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Friday Reading on Monday

Is taking a picture of yourself everyday for a year a worthy project? Depends on a couple of things, of course, and one’s ability to determine what those things are.

What if one of those days was today? What’s the picture of… alive or dead? This is beginning to sound all motivational Monday so I’ll spare you and present instead a bit of the great rock critic, Lester Bangs. If you can’t feel it from this, put the camera down and call the doctor on yourself.

A Reasonable guide to Horrible Noise
by Lester Bangs

Christgau calls it “skronk.” I have always opted for the more obvious “horrible noise.” Guitars and human voices are primary vectors, though just about every other musical instrument has been employed over the years, as well as smashed crockery (e.g, first Pere Ubu album, “Sentimental Journey”), scraped garbage-can lids and bongolated oil drums (early Stooges), not to mention phono cartridges, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, etc. (John Cage, Variations II). You probably can’t stand it, but this stuff has its adherents (like me) and esthetic (if you want to call it that).

Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation. And one could, if so inclined, take it even further than that: in his essential book The Tuning of the World, under the heading “Sacred Noise and Secular Silence,” composer R. Murray Schafer reports that during the Middle Ages to which we are after all now returning “a certain type of noise, which we may now call Sacred Noise, was not only absent from the lists of proscripted sounds which societies from time to time drew up, but was, in fact, quite deliberately invoked as a break from the tedium of tranquillity.” Or, as Han Shan also did once advise one of his Zen acolytes at Kyoto in lieu of canewhipping the whelp, “If you’re feeling uptight and truly would prefer to sail into the mystic, just chuglug two quarts of coffee and throw on side one of the first Clash album (Eng. edition) at ten, full treble, no bass.” Any more koans you need answered, refer ’em to Wild Man Fischer.

The point of all this, of course, is that hideous racket is liberating: to “go with the flow,” as Jerry Brown put it in his book Thoughts (City Lights, 1975), is always a wiser course of action than planting oneself directly in the path of the Seventh Avenue express, itself best portrayed on record by “Sister Ray” and the first New York dolls album. I am also firmly convinced that one reason for the popularity of rap music, like disco and punk before it, is that it’s so utterly annoying to those of use whose cup of blare it isn’t; more than once its fans have walked up to a doorless telephone booth I was occupying, set their mammoth radios down on the sidewalk five inches from my feet, and stood there smiling at me. They didn’t want to use the phone, but I find it hard to begrudge them such gleeful rudeness; how could I, after walking all over the city with my also highly audible cassette player emitting free jazz, Metal Machine Music, PiL’s “Theme,”  Miles Davis’s “Rated X” and Iannis Xenakis’s Electro-Acoustic Music, part one of which the composer described as sound paintings of the bombing of Greece? So fair is fair, even given the differences in taste.

Which also extends into questions of set and setting. Once I was eating lunch with two friends near St. Mark’s Place, and a familiar sound started coming out of the jukebox. It took me a few seconds to recognize it, but that voice was unmistakable: “Hey,” I said, “it’s Lydia and the Jerks doing ‘Orphans’!” One friend laughed: “Well folks, enjoy your meals!” But she hadn’t noticed it until I’d brought it to her attention, and in context it didn’t sound all that more yakkety than the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” which immediately preceded it. Then of course there is the whole question of Muzak and whether digestion really is improved by the theme from Dr. Zhivago. Or whether heavy metal and punk are essentially the same sound, or disco and punk equally oppressive. but then, when Patti Smith reviewed in Creem back in ’75, she said she liked it precisely because it was oppressive, with which I at least partially concur. Everybody has their little peculiarities, as evidenced by the fact that some people actually like to listen to the radio! So perhaps I can best bear witness to my own by listing a few of the Gehennas of wretched squawl which have made me most aware that I am alive over the years:

The Stooges, “L.A. Blues,” Fun house (Elektra): After assaulting us for half an hour with six songs
including the bulleted-boar tenor sax of Steve Mackay, the Ann Arbor visionaries let the whole thing explode and melt all over itself in this arrhythmic 1970 offering, replete with igneous feedback blankets, Mackay blowing his brains out and disappearing forever, and the man called Pop mewling, snarling, sighing, and licking his paws.

The Germs, “Forming” / “Live” (What? single): It was all downhill for Darby and Co. after this 1978
debut. They could not yet play the rather standard-issue Ramonesclone headbangisms of their album, so they had to toddle along a guitar and rhythm track that sounded like Malt-o-Meal being trailed from dining room to TV set, while Darb puled burble whose chorus you could tell he had reached whenever he repeated the words “Pull my trigger / I’m bigger than…”

A Taste of DNA (American Clave EP, 1981): The lead instrument in the new, improved DNA is neither Arto Lindsay’s slamming and scrapings of the electric twelve-string guitar he never plays chords on nor his laconically imploding epiglottis. It is Tim Wright’s bass, which ain’t even bereft of melody. and Ikue Mori cuts Sonny Murray in my book. Sure wish Ayler was alive to play with these folks (don’t laugh; Ornette almost played on “Radio Ethiopia”) – he played “skronk” (the word sounds like something straight from his bell) if anybody ever did.

The Sounds of the Junkyard (Folkways): Recorded live, of course, and quite a bit more soothing than you would expect, though with titles like “Burning Out an Old Car” you know it can’t miss.

