector; trying to spend time with my lovely but overworked tri-wife, and succeeding at about the same rate that our government succeeds in taking bold steps to reduce global warming; and so on.
So packing was successful to the extent that I had a tent (brand new, with the mesh through which you can see the night sky), a sleeping bag, warm clothes, new Tevas specifically named Star Gazers, and so embedding a vision of walking with my new product and talking knowledgeably about constellations.
At the start of the Kindness of Strangers tour, I called Wanda to beg a ride from the airport and a place to stay on the back end of the trip and a ride to the river. I think I threw in a promise to be (attempt to be?) amusing. I got off the little Delta puddle jumper jet and collected my bag and found Kevin and Wanda deep in conversation about the Law of Attraction. At first I hoped they were talking about me specifically, but soon I learned that this Law of Attraction discourse is one of those New Age crossed with Madison Avenue type products:
“Breakthrough Discovery Reveals
The Revolutionary ‘Secrets’ About
The Law Of Attraction And How To Manifest Anything You Want
In Life... Like Magic!”
Long-Lost Secrets Never Before Explained
About How To Apply The Law Of Attraction
To Create The Life Of Your Dreams
Finally Revealed In Startling Materials!
Neither Kevin nor Wanda was enthusiastic about this discourse. I felt happy to be picked up from the airport and even happier to be in a car where two of my favorite people in the world were tossing a hapless set of ideas back and forth and whacking it with verbal tennis rackets. The mountains were out and snow capped, the traffic was light, and it was fun to listen to ideas like:
1. Why any belief in lack, scarcity, or limitation is false, and the many ways in which such a belief
can hold you back in achieving your dreams.
2. Discover what cause and effect really means. Most people get this all wrong. But if you know
how to really apply this to your life, you'll be able to reap the benefits much more effectively.
3. Learn about the #1 secret you need to be aware of if you want to avoid fooling yourself into
believing you’re doing things right, while actually you're doing things wrong entirely.
We drove to Wanda and Howard’s Salt Lake neighborhood, which is lovely and tree lined and reminiscent of the America of television in the 1950’s, and Kevin and Claire and Lina packed and left for the river, and Paul and Anna came and picked up Wanda and me, and we drove to Vernal, where we would spend the night and then wake up early to drive to the put-in.
Originally Wanda and I were going to camp near town, but we got a late start and with one thing and another, including eating dinner with our friends, we ran out of light and so asked Paul and Anna if we could crash in their hotel room. Little did I know that this would be the theme of the trip for me.
The next day we drove in vans to the put-in, went through the PFD talk (personal flotation devices – I guess “life jacket” was too much of a buzz-kill in terms of marketing, implying as it does the possibility of death), floated down the river for a short time, decamped on a beach a couple hours down the river, set up tents, drank Nora’s Lemon Drops and Kevin’s gin and tonic with nice fresh lime juice, at a dinner that couldn’t be beat, fought the First Battle of the Mosquitoes, and went to sleep.
Here I discovered, in rapid succession:
1. It can get cold in the mountains on a river.
2. I had purchased a tent to look at stars through, and so chose to omit the fly; it turns out that mesh walls are to cold what the straw walls were to the Little Pigs’ wolf.
3. I had cleverly left my warm Patagonia jacket in my car at the airport in San Jose.
4. I had left my cozy long underwear in Paul and Anna’s car back in Vernal.
5. I had not brought my three season down REI sleeping bag under instructions from friends who said it made no sense to bring down to a river; what if it got wet? Instead I had grabbed what can only be described as a zero season bag, polyester, thin and aged, good for a sleep over in a warm house with wall to wall carpeting.
6. The combination of two gin and tonics, one lemon drop, dinner with salsa, and the extreme shivering of my body in the Antarctic conditions I’d prepared for myself, were unkind to my poor stomach.
7. Walking to the portable bathroom on the beach at 2 a.m. was a revelation; a dense pattern of bright stars in a sky cut out like a jigsaw puzzle piece by the canyon walls hovered over the rafts, the sand, the tents and brush and water.
8. Sleeping for ten to fifteen minutes at a time, waking up shivering for twenty minutes, and repeating, allows for a wide range of topics to be mulled over: eternity, prayer, the living conditions of the first, unhoused humans, the high quality of contemporary camping clothing and equipment, nostalgia for poly pro and things with the words REI and Patagonia on them, the hallucinatory possibilities inherent in sleep deprivation, Homer’s description of rosy fingered dawn and its relation to the present glacial rising of the pale Utah canyon sun.
Note: searching the internet I found a free essay from a site called 123helpme!.com, addressing the needs of Western civ students struggling with writing on Homer without having read much if any of the original. In this essay we find that “throughout Odysseus' journey, the metaphor of the dawn symbolizes his odyssey from immaturity, maturity, and fulfillment.” I love this sentence, since it is both terrible (odyssey from fulfillment?) and, therefore, also sounds authentically like the kind of thing a mediocre undergraduate might write, not something cadged from the internet. The essay goes on to argue, if argue is the word I want here, that rosy fingered dawn represents Odysseus as inexperienced ruler, to be replaced by later epithetis like "gold-throned dawn" and "bright-throned dawn." My favorite parts of the site? The big button that says “report plagiarism” (you can say if you think one of these abysmal free essays was written by someone other than 123helpme!) and the small print below the essay:
Important Note: If you'd like to save a copy of the paper on your computer, you can COPY and PASTE it into your word processor. Please, follow these steps to do that in Windows:
1. Select the text of the paper with the mouse and press Ctrl+C.
2. Open your word processor and press Ctrl+V.
Company's Liability
123HelpMe.com (the "Web Site") is produced by the "Company". The contents of this Web Site, such as text, graphics, images, audio, video and all other material ("Material"), are protected by copyright under both United States and foreign laws. The Company makes no representations about the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or timeliness of the Material or about the results to be obtained from using the Material.
Suffice to say, my camping is at about the same level as the Material produced by the Company and pasted into countless word processing pages by countless inmates of the Educational-Industrial-Complex. I was watching the rosy fingered dawn and wondering, how on earth am I going to gather life-sustaining warmth to myself in the next black-fingered nights?
Hence the Kindess of Stranger tour. I woke up in an amazingly good mood, my stomach took in nourishment without complaint, the sun warmed me nicely, just as it warmed those proto-humans I felt I had come to resemble. By using those handy little things I call “words” I let my nearest and dearest know I was in grave need of basic survival gear. In so doing, I found myself engaged in research on what extra gear various people brought, and it turns out, everyone brought at least one extra bit for outliers such as myself. And so by nightfall I found myself with:
1. Warm wooly hat from Morgan our river guide;
2. Cozy poly pro long underwear from Wanda;
3. A sweet fleece jacket from Dirk;
4. My tent fly, from myself to myself.
Obligingly, the weather was much warmer, almost balmy, that night, so my zero season bag couldn’t suck all the delicious heat out of my body and give it to the ground. And as I lay there that night, with a full stomach, encased in things that said REI and Patagonia, I felt like I embodied, literally, the kindness of strangers. Well, perhaps not strangers, exactly, but you know what I mean.
For the rest of the trip I noticed all the ways people did for each other. Some people had clearly spent a great deal of effort preparing for the alcohol and mixed drink needs of their comrades, and spared no effort in inventing new drinks (Nora’s Gin Flip with macerated wild juniper berries) and in the laying on of social lubricants. Laura brought Wizard, the card game that became the kid-and-adult joining activity of each evening; Tycho brought both superior insect repellent AND, crucially, an aloe-lidocaine cream. Each night people would approach him, beg in various ways, and then stand while he sprayed them, or go off with handfuls of insect-bite deadening goo and slather their angry bites with it. Three of us had the foresight to buy quantities of Double Shots, which doubled as a kind of legal tender, and I found all the kids approaching me when word got out via Lina that my soothing spray spf 45 Neutrogena sun block was the bomb.
Full disclosure: when I moved to Santa Cruz in 1979 I got interested in Tarot readings. Not that I felt these were somehow magical; I just liked the excuse to make up stories, and to play the role of soothsayer. Try saying sooth sometime; it is quite enjoyable. Anyway, forever my own card has been The Fool (I can hear you guys snickering out there, so stop that immediately!!). The Fool is the first card of the Major Arcana; he is shown in the Waite deck as a young man dressed gaily with a bag on a stick over his shoulder and a little dog by his side, walking blithely over a cliff. The first card signifies the power of innocence; not knowing what dangers surround him, he simply goes forward, and improbably, the universe supports him. He hitchhikes with his girlfriend to a concert, sleeps on a porch, and the next day hitching he meets a woman who takes the couple to her house and lends them her car for two days. The Fool card is first, and last is the Mage or Magician, who has learned to know and manipulate the principles and powers in the world that the Fool, in his folly, simply experiences through lack of fear.
You may notice, in this last description, an amusing element. My folly results in my being taken care of, which results in a knowledge of my friends that could not have happened if I had come prepared, which results in more love, affection, and appreciation of the social economy of gifts. It’s like an O Henry story, like the Gift of the Magi, but where you get to keep the comb and the watch.
It’s like the new law of attraction.
Ten minutes on July 9, 2008
Yampa, part one.
Full disclosure: my life is pretty damn sweet sometimes. June is like a diving board: one bounce for my last exam, another for the minute after I turn grades in, a third for when Bailey is done done done with the school-as-job 6am up back at 4 homework and do it again schedule. June is turning a corner and seeing, just down the road, bigger than life, the sun, beckoning and promising.
So June came and I flew to Salt Lake on Bailey’s birthday (June 20) and the minute I hit the tarmac I felt like the adventure was on: five days on the Yampa, five days on a wild undimmed river with canyon walls like the cathedrals a Greek god might fashion while working him- or her- or itself up to the Temple of Poseidon. Like the cathedral walls someone might dream and then downscale into the rich marble interiors of the Duomo in Firenze. The colors would make a Manhattan interior decorator speed dial their color consultants; the richest, deepest grays browns blacks impossibly weathered and textured. And all seen through the clearest, cleanest air in thousands of miles, as though the doors of perception had been powerwashed from both sides.
I’m glad I didn’t see any pictures of it beforehand; I wanted to turn that corner and see the river, the River, and the first bend of it, and then the scene around that bend. I wanted surprise, sublimity, surrender. I wanted the floor of time to drop out from under me.
And so was it twenty of us? congregated on the town of Vernal, a town of giant plaster dinosaurs dressed up in cowboy clothes with lightbulbs for eyes and standing 25 feet tall, forever about to lunge at the gas station just to its left. We slept and ate and drove to the put in and watched mosquitoes in randomly moving gangs mug our friends and suck their blood, and force them to spray large amounts of Off! And other protective liquids onto their unclothed and clothed parts.
