The Fiction of the Home Team

The sale of All-Star centerfielder Curtis Granderson by the Tigers to the Yankees—a matter of collective woe to that part of our clan living in Detroit—produces memories. The first of these, for me, is of watching FSV Tirschenreuth play soccer. Never heard of this famous team? It played (and plays) against the likes of SC04 Marktredwitz, SV Waldsassen, and SV Schönhaid. FSV is the German acronym for Football Sports Club, and the members of this team in my day were all sons of the small community of Tirschenreuth in Bavaria, thus our own. The club was our home team. We also had both male and female handball teams we followed with great enthusiasm. Watching the games cost nothing. We just hiked out to the distant railway station and from there, another quarter mile, to the field. No benches, either. And our passions for these teams ran high. Other reflections rise: passionately rooting for Argentina in the World Cup Soccer finals of 1986 because Roberto, our foreign exchange son that year, came from there—and the joy of victory! For a brief time, in those days, Argentina was our team. Other emotional highs come to mind, most potently the 1987 World Series in which we saw the Minnesota Twins triumph first over the Tigers—who later became our team—and then over the St. Louis Cardinals. Heroic names still echo from that time: Gary Gaetti on third, Kent (“Buy Yourself a Vowel”) Hrbeck on first, Kirby Puckett the mighty slugger in center field, and that awesome closer Juan Berenger: how we exulted when he finally came on… But in these later cases, the players came from all over the world; virtually none was a native son; and, for that matter, we ourselves were strangers from a strange land temporarily parking in some city that, at the beckoning of job opportunities, we were as likely to leave as the players we loved to watch were likely to depart to bolster some other team. Odd, isn’t it. Much as exchange students became real children to us, so players from South America, and from nearer but still distant places, became our local heroes, and teams with no real local linkage except ownership became home teams. We live in worlds much less rooted in the physical than we realize.

Shock and Awe in 1940s Style

The following extract is taken from a strange and wondrous essay titled Air War and Literature (Luftkrieg und Literatur) by W.G. Sebald, published in 2003 by Carl Hanser Verlag. Its thematic is that the air war in Europe was an unspeakable horror such that a collective forgetting has wiped it from memory—and that the literary community has utterly failed to record it. Well not quite. As I learned this morning, the essay is available in English as part of On the Natural History of Destruction, by Sebald, but the following extract is my own translation from the German. The book I own was a gift to me of son-in-law and Michelle’s husband, Thierry Paret.

In midsummer of 1943, during a heat spell of long duration, the Royal Air Force, supported by the 8th American Air Fleet, flew a series of attacks on Hamburg. The object of the mission, called “Operation Gomorrah,” was the most complete possible destruction and burn-out of the city. During the attack during the night of July 28, which began at 1 o’clock in the morning, ten thousand tons of explosive and fire-bombs were unloaded over the densely populated residential area east of the Elbe, a region that included the districts of Hammerbrook, Hamm-North and South, Eilbek, Barmbek and Wandsbek. Following an already proven method, four-thousand-pound explosive bombs were deployed by means of which all windows and doors were broken and ripped from their frames; then lighter igniters fell and set the roofs ablaze even as fire-bombs, with a weight up to 15 kilos, broke through into the lower storeys. Within a few minutes gigantic fires burned everywhere over the roughly twenty square kilometer attack terrain; the fires joined their edges so rapidly that a quarter-hour after the descent of the first bombs the entire airspace, as far as one could see, became a single ocean of fire. And after another five minutes, around 1:20, a firestorm of such intensity arose that no human, until that time, could have imagined it possible. The fire, exploding now two thousand meters into the sky, devoured oxygen with such violence that the air currents reached hurricane strength and roared like mighty organs on which all registered had been pulled. It burned like that for three hours. At its peak the storm lifted up gables and roofs and whirled beams and plaster walls through the air, twisted trees out of the ground and drove people before it like living torches. Behind crumbling facades flames shot house-high into the air, rolled like a flood wave with a speed of more than 150 kilometers an hour through the streets, whirled like fireballs in odd rhythms over open squares. In some canals the water burned. Glass panes melted in streetcar wagons; sugar stores cooked in the cellars of bakeries. Those fleeing from their underground shelters sank in grotesque twisting forms into the liquefied asphalt that formed thick blisters. Nobody really knows how many lost their lives that night or how many went mad before death overcame them.

The horrors of modern war, mirrored on the other side by the 57 nights of German bombing of London, called The Blitz, by the twin nuclear descents of atomic bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, echoed by words like Dresden, and marked more modestly on childish memories—mine were those of a child who lived through such things but managed to escape unharmed, Brigitte’s those of a young girl who had to help clear rubble—should be, if at all possible, kept vividly in mind as we contemplate yet more mayhem, endlessly, and the decades keep rolling on.

W.G. Sebald, I think, has a very legitimate point to make. It is that our memory is rather selective. We remember the Holocaust and keep its memory alive, forgetting that it was a part of a much greater display of collective inhumanity in that weirdest of all times that Brigitte and I have lived through. We remember what flatters and not that which instructs. And, indeed, reading such posts as this one does not exactly make one’s day.

Houston We Have Lift Off

She’s the cutest honey gal
Who’s ever worn a spacegal’s suit
That darling Anne, that sweet of mine
In silver, gold, and mighty cute.

Houston we have lift off—
In Nashville Tennessee
My Anne of Seven Gables
Is singing at Opree!

Just watch those rosy lips of hers
Soft-parted in mute song
Just watch that cute gloved hand of hers
Wave to the Nashville throng.

Yes Houston we have lift off—
In Nashville Tennessee
Anne soon of Seven Cables
Will now be on TV!

I love to watch her moon-bounce dance
High on that cratered stage up there
Her tiny boot-prints leave a trail
And in her helmet, golden hair.

Oh Houston we have lift off—
I hear the countdown’s sound
Anne soon of Seven Labels
Will now be Branson bound!

Tuesday or Wednesday of last week the news in the evening were thick and murky enough so that, in some weariness I went to Channel 400 or thereabouts on our Comcast cable service to find one of those music channels rather than endure the beat of punditry. There I chanced across country music channels—not one but several—and having chosen one I spent a while listening to the music. In the midst of that the amusing thought occurred to me that it might be fun to write country-western songs. I had all the equipment for producing the lyrics already—and as for the music, Brigitte and I have been talking a bit in past weeks of buying one of those electronic pianos anyway… So then Brigitte joined me to watch a movie, and the thought then sank a little but not entirely out sight.

Today, as we set out for one of our rounds—Post Office, etc.—and we were on the way, the thought came into my mind that we had lift off at last. And then, almost instantly, came the two lines of the refrain of the piece above: Houston we have lift off—in Nashville Tennessee. At once I knew that I had something. I began writing the thing while waiting in a long line at the Post Office on the back of a postal form (PS Form 1093, if you must know) that had some white space. I herewith declare myself as having entered the arena. And if composers, producers, and other Grand Ole Opry types wish to contact me, my e-mail is available by way of My Complete Profile…

Pseudo-Events

An article in the Business pages of the New York Times yesterday (“In Animated Videos, News and Guesswork Mix”) exercised Brigitte enough so that she dispatched a stinging letter to the editors. It may or may not appear in print but may appear online. The article speaks of “Maybe Journalism.” It deals with computer-generated news reports, so-called, in which what might have happened is shown in video format. An example is the recent way-way-over-wrought uproar over Tiger Woods. Brigitte’s message to the Times was: Maybe Journalism also appears in the mainstream media—endless speculative stories about what people plan, intend, seek, project, surmise, etc.—with little actual news content beyond the opinions of politicians and celebrities and the posturings of institutions.

This article came soon after another one on the decline of the Media in which the author mentioned the birth of purely ad-driven journalism. I did a post on that for LaMarotte a few days ago (here). The matter was therefore on our mind.

Talking about it reminded me of the definitive book on the subject. It is Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image, subtitled A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. The book appeared in 1961. The cover shown here is that of the Vintage Books edition of 1992 that I happen to own. The intriguing premise of the book is that Journalism, barely born, rapidly discovered an awful truth: real news are rare but dailies must be filled with something. Adapting to this situation, journalism quickly discovered the solution as well. When nothing happens, why not fill the news hole with reports on things that sound like news: pseudo-events.

In support of Brigitte’s letter, I dug through a brown bag of old papers and extracted phrases from headlines as follows: “A Candidate Plans,” “U.S. Judge Opposes,” “Report Examines,” “Obama Team Defends,” “New Plan Rattles,” “Talks Continue,” “Europe Stews,” “President Vows,” and “Marcos Seeks.”

For good measure, to show headline snippets from one paper only (this morning’s Times), here are more: “Experts Sure,” “Officials Stress,” “Candidates Claim Victory,” “Rules Raise Questions,” “Justices to Decide,” “Push Intensifies,” “White House Urged,” “Criticism Rises,” “Fears Recalled,” “Deal Puts in Doubt,” “Programmers Try to Serve,” “Shows Stir Publicity,” “Univision to Make,” “Japan May Limit,” “Letdown is Predictable,” “Executives May Proceed,” and “NFL May End.”