Yoko Ono, “Don’t worry Kyoko, Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow” (flip of John’s “Cold Turkey” single, and side two of Live Peace in Toronto LP, Apple, 1969-70): Interesting not only for John’s churning blues-unto-feedback guitar riff and how far ahead of her time Yoko was vocally(though dig Patty Waters’s “Black Is the Color” on ESP-Disk in early sixties) but for lyrical correspondence with Lydia Lunch’s “Orphan’s,” featured on Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (Migraine EP, 1980): If, as Christgau says, “Arto is the king of skronk,” then Lydia’s slide guitar work certainly qualifies her as queen. guys in my sixth-grade neighborhood used to entertain themselves by tying the head of a cat to one hot-rod fender and its tail to another and driving the cars apart slowly, which sounded a lot like part of this. Unless it’s for Catholic-school beatings by nuns, nostalgia doesn’t account for Lydia’s passionate “Baby Doll” wailing. If you only want to try one, make it this – nothing more deathly shrill has ever been recorded.

Jad Fair, The Zombies of Mora-Tau (Armageddon EP, 1980): Jad is half of 1/2 Japanese, and with his brother David made a 1/2 J. three record set that I still haven’t been able to listen to all the way through. A previous EP containing such highlights as “School of Love” was great, but this might even be better for the way Jad integrates atonal air-raid guitar with sub-Jonathan Richman white-burba-infantilismus vocals that as they natter tunelessly onward actually tell little stories (“And I said, ‘Dr. Frankenstein, you must die,’ and I shot him” and you hear the gun KABLOOIE!). This may be a whole new songwriting genre, or at least one terminal of the Lou Reed “I walked to the chair / Then I sat in it” school of lyrics.

Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music (RCA 1975): Don’t see this around much anymore, but it sure caused a ruckus when he sprang it on Transformer / Sally Can’t Dance rocky horror fans: a two-record, hour-long set of shrieking feedback run through various pieces of high-tech equipment. Sounded great in midwestern suburbs, but kinda unnecessary in NYC.

Blue Cheer, Vincebus Eruptum (Philips, 1968): These guys may well have been the first heavy metal band, but what counts here is not whether Leigh Stephens birthed that macho grunt before Mark Farmer (both stole it from Hendrix) but that Stephen’s sub-sub-sub-sub-Hendrix guitar overdubs stumbled around each other so ineptly they verged on a truly bracing atonality.

The Mars EP (Infidelity, 1980): With Teenage Jesus, DNA, and the Contortions, this group was
featured on the watershed No New York LP (You mean you don’t own a copy? What are you, sick or something?). But for my money this piece of beyond-lyrics, often  beyond-discernible-instrumentation psychotic noise is their absolute masterpiece – despite John Gavanti, their version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which I have never been able to listen to all the way through. This is not “industrial” but human music, and so what if said humans sound like they’re in a bad way? You are too. As it grinds and grieves and grovels, you cannot deny that they certainly plow what they sow. best cut: “Scorn.” Best rumor: Somebody dropped the original tapes, produced by Arto Lindsay, in water. And accidentally, at that.

-Village Voice, 30 September – 6 October 1981

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Appearance as Illusion

Over the course of working on a piece about a Swedish film director from the 70’s, I’ve been writing and thinking about the various forms of erotica, as proffered on film in this instance. On the wings of this spilling over into conversations with known associates, a friend passed this on to me. Though it’s talking about art, aren’t we always?

The connection between pornography and prostitution is witnessed by etymology. The effect of pornographic fantasy is to ‘commodify’ the object of desire, and to replace love and its vestigial sacraments with the law of the market. This is the final disenchantment of the human world. When sex becomes a commodity, the most important sanctuary of human ideals becomes a market, and value is reduced to price. That is what has happened in the last few decades, and it is the root fact of post-modern culture.

…

Sentimentality, like fantasy, is at war with reality. It consumes our finite emotional energies in self-regarding ways and numbs us to the world of other people. It atrophies our sympathies, by guiding them into worn and easy channels, and so destroys not only our ability to feel, but also our ability to bring help where help is needed and to take risks on behalf of higher things. It may seem to project and endorse a vision of those higher things, to take on itself some of the ennobling function which is the imagination’s proper task. But the appearance is an illusion. The object of sentimental emotion is in fact dragged down by the feeling which makes use of it, made grubby and tawdry in the game of emotional exchange. Sentimentality is another form of profanation. While pornography puts our lowest appetites on sale, sentimentality trades in love and virtue. But the effect is the same -to deprive these higher things of all reality, either by cynically denying them, or by making them insubstantial, dream-like, adrift in a never-never land where no human being can dwell. In the great works of imagination, by contrast, we are invited to enter a higher realm, in which real human motives and real human sentiments find their resolution and redemption. This higher realm is not a fantasy-product: it is not the surrogate object of base and existing desires. It is the true object of feelings which it itself engenders, and whereby it cleanses and sanctifies our lives.

It’s not long, so you should read the whole thing. Thanks, ac.

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W.E.B. Du Bois

In remarks yesterday before the NAACP that showed more than a few flashes of the candidate, Obama name-checked W.E.B. Du Bois as one of the founders of that organization. This is from a chapter called Of the Black Belt, from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903.