The tiny reminders that we are oh so easily distracted. And the big river pouring by, high with snow melt and volume, regarding us, or rather disregarding us, until we enter in rafts, and then carrying us on its back, one more stick or branch to be ferried past some of the most jaw dropping canyons in the West.
I could show you pictures. Or. You could just, you know, go. Or, you could tune in tomorrow for the next installment.
But I will say this. Just as when I got off the Green River a couple years ago, on the Desolation Canyon trip, just as when I spend more than four days anywhere backcountry, or deep in Yosemite, traveling at the speed of water, or legs, once again I felt as close as I have ever felt to holding, if only for moments, a feeling in my chest and along my skin that I don’t even know I crave until I sense it. And then I understand moments in Whitman, in Wordsworth and Shelley, and in the best of the modern writing on our interaction with, for lack of a better term, the natural world. Wordsworth writes about this general experience of the beautiful and sublime elements of the natural world:
Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Perhaps all things are simply mirrors of our perception. But places like the Yampa, like great and productive works of art, help us see something, feel something, beyond our usual words and sensations. Perhaps we cannot fully sustain this seeing “into the life of things” that the Romantics imagined would allow us to shape our modern world into something more just and more beautiful, more sustaining of the best in the human spirit. I left the river and got on a plane and then another plane and spent nine days on the East Coast, and even though I went to some beautiful places and the trip was just fine, the magic of that post-Yampa body I was sporting certainly faded. To quote another Romantic,
"the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure."
I think some of the giddiness, and paradoxically, the humility I feel coming off a great river like the Yampa stems from this tantalizing sense that just out of reach, just beyond words, lies so much that we need, like food, like air, to do more than survive, to live, that enigmatic verb.
Yampa, part one.
Full disclosure: my life is pretty damn sweet sometimes. June is like a diving board: one bounce for my last exam, another for the minute after I turn grades in, a third for when Bailey is done done done with the school-as-job 6am up back at 4 homework and do it again schedule. June is turning a corner and seeing, just down the road, bigger than life, the sun, beckoning and promising.
So June came and I flew to Salt Lake on Bailey’s birthday (June 20) and the minute I hit the tarmac I felt like the adventure was on: five days on the Yampa, five days on a wild undimmed river with canyon walls like the cathedrals a Greek god might fashion while working him- or her- or itself up to the Temple of Poseidon. Like the cathedral walls someone might dream and then downscale into the rich marble interiors of the Duomo in Firenze. The colors would make a Manhattan interior decorator speed dial their color consultants; the richest, deepest grays browns blacks impossibly weathered and textured. And all seen through the clearest, cleanest air in thousands of miles, as though the doors of perception had been powerwashed from both sides.
I’m glad I didn’t see any pictures of it beforehand; I wanted to turn that corner and see the river, the River, and the first bend of it, and then the scene around that bend. I wanted surprise, sublimity, surrender. I wanted the floor of time to drop out from under me.
And so was it twenty of us? congregated on the town of Vernal, a town of giant plaster dinosaurs dressed up in cowboy clothes with lightbulbs for eyes and standing 25 feet tall, forever about to lunge at the gas station just to its left. We slept and ate and drove to the put in and watched mosquitoes in randomly moving gangs mug our friends and suck their blood, and force them to spray large amounts of Off! And other protective liquids onto their unclothed and clothed parts.
The tiny reminders that we are oh so easily distracted. And the big river pouring by, high with snow melt and volume, regarding us, or rather disregarding us, until we enter in rafts, and then carrying us on its back, one more stick or branch to be ferried past some of the most jaw dropping canyons in the West.
I could show you pictures. Or. You could just, you know, go. Or, you could tune in tomorrow for the next installment.
But I will say this. Just as when I got off the Green River a couple years ago, on the Desolation Canyon trip, just as when I spend more than four days anywhere backcountry, or deep in Yosemite, traveling at the speed of water, or legs, once again I felt as close as I have ever felt to holding, if only for moments, a feeling in my chest and along my skin that I don’t even know I crave until I sense it. And then I understand moments in Whitman, in Wordsworth and Shelley, and in the best of the modern writing on our interaction with, for lack of a better term, the natural world. Wordsworth writes about this general experience of the beautiful and sublime elements of the natural world:
Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Perhaps all things are simply mirrors of our perception. But places like the Yampa, like great and productive works of art, help us see something, feel something, beyond our usual words and sensations. Perhaps we cannot fully sustain this seeing “into the life of things” that the Romantics imagined would allow us to shape our modern world into something more just and more beautiful, more sustaining of the best in the human spirit. I left the river and got on a plane and then another plane and spent nine days on the East Coast, and even though I went to some beautiful places and the trip was just fine, the magic of that post-Yampa body I was sporting certainly faded. To quote another Romantic,
"the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure."
I think some of the giddiness, and paradoxically, the humility I feel coming off a great river like the Yampa stems from this tantalizing sense that just out of reach, just beyond words, lies so much that we need, like food, like air, to do more than survive, to live, that enigmatic verb.
Ten minutes on June 17, 2008
For Father’s Day, I decided to stay in bed for a while and read The Economist and The Atlantic. My room has a huge window that looks out into the top of a big old tree with green green leaves, so I feel like I’m in a tree house sometimes. The day was gray, but promising; downstairs I can hear voices, the sounds of breakfast being made, the general chaos of children playing.
Two things immediately occurred to me. First, reading The Economist is like listening to someone who’s just traveled the globe, probably in business first class. This is not a stupid person, but it also isn’t someone who has much patience for perspectives outside the ‘realist’ political view that corporations and capitalism are here to stay, pretty much in their current shape, that Western governments make poor choices but are also the best hope for solving global conflicts, and that a fine-grained view of the internal political machinations of nations is useful. Second, looking at the ads for GE, Citi, Canon, Qatar, Shell, Emirates, Vanguard, the uses of such knowledge seem geared toward people who are interested in things like a reliable labor market, not workers, if you follow.
Given that, it was quite interesting to read:
In highlighting the improved conditions in Iraq, we do not mean to justify The Economist’s support of the invasion of 2003. Too many lives have been shattered for that. History will still record that the invasion and occupation have been a debacle.
Now this is the ending to an article that introduces a ‘briefing’ on how Iraq may be turning a corner. The cover story has an Iraqi man sitting in a small space fixing a traditional stringed instrument, rather like an oud. The cover proclaims, Iraq starts to fix itself. I want so much to imagine this man finishing his work, handing the beautiful handmade wooden instrument to a young Iraqi who will play the songs of a future Iraq, or a future landscape in which, perhaps, Iraq is no longer what we call this big square of land drawn by Western interests and ignorance.
As I read the article I am struck by a kind of double vision. The economy is growing, the government is afloat in tons of oil cash, death rates are down, a poll shows many Iraqis feel better about their future, al-Quaeda in Mesopotamia has supposedly been dealt a “near strategic defeat.” On the other hand, there is the Sadr militia, the implicit mistrust and conflict between Sadr and the government of Maliki, the conundrum of America protecting Iraqi borders while somehow not appearing to occupy the country or establish long long term military bases. The numbers in the article are like characters in themselves:
$70 billion (projected annual oil earnings this year, as in, one year)
12 million (cellular phones in use)
216, 000 (Iraqi internet users)
2.8 million (Iraqis displaced)
2.2 million (Iraqis fled abroad)
25-40% (the official unemployment rate/s)
22% to 4% (fall in share of US TV airtime devoted to Iraq war)
Notice: no real numbers on how many Americans or Iraqis actually died recently in the “better times” nor how many Americans are in the country, including not only strictly military personnel but also the legions of privatized contractors, consultants, advisers, and so on.
The effort to talk about how for the first time since the insurgency, the tide is shifting can be seen in this ending sentence: “But for the first time since the insurgency against the Americans took off, the tide, which may quickly ebb, is flowing in the direction of the new order.”
I took a deep breath and read on about the other areas of the world, and learned:
The Economist is worried that Wen Jiabao, “Grandpa Wen,” may not manage his “populist” leanings, and the ideological positions of pro and anti populist groups are represented.
Hong Kong is in the middle of a culture war pitting mandatory Cantonese in schools as the primary language (as it is the first language of most Hong Kong citizens, and of Southern China) against the teaching of “power and money” languages: English and putonghua, that is, Mandarin.
The foreign direct investment in Pakistani, and its national reserves, boomed in 2006-7, but are now going south, due to the Bhutto assassination, fertilizer prices, a crippling hailstorm, and of course that little fuel cost hike ($8.6 billion, that is Billion, for the last ten months of fuel imports by Pakistan).
The ‘grey man” of Japanese politics, Yasuou Fukada, in the midst of one crisis after another, is somehow on the rise: he is somehow now positioned as a critic of the rotten “construction state,” nurtured by all parties including his own, and he is turning from gray to green, hosting a G8 summit on climate change, and calling for cuts in Japanese greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 80% by 2050.
The air strike from American forces that killed at least 11 Pakistani paramilitaries on the border of Afghanistan shows how complicated the border war really is. Pakistanis are furious; many of the Frontier Corps, as they are called, belong to the same Pushtun ethnic group as the Taliban, and strike local truces with Taliban forces who then go over the border to attack the Afghan National Army. This is basically what happened: the Afghans came to the border to set up a post; they were dissuaded by the Pakistani Frontier Corps; then the Afghans were attacked as they retreated by the Taliban; then the US called in a strike, but hit the Pakistanis instead. Or at least this is what The Economist says happened.
In South Korea 700,000 people demonstrated in Seoul found themselves trapped between huge shipping containers thrown onto the street by police. They were angry that the president, Lee Myung-bak, had once again ok’ed the importing of American beef, stopped in 2003 after the mad cow disease was found in American cattle. Lee seems caught between the imperious Americans who refuse to renegotiate the opening of beef trade, and the mass of people who are already unhappy about rising prices and unemployment.
Kazakhstan is full of sycophants.
Ethiopia has suffered hailstorms, late rains, and too heavy rains, and insects; animals and children are listless, especially as you go deeper into the country from Goru Gutu. No wheat, no maize, no eating, food prices too high for the vast majority who make 80 cents a day. Rising fuel prices make things worse, as do the increasing unpredictability of rains. The government refuses to help Goru Gutu.
South Africa has just had a horrible wave of xenophobic violence; mobs chased many African migrants from places like Congo, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe to police stations. At the peak of the post-violence displacement, 20,000 people were living in temporary shelters in Johannesburg, scared of their now violent neighbors, scared to go home to political violence and collapsed economies. Why the violence against the migrants? Unemployment, soaring food and petrol prices, a feeling that most are forgotten by their government. South Africans accuse foreigners of stealing jobs and housing.