To be certain that we’re reading unquestionable news, the Obituary Page is highly recommended. It reports genuine events. I’ve yet to encounter there news of the fact that So-and-So may, plans, seeks, or expects to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Innocence

Words are magical—if only we look at them. The thought behind this entry comes from pondering the scurry of squirrels in our yard as they prepare for winter. We have a great Y-shaped tree in our backyard on the left strut of which Y, this year, the clan has built itself two nests. We didn’t consciously see these nests until the leaves reluctantly went south during the last few weeks. But now we see them. And the squirrels, as every year, are in a seemingly frantic hurry to store-store-store up there the treasures they find on the ground, scurrying to great heights. To complete this picture I must say that they don’t always work. This time of year some impulse also causes several or maybe all of them to clamber about in the branches of a set of smaller trees, entirely bare of any kind of nutrition, while performing astounding feats of acrobatics, apparently strictly for fun—often chasing one another in the process.

Squirrels came into our sharper view here in the suburbs of Detroit for the first time because the area is densely populated with people and with trees, and the trees are full of squirrels. Here, for the first time, we saw black as well as grey ones. Brigitte and I come from lands across the Atlantic where squirrels are seemingly smaller and almost reddish brown. American squirrels draw European attention. Our granddaughter Stella demonstrated this on walks in the Grosse Pointes here during her recent visit—absolutely fascinated with the creatures and avidly making photographs of little beasts in actions that, for us, no longer invoke much interest; they’ve become mere background.

It’s been going on like this forever here, the same patterns repeating, repeating. And, yesterday, when my eyes followed squirrels in their play and labor, the world “social Darwinism,” mentioned in that day’s blog here still on my mind, a meditation on innocence began spontaneously, as follows, more or less: Nature is innocent—humanity cannot be. For a while there I was muddled as I pondered this, thinking that innocence is rooted in knowledge, thus rising from the Latin for gnoscere. In meaning not and gnoscere meaning to know. Unknowing. Not so, it turns out. Innocence is rooted in the word nocere, meaning harm: not harming. But, of course—and never mind the etymologies—it comes to the same thing. Nature does not know. Therefore, no matter what it does, Nature can do no harm. Man always knows, also does, and therefore always knows when it does—harm. Our superiority carries a high price.

Images of the Garden loomed up, of course, that Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—and thoughts of the paradox of humanity’s fall—or was it humanity’s rising? For you must already know good and evil before you’re able to disobey. The disobedience is present in potential before the teeth sink down into the apple. And the corollary, of course, is that a way of life aping the purely natural, thus obeying the hidden hand of the market or the roar of the vox populi, is not good policy. But, having arrived at that thought, the innocent pleasure of watching the squirrels faded away and I went indoors to make a cup of coffee.

We're Oddly Privileged Observers

The chart I present today is a somewhat more rationalized version of data from the Bureau of the Census that I had already posted here a while back. It shows the best scholarly estimates available on the subject of human global population for the period 1 to 1950 A.D. What I have done is simply extrapolated data points to fill in the gaps in the estimates, thus enabling me to show population on a continuous scale at 50-year intervals for the current chronological era. The raw numbers are available here. To this I might add that the original tabulation also provides estimates from 10,000 B.C. down to 200 B.C. The estimates for the human population for the time—and it’s nothing more than a guess-and-a-golly—suggest that in that entire period the human headcount was always below 230,000 million. When I arrived in America—the 1950 census was still being processed then—our population here was just a hair under 151 million. If I’d charted the entire range of the scholarly guesstimates, it would show a straight line running just above zero for all recorded history—and a huge, unbelievable spike appearing the day before yesterday.

In this chart I’ve plotted, along with the lower and upper estimates of scholars, the running average of the low estimate (green bars) and, overlaying them for most of the temporal trip, the difference between that average and the actual low estimate. What this tells me is that the real divergence from the perennials of history had its beginning in or around 1700, thus before the Age of Oil actually began. The early rising of the curve no doubt owed a great deal to advancements in agriculture discovered and applied in medieval times as documented by Lynn White in his fascinating Medieval Technology and Social Change. Coal mining began in the late 1740s; the steam engine appeared in 1770. And it was “hold on to your seats” after that.

We’re oddly privileged observers. We’re also, if you think about it, challenged to make the most of this odd and wondrous opportunity. The Age of Oil has already begun its descent from Mount Petroleum, and in another wink or two of historical time, the found wealth—which we, in fact, did very little to obtain beyond extraction—will have been consumed. We have a tiny window of time in which, somehow, we must, if we can, learn something from all this—and make the kinds of arrangements whereby we save and protect the physical gains we have been able to realize—not least electric light and the vast deposits of knowledge leisure has made possible to study under lamps—and to apply that knowledge to social well being.

The oddity of all this is how little one person can actually do. Thus this subject, already once touched upon in this blog, deserves this repetition—in new words and with a chart that features a blue sky.

Two Takes on History

For those who share my interest in the deeper past—and attempts at grasping its enormous complexity and maddening structure—I recommend two fascinating and original essays by Paul Rodriguez on The Ruricolist, titled Xerxes and Civilizations.

James Joyce, writing in Ulysses, wrote the sentence, “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” The words are usually attributed to Joyce directly with the “Stephen said” omitted—yet one more indication how rapidly context is usually lost even in our own time. Joyce died in 1941 when I was not yet five. The quote stayed with me because history has fascinated me throughout my life; Paul’s second essay sums up some of the imponderables that any attempt at making sense of the big picture, so called, bedevils the would-be sage.

Wrought Riches

On her visit over the Thanksgiving holiday, Michelle brought us an exquisite album of wrought iron images she had taken in France over a number of visits here and there—titled Iron, Lace, Leaves and Light. Then, on the day of her departure, she left a CD with additional photos—some 402 of them! The picture shown here, one of those in the album, I chose for display because the talented photographer is herself dimly visible behind the iron.

In this and other pictures on this blog, the technical distinction between cast and wrought is not reflected in the blog entry titles. The screen in this photo shows cast iron, more common in that land of grills than wrought. The significant cost difference between the two explains that. But the effect is pleasing. With such riches in iron—and, incidentally, of the architecture of France revealed in fragments—my ability, occasionally, to lighten up the discourse has been greatly enhanced. Thank you, Michelle!

DIY Culture

I’ve finally finished reading all of Dante’s Divine Comedy—a very strange work indeed. Having read it and, alongside, several commentaries from various times and slants, I am powerfully reminded once again that “culture,” that elusive whatever-I-mean-by-that, is certainly a do-it-yourself enterprise. Having read this vast poetic work, I’m now at least personally acquainted with it. And the commentaries now give me quite another feel. I agree with bits and pieces, here and there. Nothing beats travelling a land yourself.

I’m not about to burden the reader with my take on Dante’s work; I knuckled down to read the work precisely to avoid such hear-say. The Comedy is a cultural phenomenon not a recitation of physical observations where the facts alone communicate something—although I must here note that it is sometimes equally valuable to read people like Newton in the original (or in translation from Latin for ignorami like me). There is nothing quite like the actual voice. Personal encounters often produce surprising outcomes. My views of Conan the Cimmerian abruptly changed when I read Robert E. Howard’s actual stories as they appeared in Weird Tales long ago. Commentaries swirl like clouds around the works of culture. Time and again I’ve discovered that thinkers whom scholarly consensus dismisses have genuine merits—or that lauded greats are muddled, empty, vain, or simply sick. One of my memories, on reading (or is it perhaps better to say trying to read) Plato’s Timaeus was the irritated reaction: God, I wish this man had had some sense for structure! Artistically splendid works sometimes convey loathsome themes. I think of these as beautiful sculptures made of fecal matter; but you might not realize that until you draw near.

In a way it’s maddening that we must do all the work to get some kind of reliable sense of what is out there. Art is long, life is short. The only half-way adequate work-around to this that I’ve discovered is immersion in a culture deeply enough so that you get to know its foibles and prejudices intimately enough to see them sharply. Then, if the culture is rich in values, I can use its dictates as the initial filter to look at the world of cultural creations. In this endeavor relying on multiple cultures is much recommended because, through one lens only, some things will remain more or less invisible. In our time, fortunately, access to multiple cultures is possible.

Alas. To get to a state where the features of the cultural landscape become more or less visible, something must be neglected as your back curls leaning over books. Here the half-broken ceiling of the hall-way closet of my house comes sharply to mind—and my fingers itch to put Home Depot on a to-do-slip. Alas and alack. Sometimes cultural do-it-yourself really must give way to honest to God DIY with sheetrock and plaster and moving all of the coats and hats and shoes and scarves and umbrellas and what-not out of that closet to get at the ceiling, your head hurting as it bumps against the cobwebby but now exposed dark rafters overhead.