It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,—a sort of dull, determined heat that seems quite independent of the sun; so it took us some days to muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture out on the long country roads, that we might see this unknown world. Finally we started. It was about ten in the morning, bright with a faint breeze, and we jogged leisurely southward in the valley of the Flint. We passed the scattered box-like cabins of the brick-yard hands, and the long tenement-row facetiously called “The Ark,” and were soon in the open country, and on the confines of the great plantations of other days. There is the “Joe Fields place”; a rough old fellow was he, and had killed many a “nigger” in his day. Twelve miles his plantation used to run,—a regular barony. It is nearly all gone now; only straggling bits belong to the family, and the rest has passed to Jews and Negroes. Even the bits which are left are heavily mortgaged, and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants. Here is one of them now,—a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker, illiterate, but versed in farm-lore, as his nodding crops declare. This distressingly new board house is his, and he has just moved out of yonder moss-grown cabin with its one square room.

From the curtains in Benton’s house, down the road, a dark comely face is staring at the strangers; for passing carriages are not every-day occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a good-sized family, and manages a plantation blasted by the war and now the broken staff of the widow. He might be well-to-do, they say; but he carouses too much in Albany. And the half-desolate spirit of neglect born of the very soil seems to have settled on these acres. In times past there were cotton-gins and machinery here; but they have rotted away.

The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken. Here are the remnants of the vast plantations of the Sheldons, the Pellots, and the Rensons; but the souls of them are passed. The houses lie in half ruin, or have wholly disappeared; the fences have flown, and the families are wandering in the world. Strange vicissitudes have met these whilom masters. Yonder stretch the wide acres of Bildad Reasor; he died in war-time, but the upstart overseer hastened to wed the widow. Then he went, and his neighbors too, and now only the black tenant remains; but the shadow-hand of the master’s grand-nephew or cousin or creditor stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rent remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor. Only black tenants can stand such a system, and they only because they must. Ten miles we have ridden to-day and have seen no white face.

A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cotton-fields. This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom,—the shadow of a marvellous dream. And where is the King? Perhaps this is he,—the sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty acres with two lean mules, and fighting a hard battle with debt. So we sit musing, until, as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a fairer scene suddenly in view,—a neat cottage snugly ensconced by the road, and near it a little store. A tall bronzed man rises from the porch as we hail him, and comes out to our carriage. He is six feet in height, with a sober face that smiles gravely. He walks too straight to be a tenant,—yes, he owns two hundred and forty acres. “The land is run down since the boom-days of eighteen hundred and fifty,” he explains, and cotton is low. Three black tenants live on his place, and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco, snuff, soap, and soda, for the neighborhood. Here is his gin-house with new machinery just installed. Three hundred bales of cotton went through it last year. Two children he has sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, but cotton is down to four cents; I know how Debt sits staring at him.

Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the Cotton Kingdom have not wholly disappeared. We plunge even now into great groves of oak and towering pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery. This was the “home-house” of the Thompsons,—slave-barons who drove their coach and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune into the rising cotton industry of the fifties, and with the falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole away. Yonder is another grove, with unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and grass-grown paths. The Big House stands in half-ruin, its great front door staring blankly at the street, and the back part grotesquely restored for its black tenant. A shabby, well-built Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs hard to pay rent to the white girl who owns the remnant of the place. She married a policeman, and lives in Savannah.

Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now,—Shepherd’s, they call it,—a great whitewashed barn of a thing, perched on stilts of stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting here a moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at almost any time. And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and near gather here and talk and eat and sing. There is a school-house near,—a very airy, empty shed; but even this is an improvement, for usually the school is held in the church. The churches vary from log-huts to those like Shepherd’s, and the schools from nothing to this little house that sits demurely on the county line. It is a tiny plank-house, perhaps ten by twenty, and has within a double row of rough unplaned benches, resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Opposite the door is a square home-made desk. In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in the other a dim blackboard. It is the cheerfulest schoolhouse I have seen in Dougherty, save in town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodge-house two stories high and not quite finished. Societies meet there,—societies “to care for the sick and bury the dead”; and these societies grow and flourish.

…

How curious a land is this,—how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia. Dougherty County is the west end of the Black Belt, and men once called it the Egypt of the Confederacy. It is full of historic interest. First there is the Swamp, to the west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows sullenly southward. The shadow of an old plantation lies at its edge, forlorn and dark. Then comes the pool; pendent gray moss and brackish waters appear, and forests filled with wildfowl. In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull red anger; but nobody minds. Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts, dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in living green. Spreading trees spring from a prodigal luxuriance of undergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the black background, until all is one mass of tangled semi-tropical foliage, marvellous in its weird savage splendor. Once we crossed a black silent stream, where the sad trees and writhing creepers, all glinting fiery yellow and green, seemed like some vast cathedral,—some green Milan builded of wildwood. And as I crossed, I seemed to see again that fierce tragedy of seventy years ago. Osceola, the Indian-Negro chieftain, had risen in the swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance. His war-cry reached the red Creeks of Dougherty, and their war-cry rang from the Chattahoochee to the sea. Men and women and children fled and fell before them as they swept into Dougherty. In yonder shadows a dark and hideously painted warrior glided stealthily on,—another and another, until three hundred had crept into the treacherous swamp. Then the false slime closing about them called the white men from the east. Waist-deep, they fought beneath the tall trees, until the war-cry was hushed and the Indians glided back into the west. Small wonder the wood is red.

Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of chained feet marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in these rich swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the Flint to the Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms with ninety thousand acres of tilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In a single decade the cotton output increased four-fold and the value of lands was tripled. It was the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life of careless extravagance reigned among the masters. Four and six bob-tailed thoroughbreds rolled their coaches to town; open hospitality and gay entertainment were the rule. Parks and groves were laid out, rich with flower and vine, and in the midst stood the low wide-halled “big house,” with its porch and columns and great fire-places.