The Congo is better than it was five years ago (does this seem like the same story as Iraq?) but horribly violent and unstable. The genocide in Rwanda spilled over into Congo. Hutu rebels responsible for mass murder (1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed in 1994) fled to Eastern Congo; these FDLR are at war with the Congo military, and since the “peace accord” in January 70,000 more refugees from the fighting have fled into Northern Kivu in Congo. The UN peacekeepers – mostly Indian – refused to support the Congolese army, instead are now accused of supplying the Hutu rebels with ammunition in exchange for poached Ivory. This is right out of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The cost of food and transport have doubled since January, and crime is also up. Rape is endemic as a war strategy.
Budweiser may end up in the hands of InBev, a huge Belgian brewer.
Sweden has for-profit schools that are gaining in popularity; the head of the main Swedish company running such schools proudly compares their approach to Ikea…and McDonald’s.
European biotech firms have a “Peter Pan” complex when facing big-ego, big thinking American companies. Even an apparent exception, Genmab in Denmark, has an American woman as CEO, and an aggressive American approach to the business of trading on future products.
Margann came up and wished me happy Father’s Day and I shut The Economist, looked out at the big tree, now holding sunshine in each of its leafy fingers, and headed downstairs for breakfast, eggs, toast, coffee, fruit.
The world – or that world that comes to life in print, in statistics and analysis and map and assessment – receded to that part of the brain where it continues to spin. Perhaps somewhere, many wheres, people live with my little world in a separate part of their brain. There a world spins where the father sits with the mother and the son and the neighbors, and there is plenty, plenty for everyone, and the sounds of laughter is heard, sounds like the sounds of heaven.
For Father’s Day, I decided to stay in bed for a while and read The Economist and The Atlantic. My room has a huge window that looks out into the top of a big old tree with green green leaves, so I feel like I’m in a tree house sometimes. The day was gray, but promising; downstairs I can hear voices, the sounds of breakfast being made, the general chaos of children playing.
Two things immediately occurred to me. First, reading The Economist is like listening to someone who’s just traveled the globe, probably in business first class. This is not a stupid person, but it also isn’t someone who has much patience for perspectives outside the ‘realist’ political view that corporations and capitalism are here to stay, pretty much in their current shape, that Western governments make poor choices but are also the best hope for solving global conflicts, and that a fine-grained view of the internal political machinations of nations is useful. Second, looking at the ads for GE, Citi, Canon, Qatar, Shell, Emirates, Vanguard, the uses of such knowledge seem geared toward people who are interested in things like a reliable labor market, not workers, if you follow.
Given that, it was quite interesting to read:
In highlighting the improved conditions in Iraq, we do not mean to justify The Economist’s support of the invasion of 2003. Too many lives have been shattered for that. History will still record that the invasion and occupation have been a debacle.
Now this is the ending to an article that introduces a ‘briefing’ on how Iraq may be turning a corner. The cover story has an Iraqi man sitting in a small space fixing a traditional stringed instrument, rather like an oud. The cover proclaims, Iraq starts to fix itself. I want so much to imagine this man finishing his work, handing the beautiful handmade wooden instrument to a young Iraqi who will play the songs of a future Iraq, or a future landscape in which, perhaps, Iraq is no longer what we call this big square of land drawn by Western interests and ignorance.
As I read the article I am struck by a kind of double vision. The economy is growing, the government is afloat in tons of oil cash, death rates are down, a poll shows many Iraqis feel better about their future, al-Quaeda in Mesopotamia has supposedly been dealt a “near strategic defeat.” On the other hand, there is the Sadr militia, the implicit mistrust and conflict between Sadr and the government of Maliki, the conundrum of America protecting Iraqi borders while somehow not appearing to occupy the country or establish long long term military bases. The numbers in the article are like characters in themselves:
$70 billion (projected annual oil earnings this year, as in, one year)
12 million (cellular phones in use)
216, 000 (Iraqi internet users)
2.8 million (Iraqis displaced)
2.2 million (Iraqis fled abroad)
25-40% (the official unemployment rate/s)
22% to 4% (fall in share of US TV airtime devoted to Iraq war)
Notice: no real numbers on how many Americans or Iraqis actually died recently in the “better times” nor how many Americans are in the country, including not only strictly military personnel but also the legions of privatized contractors, consultants, advisers, and so on.
The effort to talk about how for the first time since the insurgency, the tide is shifting can be seen in this ending sentence: “But for the first time since the insurgency against the Americans took off, the tide, which may quickly ebb, is flowing in the direction of the new order.”
I took a deep breath and read on about the other areas of the world, and learned:
The Economist is worried that Wen Jiabao, “Grandpa Wen,” may not manage his “populist” leanings, and the ideological positions of pro and anti populist groups are represented.
Hong Kong is in the middle of a culture war pitting mandatory Cantonese in schools as the primary language (as it is the first language of most Hong Kong citizens, and of Southern China) against the teaching of “power and money” languages: English and putonghua, that is, Mandarin.
The foreign direct investment in Pakistani, and its national reserves, boomed in 2006-7, but are now going south, due to the Bhutto assassination, fertilizer prices, a crippling hailstorm, and of course that little fuel cost hike ($8.6 billion, that is Billion, for the last ten months of fuel imports by Pakistan).
The ‘grey man” of Japanese politics, Yasuou Fukada, in the midst of one crisis after another, is somehow on the rise: he is somehow now positioned as a critic of the rotten “construction state,” nurtured by all parties including his own, and he is turning from gray to green, hosting a G8 summit on climate change, and calling for cuts in Japanese greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 80% by 2050.
The air strike from American forces that killed at least 11 Pakistani paramilitaries on the border of Afghanistan shows how complicated the border war really is. Pakistanis are furious; many of the Frontier Corps, as they are called, belong to the same Pushtun ethnic group as the Taliban, and strike local truces with Taliban forces who then go over the border to attack the Afghan National Army. This is basically what happened: the Afghans came to the border to set up a post; they were dissuaded by the Pakistani Frontier Corps; then the Afghans were attacked as they retreated by the Taliban; then the US called in a strike, but hit the Pakistanis instead. Or at least this is what The Economist says happened.
In South Korea 700,000 people demonstrated in Seoul found themselves trapped between huge shipping containers thrown onto the street by police. They were angry that the president, Lee Myung-bak, had once again ok’ed the importing of American beef, stopped in 2003 after the mad cow disease was found in American cattle. Lee seems caught between the imperious Americans who refuse to renegotiate the opening of beef trade, and the mass of people who are already unhappy about rising prices and unemployment.
Kazakhstan is full of sycophants.
Ethiopia has suffered hailstorms, late rains, and too heavy rains, and insects; animals and children are listless, especially as you go deeper into the country from Goru Gutu. No wheat, no maize, no eating, food prices too high for the vast majority who make 80 cents a day. Rising fuel prices make things worse, as do the increasing unpredictability of rains. The government refuses to help Goru Gutu.
South Africa has just had a horrible wave of xenophobic violence; mobs chased many African migrants from places like Congo, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe to police stations. At the peak of the post-violence displacement, 20,000 people were living in temporary shelters in Johannesburg, scared of their now violent neighbors, scared to go home to political violence and collapsed economies. Why the violence against the migrants? Unemployment, soaring food and petrol prices, a feeling that most are forgotten by their government. South Africans accuse foreigners of stealing jobs and housing.
The Congo is better than it was five years ago (does this seem like the same story as Iraq?) but horribly violent and unstable. The genocide in Rwanda spilled over into Congo. Hutu rebels responsible for mass murder (1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed in 1994) fled to Eastern Congo; these FDLR are at war with the Congo military, and since the “peace accord” in January 70,000 more refugees from the fighting have fled into Northern Kivu in Congo. The UN peacekeepers – mostly Indian – refused to support the Congolese army, instead are now accused of supplying the Hutu rebels with ammunition in exchange for poached Ivory. This is right out of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The cost of food and transport have doubled since January, and crime is also up. Rape is endemic as a war strategy.
Budweiser may end up in the hands of InBev, a huge Belgian brewer.
Sweden has for-profit schools that are gaining in popularity; the head of the main Swedish company running such schools proudly compares their approach to Ikea…and McDonald’s.
European biotech firms have a “Peter Pan” complex when facing big-ego, big thinking American companies. Even an apparent exception, Genmab in Denmark, has an American woman as CEO, and an aggressive American approach to the business of trading on future products.
Margann came up and wished me happy Father’s Day and I shut The Economist, looked out at the big tree, now holding sunshine in each of its leafy fingers, and headed downstairs for breakfast, eggs, toast, coffee, fruit.
The world – or that world that comes to life in print, in statistics and analysis and map and assessment – receded to that part of the brain where it continues to spin. Perhaps somewhere, many wheres, people live with my little world in a separate part of their brain. There a world spins where the father sits with the mother and the son and the neighbors, and there is plenty, plenty for everyone, and the sounds of laughter is heard, sounds like the sounds of heaven.
Ten minutes on June 16, 2008
Wandas on Father’s Day
Hot tub to end it and then the tucking in of the little prince. The hot tub was 106 the night was coolish Peter Cat and me after a day of talking we were talked out or so I thought.
Then we started talking about the name Wanda. I am about to see my friend Wanda in Salt Lake, and go camping with her and Anna and Paul. The last time I saw her we’d just gotten off the Green River, Desolation Canyon, and I wondered whether, seeing her, I’d feel that same crazy solidarity I’d felt when we got back to her house put our kids to sleep put her friend to sleep. I remember coming home and telling Kevin I’d had this great talk with her. And we recalled how she had almost single handedly gotten her raft across the river in the teeth of an insane wind that came around the bend and just drilled the rafts backwards. I think I mentally called her Pioneer Woman for a while after that.
Then my brother told a story about a girl he met roller skating named Wanda. She was crazy I think she more or less tackled him he left out some details she was from West Springfield (pretty far away – about ten miles and at least one class level away) and one day Peter was sitting in his Business Math class and he looked up and there she was looking in the school window at him.
Cat remembered a friend named Wanda was she the middle of eight kids in Oakland and had a magnificent voice gospel?
Then I told the story of how my family went to Plymouth (as in Plymouth Rock Pilgrims etc. etc.) when I was a teenager and I wanted to stay home and be with my girlfriend and with my All Star baseball team but my parents wouldn’t let me stay home alone and I was bitter alienated glass nine tenths empty. I wore a hat pulled over my hair and my hair pulled over my face I was reading Huckleberry Finn and identifying with him and I wanted to light out for the territories. And I fell in with a group of kids from Eastern Massachusetts, I think from Framingham, and they had intense Eastern Massachusetts accents:
Card cahd
Car cah
Wanda Woahndah
Yard yahd
Etc.
And there was one girl named Wanda that I liked and wanted to notice me but I was not from their tribe. And one day they were hanging around as usual doing nothing bored without imagination more or less identical to my own frame of mind and the kids went over to this place back from the ocean and there was an old funky shack and they all started throwing rocks at it and missing I figured well this is one thing I can do and then this girl might notice me so I picked up a rock and broke the window that they were aiming at.
