Derek Alexander's blog

paya

2012-01-25T08:38:00.001-05:00

Burmese pagodas, or paya, taught me something about architecture. I have a basically modern, western view of architecture - not surprisingly. When I think about - or appreciate - the exterior form of a building, I think in large part of enclosure and purpose. Enclosure: how is the exterior space resolving the problem of packaging the needed interior spaces. Purpose: what is the function of the building - a consideration partly bound up in the question of enclosure.

In short, form follows function - the familiar formula. Obviously there is more to my view of architecture than that, but that is a substantial part.

Burmese paya force me to think outside that formula. First, the most typical and prominent type of paya has no interior spaces - it is a solid mass. Second, its function chiefly to serve as an object of religious devotion - that is, to be looked at a certain way. The modernist use of function to interpret or solve the visual breaks down under these two facts.

(To be sure, most paya entomb relics - sometimes of great importance, sometimes simply included in order to make the pagoda complete. So I understand that there is something inside and that the paya functions as a kind of casket. But these facts don't change my point because this sort of enclosure tells you nothing about exterior shape - because the things enclosed are so insignificant in mass relative to the whole paya that they tell you nothing about shape and because such a massive casket tells you nothing about the thing enclosed - any shape would work.)

So, what to make of a paya architecturally? I think you have to think of them as highly elaborated devotional mounds. (Some early paya are simply hemispherical mounds - others are sort of blobs - like Bupaya in Bagan.)

Well, first it is a raised mound - the foundation became square. Second, it has a tapering, round top, or point, usually hatted with a "hti". Square base, conical top. That's the idea but without more it wouldn't look very good.

The builders wanted to integrate the square base with the cylindrical top, and they also wanted to complicate the ascending cone, to make it look good. The basic task is to circle the square (going from the bottom up, which is certainly how you look at a paya, rather than top down). Often this is done with elaborated octagons - beginning as squares with clipped corners at the bottom, and then modifying in ascending terraces towards a more rounded shape. These complexes of octaganal terraces, almost square at the bottom, almost round by the time they give way to the actually round middle stages of the paya, can be very beautiful indeed.

The next task is to draw the cone into bulb-like sections that look good and to apply some decoration (roundels, crenellation, florets, etc.) that embellishes but does not overwhelm. The effect, at its best, can be both somewhat flowerlike (like the bud of a waxy flower like a tulip or lily) and somehow anthropomorphic - almost like the shoulders of a person giving way to the neck, then the head.

So, it comes down to proportion, the quality of the transition from base to spire, and the beauty of the banding, bulbing and sculptural decoration. Shwedagon comes out very well by these standards, as does Ananda.

And there is a sort of template - well-funded modern paya tend to show up in Shwedagon-like proportions that offer no novelty, and often no delight, but are competent, pleasing and safe. With these, the eye therefore is drawn chiefly to the quality of execution, use of materials, and selection of site.

onyx sculpture

2012-01-24T17:02:00.000-05:00

Productive stubbornness is an art. The art is in having adamantine firmness, but placed and timed with flexibility and finesse.

announcement

2012-01-23T08:40:00.000-05:00

On the 6 train, at City Hall this weekend. We stop, doors open and we hold. The conductor: "There is no express service this weekend. You see that 5 going to come in over there? That's a local. He's leaving first."

To a New Yorker this is quite dull. But nowhere else is the subway set up this way - locals and express trains; conductors with snappy information.

Burma in view

2012-01-19T17:15:00.002-05:00

Yenangyaung 5

2012-01-19T08:50:00.002-05:00

Burmese culture is diverse and multiethnic, so the food is also diverse, and Burmese I met eat (and often cook) right across the various ethnic cuisines, plus the bordering cuisines of Thailand, China and India.

I think that is part of why the ordinary run of the Burmese population shows no awareness that a Westerner eats different food, or that a Westerner might have a hard time with some of the foods on offer. After all, when Burmese travel within the country, they tend to hunger for the local specialties cooked where they're going. So to a guest, they serve up the best, and what they imagine you most want, which is the town's specialties. When they travel, they want the local specialty, so why wouldn't you?

Fortunately, I'm up for this, but as in any culture, "specialties" tend to be further up the scale of food difficulty. To take an extreme example, I was served a rat and ate it - at least it was deep fried and not different than any other fried meat.

Now, as you move up the social scale in Burma, you quickly hit families that are aware of Western taste in food, and Western difficulty with some Burmese seasonings, and often they have a taste for Western food themselves. So they will often serve a Western or Thai meal, or at least a bland one. (Thai cuisine being correctly seen as common ground, foodwise.)

Now, the real point. Some of the most charming families and hosts in Burma are part of the thin middle class - retired professionals on modest but solid pensions and such. They sit between those who serve up the local specialty and think nothing of it and those who attempt to serve a western meal.

This charming band of the population is the toast belt. Without fail, in our trip, when we would visit such a family, I would be offered toast and jelly, along with whatever else was being put out. These were houses that plainly did not, usually or ever, have sliced bread and jelly in the pantry - they went to buy it special, and I'm not sure how they managed that sometimes - outside Yangon and Mandalay, I never saw toast and jelly in stores. Either it's in town stores I didn't see, or they asked city relations to buy it and had it transported (probably by bus cargo, which is common in Burma). I'd bet the latter.

So when a middle class Burmese family asks itself what to serve the visiting Westerner, the answer is: toast!