And yet with all this there was something sordid, something forced,—a certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all this show and tinsel built upon a groan? “This land was a little Hell,” said a ragged, brown, and grave-faced man to me. We were seated near a roadside blacksmith-shop, and behind was the bare ruin of some master’s home. “I ’ve seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked aside, and the plough never stopped. And down in the guardhouse, there’s where the blood ran.”

…

We pass the Munson place, where a plucky white widow is renting and struggling; and the eleven hundred acres of the Sennet plantation, with its Negro overseer. Then the character of the farms begins to change. Nearly all the lands belong to Russian Jews; the overseers are white, and the cabins are bare board-houses scattered here and there. The rents are high, and day-laborers and “contract” hands abound. It is a keen, hard struggle for living here, and few have time to talk. Tired with the long ride, we gladly drive into Gillonsville. It is a silent cluster of farm-houses standing on the cross-roads, with one of its stores closed and the other kept by a Negro preacher. They tell great tales of busy times at Gillonsville before all the railroads came to Albany; now it is chiefly a memory. Riding down the street, we stop at the preacher’s and seat ourselves before the door. It was one of those scenes one cannot soon forget:—a wide, low, little house, whose motherly roof reached over and sheltered a snug little porch. There we sat, after the long hot drive, drinking cool water,—the talkative little storekeeper who is my daily companion; the silent old black woman patching pantaloons and saying never a word; the ragged picture of helpless misfortune who called in just to see the preacher; and finally the neat matronly preacher’s wife, plump, yellow, and intelligent. “Own land?” said the wife; “well, only this house.” Then she added quietly, “We did buy seven hundred acres up yonder, and paid for it; but they cheated us out of it. Sells was the owner.” “Sells!” echoed the ragged misfortune, who was leaning against the balustrade and listening, “he ’s a regular cheat. I worked for him thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in cardboard checks which were to be cashed at the end of the month. But he never cashed them,—kept putting me off. Then the sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furniture—” “Furniture?” I asked; “but furniture is exempt from seizure by law.” “Well, he took it just the same,” said the hard-faced man.
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What is Design?

The dictum for which Einstein is famously quoted,”You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war,” bears a pointed similarity to the way we are presently enmeshed in a no man’s between an unknown future and well-trodden past. That is, we are generally accepting of the fact that our world has changed from its industrial-model platform; yet we continue to plan, design, build, educate and think as if it has not. The comparison to war and peace is inexact but illuminating. The idea that one will get us the other is a fantasy lived and re-lived throughout the ages. By the same token, new systems for human viability will not emerge from continued industrial machine age thinking.

There is a chasm, therefore, between the way we built our industrial age society and the manner in which we will navigate a post-industrial future. They bare so little resemblance that we have a hard time imagining that future, letting go of some of the major characteristics of the past to grab hold of… what? We’re not sure. And reaching for something we’re not sure of makes little sense to us. We have spent no small amount of energy greatly trying to eliminate uncertainty in many aspects of life. But this situation requires us to orient ourselves in this chasm of great uncertainty – a feat which points to our greatest weakness.

The even greater conundrum, it seems, is that it is up to us to change our own thinking and ways of learning about the world going forward. Instead of honing in on small problems, reductive elimination of unwanted elements and specialization, there is a need to zoom out to a point where can ask very broad questions, like, what is design?

The systems scholar Bela H. Banathy wrote extensively on this subject of societal transformation, asking some great questions and positing some rather intuitive points about changing the ways we live.. The following is from his research paper, We Enter the Twentieth Century with Schooling Designed in the Nineteenth. (Copyright 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

The design of social systems, such as education, is a future-creating human activity. People in these systems engage in design in order to create and implement systems, based on their vision of what those systems should be. Or, they may redesign their existing system in order to realize their changing expectations and aspirations and the expectations of their environment. Competence in design enables us to create systems that enrich the quality of our lives and add value to the systems in which we live and work.

In general, people in our educational systems are not yet aware of the potential and power of systems design. Education in design and expertise in design are limited to a few technical professions. But when it comes to the design of systems in which we live and work, we are the experts. When it comes to designing educational systems, the right and responsibility to design are shared by those who serve the system, who are served by the system and who are affected by it. It is such collective involvement in design that makes a system authentic and sustainable. Furthermore, each and every community is unique. It becomes the task of each and every community to design its own unique educational system. Nobody has the right to design educational systems – or any social system – for someone else. The age of social engineering by outside experts is over. We have arrived at the age of ‘user-designers’ people designing their own systems. That is what true empowerment is about. But empowerment cannot be given; it has to be learned.

A precondition of engaging in educational design is the development of competence among ‘user-designers’ that enables them to design their own system. Only the attainment of design competence makes empowerment a reality. Without it, empowerment is just an empty word, nothing more than political rhetoric. Thus we have to create opportunities and programs for design learning, for the development of design competence. People empowered by such learning will become competent individually to design their own lives and, collectively, to design the systems in which they live and work, design their communities and design their systems of living and human development.

Emphasis mine.