This, sadly, or perhaps not sadly, did not win me any face time with the lovely if thickly accented Wanda.
Later I was in our beach house upstairs and I heard the doorbell and my dad answered a cop asked if I was home and I came down and my dad was standing with him and the cop asked me if I broke the window and I said yes and my father said we’d fix it and then the cop left and my dad said I’m glad you didn’t lie.
And that is how the story would end if this were on TV.
But the next day we went looking for a precut window for the shack and we drove up the gridlock-prone Cape Cod highway to different hardware stores where no one had precut glass that size (it turned out the place really was a funky shack and the guy had jury rigged the whole thing including weirdly measured window panes for the offsize and not even truly square door) and the longer it took the more furious my dad got and I recall him just fuming away unable to control it talking to himself to me to himself.
And that kind of erased the whole wow my dad is pretty cool for not lowering the boom on me for the rock throwing incident feeling of the previous evening.
As I was telling the story I seem to recall putting up one of those shields, an invisible shield, like the kind Sue Storm puts up in Fantastic Four, an energy field that can hold back dangerous rays from weapons and stuff. Or like the Jedi ability to protect themselves with energy fields. And it didn’t feel, doesn’t in hindsight feel, like it was simply a teenager thing to do. Of course it was, partly, but also it was the sense that I didn’t want to be implicated in this elaborate emotionally bruising ritual of anger.
Stormtrooper: Let me see your identification.
Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don't need to see his identification.
Stormtrooper: We don't need to see his identification.
Obi-Wan: These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Stormtrooper: These aren't the droids we're looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: You can go about your business.
Obi-Wan: Move along.
Stormtrooper: Move along... move along.
This is not the only way to express frustration and anger. Move along.
After the hot tub we came home Peter and I and Kelsey was just finishing reading to Bailey his room was a wreck the hour was late I made his bed with him in it tucked in the sheet laid the softest blankest on went and got Cliff and put him on his favorite blue blanket which he nurses and paws in a kind of canine OCD way.
Peter and I talked, and he thought about that girl and said, she was crazy again. And then he thought for a moment and said, Wait. Her name wasn’t Wanda. It was Candy.
And I thought about my own story. Did all that happen just as I imagined it?
I thought tonight about how so much of what we imagine to be our realistic view of the world is actually a creation of our mind, our self or selves, a story that is always straining to explain and give meaning to. And intersecting our bubble are the bubbles of other people, and also all the elements of nonhuman reality. So reality is a diffraction pattern, which forces us to constantly revise our overall story even as it also forces us to consolidate that story.
It is Father’s Day and I realized that probably my view of my father is the myopic view of the first son, up too close and personal to get the entire complicated view, though not without truth or insight.
But perhaps he was a cunning banker warrior?
Luke: No, my father didn't fight in the Clone Wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter.
Obi-Wan: That's what your uncle told you. He didn't hold with your father's ideals; he felt he should've stayed here and not gotten involved.
Luke: You fought in the Clone Wars?
Obi-Wan: Yes. I was once a Jedi knight, the same as your father.
Luke: I wish I'd known him.
Obi-Wan: He was the best star pilot in the galaxy, and a cunning warrior. I understand that you've become quite a good pilot yourself.
I’m trying to be a good pilot, Dad. Not easy, as I’m sure you know. Which way’s the Death Star?
Wandas on Father’s Day
Hot tub to end it and then the tucking in of the little prince. The hot tub was 106 the night was coolish Peter Cat and me after a day of talking we were talked out or so I thought.
Then we started talking about the name Wanda. I am about to see my friend Wanda in Salt Lake, and go camping with her and Anna and Paul. The last time I saw her we’d just gotten off the Green River, Desolation Canyon, and I wondered whether, seeing her, I’d feel that same crazy solidarity I’d felt when we got back to her house put our kids to sleep put her friend to sleep. I remember coming home and telling Kevin I’d had this great talk with her. And we recalled how she had almost single handedly gotten her raft across the river in the teeth of an insane wind that came around the bend and just drilled the rafts backwards. I think I mentally called her Pioneer Woman for a while after that.
Then my brother told a story about a girl he met roller skating named Wanda. She was crazy I think she more or less tackled him he left out some details she was from West Springfield (pretty far away – about ten miles and at least one class level away) and one day Peter was sitting in his Business Math class and he looked up and there she was looking in the school window at him.
Cat remembered a friend named Wanda was she the middle of eight kids in Oakland and had a magnificent voice gospel?
Then I told the story of how my family went to Plymouth (as in Plymouth Rock Pilgrims etc. etc.) when I was a teenager and I wanted to stay home and be with my girlfriend and with my All Star baseball team but my parents wouldn’t let me stay home alone and I was bitter alienated glass nine tenths empty. I wore a hat pulled over my hair and my hair pulled over my face I was reading Huckleberry Finn and identifying with him and I wanted to light out for the territories. And I fell in with a group of kids from Eastern Massachusetts, I think from Framingham, and they had intense Eastern Massachusetts accents:
Card cahd
Car cah
Wanda Woahndah
Yard yahd
Etc.
And there was one girl named Wanda that I liked and wanted to notice me but I was not from their tribe. And one day they were hanging around as usual doing nothing bored without imagination more or less identical to my own frame of mind and the kids went over to this place back from the ocean and there was an old funky shack and they all started throwing rocks at it and missing I figured well this is one thing I can do and then this girl might notice me so I picked up a rock and broke the window that they were aiming at.
This, sadly, or perhaps not sadly, did not win me any face time with the lovely if thickly accented Wanda.
Later I was in our beach house upstairs and I heard the doorbell and my dad answered a cop asked if I was home and I came down and my dad was standing with him and the cop asked me if I broke the window and I said yes and my father said we’d fix it and then the cop left and my dad said I’m glad you didn’t lie.
And that is how the story would end if this were on TV.
But the next day we went looking for a precut window for the shack and we drove up the gridlock-prone Cape Cod highway to different hardware stores where no one had precut glass that size (it turned out the place really was a funky shack and the guy had jury rigged the whole thing including weirdly measured window panes for the offsize and not even truly square door) and the longer it took the more furious my dad got and I recall him just fuming away unable to control it talking to himself to me to himself.
And that kind of erased the whole wow my dad is pretty cool for not lowering the boom on me for the rock throwing incident feeling of the previous evening.
As I was telling the story I seem to recall putting up one of those shields, an invisible shield, like the kind Sue Storm puts up in Fantastic Four, an energy field that can hold back dangerous rays from weapons and stuff. Or like the Jedi ability to protect themselves with energy fields. And it didn’t feel, doesn’t in hindsight feel, like it was simply a teenager thing to do. Of course it was, partly, but also it was the sense that I didn’t want to be implicated in this elaborate emotionally bruising ritual of anger.
Stormtrooper: Let me see your identification.
Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don't need to see his identification.
Stormtrooper: We don't need to see his identification.
Obi-Wan: These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Stormtrooper: These aren't the droids we're looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: You can go about your business.
Obi-Wan: Move along.
Stormtrooper: Move along... move along.
This is not the only way to express frustration and anger. Move along.
After the hot tub we came home Peter and I and Kelsey was just finishing reading to Bailey his room was a wreck the hour was late I made his bed with him in it tucked in the sheet laid the softest blankest on went and got Cliff and put him on his favorite blue blanket which he nurses and paws in a kind of canine OCD way.
Peter and I talked, and he thought about that girl and said, she was crazy again. And then he thought for a moment and said, Wait. Her name wasn’t Wanda. It was Candy.
And I thought about my own story. Did all that happen just as I imagined it?
I thought tonight about how so much of what we imagine to be our realistic view of the world is actually a creation of our mind, our self or selves, a story that is always straining to explain and give meaning to. And intersecting our bubble are the bubbles of other people, and also all the elements of nonhuman reality. So reality is a diffraction pattern, which forces us to constantly revise our overall story even as it also forces us to consolidate that story.
It is Father’s Day and I realized that probably my view of my father is the myopic view of the first son, up too close and personal to get the entire complicated view, though not without truth or insight.
But perhaps he was a cunning banker warrior?
Luke: No, my father didn't fight in the Clone Wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter.
Obi-Wan: That's what your uncle told you. He didn't hold with your father's ideals; he felt he should've stayed here and not gotten involved.
Luke: You fought in the Clone Wars?
Obi-Wan: Yes. I was once a Jedi knight, the same as your father.
Luke: I wish I'd known him.
Obi-Wan: He was the best star pilot in the galaxy, and a cunning warrior. I understand that you've become quite a good pilot yourself.
I’m trying to be a good pilot, Dad. Not easy, as I’m sure you know. Which way’s the Death Star?
Ten minutes on June 12, 2008
Fire, magical thinking, and art
Duncan Maxwell said from Redwoood Elementary School, a couple miles north of Boulder Creek, [the fire] “looks like a mushroom cloud.”
Santa Cruz Sentinel, Thursday, June 12, 2008.
I often read the newspaper, or consider the experience I am in the middle of, and think “In the movie…” As in, “In the movie about the end of the Bush administration, there are fires everywhere, and the people losing their homes to fifty foot high wildfires storming across fire lines drive to evacuation areas, passing on the way people who lost their homes to the invisible fires of late capitalism, the sub prime mortgage fiasco, the concentration of capital in the hands of fewer mammoth companies.” Cue music. More and more I feel myself slipping back into what I used to consider “floating poet” mode, in which reality keeps providing metaphors, synecdoche, narratives alive in contrast and image. And in fact that is what we are all faces with in late modernity, managing all this information coming at us from all angles as we also manage increasingly complex, even chaotic and frenetic lives. Which, if you think about it, is another one of those damn similes. Staying sane, imagining ways forward, is similar to gathering the fragments Picasso used in his collages, or seeing from the multiple perspectives of cubism or futurism, and finding a way to continue to make art, make lives, that never cease to question the inevitability of current evils, that continue to dare to believe in an unwritten future, that are always beginning to write that future with their largest and least actions.
I was driving a couple days ago listening to KPIG, the eclectic local radio station that specializes in hog noises, an often-irreverent DJ lineup, and songs not on the top forty, but more the back forty, of the musical ranch. An ad came on for a company that told me I had done it all, had the kids and house, had the sailboat, life was good, but what about my future? Would I continue to sail calmly, or…I was in stop and go traffic, and was clearly not the target demographic, but waited patiently through the metaphor to the end, where I was in a safe harbor with a bank that would take care of my retirement and investment needs, apparently while shining my shoes and serving me a tall cold drink with an umbrella in it every afternoon after fetching the paper. I punched the button and immediately listened to a story about Darfur, where a man had borrowed his relatives’ portion of food to tide him over, but was then stiffed with his ration of rice and now was caught between the demands of his hungry children and his relatives, themselves living one handout at a time. I looked up at the traffic, the cars in line, each one smoking a petroleum cigar, some with huge bodies in glistening red or black, tires the size of millstones. I blanked on the actual vision through the glass, and instead saw a series of images: corn made into biofuels, corn prices going up, food shortages and crises all over the globe, massive population destabilization, aid workers watching as a line forms, some refugees, some militiamen just back from machine gunning refugees and villagers across the border…the light changed and people turned left, right, turned in U’s back the direction they came, flowed forward toward the temples of consumption past the mostly invisible people and systems and structures that keep everything from completely going under.