Private and Public

A striking contrast between the private and the public becomes sharply visible at certain times. Vacations are one category of such occasions—family visits and reunions another. The media recede; they’re temporarily pushed aside. And then—so long at least as the economic foundations are firm enough—the unchanging aspects of life come to the fore so that, remembering the distant past, it echoes the personal present—and, turned about, the present echoes the past. In this country Thanksgiving is perhaps the best reminder of the perennial human pattern. Above all it is a family holiday. It chief symbol is a common meal. Its rootings are in festivals of harvest as far back as we can see—thus in humanity’s organic dependence on the earth’s bounty. Yes. The increasingly hysterical anxieties of our seemingly failing commercial society intrude ever more into this time. My last trip out to buy the last few ingredients at Kroger carried me past vast Christmas trees; wreath and garlands everywhere; and the Salvation army’s huddled figures already rang their bells next to the red pots. The late night check of e-mail last night brought strident reminders that today is Black Friday—which is supposed to arouse my anxieties lest I miss out on some unspeakable bargains today. Christmas, alas, has long been destroyed.

What strikes me about all this is the permanent character of the personal and private and the brittle artificiality of a public projection of—words fail me—of something, of some desired state of mind or nerves, the projection of lures, prods, reminders, and supposed desires in pursuit of which we shall serve some common good, namely the expenditure of money so that those economic foundations, already mentioned above, will remain firm enough to sustain this St. Vitus dance of public insanity.

Twenty, thirty, forty years ago we saw the technological expansion, begun in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as making the world smaller. And smaller it is. Now our children Skype across vast oceans and kid and tease each other as if they were cheek to cheek. But the strange phenomenon of a crazed, brittle, public realm, grinning down at the personal life with a phony smile and deadly eyes—using symbols once infused with feeling and with awe as reminders of crazed commercial need—suggests something else to me now. It suggests that the world has grown tight, as if the sky were disappearing. The limitless dome of sunny blue above us has come to be thickly covered by a dark and incessantly moving wirrwarr of mechanical nastiness. It is thickening, descending—like a curtain, like a pall. It constricts our private and real life. We’re forced now to live our lives with more and more conscious and active effort to disregard a whole dimension of reality, once helpful and encouraging. We must fend it off, ignore it, cope with it as best we can lest it press out the last bit of air from our rapidly heaving chests. This can’t and won’t go on much longer.

One of Our Cradles: St. Luke's Hospital, Kansas City, Mo.

The picture is tiny but of great value to us. St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, Mo, has been transformed, since this photograph was taken, into a gigantic and awe-inspiring structure, but forty-six years ago this day, on the morning of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination, long before the sun rose, driving our little grey VW bug, I was headed to this building with Brigitte and, many hours later, our youngest child, Michelle, was born in this much humbler structure to her exhausted mother. Happy birthday, dear daughter. It is a joy to have you here with us today—and strange indeed to think that you are here vacationing briefly from your labors at Les Bluets, that most famous of all maternity hospitals of the great city of Paris—where the facilitation of such events, always absolutely unique although they are, is your calling and your daily work...

The second picture shows Les Bluets. It is a very modern facility but, be assured, has its own honored and ancient history by now. Les Bluets was founded in 1901. Yes. Thinking of that time and this one, and contemplating our present rough history, on its still lurching slouch toward Bethlehem, it strikes me that there are, thanks to the convergence of many tiny lights of human spirit, many things for which we may be grateful in this season of thanksgiving.

The Swans Referred To...

Herewith a picture of the trumpeter swans I mentioned yesterday. A distinguishing feature is the black bill. The much more common mute swans, who, John Magee assures me, are not mute (and I can testify to the truth of that too) have a yellow bill. Trumpeters are also much larger. Photo credit: Patio Boat.

Early Festivities

The chalked message at the side of our house, beneath the arched portico—ideal for the little cars of the 1920s but narrow for those of today—appeared there for the first time a long time ago now to mark one of the visits of grandchildren. Less legibly other names appear to announce that they too slept at this address; those are the names of Malcolm and Henry, the doughty authors of Pontoon Pirates. This fall of 2009, Stella managed to be present all by herself, but in company of her mother. They arrived a week ago on a quick flying trip, out of season, as it were (neither summer nor yet Christmas), but delighting us by illuminating our Thanksgiving holidays.

Michelle’s ability to break away for a brief spell triggered a somewhat fractured but still emotionally uplifting family reunion here—very rare these days with the Ghulf clan spread all over the continents. Susie, my sister, and my brother Baldy, with Peggy his wife, managed to come here too before departing to host get-togethers of their own. We missed the rest of the French clan, busy finishing school (the children) and starring in a French production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (Papa): no way to break that contract. We also sorely missed seeing Barbara, our oldest, or her brood; she was prevented from coming by having just begun a very promising new job. Alas the real Ghulf clan, unlike its imaginary counterpart, is not sustained by millions and millions of whatever currency you like derived from zerofric. Skype to the rescue—even if the cameras, now on one side, now on the other, did not always function as they should.

This event will end with the usual yawning abruptness of departures after Thanksgiving dinner at Monique’s and John’s house this year on the shores of Lake Wolverine—where trumpeter swans presently have, as it were, made a stunning appearance in great numbers to signal that even species depleted to nearly unsustainable numbers can bounce back with a little assist from caring elements of humanity. And after that the impersonal sway of airlines and oceans will once more come to spread the distance between us and the usual quiet of the banal everyday shall once more settle with, presumably, the falling snow.

Reminder

Power failures are intended, I believe, to remind us that the most important technological innovation of the modern age is the discovery of electricity. That reminder came again abruptly yesterday evening at 5:30 p.m. Light enough remained to let us find the flashlights and, using those, to find the matches to light the candles. The message for me, personally, was that while technology may be neutral, its absence can be felt as something positively annoying. Light is that ultimate symbol of value. Let there be light!

I’ve spent a substantial part of my life studying technology from various points of vantage. This began for me as a personal point of curiosity while I was still in the Army and later became a professional activity. I remember once in the service filling an empty hour looking up the respective populations per square mile of India and the United States and then calculating the U.S. population as it would be if it had India’s population density. That is a technological preoccupation? Absolutely. By the time I first chanced across Blake’s “Energy is eternal delight,” I lit up, as it were, already adequate to understand that feeling.

You cannot spend your time doing things of that sort without becoming painfully aware of the fact that our civilization is largely defined by the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels beginning early in the nineteenth century. In my personal parlance we have been and are still traveling on a bubble of oil, suspended in air, as it were, but this bubble, like the soapy kind, is of a brief duration. What follows after we’ve exhausted oil, gas, and eventually all coal? What I am hoping is that we shall still have the most important gift that we discovered: light.

That may happen if we eventually master fusion technology. The interesting aspect of that potential development is that it promises to give us light and modern communications and, possibly, energy enough for emergency transportation—and not much more than that. The reasons for that are that the yield of energy obtained, per unit of new energy needed to get it, will be modest. I’ve summarized the issues on LaMarotte here. Still, if we could get there, it would be a great boon—although, at present, mastery still eludes us. But if this brief blip in history, the Age of Oil, now stumbling towards its chaotic end, leaves us with electric power, that will have justified its vast excesses and violence for endless generations to come.

Images of a Culture

Herewith two images, one a little statue of a mandarin, the other a photograph of China's President Hu Jintao. It strikes me that these represent an unbroken cultural continuity.

The statue actually stands guard on the front stoop of a house across the street and down a ways. Each time I pass it I nod to the gentleman, and gentleman because I think he really depicts one. I've modified the photograph, of course, to bring out the image. The photo of Hu Jintao is taken from the Internet, one of those official photos where he stands, his wife to his left, the visiting dignitary (and wife) to his right, on a red carpet, in front of a vast painting of the Chinese Wall. Here, too, I've obscure the irrelevant in a haze of blue to bring out the form. Amazing phenomenon, culture... both in what it shows and what it hides.

Technology is Neutral

An eccentric way to illustrate the truth of this assertion is to point out that science is not what makes “science fiction” interesting. It’s always the story, stupid, and it matters not what the wrapper is, be it sword and sorcery, politics, a medieval setting, a cowboy tale, or the siege of Troy and its great Wooden Horse. The story is always about people.

Years ago, in one of my then endless pursuits of technological change, I chanced across a most revealing academic work, Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change. It is an absolutely fascinating work. It deals with the stirrup, horsepower, crop rotation, protein generation—and how these innovations influenced the physical environment and therefore society.

Reading that book I realized another important truth about technology. Unlike social structures, which cycle—ever recurring, ever decaying, but not really advancing in any meaningful sense—technology is cumulative and progressive. Once invented and proved useful, it will persist. The Incas had not invented the arch. But we now see that form of architecture (notice the etymological link in that word) everywhere in the world. And it won’t go away. Forms of social organization, a kind of technology for controlling people, tend to cycle. Physical technologies—in contrast with human organizational forms—benefit from the persistently uniform behavior of matter. Democracy controls that much more volatile element, free human entities; therefore it recurs in endless forms when conditions favor it and then deforms, decays, becomes unrecognizable, eventually unworkable, and gives way to other recurring forms of rule that then fit the times better again.

I stress the neutrality of technology but, having written this much (writing reveals what is deeper in the mind) I realize now that all I’m saying is that matter is neutral. Technology, after all, is just a tooling for managing matter. What maintains technological knowledge is the unchanging relationship we have with matter, and exactly the same relationship regardless of the ideological structures that guide our thought. Therefore it is in no one’s interest to neglect those things that happen to be universally useful.