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War’s ensanguined cloud

As so many of us celebrate American Independence Day with what we might consider healthy doses of our martial history, perhaps this proclivity should be leavened with some reverence for one of our most sympathetic souls. Walt Whitman was born in Brooklyn one hundred and ninety years ago and grew into a man whose patriotism was indistinguishable from his sensitivity to nature and the suffering of his fellow citizens. From among many elements of his development, this note from an online biography.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a “purged” and “cleansed” life. He wrote freelance journalism and visited the wounded at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in the war.

Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals and stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. Harlan fired the poet.

Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. In Washington, he lived on a clerk’s salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the patients he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid brother. From time to time writers both in the states and in England sent him “purses” of money so that he could get by.

Penury aside, his legacy would have been quite different had he served as a general or president, much less a captain of industry, rather than a poet. What this says about us he says all the better, with much greater elegance and precision, here in Death of a Nature-Lover, from 1843.

Not in a gorgeous hall of pride
   Where tears fall thick, and loved ones sigh,
Wished he, when the dark hour approached
   To drop his veil of flesh, and die.

Amid the thundercrash of strife,
   Where hovers War’s ensanguined cloud,
And bright swords flash and banners fly
   Above the wounds, and groans, and blood.

Not there—not there! Death’s look he’d cast
   Around a furious tiger’s den,
Rather than in the monstrous sight
   Of the red butcheries of men.

Days speed: the time for that last look
   Upon this glorious earth has come:
The Power he served so well vouchsafes
   The sun to shine, the flowers to bloom.

Just ere the closing of the day,
   His fainting limbs he needs will have
Borne out into the fresh free air,
   Where sweet shrubs grow, and proud trees wave.

At distance, o’er the pleasant fields,
   A bay by misty vapors curled,
He gazes on, and thinks the haven
   For which to leave a grosser world.

He sorrows not, but smiles content,
   Dying there in that fragrant place,
Gazing on blossom, field, and bay,
   As on their Maker’s very face.

The cloud-arch bending overhead,
   There, at the setting of the sun
He bids adieu to earth, and steps
   Down to the World Unknown.

* * *

Independence Day, indeed.

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Building a Staircase

They call this a WWIII propaganda poster. Okay. So if it’s a how-to kind of day, plus it being summer and the height of the vacation season, maybe we turn to the Lawrence Durrell Travel Reader. This one is How to Buy a House, from Bitter Lemons, 1957.

SABRI TAHIR’S OFFICE IN THE TURKISH QUARTER of the Kyrenia bore a sun-blistered legend describing him as a valuer and estate agent, but his activities had proliferated since the board was painted and he was clearly many things besides. The centre of the cobweb was a dark cool godown perched stategically upopn a junction of streets, facing the little Turkish shrine of some saint or warrior whose identity had vanished from the record, but whose stone tomb was still an object of veneration and pilgrimage for the faithful. It stood under a dusty and desiccated pepper tree, and one could always find an ex voto or two hanging beside it.

Beyond was a featureless empty field of nettles in which stood a couple of shacks full of disembodied pieces of machinery and huhe heaps if uncut carob and olive, mingled with old railway sleepers and the carcasses of buses which turned up her at the end of the trail, as if to some Elephants’ Graveyard, to be turned into fuel. Sabri’s empire was still in an embryonic stage, though ti was quite clear that he was speculating wisely. A circular saw moaned and gnashed all day in one of the shacks under the ministrations of two handsome Turkish youths with green headbands and dilapidated clothes; a machine for making cement blocks performed its slow but punctual evacuations, accompanied by a seductive crunch.

Sabri could watch all these diverse activities from the darkness of his shop…

On that first morning when I stepped into the shadows of his shop, the headquarters of the empire, he was sitting dreamily at his desk mending a faulty cigarette-lighter. His good morning was civil, though preoccupied and indifferent; but as I approached he paused for one instant to snap finger and thumb and a chair materialized from the shadows behind him. I sat down. He abandoned his task and sat silent and unwinking before me. ‘Mr. Sabri,’ I said, ‘I need your help. I have been making inquiries in Kyrenia and on all sides I am told that you are the most untrustworthy man of business in the place – in fact, the biggest rogue.’

He did not find the idea offensive so much as merely interesting. His shrewd eye sharpened a trifle, however, and he lowered his head to scan me more gravely. I went on. ‘Now knowing the Levant as I do, I know that a reputation for being a rogue means one thing and one thing only. it means that one is cleverer than other people.’ I accompanied this with an appropriate gesture – for cleverness in the hand-language is indicated by placing the forefinger of the right hand slowly and portentiouusly on the temple: tapping slightly, as one might tap a breakfast-egg. (Incidentally, one has to be careful, as if one turns the finger in the manner of turning a bolt in a thread, the significance is quite different: it means to be ‘soft in the head’ or to ‘have a screw loose’.) I tapped my skull softly. “Cleverer than other people,’ I repeated. ‘So clever that the stupid are envious of one.’

He did not assent or dissent from the proposition. He simply sat and considered me as one might a piece of machinery if one were uncertain of its use. But the expression in his eyes shifted slightly in a manner suggesting the faintest, most tenuous admiration. ‘I am hee,’ I went on, convinced by this time that his English was good, for he had followed me unerringly so far, to judge by his face, ‘I am here as a comparatively poor man to ask you a favour, not to make you a business proposition. There is no money to be made out of me. But I want you to let me use your brains and experience. I’m trying to find a cheap village house in which to settle for a year or two – perhaps forever if I like it enough here. I can see now that you I was not wrong; far from being a rogue you are obviously a Turkish gentleman, and I feel I can confide myself entirely to your care – if you will accept such a thing. I have nothing to offer except gratitude and friendship. I ask you as a Turkish gentleman to assit me.’