We just had a huge fire here in Santa Cruz, three weeks ago. 4,270 acres off Summit Road, 35 homes burned. It was horrible, inevitable perhaps, fuel that had lain there for fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years went up, potential turned into thermal energy. For the people who suffered through it, it was an apocalypse; for others, it was a very interesting news item for some days, but less and less compelling perhaps unless you knew someone, knew some ones, who had experienced it first hand.
I was talking with my friend Kevin about the inability of the Santa Cruz city or county government to get on the same page with the fire department around fire abatement. Our little community of 60 brought the fire department in to look at our arroyo, which is considered a triple threat fire area, and then started doing what they recommended. For our efforts we were called in by a neighbor for cutting down eucalyptus trees, fined by the city, forced to do work to counter erosion (work we were going to do after we completed fire abatement work). Now, a year and a half later, we are clear of the city’s fines and censure. We did all the work they asked. And in turn, nothing has been done about fire abatement. Nothing. My house could burn up in fifteen minutes if a fire like the one now burning within sight of our land broke out in the arroyo. I said to him that it was the perfect time to mobilize our neighbors to get the city to do something besides impede and paralyze anyone’s efforts to prevent fire. The big Summit fire was warning enough. But was it? We pondered. Perhaps people needed even more of a wake up call, or, if you will, a fire lit under them.
About 12 hours later the Martin fire started.
Magical thinking is the notion that you can control certain things with your mind, or actions, things that are unlikely in actuality to be affected by your efforts. Sacrificing a goat or lamb, say, to appease the fire gods. Mentally imagining a hated politician caught in a scandal, and thinking it will happen because you imagined it so hard. I saw the fire and immediately thought, damn. Be careful what you wish for.
Then I turned my suddenly powerful mind to other projects. I could tell you what they are, but then I would have to reach out with my mind and kill you. Suffice to say, these projects are complex enough to involve the entire global economy and its networks, the ecosystems and their subsystems, the NBA playoffs, and, possibly, the uncanny return of Audrey Hepburn circa Roman Holiday to Northern California.
After a cup of coffee (once again sub par because my neighbors have suddenly stopped drinking half and half, while my son mixes it with nonfat milk when the 1% is gone, resulting in a rash of creamer shortages in my immediate vicinity) I tried to stop thinking magically (the wild fires strangely target only military contractors and weapons manufacturers, sparing the houses of the humble) and consider the bubble we all walk around in.
This fire that I can see with its massive plumes of smoke is the second one in my county in a month. And like the other, less visible fires of our economy, our political system, the more you look into it, the more it looks shaky. It turns out there are a bunch of wildfires going off in Northern California alone, way early for the fire season, and given that, we might move into August with no reserves left to fight the even more intense fires of that hot hot month. The firefighters are like our military, spread too thin over too vast an area, weakened by all the effort. Paul Van Gerwen, Bay Area spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in an interview "The resources we have stationed around the state are all being tied up. When you have five or six fires going, you start to have things spread pretty thin . . .. Any new fires that occur, there's a risk of not being able to control them."
Afghanistan. Iraq. Darfur. Somalia. Yemen. All fires, burning on. Things spread pretty thin.
Other fires burning in Northern California on Wednesday included:
1. A 860-acre fire near Cloverdale in Sonoma County that was 80 percent contained.
2. A 1,200-acre fire near Highway 132 and Don Pedro Reservoir in Tuolumne County that was 30 percent contained.
3. A 4,200-acre fire in the Los Padres National Forest in Monterey County that was 10 percent contained. About 15 summer cabins in the Santa Lucia Tract remain evacuated as a precaution.
4. A 3,300-acre fire about 10 miles north of Fresno in Madera County that was 100 percent contained.
Major fires. All burning now. All taking resources to combat. All wearing thin the nerves of those battling them, some of whom are simply twenty somethings from places like the state correctional centre in nearby Ben Lomond.
Global warming, yes, but also simply drought, all this building in areas where fuel builds up and fires are prevented and suppressed for long periods of time.
Is fire like war? I don’t know. But they are on my radar at the same time.
According to globalsecurity.org,
The United Nations defines "major wars" as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. In 1965, there were 10 major wars under way. The new millennium began with much of the world consumed in armed conflict or cultivating an uncertain peace. As of mid-2005, there were eight Major Wars under way [down from 15 at the end of 2003], with as many as two dozen "lesser" conflicts ongoing with varying degrees of intensity.
So much of the violence in the world, it seems to me, is fallout from the kinds of war developed via modern technology married to large industrial states led by political parties keen to gain land and resources and labor and control over these things. So much of the fuel for fire was laid down by colonialism and imperialism. Yes, wars have plagued Africa for centuries, as they plagued other areas where aggressive humans lived and shaped cultures around patriarchy and authoritarian modes of control. But the current wars are much, much worse, like the current fires, because of the historic fuel that has never been properly cleared. So the fires, and wars, burn hotter, overwhelm things designed to withstand them, like certain trees or certain human capacities for empathy and peace.
I think most people in the world today desire a peaceful life. And a life that includes animals and habitat, farmland and clean air, cultural diversity and creativity. But it seems that more and more, in postmodern societies, they have given over practical control over most areas of life to those who promise to take care of these areas: political parties, corporate entities, national security and military structures. And these groups, living in their own bubbles, threatened by their shadows, the parallel structures in other nations and peoples, are massively out of touch with the feedback loops of the natural, social, and economic. Most people are kept busy, or distracted with entertainment, or controlled by fear and police, or all at once; most leaders are busy preparing the next fire, or selling countries and militaries the fuel and tinder with which to make an even hotter fire.
During World War I, civilians made up fewer than 5 percent of all casualties. Today, 75 percent or more of those killed or wounded in wars are non-combatants. The reward to civilians for giving over more control of these systems to our current leaders is an increasing share of the pie…of death.
Many brave people are right this minute working so that the fire I can see doesn’t come and burn down my house and leave me and my wife and son and neighbors homeless. If it came down to it, I’d be beside them, cutting trees so that the fire is less able to leap the road and hit Pete and Beth’s house, or the chicken coop, or Tycho and Kristina’s yard. In times like these, when disaster hits, people often cooperate and help each other and rise to the occasion.
And right this minute, many brave people are working so that these invisible fires which most of us can’t see don’t come and lay waste to our present and our future. They work to connect the visible to the invisible, the present to the future, the everyday to the epic. We have an idea, I think, of how to better prepare for fire in times of drought; it begins with knowing that droughts happen, and not making them worse.
And it begins, perhaps, with art. That is, with putting together the fragments of the present and past, and composing new narratives of the future that engage all of our abilities to create and to live out our creations. That is what I think we get, besides blessed escape, from good novels, short stories, essays, blogs, films, painting, what have you. Models for creating our own lives and stories, and collaborating with others as we join stories to create cultures and subcultures. We need the escape from the relentless repetition of the dismal story of What Is (appears to be) Real, in order to get the distance requisite to re-see, to revise; then we need models of alternatives, new narratives, to remind us of what is wrong with What Is and what seeds of the possible lie in what is wrong.
Every fairy tale has, at its core, a realistic story of human beings, psychology, what is involved in the quest for power and happiness. Every realistic novel, with its take on dysfunctional families, or every realist political analysis that feels compelling, has, at its core, a fairy tale that such writing can make a difference, that power and happiness and grace are possible. Even a fire can reveal human abilities of cooperation and competence that allow us to imagine putting out those other, invisible, conflagrations.
Fire, magical thinking, and art
Duncan Maxwell said from Redwoood Elementary School, a couple miles north of Boulder Creek, [the fire] “looks like a mushroom cloud.”
Santa Cruz Sentinel, Thursday, June 12, 2008.
I often read the newspaper, or consider the experience I am in the middle of, and think “In the movie…” As in, “In the movie about the end of the Bush administration, there are fires everywhere, and the people losing their homes to fifty foot high wildfires storming across fire lines drive to evacuation areas, passing on the way people who lost their homes to the invisible fires of late capitalism, the sub prime mortgage fiasco, the concentration of capital in the hands of fewer mammoth companies.” Cue music. More and more I feel myself slipping back into what I used to consider “floating poet” mode, in which reality keeps providing metaphors, synecdoche, narratives alive in contrast and image. And in fact that is what we are all faces with in late modernity, managing all this information coming at us from all angles as we also manage increasingly complex, even chaotic and frenetic lives. Which, if you think about it, is another one of those damn similes. Staying sane, imagining ways forward, is similar to gathering the fragments Picasso used in his collages, or seeing from the multiple perspectives of cubism or futurism, and finding a way to continue to make art, make lives, that never cease to question the inevitability of current evils, that continue to dare to believe in an unwritten future, that are always beginning to write that future with their largest and least actions.
I was driving a couple days ago listening to KPIG, the eclectic local radio station that specializes in hog noises, an often-irreverent DJ lineup, and songs not on the top forty, but more the back forty, of the musical ranch. An ad came on for a company that told me I had done it all, had the kids and house, had the sailboat, life was good, but what about my future? Would I continue to sail calmly, or…I was in stop and go traffic, and was clearly not the target demographic, but waited patiently through the metaphor to the end, where I was in a safe harbor with a bank that would take care of my retirement and investment needs, apparently while shining my shoes and serving me a tall cold drink with an umbrella in it every afternoon after fetching the paper. I punched the button and immediately listened to a story about Darfur, where a man had borrowed his relatives’ portion of food to tide him over, but was then stiffed with his ration of rice and now was caught between the demands of his hungry children and his relatives, themselves living one handout at a time. I looked up at the traffic, the cars in line, each one smoking a petroleum cigar, some with huge bodies in glistening red or black, tires the size of millstones. I blanked on the actual vision through the glass, and instead saw a series of images: corn made into biofuels, corn prices going up, food shortages and crises all over the globe, massive population destabilization, aid workers watching as a line forms, some refugees, some militiamen just back from machine gunning refugees and villagers across the border…the light changed and people turned left, right, turned in U’s back the direction they came, flowed forward toward the temples of consumption past the mostly invisible people and systems and structures that keep everything from completely going under.