I got into this subject today thinking of modern modes of communication: mail, telephone, e-mail, Internet (in general), blogs, and social networks. The underlying technology (of late) is the manipulation of electromagnetic currents and states, their transmission, storage, and manipulation using computers. And the underlying human motives that have lifted this technology into the useful category are two-fold: one is that communications connect the separated; the other is that people seek and value attention. The two are closely linked, of course. All of these manifestations have negative and positive aspects. Mail also means junk mail, telephone also means the automated nuisance call, e-mail also means spam, blogs can and often do communicate hate, and social networks, while they connect, can also distract.

It’s one of our modern fetishes to assign values to neutral mechanisms that, in themselves, carry no values at all. Or, perhaps, to make the point more explicit, these mechanisms are tools—and tools are one half of a whole. The tool user is the other half. Technology also has an inherent value. It is the knowledge of the toolmaker that it embodies, a superior knowledge of how the material world behaves. I hate technology only when it stops working properly. The indifferent, thoughtless, or exploitive uses of technology—why, that’s the story, the fiction part of “science fiction.” And there we must look at ancient concepts like original sin and not speak ill of that steady, never-changing innocent, other we call Matter, and its handmaiden, Technology.

Matapedia

Back in Minnesota days, Brigitte was driving home from someplace when, over the radio, she heard “Matapedia,” the title song of the album named after it. Kate and Anna McGarrigle wrote and sang it. Either one or the other of us bought it. Since that time we’ve purchased many a copy of it as gifts to friends. For quite some while now I’ve wanted to put a YouTube video on this blog, and I can’t think of a better one to put on Ghulf Genes than this song. No image moves, but who needs pictures when you have this melody and words. Thus I launch my first such offer with much gratitude to these two gifted artists. The lyrics to the song are available here.

The Taste and the Abstraction

In a post the other day (“Difficult to Express”) I remarked as follows:

In fact, I must confess, I don’t ... much like that word: abstraction. It suggests some kind of paltry residue of the physical, the last considered real, all else a derivate.

I’d like to expand on that now. The more time passes the more conscious I become of the limitations of concepts. They work fine for personal understanding. In using words, I know what I mean; but we have a tendency to use words we understand to communicate with others—and other people understand those words in quite other ways. For this reason I’ve long felt that genuine inner discoveries of how the world is fashioned and how it moves and has its being can only be communicated effectively using stories and poetry. But those forms of communication, of course, will leave some people dissatisfied. They want their concepts more sharply defined, made mathematical, as it were, stripped of flesh, guts, and circulatory systems, seeing only the supporting structure of bone. But the maddening aspect of reality is that it is captured by the very fusion of its parts. Bones aren’t prior to flesh and blood; but tissue cannot be placed above bone in any hierarchical sense either. It’s the totality that counts. I must assume that bodies came about by a circular or iterative process in which, no doubt, a single fuzzy, undifferentiated intention came to manifest, by degrees, as a structure that has many complexly integrated parts.

In the same post I make the point that for me essences, or forms, are best viewed as intentions, and by that I mean that intentions have a formative impetus. But when I compare this understanding of form to the eternal forms associated with Plato, I see something quite different. Plato’s forms appear to be static—whereas intentions are always dynamic. Eternal forms don’t seem to have life, but intentions are life. In the usual ways of teaching young students the basics of Greek thought, form and matter, the examples for form tend to be static: it’s the image of Venus rendered in stone or bronze, the static idea of a residence, fully formed and rendered as architect’s drawings. But behind that Venus or that residence was, first, a living form in a living mind, and not present in full detail at all but, as I say above, in a fuzzy state, at least as much feeling as image. The concept of “form” has a great deal more energy and life hidden within it than that word routinely suggests. Now I suspect that Plato’s own conception was undoubtedly much more like what I’ve just laid out than as it has come to be passed on to later generations, but the exigencies of communication have eroded its most essential characteristics into a caricature.

Yesterday, after writing a brief and very foreshortened piece on existentialism—and discussing it with Brigitte—and later pondering our talk while on my walk, it suddenly dawned on me that what Heidegger called care (Sorge) and what Sartre called engagement, that very same whatever is what I routinely mean by consciousness. That happens to be my pet expression for something that, in its native form, is an experience, a complex something, a feeling as much as an understanding or, perhaps, an understanding of a feeling—what the Sufi’s call a taste. You have to taste it to know it, the Sufis say. But a taste, alas, is very difficult to convey to someone who hasn’t already tasted the same thing.

In my own personal lexicon, consciousness contains a meaning quite missing for many other people. In my personal understanding, it gets a certain emphasis. It has the character of being awake, really awake, more dynamically of coming awake, of realization, of a sudden grasp. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn—if I could summon the spirit of a long-dead gnostic—that what one calls care, another engagement, and a third consciousness a Gnostic might have called a gnosis, a knowing. In this contexts I might mention that Hans Jonas, in his superb The Gnostic Religion, concludes that Gnosticism in its own time was what, in ours, we experience as existentialism.

Now I would submit here that the storyteller, novelist, and poet—all using a much more comprehensive language than merely that of concepts—is much more able to communicate the taste, the reality, and the flavor of experience than the person who tries to balance the entire insight on the single leg of abstractions.

A Pleasing Gate

Wrought Iron Gate Photographed in Hagenau, France—courtesy of Pontoon Pirates.

The Eye and the Beholder

Many years ago now, engaged in a study of packaging on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, I got involved with bottles-and-cans. That phrase became shorthand, later, for a significant uproar across the environmental community dealing with beverage containers, their discard as litter, and efforts to force industry to reclaim and to recycle them. In studying this matter I visited Coca Cola in order to understand better how this aspect of packaging worked. In that process I came to marvel. The more I learned about the subject, the more it expanded. An empty, bent, carelessly discarded small container along the roadside—barely seen as we drive by it—morphed into a vast commercial, engineering, and manufacturing colossus which was the central concern, indeed the living, of thousands of people across the United States. I came to think of these containers as the uniformed armies of the two great competing empires of Sugar-Water, and, indeed, later on, having visited the one in Atlanta I also traveled to upstate New York, and there I was appropriately awed by the glorious glass palace that housed Pepsi, the other.

Who says that life in business is a dull affair? You drive away from such a setting in the green-gold countryside at the wheel of your red Avis on a brilliant fall day, having admired very fine art on display in a vast building-circumambulating lobby, and you think yourself magically transported into another medieval time of duchies and princedoms, the dukes and princes of whom are powerful figures who visit—or are visited by—senators and presidential aides, and in your thoughts, as the palace falls behind you and the black ribbon of the road bisects breathtaking woods, you wonder what a strange thing it might be to expend your efforts serving Sugar Water, travelling over oceans in shiny airplanes on its behalf…and realizing that this strange notion may never ever occur to Sugar Water’s actual minions who, bless them, just think of what they do as the same-old-same-old-same-old job.

I was reminded of the strange, lens-like character of attention in the context of yesterday’s post about living in multiple mental worlds. Our ability to pay attention to many quite different realities would seem to have a scattering, a centrifugal force. Here is time spent on complex technical problems (at work), the right wine for the chosen meat (shopping), the matter-form duality underlying Aristotle’s concept of substance and the peculiar habitation of unformed matter and immaterial form (reading), and then (Saturday night) immersed in experience of the music and the husky words of the creator of Thunder Road. Oh my. Yes, indeed. And the loom to weave all this into a fabric?

As the world infinitely expands, proliferates, and complexifies the more we stare at it, as at every blink that gets us closer it only unfurls yet another even greater fractal layer of yet another depth of intricacy—or as this same complexity curls up into a simple object, then shrinks into a token, then turns into a concept, and then may actually disappear as we withdraw our attention—all this while that which is behind the attention remains the only fixed and immutable point. And that point—we can’t actually get at it at all—is ourselves. It does the weaving. How we do it, how well we do it, that is the crux of the matter.

* * *

Thunder Road bring memories? A puzzlement? To hear the song, click here. To read the lyrics, here. The combined effect of words and music will not be revealed, I don’t think, by close study, however intense, of either one or the other, no matter how well conducted.

Difficult to Express

Over the last several years I’ve found myself noting more and more frequently, in this and that connection, that our lives, however powerfully they’re anchored in the material dimension—and they certainly are—take place in mental spaces. The feeling is difficult to express. Someone hearing might say, “But of course. We’re conscious creatures. We live in a stream of consciousness. It’s a mixture of sense impressions, phantasms, and of memories.” The statement is true enough, but it doesn’t measure up to my odd intuition.

Pondering that intution now, I am beginning to see it better. Various relational structures adhere to every kind of activity. Back in my working days, I would work on a novel in the early hours and then travel to my office. And in that space a different set of relationships came into focus. The novel was one structure, the business another. And, being engaged with one, then with the other, I was living each in sequence because of identification. The concerns that used to exercise me in my days at North Star, in Minneapolis, for instance, have absolutely no influence on me now. I can reread one of my novels and re-enter its world again. Once more it becomes real. In the first case the various “issues” that exercised me just happened to concern real people and events; in the other case they happened to be imaginary, but, since the novel in question was realistic, it felt just as real as the flow of events at work. But even if the novel had been quite wildly surrealistic, it would still have operated as a frame for experience provided that it had had the necessary consistency and coherence.