Sabri’s colour had changed slowly throughout this harrangue and when I ended he was blushing warmly. I could see that I had scored a diplomatic stroke in throwing myself completely upon the iron law of hospitality which underpins all relations in the Levant. More than this, I think the magic word ‘gentleman’ turned the trick in my favor for it accorded him an unaccustomed place in the consideration of strangers which he certainly merited, and which he henceforward lived up to in his dealings with me. By a single tactful speech I had made a true friend.

The negotiations continue from there, but you get the idea. I had to look it up but a godown is a kind of warehouse or other storage place. Which completely makes sense. Once again, knowledge wins!

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Away from the Mist

Some say you have to read Kant before you can understand Schopenhauer. Well, as one of my uncles used to tell us boys, “Can’t never could.”

This is from The World as Will and Idea by Arthur Schopenhauer, from the supplements to the third book, chapter xxxiv, On the Inner Nature of Art

Every work of art accordingly really aims at showing us life and the things as they are in truth, but cannot be directly discened by every one through the mist of objective and subjective contengencies. Art takes away this mist.

The works of poets, sculptors and representative artists in general contain an unacknowledged treasure of profound wisdom; just because out of them the wisdom of the nature of things itself speaks, whose utterances they merely interpret by illustrations and purer repetitions. On this account, however, every one who reads the poem or looks at the picture must certainly contribute out of his means to bring that wisdom to light; accordingly he comprehends only so much of it as his capacity and culture admit of; as in the deep sea each sailor only lets down the lead as far as the length of the line will allow. Before a picture, as before a prince, everyone must stand, waiting to see whether and what it will speak to him; and, as in the case of the prince, so here he must not himself address it, for then he would hear himself. It follows from all this that in the works of the representative arts all truth is certainly contained, yet only virtualiter or implicite; philosophy, on the other hand, endeavors to supply the same truth actualiter and explicite, and therefore, in this sense, is related to art as wine to grapes. What it promises to supply would be, as it were, an already realised and clear gain, a firm and abiding possession; while that which proceeds from the achievements and works of art is one which has constantly to be reproduced anew. Therefore, however, it makes demands, not only upon those who produce its works, but also upon those who are to enjoy them, which are discouraging and hard to comply with. Therefore its public remains small, while that of art is large.

The co-operation of the beholder, which is referred to above, as demanded for the enjoyment of the work of art, depends partly on the fact the every work of art can only produce its effect through the medium of the fancy; therefore it must excite this, and can never allow it to be left out of the play and remain inactive. This is a condition of the aesthetic effect, and therefore a fundamental law of all fine arts. But it follows from this that, through the work of art, everything must not be directly given to the senses, but rather only so much as is demanded to lead the fancy on to the right path; something, and indeed the ultimate thing, must always be left over for the fancy to do. Even the author must always leave something over for the reader to think; for Voltaire has rightly said,” Le secret d’etre ennuyeux, c’est de tout dire.” [my trans – the secret to being boring is to say everything] But besides this, in art the best of all is too spiritual to be given directly to the senses; it must be born int he imagination of the beholder, although begotten by the work of art. It depends upon this that the sketches of the great masters often effect more than their finished pictures; although another advantage certainly contributes to this, namely, that they are completed offhand in the moment of conception; while the perfected painting is only produced through continued effort, by means of skillful deliberation and persistent intention, for the inspiration cannot last till it is completed. From the fundamental aesthetical law we are speaking of, it is further to be explained why wax figures never produce an aesthetic effect, and therefore are not properly works of fine art, although it is just in them that the imitation of nature is able to reach it highest grade. For they leave nothing for the imagination to do. Sculpture gives merely the form without the color; painting gives the color, but the mere appearance of form; thus both appeal to the imagination of the beholder. The wax figure, on the other hand, gives all, form and color at once; whense arises the appearance of reality, and the imagination is left out of account. Poetry, on the contrary, appeals to the imagination alone, which it sets in action by means of mere words.

Leprechauns notwithstanding.

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Still away

A close up of a miniature model exhibit of the Green Corn Dance, at the American Museum of Natural History. What is the Green Corn Dance?

This is from the wikipedia entry on the Muskogee tradition of the Dance:

the Green Corn festival is called Posketv (Bus-get-uh) which means “to Fast”. This ceremony is celebrated as the new year of the Stomp dance society and takes place on the central ceremonial Square Ground which is an elevated square platform with the flat edges of the square facing the cardinal directions. Arbors are constructed upon the flat edges of the square in which the men sit facing one of the four directions. This is encircled by a ring-mound of earth outside of which are constructed the clan houses. In the center of this is the ceremonial fire, which is referred to by many names including ‘Grandfather’ fire. Ceremonially, this fire is the focus of the songs and prayers of the people and is considered to be a living sacred being who transmits our prayers to Ofvnkv (the One Above) and Hsakvtvmes (the Breathmaker). The whole general ceremony centers on the relighting of this ceremonial fire.

The Posketv is the Creek and Seminole New Year. At this time all offenses are forgiven save for rape and murder which were executable or banishable offenses. Historically nearly everything would be torn down and replaced within the tribal town. In modern tribal towns and Stomp Dance societies only the ceremonial fire, the cook fires and certain other ceremonial objects will be replaced. Everyone usually begins gathering by the weekend prior to the Posketv, working, praying, dancing and fasting off and on until the big day.