We just had a huge fire here in Santa Cruz, three weeks ago. 4,270 acres off Summit Road, 35 homes burned. It was horrible, inevitable perhaps, fuel that had lain there for fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years went up, potential turned into thermal energy. For the people who suffered through it, it was an apocalypse; for others, it was a very interesting news item for some days, but less and less compelling perhaps unless you knew someone, knew some ones, who had experienced it first hand.
I was talking with my friend Kevin about the inability of the Santa Cruz city or county government to get on the same page with the fire department around fire abatement. Our little community of 60 brought the fire department in to look at our arroyo, which is considered a triple threat fire area, and then started doing what they recommended. For our efforts we were called in by a neighbor for cutting down eucalyptus trees, fined by the city, forced to do work to counter erosion (work we were going to do after we completed fire abatement work). Now, a year and a half later, we are clear of the city’s fines and censure. We did all the work they asked. And in turn, nothing has been done about fire abatement. Nothing. My house could burn up in fifteen minutes if a fire like the one now burning within sight of our land broke out in the arroyo. I said to him that it was the perfect time to mobilize our neighbors to get the city to do something besides impede and paralyze anyone’s efforts to prevent fire. The big Summit fire was warning enough. But was it? We pondered. Perhaps people needed even more of a wake up call, or, if you will, a fire lit under them.
About 12 hours later the Martin fire started.
Magical thinking is the notion that you can control certain things with your mind, or actions, things that are unlikely in actuality to be affected by your efforts. Sacrificing a goat or lamb, say, to appease the fire gods. Mentally imagining a hated politician caught in a scandal, and thinking it will happen because you imagined it so hard. I saw the fire and immediately thought, damn. Be careful what you wish for.
Then I turned my suddenly powerful mind to other projects. I could tell you what they are, but then I would have to reach out with my mind and kill you. Suffice to say, these projects are complex enough to involve the entire global economy and its networks, the ecosystems and their subsystems, the NBA playoffs, and, possibly, the uncanny return of Audrey Hepburn circa Roman Holiday to Northern California.
After a cup of coffee (once again sub par because my neighbors have suddenly stopped drinking half and half, while my son mixes it with nonfat milk when the 1% is gone, resulting in a rash of creamer shortages in my immediate vicinity) I tried to stop thinking magically (the wild fires strangely target only military contractors and weapons manufacturers, sparing the houses of the humble) and consider the bubble we all walk around in.
This fire that I can see with its massive plumes of smoke is the second one in my county in a month. And like the other, less visible fires of our economy, our political system, the more you look into it, the more it looks shaky. It turns out there are a bunch of wildfires going off in Northern California alone, way early for the fire season, and given that, we might move into August with no reserves left to fight the even more intense fires of that hot hot month. The firefighters are like our military, spread too thin over too vast an area, weakened by all the effort. Paul Van Gerwen, Bay Area spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in an interview "The resources we have stationed around the state are all being tied up. When you have five or six fires going, you start to have things spread pretty thin . . .. Any new fires that occur, there's a risk of not being able to control them."
Afghanistan. Iraq. Darfur. Somalia. Yemen. All fires, burning on. Things spread pretty thin.
Other fires burning in Northern California on Wednesday included:
1. A 860-acre fire near Cloverdale in Sonoma County that was 80 percent contained.
2. A 1,200-acre fire near Highway 132 and Don Pedro Reservoir in Tuolumne County that was 30 percent contained.
3. A 4,200-acre fire in the Los Padres National Forest in Monterey County that was 10 percent contained. About 15 summer cabins in the Santa Lucia Tract remain evacuated as a precaution.
4. A 3,300-acre fire about 10 miles north of Fresno in Madera County that was 100 percent contained.
Major fires. All burning now. All taking resources to combat. All wearing thin the nerves of those battling them, some of whom are simply twenty somethings from places like the state correctional centre in nearby Ben Lomond.
Global warming, yes, but also simply drought, all this building in areas where fuel builds up and fires are prevented and suppressed for long periods of time.
Is fire like war? I don’t know. But they are on my radar at the same time.
According to globalsecurity.org,
The United Nations defines "major wars" as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. In 1965, there were 10 major wars under way. The new millennium began with much of the world consumed in armed conflict or cultivating an uncertain peace. As of mid-2005, there were eight Major Wars under way [down from 15 at the end of 2003], with as many as two dozen "lesser" conflicts ongoing with varying degrees of intensity.
So much of the violence in the world, it seems to me, is fallout from the kinds of war developed via modern technology married to large industrial states led by political parties keen to gain land and resources and labor and control over these things. So much of the fuel for fire was laid down by colonialism and imperialism. Yes, wars have plagued Africa for centuries, as they plagued other areas where aggressive humans lived and shaped cultures around patriarchy and authoritarian modes of control. But the current wars are much, much worse, like the current fires, because of the historic fuel that has never been properly cleared. So the fires, and wars, burn hotter, overwhelm things designed to withstand them, like certain trees or certain human capacities for empathy and peace.
I think most people in the world today desire a peaceful life. And a life that includes animals and habitat, farmland and clean air, cultural diversity and creativity. But it seems that more and more, in postmodern societies, they have given over practical control over most areas of life to those who promise to take care of these areas: political parties, corporate entities, national security and military structures. And these groups, living in their own bubbles, threatened by their shadows, the parallel structures in other nations and peoples, are massively out of touch with the feedback loops of the natural, social, and economic. Most people are kept busy, or distracted with entertainment, or controlled by fear and police, or all at once; most leaders are busy preparing the next fire, or selling countries and militaries the fuel and tinder with which to make an even hotter fire.
During World War I, civilians made up fewer than 5 percent of all casualties. Today, 75 percent or more of those killed or wounded in wars are non-combatants. The reward to civilians for giving over more control of these systems to our current leaders is an increasing share of the pie…of death.
Many brave people are right this minute working so that the fire I can see doesn’t come and burn down my house and leave me and my wife and son and neighbors homeless. If it came down to it, I’d be beside them, cutting trees so that the fire is less able to leap the road and hit Pete and Beth’s house, or the chicken coop, or Tycho and Kristina’s yard. In times like these, when disaster hits, people often cooperate and help each other and rise to the occasion.
And right this minute, many brave people are working so that these invisible fires which most of us can’t see don’t come and lay waste to our present and our future. They work to connect the visible to the invisible, the present to the future, the everyday to the epic. We have an idea, I think, of how to better prepare for fire in times of drought; it begins with knowing that droughts happen, and not making them worse.
And it begins, perhaps, with art. That is, with putting together the fragments of the present and past, and composing new narratives of the future that engage all of our abilities to create and to live out our creations. That is what I think we get, besides blessed escape, from good novels, short stories, essays, blogs, films, painting, what have you. Models for creating our own lives and stories, and collaborating with others as we join stories to create cultures and subcultures. We need the escape from the relentless repetition of the dismal story of What Is (appears to be) Real, in order to get the distance requisite to re-see, to revise; then we need models of alternatives, new narratives, to remind us of what is wrong with What Is and what seeds of the possible lie in what is wrong.
Every fairy tale has, at its core, a realistic story of human beings, psychology, what is involved in the quest for power and happiness. Every realistic novel, with its take on dysfunctional families, or every realist political analysis that feels compelling, has, at its core, a fairy tale that such writing can make a difference, that power and happiness and grace are possible. Even a fire can reveal human abilities of cooperation and competence that allow us to imagine putting out those other, invisible, conflagrations.
Ten minutes on June 6, 2008
Iron Man and mundane cyborgs
So I saw the film Iron Man finally. Bailey had his last day of school yesterday, and then the Achievement Night was at 6PM, so we had some time to, if not kill, at least toy with. Bailey’s attitude toward school is less than enthusiastic, and since he lives so far away, it has been nearly impossible to establish friendships with the few boys he has liked at his school. So watching him walk up to the car on the last day, I wondered if he would feel the joy of Summer Vacation, or the bittersweet feeling of leaving something you’ve done for a long time behind. He immediately picked a fight with me and had no patience whatsoever for about fifteen minutes. Luckily, I am a Jedi dad, and so used my mind tricks to not make things worse, and soon we were tooling down the highway and he was telling me a story about an invention, and we got to Pacific Grove and there is was: the Lighthouse Theatre, in all its restored art deco movie palace glory. Park the car, go in, movie starts in ten minutes, repark the car, trade out the shades for indoor glasses, buy the requisite drink, and kick back in the fully functional recliner chairs.
First day of summer kid done with school dad done with school, his own and kid’s. Cyborg movie in the afternoon. Deep breath – oooooo, yeahhhhh!
Full disclosure: I read Iron Man when I was seven, in Jimmy’s Barber Shop. My dad would go there and take me, and then my brother and me, and we’d get the serious Catholic buzz cuts, the ones that last for months and that make you look disturbingly like a camp survivor, as in refugee or concentration, not summer. But I loved going there, partly because it was one of those Male Mysteries that I always wanted to find but never did, quite. My dad had gone there as a kid! And so everyone knew him, all the old guys from the neighborhood, and he’d talk to them and they’d establish that comforting patter of saying not really anything but jointly invoking the old days, to everyone’s real pleasure. And my brother would go and be afraid (at least that is my memory) and he’d sit in the horse chair, the kid chair with the horse head and saddle, and I think he cried some and my dad and the other men would try to do non-feminine things to soothe him, like talk gruffly and in the “you’re ok little man” style. Which I still find adorable, though that probably isn’t the word I’d use with them.
Anyway Jimmy had one of those barber shops with a long long mirror and three chairs, and at the back of the room there was a huge rack of comic books. All comic books. No Time Magazines or small print newspapers to pollute the glorious tsunami of super heroes, all read and reread until the covers were ripped and all the pages slightly smeared and the corners worn. Reading those comics, you felt you were part of a community of readers, others who had gone before you, so it didn’t matter that you weren’t the first to read this version of The Submariner. Instead, you were a kid and you got to read them all for free, as many as you could slam until Dad had his haircut and Billy had his and it was time for your own depilatory experience.
I liked Iron Man. I liked Tony Stark, the whole suit thing, the glowing disc, the notion of the business guy with a cooler backstory. I liked the problems and conflicts they’d throw in to make things interesting. I liked the nonsense words that Kirby and Lee threw in to signify Epic Battles, though I can’t remember the ones from Iron Man (my favorites were from Sgt. Rock – the machine gun budda budda budda, sniper shots k-ping, krak). I didn’t quite get the playboy thing, but I sensed that Tony was kind of like James Bond, the guy who had it wired in all parts of life, but who risked all of that to fight the Evil that was beyond the skills of mere mortals. And apparently this Evil just keeps coming. You’re never done with Evil, because just when you’ve overcome the odds to beat down Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #5, and you are thinking, hey, time to take a short vacation, maybe fix things on the home front with the secretary and the girlfriend, bam! Here comes Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #6. It’s like Mr. Incredible says in the interview that starts the eponymous movie: “No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, you know?”