Each world we inhabit temporarily has its facts, logic, dynamism, feeling tones, actions, and consequences. The substance may be predominantly physical—which was indeed the case when I spent several weeks  redecorating the whole house, once, long ago in Kansas. The substance may be commercially toned, as it tends to be in a business. Human relations and memory may predominate during an extended family reunion. The substance may also be on a highly abstract plane—albeit never entirely divorced from physical reference—in a career, say, focused professionally on philosophy or higher math.

The striking similarity between imagined realities (the novel) and the actual (business) comes into focus when I reflect that in most business relationships the physical contact with people is often quite minimal or takes place only from time to time or at some remove (telephone, e-mail). Most of the time most of the people we deal with are mental presences, not bodies visible to my eyes. This is true above all in our era of effective mass communications. For many people the endless meetings—and these are face to face—are a distraction. Most tellingly, in most businesses, those engaged in them almost never see the actual customer unless in a generic sense—when they themselves go shopping. Back when you hawked your goods at your stall in the market—another story that.

The feeling that I find difficult to express today is, I think, a strengthened realization of the huge role the immaterial plays in our experience of living. I don’t want to call it abstract because, in most of our activities, the mental flow has feeling tone and is accompanied by imaginal traces: it is mental but alive. In fact, I must confess, I don’t and never did much like that word: abstraction. It suggests some kind of paltry residual of the physical, the last considered real, all else a derivate. In my own mental culture, I conceive of essences as intentions, thus as having more energy and a closer proximity to the Real than the actual physical manifestation.

A special case of this “life in the immaterial” is our relationship to the Media. Driven by the need to be efficient—in drawing and holding audiences for profit—they tend to create oddly deformed arrangements of reality in which short phrases are used to reference often very complex and dynamically changing relationships. To the extent that the Media optimize their content to maximize their viewership, to that extent they fail to carry out their self-proclaimed mission. And as this ratio shifts to favor the bottom line, to that extent, certainly, the medium is the message.

One More Fall Image

The Stone Sun

The image is a sandstone sculpture. Brigitte and I saw and immediately fell in love with it at a Renaissance Festival in the Minneapolis Hinterland. It has been hanging in one or another of our gardens ever since. Over the years wind and water have weathered away some of the sand and produced the highlights that you see. In the midst of flux, for us, this object is a small anchor of permanence.

A Time of Shatter

Healthy societies are complexly integrated whereas decadent societies are engaged in a process of slow-motion shatter. If I stare at the word complexity long enough, I realize that in a complex system every part and aspect of the whole is equally important although the parts are always hierarchically related. In a monoculture everything is the same. My Mother used to say, by way of dismissing certain kinds of views, “Everything is wood.” When asked what she meant, she would say: “Those people are just like termites. For them everything is wood.” Or everything is money. I picture a book in its normal use. Every word in it is meaningful—in placement and in sequence. So are the letters in the words. The covers have their purpose, the pages are numbered, and the use of the book is governed by its internal arrangements. But if that same book has been discarded, perhaps because it has been damaged, and is now relegated to serve as kindling next to the fireplace, it matters not what page you tear out to light the fire. Complexity has been reduced to monoculture. The words have lost all of their relevance.

Disintegration manifests by the separation of parts once meaningfully linked. So in a decadent society mutually supportive orders became alienated one from the other. What used to be relationships turn into uses. People are commodified. They become markets, human resources, labor, management, constituencies, blocks, interests, lobbies. Creative work becomes content. These are not merely verbal distinctions. They come with feeling tones attached. They are attitudes. They signal distance and indifference. “We’re having some labor problems. But we’re getting on top of them.” My favorite symbols for this include the recorded telephone call (“Your call is very important to us”) and the old Russian communist adage: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”

This situation is pregnant with meanings—as is its opposite, community. For instance: as society loosens, freedom increases but relationships weaken. As one Russian émigré writer, living in New York, once complained: “At least back home the NKVD read what I wrote.” The urge to escape the oppressive integration of the small town or the village—in order to enjoy the freedom of city life—becomes the oppressive anonymity of urban life where you don’t even know your neighbors. When community shatters a complex network of relationships yields a single means of relating to everything—through money. Only money carries universal value. Thus is born celebrity and the yearning for visibility—that fifteen minutes of fame on television. And this is what feeds American Idol, brings it contestants and the vicarious participation of the vast alienated masses.

But life in a complex community has its down-side too. It requires attention, time, and effort expended on the community itself—very often “just because,” as in noblesse oblige—thus without any compensation in return. The obligation to work for the common good is not pragmatically rewarded—or, if it is done for reward, it is not that kind of effort. Nothing forces you to do it. It can be and often is felt as a burden. Its support is ethics, thus a moral sense. And this moral sense is reinforced by a hierarchical conception of reality, thus it has a religious connotation or underpinning.

Now, it seems, societies decay by a curious process. Community spirit and complex relationships produce order; order produces wealth; and wealth, as it spreads, weakens the sense that effort on behalf of the community is necessary. It is easier to avoid its burdens. This tendency to turn aside is felt as liberating. The notion is then expanded philosophically into a cult of freedom and individualism. This, in turn, damages the hierarchical arrangement on which the whole society rests. How wide this alienation spreads depends on the extent of the wealth produced. In pre-industrial times, only elites became wealthy enough to lose their bearings—hence also dynasties fell. The so-called ignorant masses kept clinging to whatever spirits or gods they worshipped. In our times, the devastation reaches much deeper into the population because the wealth produced has been so great.

The process of decay is also marked by a movement from the personal to the abstract—because love (one of the three theological virtues) is withdrawn. The farmers market where contact is vividly real becomes capitalism. Trade—at core a vital, complex, two-way river—becomes soulless globalization. It is a negative phenomenon because its single glassy eye is focused solely on gain. It produces a monoculture of technique. Everything must align with it or perish. Good-by to the shop, farewell the local merchant. In agriculture we literally have it—monoculture. Industrial means of raising chickens, pigs, and cattle are, frankly, obscene. What is the justification for this? The only denominator common to everything in a shattering culture: money. When a hierarchy of values is absent, complexity begins to disappear. When complexity begins to show cracks, only time is required for the whole to fall apart. In the midst of this process it is almost impossible to believe that the society is doomed. But such is the case.

The human community revives from these long and painful periods of desertification only because minorities fiercely cling to the more complex value systems which are the full expression of humanity. Small communities, often isolated, certainly separated, continue to exist. As things fall apart, these seeds begin to link. Out of them are formed new cultures which, for a time anyway, realize the values we celebrate over the centuries. To this I might add that the Decline of the West (as Spengler called it) can be and is resisted by those other societies in which the ethical current still flows strong.

A Loom

Upon this age, that never speaks its mind,
This furtive age, this age endowed with power
To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar
Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find
What swims before his prow, what swirls behind —
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric; undefiled
Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still
Upon this world from the collective womb
Is spewed all day the red triumphant child.
       Millay, Edna St. Vincent, Hunter, What Quarry? Harper & Bros., New York, 1939.

This poem, written at around the time of my birth and published when I was three, has illuminated reality for me in various and different ways ever since I stumbled across it at the Overland Park library in Kansas (one of those splendid libraries I always praise). The event took place sometime in the 1970s. There are these moments. You don’t forget them. I still see the scene, the shelves to my left. I was looking inward, into the stacks. The yellow book (how come we remember such things?) was open in my hand. I was reading this poem. The words produced electrical shudders in my body. The odd power of this poem lies in its ability to say different things at different times; like a magical mirror it reflects back that which appears before its face. At that time my inner state reflected back the surface meaning—namely the absence of a loom. With time I came to realize consciously what it was that had made me shiver then—namely that this poem itself, proclaiming its absence, is actually the very loom that produces a fabric of meaning. For starters…

Tomato Manikin

This is the last tomato we managed to grow this season. He does not seem very happy, regretting coming late enough to miss just about the whole of summer. “He talks to me,” Brigitte says, and indeed, he seems to. The markings are entirely natural, although the festive gown and the supporting toothpick are donations from humanity. Brigitte also likes to speak of this little fellow as her Tomato Pumpkin or Tompkin...

To make this introduction a little more formal, this small gentleman’s full name is Mr. Tompkin Lycopersicon esculentum, meaning edible wolf’s peach. The name in the Vulgate, as it were, is Yellow Cherry Tomato. This variety is quite small, about the size shown when full grown, and to the taste very sweet.