The first day of the Posketv is the Ribbon or “Ladies” Dance in which the women of the community perform a purifying dance to prepare the ceremonial ground for the renewal ceremony. Following this there is a family meal and by midnight all the men of the community begin fasting. The men sleep right outside the ceremonial square to guard it from intruders.

The men rise before dawn on the second day and remove the previous year’s fire and clean the ceremonial area from all coals and ash. There are numerous dances and rites that are performed throughout the day as the men continue to fast in the hot southern summer. During this time the women clean out their cook-fires as the central ceremonial fire is relit and nurtured with a special medicine made by the Hillis Hiya. Many Creeks still practice the sapi or ceremonial scratches, a type of bloodletting in the mid afternoon. Then the head woman of each family camp comes to the ceremonial circle where they are handed some hot coals from the newly established ceremonial fire, which they take back to their camp and start their cook fires.

During this time, men who have earned the right to a war-name are named and the Feather Dance is performed. This dance is a blessing of the area and a rite of passage for youths becoming men. It consists of 16 different performances including a display of war-party tactics and virility.

The fasting usually ends by supper-time after the word is given by the women that the food is prepared, at which time the men march in single-file formation down to a body of water, typically a flowing creek or river for a ceremonial dip in the water and private men’s meeting. They then return to the ceremonial square and perform a single Stomp Dance before retiring to their home camps for a feast. During this time, the participants in the medicine rites are not allowed to sleep, as part of their fast. At midnight a Stomp Dance ceremony is held, which includes fasting and continues on through the night. This ceremony usually ends shortly after dawn, part the participants in the previous day’s rites do not sleep till mid-day.

Posketv the “Ceremonial Fast,” commonly referred to as “Green Corn” in English is the central and most festive holiday of the traditional Muskogee people. It represents not only the renewal of the annual cycle, but of the community’s social and spiritual life as a whole. This is symbolically associated with the return of summer and the ripening of the new corn.

Just sayin’.

For more on the Green Corn Dance, see Mornings in Mexico by David Herbert Lawrence. Good luck finding it, however, interweb notwithstanding.

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Imported and Distorted

Insight on the new Honda Insight (hybrid automobile) from a climate change skeptic, whose cruel sense of humor almost circles back around to making sense. Sample.

The nickel for the battery has to come from somewhere. Canada, usually. It has to be shipped to Japan, not on a sailing boat, I presume. And then it must be converted, not in a tree house, into a battery, and then that battery must be transported, not on an ox cart, to the Insight production plant in Suzuka. And then the finished car has to be shipped, not by Thor Heyerdahl, to Britain, where it can be transported, not by wind, to the home of a man with a beard who thinks he’s doing the world a favour.

Why doesn’t he just buy a Range Rover, which is made from local components, just down the road? No, really — weird-beards buy locally produced meat and vegetables for eco-reasons. So why not apply the same logic to cars?

Just so.

Reminds me of L.F. Celine’s Bardamu in Journey to the End of the Night, when the doctor-cum-mal vivant spends some time working at a Ford Plant near Detroit.

When we’d put on our clothes again, we were sent off in slow-moving single files and hesitant groups towards the places where the vast crashing sound of the machines came from. The whole building shook, and oneself from one’s soles to one’s ears was possessed by this shaking, which vibrated from the ground, the glass panes and all this metal, a series of shocks from floor to ceiling. One was turned by force into a machine oneself, the whole of one’s carcass quivering in this vast frenzy of noise, which filled you within and all around the inside of your skull, and lower down rattled your bowels, and climbed to your eyes in infinite, little, quick unending strokes. As you went along, you lost your companions. You gave them a little smile when they fell away, as if it was all the greatest fun in the world. You couldn’t speak to them any longer or hear them. Each time, three or four stayed behind around a machine…. The little bucking trolley car loaded with metal bits and pieces strives to make headway through the workmen. Out of the light! They jump aside to let the hysterical little thing pass along. And hop! There it goes like mad thing, clinking on its way amid belts and flywheels, taking the men their ration of shackles.

Since we cannot but ask for more, seconds all around.

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Vlad, Paul and Barack walk into a blog

And the punch line: “oh, to be a flaw on that why.” Thank you, I’m here all week. Onto the set-up.

Krugman goes to China and his hair catches fire.

The President gives the commencement address at Arizona State and the guy’s just, well…

It should be clear to you by now the category into which all of you fall. For we gather here tonight in times of extraordinary difficulty, for the nation and for the world. The economy remains in the midst of a historic recession, the worst we’ve seen since the Great Depression; the result, in part, of greed and irresponsibility that rippled out from Wall Street and Washington, as we spent beyond our means and failed to make hard choices. (Applause.) We’re engaged in two wars and a struggle against terrorism. The threats of climate change, nuclear proliferation, and pandemic defy national boundaries and easy solutions.

For many of you, these challenges are also felt in more personal terms. Perhaps you’re still looking for a job — or struggling to figure out what career path makes sense in this disrupted economy. Maybe you’ve got student loans — no, you definitely have student loans — (applause) — or credit card debts, and you’re wondering how you’ll ever pay them off. Maybe you’ve got a family to raise, and you’re wondering how you’ll ensure that your children have the same opportunities you’ve had to get an education and pursue their dreams.