That has got to be frustrating, I imagine.
Anyway, I will end with my beginning, which is the figure of the cyborg. Tony Stark as Iron man is a cyborg as we have come to know it: an individual human with extraordinary prosthetics that enable him/her/it to be a kind of super hero with Superhuman Powers. We have seen lots of these kinds of cyborgs: the Six Million Dollar Man, RoboCop, Terminator. They are the Only One of their kind; they are involved in dramatic Action featuring Evil Ones that threaten to destroy the world. Often they are based on the moral world of Superman and his superhero family from D.C. comics (the paterfamilias of big comic companies, originally Detective Comics from 1934), or the more interpersonally fraught, wisecracking heros from Marvell (the comic series that I, personally, based much of my early identity-making on, for better or worse).
Thus we tend to see the figure of the cyborg as larger than life, as either threatening the ‘human’ or saving it, but in both cases the cyborg is somehow not human because of its technological additions. It is forever apart, and that affects its psychology. Like Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein, it has an outsider mentality that both scars it and offers it a potent drive.
But more and more I am thinking about the other kind of cyborg, what I have been calling the mundane cyborg. That is, instead of massive technological interventions on one human body, using the formidable resources of the state, the military, and Big Science, the mundane cyborg is us, as we are changed and reinvented in our use of myriad smaller technologies: cell phones, cars, personal computers and computer games, mp3 players, myoelectric arms, cochlear implants, Jarvic hearts and pacemakers, virtual reality arcades, online courses, blackberries, rfid chips, smart classrooms and smart consumer electronics and smart houses and toy lions and tigers and bears with chips that let them move and growl. Instead of a defining moment where we become Iron Man, or RoboCop, we move imperceptibly toward being cyborgs one tiny insect bite of technology at a time. Late capitalism’s rejuvenation by niche marketing combined with the increasing pace of life and human fascination with machinery has meant a massive invasion of organic life, but in tiny increments for each person.
So this is what I am interested in now, in parallel with the more extreme cyborg dangers that military people will increasingly look like Transformers, or that in two generations everyone will have sockets in their neck for inserting software, or regularly change sex/gender, or boast multiple implants that allow us to see and sense inhuman, or superhuman, areas of the spectra.
I don’t mean this to be a “run from your toaster it’s alive” kind of fear segment of popular technology writing. I am trying more to see how we can be more skillful not only in using the technologies modern capitalism has given us, but also how we can begin to shape the overall life that these prostheses are attached to, and to be more selective in the ones we become, ahem, attached to. And as we approach a world where energy is not necessarily available to all, and where environmental degradation will threaten to make us all cyborgs in the sense of beings able to live in inhospitable environments (the first notion of cyborgs was enabling astronauts to adapt to conditions in space and on other planets), this question of smaller technologies and our use of and by them will become even more important. I like the notion that we develop these rich communication systems and social networking technologies, and then use them to…well, use them to co-produce the next reality show, featuring new hybrid cultures, new basic ethical units where animals and plants and the biosphere have standing and voices, where we move more electrons and less protons, tend the Garden we’ve inherited, respect the work evolution has done, and continue the recent human experiment with identities, psychologies, titrating happiness and respect and gratitude in shaping our collaged lives.
Which is, after all, another way of saying, save the world.
Iron Man and mundane cyborgs
So I saw the film Iron Man finally. Bailey had his last day of school yesterday, and then the Achievement Night was at 6PM, so we had some time to, if not kill, at least toy with. Bailey’s attitude toward school is less than enthusiastic, and since he lives so far away, it has been nearly impossible to establish friendships with the few boys he has liked at his school. So watching him walk up to the car on the last day, I wondered if he would feel the joy of Summer Vacation, or the bittersweet feeling of leaving something you’ve done for a long time behind. He immediately picked a fight with me and had no patience whatsoever for about fifteen minutes. Luckily, I am a Jedi dad, and so used my mind tricks to not make things worse, and soon we were tooling down the highway and he was telling me a story about an invention, and we got to Pacific Grove and there is was: the Lighthouse Theatre, in all its restored art deco movie palace glory. Park the car, go in, movie starts in ten minutes, repark the car, trade out the shades for indoor glasses, buy the requisite drink, and kick back in the fully functional recliner chairs.
First day of summer kid done with school dad done with school, his own and kid’s. Cyborg movie in the afternoon. Deep breath – oooooo, yeahhhhh!
Full disclosure: I read Iron Man when I was seven, in Jimmy’s Barber Shop. My dad would go there and take me, and then my brother and me, and we’d get the serious Catholic buzz cuts, the ones that last for months and that make you look disturbingly like a camp survivor, as in refugee or concentration, not summer. But I loved going there, partly because it was one of those Male Mysteries that I always wanted to find but never did, quite. My dad had gone there as a kid! And so everyone knew him, all the old guys from the neighborhood, and he’d talk to them and they’d establish that comforting patter of saying not really anything but jointly invoking the old days, to everyone’s real pleasure. And my brother would go and be afraid (at least that is my memory) and he’d sit in the horse chair, the kid chair with the horse head and saddle, and I think he cried some and my dad and the other men would try to do non-feminine things to soothe him, like talk gruffly and in the “you’re ok little man” style. Which I still find adorable, though that probably isn’t the word I’d use with them.
Anyway Jimmy had one of those barber shops with a long long mirror and three chairs, and at the back of the room there was a huge rack of comic books. All comic books. No Time Magazines or small print newspapers to pollute the glorious tsunami of super heroes, all read and reread until the covers were ripped and all the pages slightly smeared and the corners worn. Reading those comics, you felt you were part of a community of readers, others who had gone before you, so it didn’t matter that you weren’t the first to read this version of The Submariner. Instead, you were a kid and you got to read them all for free, as many as you could slam until Dad had his haircut and Billy had his and it was time for your own depilatory experience.
I liked Iron Man. I liked Tony Stark, the whole suit thing, the glowing disc, the notion of the business guy with a cooler backstory. I liked the problems and conflicts they’d throw in to make things interesting. I liked the nonsense words that Kirby and Lee threw in to signify Epic Battles, though I can’t remember the ones from Iron Man (my favorites were from Sgt. Rock – the machine gun budda budda budda, sniper shots k-ping, krak). I didn’t quite get the playboy thing, but I sensed that Tony was kind of like James Bond, the guy who had it wired in all parts of life, but who risked all of that to fight the Evil that was beyond the skills of mere mortals. And apparently this Evil just keeps coming. You’re never done with Evil, because just when you’ve overcome the odds to beat down Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #5, and you are thinking, hey, time to take a short vacation, maybe fix things on the home front with the secretary and the girlfriend, bam! Here comes Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #6. It’s like Mr. Incredible says in the interview that starts the eponymous movie: “No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, you know?”
That has got to be frustrating, I imagine.
Anyway, I will end with my beginning, which is the figure of the cyborg. Tony Stark as Iron man is a cyborg as we have come to know it: an individual human with extraordinary prosthetics that enable him/her/it to be a kind of super hero with Superhuman Powers. We have seen lots of these kinds of cyborgs: the Six Million Dollar Man, RoboCop, Terminator. They are the Only One of their kind; they are involved in dramatic Action featuring Evil Ones that threaten to destroy the world. Often they are based on the moral world of Superman and his superhero family from D.C. comics (the paterfamilias of big comic companies, originally Detective Comics from 1934), or the more interpersonally fraught, wisecracking heros from Marvell (the comic series that I, personally, based much of my early identity-making on, for better or worse).
Thus we tend to see the figure of the cyborg as larger than life, as either threatening the ‘human’ or saving it, but in both cases the cyborg is somehow not human because of its technological additions. It is forever apart, and that affects its psychology. Like Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein, it has an outsider mentality that both scars it and offers it a potent drive.
But more and more I am thinking about the other kind of cyborg, what I have been calling the mundane cyborg. That is, instead of massive technological interventions on one human body, using the formidable resources of the state, the military, and Big Science, the mundane cyborg is us, as we are changed and reinvented in our use of myriad smaller technologies: cell phones, cars, personal computers and computer games, mp3 players, myoelectric arms, cochlear implants, Jarvic hearts and pacemakers, virtual reality arcades, online courses, blackberries, rfid chips, smart classrooms and smart consumer electronics and smart houses and toy lions and tigers and bears with chips that let them move and growl. Instead of a defining moment where we become Iron Man, or RoboCop, we move imperceptibly toward being cyborgs one tiny insect bite of technology at a time. Late capitalism’s rejuvenation by niche marketing combined with the increasing pace of life and human fascination with machinery has meant a massive invasion of organic life, but in tiny increments for each person.
So this is what I am interested in now, in parallel with the more extreme cyborg dangers that military people will increasingly look like Transformers, or that in two generations everyone will have sockets in their neck for inserting software, or regularly change sex/gender, or boast multiple implants that allow us to see and sense inhuman, or superhuman, areas of the spectra.
I don’t mean this to be a “run from your toaster it’s alive” kind of fear segment of popular technology writing. I am trying more to see how we can be more skillful not only in using the technologies modern capitalism has given us, but also how we can begin to shape the overall life that these prostheses are attached to, and to be more selective in the ones we become, ahem, attached to. And as we approach a world where energy is not necessarily available to all, and where environmental degradation will threaten to make us all cyborgs in the sense of beings able to live in inhospitable environments (the first notion of cyborgs was enabling astronauts to adapt to conditions in space and on other planets), this question of smaller technologies and our use of and by them will become even more important. I like the notion that we develop these rich communication systems and social networking technologies, and then use them to…well, use them to co-produce the next reality show, featuring new hybrid cultures, new basic ethical units where animals and plants and the biosphere have standing and voices, where we move more electrons and less protons, tend the Garden we’ve inherited, respect the work evolution has done, and continue the recent human experiment with identities, psychologies, titrating happiness and respect and gratitude in shaping our collaged lives.
Which is, after all, another way of saying, save the world.
Ten minutes on June 4, 2008
" Omnia iam fient fieri quae posse negabam."
I want to talk about phantom ring, and mundane cyborgs, and the way the words cyborg and cybernetic have evolved, devolved, and revolved. But I can’t talk about those things now, I just can’t. So first, a word from our writer.
I went up to Calistoga with Claire for her 50th birthday party, and we stayed in a little cluster of doll houses for people, very nice, and Kevin and Claire brought their espresso machine, and we went to Groth and Plump Jack (the loser!) and Cuvaisson and a place called Ovid (more of that in another post) and ate at the Martini House on Friday night which might have been one of the top five dinners I’ve ever eaten in this particular life cycle.