The River

I’m dumbfounded. After all these years, I still don’t get how Broadway works or what to make of our culture. [Neil Simon, quoted in the New York Times on November 2, 2009]

This statement, of course, has its specific context. A revival of Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, one of his most popular plays, opened on Broadway a week ago and abruptly closed again yesterday. Now I don’t happen to be a great fan of Broadway (despite minoring in Drama in college); nor am I much attracted to popular shows like Barefoot in the Park, Brighton Beach, Biloxi Blues, or Broadway Bound—to cite just those Neil Simon works that start with B. But I was a fan of Sid Caesar’s in the 1950s, and Neil Simon wrote many of the episodes and jokes that I enjoyed; I certainly appreciate Simon’s wit and sense of humor. Simon, who is now 82, left a very big mark on popular entertainment but evidently learned little about culture. Failure is a better teacher; hence he is now at last embarked on the narrow road to wisdom.

Interesting how, in his reaction to the reverberating thud of the last curtain on this revival of Brighton Beach, Simon seems to think that “Broadway” and “culture” are static structures, a kind of rock-solid reality that, once understood, always understood. Not. The play deals with a Depression era family coping with hard times, no doubt the reason why it was revived on Broadway. Its producers evidently thought that it would resonate with the public; but they too were benighted.

The Mississippi as it flows at its origin out of Lake Itasca—where it is a tiny little streamlet and you can jump across it, as I did, grinning from ear-to-ear (“I just jumped over the Mississippi”)—is not the river that empties its masses of mud-laden waters out into the Gulf of Mexico south of New Orleans. I saw that too. My first view of American “land” came when, aboard the USS General Muir, we saw the ocean turning yellow hours before we actually saw the scrubby islands that mark the river’s estuary.

Neil Simon evidently managed to remain unaware, as the years rolled on, carrying him toward 82, that he was in motion all the while, and looking down, the bright, shimmering, young stream had become a vast, huge, sluggish, muddy mass on which big, grey ships and barges now carried ignorant, young, brash, but hopeful immigrants upstream to fashion a new world.

The Well of the Past

In the opening lines of Joseph and His Brothers, Thomas Mann says: “Deep is the well of the past. Shouldn’t one call it bottomless?” I looked down that well just recently when, inspired by tangdynastytimes, I tried to answer the question: How exactly does that dynasty fit into Chinese history? I’ve kept returning to the subject of Chinese history ever since I encountered the culture in my teens through the writings and presentations of Lin Yu Tang. Later, in the Army, in college classes brought us in Germany by the University of Maryland, a stellar professor introduced us (an admixture of sergeants and colonels) to an ancient and evidently very effective philosophy of rule: rely on the mandate of heaven. This approach to governance has produced, if not the oldest then certainly the longest living continuous society in human history.

I don’t hesitate to oversimplify when the subject is beyond effective summary. With that in mind I provide a graphic of that history below. It traces the dynasties and kingdoms in China from 2100 BC to the present. That date marks the beginning of the first of many long-lived dynasties, but it is well to remember that, in 2100 BC the people of the Middle Kingdom already looked back on 800 years of history. The Yan and the Yellow emperor were then already legendary figures.

Time in this chart runs both downward and from left to right. The regimes that held sway in China are shown in chronological order. The horizontal bars show how long each dynasty or era endured. I’ve colored red those periods in which no single dynasty dominated the Chinese territories and states contended or multiple kingdoms ruled parts. Notable in this drastic summary (a single Excel graph compressing 4000 years of history) is the long dominance of single dynasties and the recurring punctuations of disorder or disunity. Not that those long periods were quiet and without conflict—nor that periods marked in red were entirely chaotic. Parts of the Great Wall of China were built during the Warring States. Notable against this panorama of endurance is the puny aspect of the latest dynasty in China, call it the Mao or the Communist dynasty. Just a blip on the last line—but it certainly loomed and still looms large in our own parochial temporality.

Now for the Tang Dynasty. It was a period of exuberance, wealth, and cultural flowering. It lasted quite a long time, certainly for a dynasty, and long even when matched up against the period of a culture, say Christendom. The Tang Dynasty began roughly 300 years after Constantine established Christianity as the ruling religion of the dying Roman realm. The Tang rule broke apart into many competing regimes about 90 years before Christianity reached its peak in 1000 AD and clothed itself in a white mantle of churches.*

The most famous names likely to be familiar to Westerners long predate the Tang Dynasty. Confucius and Lao Tsu both date to the Spring and Autumn period, which is the concluding part of the Zhou Dynasty (722-481 BC); Chuang Tsu, probably the best known Taoist teacher and Lao Tsu disciple lived in the Warring States period. Sun Tzu, the general who wrote the world-famous The Art of War is placed either into the Spring and Autumn period or into the Warring States period by scholars. Buddhism was present in China by about 265 BC, but, looking at some pictures, it is obvious that the most inspiring statues of Buddha were created in Tang times.

The coexistence of what we would call an advanced, sophisticated era like the Tang on one side of the globe and what most people call the Dark Ages in Europe suggests to me that the environments we inhabit (will-ye, nil-ye) are above all cultural. With effort and imagination we can think and feel the airs beyond them, but what surrounds us and dominates our everyday is the creation of our own place and time.
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*A phrase attributed to Raoul Glaber, an eleventh century monk of Burgundy: “It seemed as though the earth were shaking off the rags of its antiquity, to clothe itself anew with a white mantle of churches.” Quoted in Albert Guerard, France—A Short History, W.W. Norton, 1946, p.85.

Rule of Law?

A headline in the most recent Christian Science Monitor (CSM, 11/1/09) suggested the following line of thought. The headline says “Afghan election chaos may boost rule of law.”

The strict meaning of that phrase is that the laws have universal applicability to all people under it, thus not just the ordinary people but also the wealthy, the powerful, and the ruler himself. The author’s premise is that American pressure to roll back a fraudulent election teaches Hamid Karzai that the laws of Afghanistan (they forbid ballot stuffing) apply to him as well. Nice try, CSM. The article attributes the nullification of the recent election to two internal election bodies and “the world’s elder statesmen.” I don’t really think that the media should serve the public baby food, and the use of phrasing like “elder statesmen” suggests something far removed from reality. When someone says “the world’s elder statesmen,” I picture Jimmy Carter and other revered but powerless individuals. This election was overturned because the U.S. government signaled to Karzai that it would not support him, either with troops or, more importantly, with money. Why? Public opinion would turn against the administration. The administration’s own precious rear was too close to the fire.

Karzai is in power because U.S. funds flow through his hands. These moneys next buy the services of the Afghanistani war lords beneath thick tables that hide the transactions fairly effectively from common view—certainly from the view presented by CSM and other media, which always speak of corruption as present only on the Afghan side. But the truth of the matter is that this corruption must be funded. There are only two sources of money in Afghanistan.

One of these is opium. The Taliban control the opium, but the money to buy it comes, in this order, from Europe, Russia, China, Africa, and the US and Canada—to name the top five markets. More than 20 percent of opium is consumed in North America. The source of this is the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC); I saw the story here. This means that the Taliban are supported by the drug trade of the rest of the world.

The other source of money is the U.S. taxpayer. This money supports the U.S. military effort, the half-cooked build-up of an Afghan national army and police (why is it still not effective?), and funds the war lords. It’s not as if U.S. paymasters were riding around in helicopters handing over bundles of dollars to war lords in ceremonies—but they might as well. The job, however, is left to Karzai & Company, meaning his family members and friends. The war lords keep the U.S. forward operations and convoys relatively safe. You can acquire more details about this subject here, one of the articles published by AntiWar.com. Ideological reflex may cause you either to embrace or to reject that message, but either reaction is also childish behavior. Just ponder the facts.

But here is the question I ask: What is wrong with the following CSM paragraph?

For years, the international community has ineffectually hectored Karzai for reforms such as sharing more power with parliament, electing governors rather than rotating around his cronies, and ending deals with warlords.

What this paragraph leaves unsaid is that one of the two sources of local power in Afghanistan is the war lord. The other is the Taliban. That famed Loya Jirga that formed the Afghan government was drawn from Afghanistan’s tribes. Those tribes are ruled by war lords. There is no third party in Afghanistan, no genuinely organized “we the people” that stands over against the Taliban and the war lords both. That third force is a figment of Western imagination. Real power in Afghanistan has always been tribal, and “war lord” is just the west’s denigrating label for “tribal leader.”

The paragraph also fails even to hint at other illuminating facts. One: After the Russians were defeated, a civil war began. In that civil war the Taliban fought, defeated, marginalized, and drove the war lords, their enemies, to the edges of Afghanistan, thus to regions bordering the former U.S.S.R. I recall staring at successive maps showing the war lords’ retreat. Two: When the U.S. arrived in Afghanistan hell-bent on defeating Al Qaida, aka Osama Bin Laden, aka son-in-law of Omar, the leading figure of the Taliban, the U.S. forces immediately armed, equipped, and fueled the war lords in order to deploy them, once again, against the Taliban. U.S. taxpayer dollars are still funding this faction.

My chief points here are that the media may present most of the facts, but the interpretation they supply does not match Afghanistan’s realities.  The various attempts to build the institutional framework of a republican style government are vain and symbolic gestures that lack a genuine grounding in on-the-ground reality. Republican style governments demand the presence of a strong, organized, and extensive middle class. There is no such class in Afghanistan. What Afghanistan does have is the early stages of a feudal order. These are dominated by dukes (another good word for war lord, derived as the word is from the Latin dux, which used to mean general or military leader; after the central power fell, these dukes became local sovereigns).