Now, in the face of these challenges, it may be tempting to fall back on the formulas for success that have been pedaled so frequently in recent years. It goes something like this: You’re taught to chase after all the usual brass rings; you try to be on this “who’s who” list or that top 100 list; you chase after the big money and you figure out how big your corner office is; you worry about whether you have a fancy enough title or a fancy enough car. That’s the message that’s sent each and every day, or has been in our culture for far too long — that through material possessions, through a ruthless competition pursued only on your own behalf — that’s how you will measure success.

Now, you can take that road — and it may work for some. But at this critical juncture in our nation’s history, at this difficult time, let me suggest that such an approach won’t get you where you want to go; it displays a poverty of ambition — that in fact, the elevation of appearance over substance, of celebrity over character, of short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end.

And so, since it’s Christmas and you’re the Priest… a howdy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Father’s Butterflies:

When we affirm the conformity between the cycles of a species in time and in space, we are very far from the concept of evolution. In both time and space the development of variational distinctions is subordinate to the circle enclosing the species. One more step and we are out of the circle and have entered the domain, equally delineated and autonomous, of a different species. When a paleontologist aligns a row of progressively larger skeletons purporting to represent the evolution of the “horse,” the deception is that, in reality, no hereditary connection exists; the concept of species is hopelessly confused here with those of genus and family; we are faced with such a number of different species of animals that at one time formed, with other species related to each of them, a specific spatial cycle of a particular genus, to which a particular cycle corresponds in time; all these spheres of species (and genera)have long ago disintegrated; and the various species of Equus that we currently encounter on earth in a far from typical period of the species’ harmony, nonetheless represent more fully the “history of the horse” than a series of heterogeneous animals arranged on an evolutionary ladder. By this we certainly do not mean to say that the work of evolutionists has no scientific significance. The value of biological observations is in no sense diminished by the fact that deductions from them might have either been made a priori, or else have tempted thought into a vicious circle…. One is tempted to compare the evolutionist to a passenger who, observing through a railroad-car window a series of phenomena that implies a certain logic of structure (such as the appearance of cultivated fields, followed by factory buildings as a city approaches), would discern in these results and illustrations of movement the reality and laws of the very force governing the shift of his gaze.

Yet that a certain development of forms, from which the “bubbles of species” arose, somehow grew, for some reason burst, is beyond doubt. It is this path that we must now explore.

REACHING again into the basket of generally accessible examples, let us recall the analogy noticeable between the development of individual and species. Here an examination of the human brain can be most fruitful. We emerge from darkness and infancy and regress into infancy and darkness, completing an entire circle of existence.

In the course of life we learn, among other things, the concept of “species,” unknown to the ancestors of our culture. Yet, not only is the history of mankind parodied by the developmental history of the writer of these and other lines, but the development of human ratiocination, in both the individual and historic senses, is extraordinarily linked to nature, the spirit of nature considered as the aggregate of all its manifestations, and all the modifications of them conditioned by time. How is it conceivable, in fact, that amid the huge jumble containing the embryos of countless organs (of which up to forty-three are currently represented), the magnificent chaos of nature never included thought? One can doubt the ability of a genius to animate marble, but one cannot doubt that one afflicted by idiocy will never create a Galatea. Human intelligence, with all its limitations and rights, inasmuch as it is a gift of nature, and a perpetually repeated one, cannot fail to exist in the warehouse of the bestower. It may, in that dark storehouse, differ from its species seen in sunlight as a marble god is distinct from the convolutions of the sculptor’s brain — but still it exists. Certain whims of nature can be, if not appreciated, at least merely noticed only by a brain that has developed in a related manner, and the sense of these whims can only be that — like a code or a family joke — they are accessible only to the illuminated, i.e., human, mind, and have no other mission than to give it pleasure — we are speaking of the fantastic refinement of “protective mimicry,” which, in a world lacking an appointed observer endowed with artistic sensitivity, imagination, and humor, would simply be useless (lost upon the world), like a small volume of Shakespeare lying open in the dust of a boundless desert. This fact, even taken alone, implies a silent, subtle, charmingly sly conspiracy between nature and the one who alone can understand, who alone has at last achieved this comprehension — a spiritual alliance concluded above and beyond all the seething, the stirring, the darkness of roaming reveilles, behind the back of all the world’s organic life.

Just as an increase in the brain’s complexity is accompanied by a multiplication of concepts, so the history of nature demonstrates a gradual development in nature herself of the basic concept of species and genus as they take form. We are right in saying quite literally, in the human, cerebral sense, that nature grows wiser as time passes, that in a given period it has reached this or that specific stage. The only nit that can be picked is that we do not know what we imply when we say “nature” or “the spirit of nature.” But, as we shall see, this monstrous “X” to which, taking advantage of its infinite spaciousness, we ascribe responsibility even for our ignorance about its true countenance, does not avoid us in some inviolable mist, but merely does not turn our way. This particularity, in turn, opens the way toward identification, and strikes the first blow toward concrete comprehension, promising us what we, who were raised on the idea of orbits, can naturally expect, upon the sighting of anything revolving away from us, that it will keep rotating until it turns back to face us.

Until that happens we must be content with the half-smile of averted lips, a conspiratorial sign, an elusive glance from narrowed eyes. In order to bring into focus the concrete subject that interests us — the formation of the species concept in nature’s mind — this sign should suffice; but the path of thought pursuing the given objective is such a mirror-slippery slope — follows, like any correct but barely passable path, such a narrow ledge above such a chasm of nonsense — that its very novelty can already give a sense of falling.