In the way of the Fates, not that I believe in fate but in happymaking accidents that keep happening to me, we strolled out of Martini House feeling oh so wonderful but also late for our date with Cat’s friend. Oh well let’s go so we arrived house is dark downstairs but we ring anyway and down comes Janet in her bathrobe and graciously invites us in and we all begin to talk about wine and her husband Lester has a paper from Iceland. So I say it looks like Old English, and he mentions the Eddic sagas, and I mention I teach Beowulf, and he mentions the translations of the sagas by that Victorian writer, and hands me the tale of Howard the Halt, in a beautiful edition, and I mention Tolkien, and he asks me if I’ve ever read On Fairy Stories, and off we go.
Lester is remarkable. He can talk about Yeats, and in a moment switch to yeasts, as in industrial yeasts vs. European yeasts, alcohol conversion rates, and the micro-ecology of wine. He has eyebrows like Gandalf, and come to think of it, similar eyes and expressions. Separated at birth? Not impossible!
Anyway we talked about Tolkien’s notion of how the fairy story and faery. Tolkien hated the way fairy stories had become cutesy stories about diminutive folk who could hide behind a pansy. He blamed not only the Victorians, but also the Elizabethans like Shakespeare. And he went on to contemplate the pre-shrinking of the faery, the world where all sorts of beings lived, and where humans wandered when a-mazed and under spells, often to their doom, always at their peril.
I sat there, having eaten a meal from Another World, ready to be transported into faery by Lester, and so it wasn’t long before all sorts of ideas came into my head.
I talked with Lester. The next day we drank wine starting at around 10:30, had wine with lunch and dinner, and in general were all wandering across that invisible line between Regular Life, which has a lot of tooth brushing but not nearly so much imbibing and general hilarity, and Something Else, very different, magical, where other sorts of things can and do happen on a regular basis. We explored caves deep in the earth, sang three part harmonies and heard the walls give us back our own voices; some of us found ourselves up to our necks in mud, or hot water, eyes closed, far away from all our own personal Kansases. We ascended up above the valley, above the world of mere mortals, up to the land of metamorphosis, of Giant Rocks lifted from the ground, of a mead hall made of glass perched like an eyrie, looking across at the heavens and down at the world below. We drank wines whose grapes reigned hundreds of years ago; we drank wines not yet released to the world, as in anywhere, that danced on the tongue and made me want to compose songs praising the lord of this manor, and the noble vintner, and the company, and the writings of Ovid.
We traveled, that is, to the places where change happens, and change itself seems changed, magical, metamorphosed into something rich and strange.
And I wanted to write about faery, the world Tolkien defended so angrily and with so much energy, in the face not only of the disempowered fairy story, but also in the face of industrialism (it would take a very unimaginative reader not to read the scenes of orcs tearing trees up by their roots and throwing whole forests into the fires, to forge the weapons of Saruman’s army, and not see Industrialism tearing down whole forests to forge the weapons of war and the weapons of peace, suburbia in all its imagination-blasting, same producing glory). That is I wanted to see how the world of faery that Tolkien wrote into being and studied and saw as real in the past but irreal in the present, mapped onto my world.
I saw a circle. Inside it is always already the world of what is real and rational to most people of a particular time and place. What is inside the circle is always changing, and certainly so over long historical stretched. But the relation of inside to outside seems to stay the same. Some would call it reason vs irrational; others, instrumental reasoning vs metaphysical reasoning; others, science vs art; and so on.
As I thought about the world of faery, and Tolkien, and talked to this or that person, over a week or so, I realized that it was a wildly productive idea for me. I felt it in my own life: the desire to be enchanted, to allow for enchantment whatever that might mean. I like my life, toothbrush and all, my nice house and the network of friends and family that I help keep real and alive each day. And a part of me longs to be transported, to be a-mazed, to enter the realm of the sublime and powerful.
And as the idea kept growing I got writer’s block, or got lost in too many meanings, or not enough meaning, and didn’t write.
So this is my first crack at it. What do you make of it? Tolkien clearly didn’t mean Lord of the Rings to be about the atomic bomb, or Hitler, or even about hippies going back to the land with banged-up copies of Return of the King and jokes about pipe-weed. And yet in the world of the nuclear weapon and massive rationalization of work and edge cities of suburbian tsunamis, people flock to see the hobbits on the Big Screen, and Harry Potter and friends in their parallel to the muggles universe, encountering faery everywhere. He Who Must Not Be Named – is it faery?
And if so, what is the relation of this clear need of humans to find alternative places to be, and the parallel need of humans to gain more control over the impacts of our technologies, our world-eating appetites? Is the former simply a flight from Reason? Or a flight from reasoning fed on too much junk food and 64 ounce bottles of Mountain Dew?
I want the world to right itself, humans to find the middle way and use our technologies, those fires stolen from the gods, wisely. I want humans to realize that science is not opposed to imagination, that what we think about the cosmos and the origin of life is as stunningly sublime and wild as any creation myth, and ought to have the same effect of humility and magic on us. I want love, friendship, food, drink, music, inspiration, grace under pressure, the re-enchantment of the everyday.
”Omnia iam fient fieri quae posse negabam."
"Everything which I said could not happen will happen now.”
Ovid
" Omnia iam fient fieri quae posse negabam."
I want to talk about phantom ring, and mundane cyborgs, and the way the words cyborg and cybernetic have evolved, devolved, and revolved. But I can’t talk about those things now, I just can’t. So first, a word from our writer.
I went up to Calistoga with Claire for her 50th birthday party, and we stayed in a little cluster of doll houses for people, very nice, and Kevin and Claire brought their espresso machine, and we went to Groth and Plump Jack (the loser!) and Cuvaisson and a place called Ovid (more of that in another post) and ate at the Martini House on Friday night which might have been one of the top five dinners I’ve ever eaten in this particular life cycle.
In the way of the Fates, not that I believe in fate but in happymaking accidents that keep happening to me, we strolled out of Martini House feeling oh so wonderful but also late for our date with Cat’s friend. Oh well let’s go so we arrived house is dark downstairs but we ring anyway and down comes Janet in her bathrobe and graciously invites us in and we all begin to talk about wine and her husband Lester has a paper from Iceland. So I say it looks like Old English, and he mentions the Eddic sagas, and I mention I teach Beowulf, and he mentions the translations of the sagas by that Victorian writer, and hands me the tale of Howard the Halt, in a beautiful edition, and I mention Tolkien, and he asks me if I’ve ever read On Fairy Stories, and off we go.
Lester is remarkable. He can talk about Yeats, and in a moment switch to yeasts, as in industrial yeasts vs. European yeasts, alcohol conversion rates, and the micro-ecology of wine. He has eyebrows like Gandalf, and come to think of it, similar eyes and expressions. Separated at birth? Not impossible!
Anyway we talked about Tolkien’s notion of how the fairy story and faery. Tolkien hated the way fairy stories had become cutesy stories about diminutive folk who could hide behind a pansy. He blamed not only the Victorians, but also the Elizabethans like Shakespeare. And he went on to contemplate the pre-shrinking of the faery, the world where all sorts of beings lived, and where humans wandered when a-mazed and under spells, often to their doom, always at their peril.
I sat there, having eaten a meal from Another World, ready to be transported into faery by Lester, and so it wasn’t long before all sorts of ideas came into my head.
I talked with Lester. The next day we drank wine starting at around 10:30, had wine with lunch and dinner, and in general were all wandering across that invisible line between Regular Life, which has a lot of tooth brushing but not nearly so much imbibing and general hilarity, and Something Else, very different, magical, where other sorts of things can and do happen on a regular basis. We explored caves deep in the earth, sang three part harmonies and heard the walls give us back our own voices; some of us found ourselves up to our necks in mud, or hot water, eyes closed, far away from all our own personal Kansases. We ascended up above the valley, above the world of mere mortals, up to the land of metamorphosis, of Giant Rocks lifted from the ground, of a mead hall made of glass perched like an eyrie, looking across at the heavens and down at the world below. We drank wines whose grapes reigned hundreds of years ago; we drank wines not yet released to the world, as in anywhere, that danced on the tongue and made me want to compose songs praising the lord of this manor, and the noble vintner, and the company, and the writings of Ovid.
We traveled, that is, to the places where change happens, and change itself seems changed, magical, metamorphosed into something rich and strange.
And I wanted to write about faery, the world Tolkien defended so angrily and with so much energy, in the face not only of the disempowered fairy story, but also in the face of industrialism (it would take a very unimaginative reader not to read the scenes of orcs tearing trees up by their roots and throwing whole forests into the fires, to forge the weapons of Saruman’s army, and not see Industrialism tearing down whole forests to forge the weapons of war and the weapons of peace, suburbia in all its imagination-blasting, same producing glory). That is I wanted to see how the world of faery that Tolkien wrote into being and studied and saw as real in the past but irreal in the present, mapped onto my world.
I saw a circle. Inside it is always already the world of what is real and rational to most people of a particular time and place. What is inside the circle is always changing, and certainly so over long historical stretched. But the relation of inside to outside seems to stay the same. Some would call it reason vs irrational; others, instrumental reasoning vs metaphysical reasoning; others, science vs art; and so on.
As I thought about the world of faery, and Tolkien, and talked to this or that person, over a week or so, I realized that it was a wildly productive idea for me. I felt it in my own life: the desire to be enchanted, to allow for enchantment whatever that might mean. I like my life, toothbrush and all, my nice house and the network of friends and family that I help keep real and alive each day. And a part of me longs to be transported, to be a-mazed, to enter the realm of the sublime and powerful.
And as the idea kept growing I got writer’s block, or got lost in too many meanings, or not enough meaning, and didn’t write.
So this is my first crack at it. What do you make of it? Tolkien clearly didn’t mean Lord of the Rings to be about the atomic bomb, or Hitler, or even about hippies going back to the land with banged-up copies of Return of the King and jokes about pipe-weed. And yet in the world of the nuclear weapon and massive rationalization of work and edge cities of suburbian tsunamis, people flock to see the hobbits on the Big Screen, and Harry Potter and friends in their parallel to the muggles universe, encountering faery everywhere. He Who Must Not Be Named – is it faery?
And if so, what is the relation of this clear need of humans to find alternative places to be, and the parallel need of humans to gain more control over the impacts of our technologies, our world-eating appetites? Is the former simply a flight from Reason? Or a flight from reasoning fed on too much junk food and 64 ounce bottles of Mountain Dew?
I want the world to right itself, humans to find the middle way and use our technologies, those fires stolen from the gods, wisely. I want humans to realize that science is not opposed to imagination, that what we think about the cosmos and the origin of life is as stunningly sublime and wild as any creation myth, and ought to have the same effect of humility and magic on us. I want love, friendship, food, drink, music, inspiration, grace under pressure, the re-enchantment of the everyday.
”Omnia iam fient fieri quae posse negabam."
"Everything which I said could not happen will happen now.”
Ovid