Another important point is that Karzai became president precisely because he was not one of the war lords. He was a well-connected operator from the yet-to-be-fully-developed merchant class on whom the dukes of Afghanistan could agree—and who was also acceptable to the invading kingdom (in local eyes) of America. There is no point in hectoring a hammer. You have to hector the hammer’s wielder.

Someone who introduces the notion of “rule of law” into this discussion is either naïve or is patronizing the reading public. We must teach history properly so that we can recognize recurring patterns on the ground. This sort of reportage reminds me of the soothing explanation a little child might receive when it inadvertently walks in on mom and dad as they are engaged in the marital act. “Don’t cry, honey! Mom and dad were just playing. We were wrestling…”

The Times, the Names…

In an e-mail comment on the last post, Michelle (la sage-femme and funny ghost-writer of Pontoon Pirates) had this to say among other things:

Just for fun : in Paris there are two streets like Die Grosse and Die Kleine Freiheit. They are rue de la Grande Truanderie and rue de la Petite Truanderie in the 1st arrondissement. They, like rue de la Brèche-aux-Loups in the 12th and rue de La Grange-aux-Belles in the 10th, have often made me wonder dreamily where those names came from... Much more inspirational than Main street, no? But Grand rue also exists in France, in Etueffont as a matter of fact.

Wonderful. A truanderie is a swindle. Next we have “the Breach of the Wolves,” thereafter the “Barn of the Beauties.” Now concerning the wolves, I wonder if the original name referred to a huge or an especially wide breach or opening, this because in French wolf is also used as a word of emphasis. In that language, like in English, you’re hungry as a wolf; but in France you can also be cold as a wolf.

Michelle also commented on the dissonance that sometimes appears between the cover and the content when the intention is to-draw-attention-for-profit. She comments on the three book covers I’ve trotted out in the last few days:

Those covers look great today, don’t they? Vintage 1970s sci-fi creativeness! I remember thinking, back then, that they were, how shall I put it, a bit loud for my taste and mostly not at ALL what I had imagined when hearing the books [read out loud]. Those brash, colorful covers were light-years away from Darnay genes. Strange, huh?

This reminds me of a true story told by Idries Shah regarding his forays into publishing Sufi materials to a western audience. Shah’s writings have been very successful, but not so in the beginning. His first books had very formal and scholarly covers; they were intended for a scholarly audience. Sales were nil. Shah then had the covers changed; now they were vivid, colorful, and showed intriguing, romantic images. Sales—still from the scholarly community, first targeted in mailings—suddenlyshot up. And then stayed up thereafter.

Does that suggest that I should to change the cover of Ghulf Genes (the novel)? A gyrating belly-dancer? A Conan-like muscle-bound half-naked hunk charging a monster?

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Smell? You’re right enough about the smell, Bill, but I was talking about sell. Get it? Sell!

The Genesis of a Title

In my experience the titles of literary works—and similarly the names of places—have a life of their own; they can subsist in my memory and come to represent something quite different than the author once intended, or, equally likely, continue to hold the essence while the details that supported it thin out and vanish.

To give an example, many years ago now I watched a play on public television—quite a long play and very cerebral, intellectual, but fascinating. It was called The Ascent of Mt. Fuji. I remembered the title, also a kind of mental snapshot of watching the play, but had forgotten all else until I went in search of the details this morning. The play was written by Chingiz Aitmatov, a Kyrgyzstani writer of the communist era. The play dealt with the suppression of dissent in the U.S.S.R. in his time, but I retained something quite different from it, the essence of any and all ascents from the restricted to the exalted. For details about Aitmatov, I suggest this site.

But let me get to the title of my first published novella, The Splendid Freedom. Having been raised in multiple languages—so much so that they are part of my bodily fiber, when the plot of that novel arose in my mind, the perfect title for it came to me instantly. Too bad it was in German: Die Grosse Freiheit. The words simply mean “the great freedom.” The reason why these words surfaced was because there had been a quite famous movie entitled Die Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7. It was a Nazi era film (1944); Hans Albers starred in it. But the Nazis themselves then banned it.

What about that Nr. 7? Well, the original of Die Grosse Freiheit is actually the name of a street in the Reeperbahn district of the city of Hamburg, an entertainment enclave. There is also Die Kleine Freiheit, the little one, in the same neighborhood. The movie dealt with a sailor’s love affair while on leave. Not that any of this was consciously in my mind. I was too little at the time of the film either to have seen it or, aged eight, to have any concept of its premise. But the phrase had a lot of visibility in later years, not least because it occurs in the refrain of German lyrics fashioned to the famous melody, La Paloma, which that movie introduced.

Herewith a rather free translation of the first two stanzas of the song as the Germans sang and presumably still sing it. To check the German original, those adequate might want to look here.

A wind blows from the south and draws me out to sea.
Don’t sorrow, child, although our parting smarts—but me,
I must on journeys go, afar abroad, away.
Your pain shall pass, reunion soon shall be our bliss.
Longing tugs me toward a blue horizon with
Waves beneath, the night and stars above. The hiss
Of this life’s wind is at my back, distance in sight.
Cry not, my child, your tears cannot arrest my flight.

La Paloma, olé
That which must be, must be
Only the longed-for hours of love
Remain behind on land, my dove.
The sea, the sea, she is the sailor’s bride
And by her side, sweet one, I must abide,
But when storms start to shriek their melody
The Splendid Freedom, in my heart, still holds a memory.

In any case, to round this out, as I was contemplating that title, I translated it then, as I did this morning here, rendering the lyrics, by replacing great, with but one syllable, with splendid, with two, which matches the rhythm of the German and, in effect (to use a musical analogy) raises the meaning by an octave.

A Novella Online

The first story I ever published was entitled The Splendid Freedom. It ran in one of the 1974 issues of Galaxy magazine. Some time later (1980) it lent its name to a story collection of mine (shown to the left), which, in addition to that tale, also had two of my then most popular shorter pieces, The Eastcoast Confinement and Plutonium.

I have put up the text of Splendid Freedom on what I call my literary (or more humbly, my writing) site (Ghulf Records) accessible here. It is in PDF format. Some readers of this blog, suddenly seeing me revealed as an author of fiction, can now read one of my pieces and see for themselves what I sound like in another of my personae. In a way it pleases me that this novella, although now three decades old and counting, has not lost its meaning or relevance; nor am I tempted to make excuses for it. If you don’t have an Adobe Reader, send me e-mail and I’ll give it to you as an MS Word document. The e-mail address is accessible through my profile.

One additional comment. While the illustration of the story collection (shown) is actually drawn from the story, my own approach to science fiction—however artfully I deal with science and technology in these accounts—is never about whizz-bang. But then regular visitors here will already know that. Meanwhile I always insist that the science part of my sci-fi apes reality much better than many others’ efforts manage the job.

In Praise of Maps

On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: “We don’t show churches on our maps.” Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. “That is a museum,” he said, “not what we call a ‘living church.’ It is only the ‘living churches’ we don’t show.” [First paragraph of E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed]

It has been a while since I have praised maps and their makers, but maps came into focus the other day—and last night again in the highest context—so I thought I would sink another benchmark in this survey. The first reminder came when we were slightly disoriented in Roseville, MI. We discovered that we had maps of the State of Missouri, of the cities of Quebec in Canada, Traverse City in Michigan, and Lake George in New York quite handy, but to find the map of this area led to frantic clawing. At last, here it was—South-East Michigan! And what a relief it was!

The other polarity of today’s inspiration was a set of diagrams in my edition of the Divine Comedy. I was looking at them last night in my by now out-of-breath ascent of the peak of Paradise. The thought came then, falling asleep, that great works all have the quality of maps. In Dante, one is always keenly aware of his own quite serious intent on producing an accurate cosmic map—the depths, the earth, the heavens. For Henry Corbin, that obscure but admirable philosopher of the invisible, orientation is a constant concern. Schumacher quite consciously set out to make a philosophical map in the work cited above. And my own life-long interest in the cyclic historians is anchored in my determination to see the big picture before I worry about the small.

Obviously map-making is not a peculiarly modern urge, although the really great advances in earth-measurement are modern. I was fascinated a while back by the figure of Colin MacKenzie (1754-1821); I encountered him in a show on PBS. He turned heaven and earth upside down in his attempts to survey India, and I became aware of the difficulties of this kind of work. I have a fine book, The Measure of All Things, by Ken Adler. It documents the labors of Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre (1749-1822), Pierre-François-André Méchain (1744-1804), and Joseph-Jérôme Lalande (1732-1807) who, in the midst of the French Revolution, and working right through it, in effect finessing and ignoring it, working with both sides in the conflict, mapped and measured the meridian that runs from Dunkerque through Paris to Barcelona in efforts of establish the length of the meter, defined as one-ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator. Such heroic work underlies all of our maps. We fold them any-which-way and toss them into drawers whereas, if we but knew the underlying labors, we would place them reverently high up on our shelves.

Back in Minnesota days I used to take Winnie (yellow Lab, a notable canine Ghulf) on his walk. We followed the tracks of Burlington Northern from the edges of suburban settlements into the wilds. One of my stops was a bridge across a creek. Winnie would run down the near-vertical drop off to forage along the shore and drink water. And down there, each time he descended, he passed a survey stone. As I became more knowledgeable about the art and science of earth measurement, that stone, initially just a grey thing with a mark, took on the character of a monument to a tribe of people too much neglected in the world’s history—while we make destroyers and powerful madmen famous.

Maps of all kinds—and obscure figures working away to perfect them. They deserve a nod and the occasional recognition. Was lost, but now, with their assistance, I am found.

A Kind of Numbness Sets In

Fellow-blogger Paul Rodriguez reminded me this morning in another context of the dim past of my life. This caused me then to pick up a family memoir which begins:

My second conscious memory is of the day when Hitler invaded Poland. It was evening; we were on a train; the day was Friday, September 1, 1939. I was three years old and had a stomach ache—the reason, I suppose, why I remember the event. I have the notion that we were travelling east to west. The impression must have arisen later when my mother…told me where we’d been and where we had been going. The details I’ve now forgotten but the direction remains.… The news of war came at one of the stops and spread like wildfire throughout the train. Children have a curious animal sense and pick up the adults’ emotions. The mood was a mixture of excitement and anxiety. I was lying in one of the compartments across two seats. A narrow corridor ran past the compartments. Grownups had left their places and crowded out there—excited talk. I remember darkness and lights. The lights flashed on and off, and on and off, as we pulled out of the settlement where the news had reached us. I remember the talk and the movement in the corridor, the beat of the train’s wheel on the rails, and the pain in my stomach…

Three days after that memory of mine, the German troops reached Lodz, in Poland where Brigitte, my future life’s companion, a girl of seven-and-a-half that year, lived with her parents, a German family settled in Poland. The war caught her too and, as she recalls it, she was confined to her room—while there, as everywhere, the adult world held its breath.

This morning’s paper brings news of yet another massive bombing in Iraq, 130 or more dead, trumping the 122 who died in August in Baghdad at another bombing of ministries. The New York Times brings a picture of a huge ravaged building and, in the foreground, a man with his head bent in a state of mental anguish. Throughout our lives, from the very beginning, as it were, this sort of thing has never relented, only the forms and the locations keep changing.

Brigitte and I and most members of our family have been very fortunate in escaping the direct, sharp, and dreadful pain of losing those we loved to collective violence. And there is a limit, probably imposed by our biology, to the vicarious suffering that we can actually experience. Those deaths—wherever they happen—are as much our pain as of those directly affected, but, alas, a kind of numbness sets in and, with it, a kind of guilt because the collective agony is behind a kind of veil…

October Out-Back

The Eagle, Lion, and the Owl

The production of grand, lasting symbols is a process mirrored in the creation of great art. In practice it is grubby craftsmanship, messy, arduous, often obsessively mechanical. From this labor arises the new, but the labor itself is inspired by something lofty, already or always present, high above. Today I return to the Eagle—which irked me a while back in one of Dante’s cantos. The focus today is the American Bald Eagle in the Great Seal of the United States of America.

I must confess that heraldry had already gripped me as a child. Its mesmerizing quality merely strengthened later when I encountered phrases like “argent a lion azure with two bends gules athwart,” etc., and if the words “griffon sable” or “chevron between three swords erect” were present, so much the better. My last foray into this subject came in the context of the seal of Budapest, my place of birth. I researched the Roman eagle a few days ago frustrated by dearth of explanations and decent images. Then yesterday Peony, she who is the guarding spirit of the Tang Dynasty, wondered out loud: Was there a link between Minerva and the Eagle? This is the sort of challenge I cannot resist.

It turns out that the Great Seal, quite like the Seal of Budapest, was the work of a committee, a contentious labor extending over a long period. In our own case here three committees labored to generate the seal. The last finally yielded to the decisive action of a single person, that of Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress. He introduced the eagle; it had not appeared in earlier designs. He specified that the bald eagle be used—that oddly-named bird which isn’t bald at all. Curiously, the motivating force behind this selection was exerted by the image of thirteen arrows held by the bird. But that image was probably suggested by a book of emblems supplied by Benjamin Franklin. It had the eagle, the arrows, and the olive branch. At that time the seal of the Dutch Republic also featured a bunch of arrows—the only European state with a representative form government. The Dutch seal, however, depicted a lion holding seven arrows, one for each subdivisions of the state. Neither Rome nor Minerva seemed to play a visible or obvious role in this labor of creation (or, perhaps, appropriation), although—as in all matters of art and spirit—they were there up in the sky. The source (as usually) is Wikipedia. The synthesis, as always, mine.

The eagle or the lion predominate as symbols of sovereignty, and the two combined produce the griffon. The owl belongs, as it were, to a higher order of reality and also to a more ancient dispensation, the ages of the Goddess.

Minerva, in Etruscan and later in Roman times, was the preeminent image of the Goddess and, being All to All, presided over all important things. She was the goddess of war, poetry, medicine, wisdom, commerce, crafts, and magic. She also invented music. The owl was her bird and hence Owl and Wisdom remain forever united.

Here I cannot resist pointing out that Brigid, the Celtic Tripple Goddess, was the Nordic manifestation of the southern Minerva. Her inclusive governance of all things worthy is indicated in this quote from Lady Augusta Gregory, quoted in turn by Wikipedia here: The goddess was, Lady Gregory wrote, “A woman of poetry, and poets worshipped her, for her sway was very great and very noble. And she was a woman of healing along with that, and a woman of smith’s work, and it was she first made the whistle for calling one to another through the night. And the one side of her face was ugly, but the other side was very comely. And the meaning of her name was Breo-saighit, a fiery arrow.” And she honors me by being my Muse and blesses me by being my wife.

* * *

In conclusion, in a whisper, as it were (thinking of a post here titled “Thirteen”), I would point out that the stars above the eagle, the arrows in its claw, the leaves of the olive branch, and the letters in E pluribus unum all number thirteen.
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Minerva photo credits: Marble Bas Relief of Minerva With Her Owl at the Library Of Congress John Adams Building (Washington, DC). Originally uploaded by takomabibelot

The Medium?

In this house most of our books are in the attic on sturdy shelves I bought at Home Depot. The grand wall-to-walls of our biggest house, St. Albans Hotel, we called it, are no more. Books in current use occupy various diasporas. A cluster lives in my basement “office,” another in my actual office; we have bedroom libraries, his and hers, with resident books that after long or short sojourns return home again. We have three diasporas on the main floor too, on shelves in Brigitte’s office and in the living room, and out in the sunroom are less organized aggregates more or less helter-skelter in stacks. As luck would have it—this situation keeps me slim—the book I want is rarely on the floor where I happen to be; so up I go two flights to fetch the book, forget to repatriate it, hence the next time I go down two flights, etc. In one of these passes, up in the attic, my eye fell on a volume that has achieved honorable retirement: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. This once very popular book by Marshall McLuhan, published in 1964, was the source of a phrase that has persisted: “The medium is the message.” I’d read the book, and here it was again. With it came that strange cloudy feeling in which the impression the book had left is there again as a kind of mood. This book was part of a prophetic upsurge in those times, prostate before the clay feet of technology, much as the counterculture dreamt of The Greening of America. Neither cult appealed to me, but I did perceive a certain bright originality in Marshall McLuhan.

The medium is the message? This phrase, alas, suffers from a deep flaw in the modern understanding of reality. It assumes that structures, objects, things communicate. Marshall McLuhan was, you might say, merely updating Emerson who said the same thing midway through the nineteenth century at a higher level of abstraction:

The horseman serves the horse,
The neat-herd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
‘Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind,
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
       [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Ode Inscribed to William H. Channing”]

My attic experience lies about a month in the past, but it came back to me with a rush as I was reading the New York Times this morning. There was another cloud there, in my chest, another mood that wished to be rendered into concepts. And the concept hidden in the murk was, “It’s the intention that’s the message, and the medium be damned.”

Experience supports me. I well remember how, after we met in Germany, Brigitte and I used to watch television, German television—back when a single channel, which said good-night at midnight, did all the work. That kind of television sent quite a different message and, in effect, contradicted, by our own experience, what McLuhan claimed, namely that the content didn’t matter; it was the medium itself that spoke the volumes. On the contrary. The intention behind German television then reflected a noble intention. It intended to serve a public in a quite conscious way, and the content reflected that. The seasoned woodman knows his woods and the merest branch or rock or shade tells him of hidden things. So it is in other realms. The right nose can smell the intention behind every communication, however it may be packaged. And once you discern the intention, you already know how the content will be shaped.

Wolverine Lake, MI

Balsamic Vinegar

Great works of art are distillates of memory
In which the essences of past experience,
Boiled down, fermented, pressed, enriched, and crisscross-linked
By hard-forged values will persist in simple
Narrative or smooth-formed stone or marching meter,
Resisting time’s relentless rub and scrape and as
On air, magically suspended, are carried
By a Persian carpet despite their ponderous weight.