Yenangyaung 4

2012-01-18T14:40:00.002-05:00

In Burma, friends and relatives really touch and hold each other. It isn't in any way sexual - in fact it is beautiful and comforting and natural. You see it on the street - two guys going down the street, not just arm in arm, but each with an arm over the other's shoulder, and the other arms clasped - really interlocking. And you see it at home with family - everyone sprawled out on the floor, arms on one another's legs, hands on one another's knees. It felt very good.

There is an etiquette through it though. The most interesting element of which is that the "appropriate" or "touchable" parts of your body are basically the sides. The front centerline of your body, running from the neck down to the groin, is avoided. Outer thighs are in bounds and much touched. The personal boundary is vertical - the left and right sides of your body, along with your whole shoulderline.

Contrast this with the western division of the body into personal zones, which is horizontal - basically the waistline, or the neckline.

Yenangyaung 3

2012-01-16T12:29:00.001-05:00

Of the many Buddhist payas (pagodas) in Yenangyong, the most interesting is the one on the top of a hill that collapsed a few months back. For payas entomb treasures, and ancient ones contain what is known only by legend, or not at all. For to deconstruct a paya and look within is accursed.

The gilded brick cracked and finally collapsed, of its own accord. Revealed within what had been perhaps five stories high was another paya, ornate and of marble, perhaps two stories high - like a Russian Doll - along with caskets of jewels, the beads and buttons and teeth of old, once revered, now forgotten monks, and perhaps a thousand of lead and silver figures - the king and his court, in miniature.

The paya is being rebuilt, but in cave form, rather than solid, so that the marble paya within remains accessible. This is permitted. But the jewels and figures and beads and buttons and teeth will be bricked back into the structure, both kept and forgotten, both treasured and lost, within.

Yenangyaung 2

2012-01-15T15:36:00.001-05:00

In Yenangyong I sit and visit with older friends and relations, drinking tea, outside the shop, watching the sun go down and traffic go by.

The younger crowd come back from playing chinlone, a game played with a wicker ball, a kind of kick ball. One older fellow, in his forties, leads the pack. He's the captain of their team, and they play most nights, over at one of the monasteries. "We won." he tells me, "Look - a 60 watt bulb - the prize!" And he holds out the bulb for me to admire, and I congratulate him and the team of kids. Everyone is happy - with the win and with the prize.

Yenangyaung 1

2012-01-15T12:22:00.001-05:00

We travel deep into the Burman heartland, to Yenangyong, a small town hugging either side of a strip of rural highway: unpaved, packed dirt, with steady traffic carts, horses, ragged trucks, constant dust, and numberless stray dogs.

We are welcomed warmly by local friends and relations, and that evening, the tent goes up outside their old shop and home, blocking part of the highway. Through that tent will pass the Buddhist monks of the town's several monasteries: a donation of food. The family prepares rice and coffee, pickles and sweets: enough to feed eight hundred. A band from a neighboring town has been hired to play.

Early the next morning, not quite four a.m., the donation begins. The tent is brightly lit, roped with colored lights, but the rest of the street is dark - dark and still.

Out from that dark, the monks begin to come. Lining up in the unseen distance, wearing their dark saffron robes, silent, faces held in practiced neutrality, but individual personalities still showing.

They come nearer, and the hired band begins to play: gongs and reeded instruments, drums and singers - a woman and a girl. The beautiful, lurching, loud music of traditional Burma, with it's rhythm of ebb --- rush --- ebb --- rush --- ebb --- crash, each rush filled with its own internal rhythm. The woman and girl wail, each song telling a sad song of love.

The first great vat of rice is uncovered, heaved by three men onto the stand, and the elder relations pair off at each station, beginning with the rice. One scoops the rice with a special wooden measure - used only for this kind of donation - and another takes each monk's alms bowl, holds it out to receive the measure of rice, shakes the bowl to even the rice, and hands it back to the monk. And then the next, and the next. Another relation cries out "Welcome; It's a blessing!" to each monk; and another keeps count of how many monks have been served. Further down the line, under the tent, more relations hand out the smaller items of food, placing them on the now-covered alms bowls of rice. Some are too old and frail to hold their bowl, so another monk carries his and his own both.

The line moves forward, and moves on. One sees a small group of senior monks, abbots holding black fans indicating rank, on the opposite road, somehow coordinating the line, or perhaps only observing. I cannot tell. Later they will be invited into the donors' home to pray, intercede for the stroke-ridden uncle within, and eat a more elaborate meal.

Standing apart, senior nuns, heads shaved in the same manner as the monk in their pink and orange robes. When the last of the hundreds of monks, stragglers now, has gone, the nuns begin their line, keeping five monks' space between the first of the nuns and the last, tardy monk. It is almost six.

The nuns, like the monks, are mostly between five years old and perhaps thirty. I am told they are, with few exceptions, orphans or from parents who could not feed them. They are the sanctified poor, the least made holy, sheltered in monasteries, clothed in robes, fed by donation, educated through charity. Most will leave their religious orders eventually to work or marry. A few will remain to serve in monastic duties, and die penniless but revered.

The nuns today are fewer in number, and not quite two hundred will eventually come. They receive the same measure as the monks. What is left for the light of day will be given to the beggars, who already squat with their children, up on a small hill, waiting and watching.

I walk down the dark street and find that the monks' and nuns' line assembles not far away from the tent - not far into the darkness.

There, the nuns queue. Towards the rear, a very young nun, perhaps not even five, breaks suddenly from the pack and lunges into the street, menaced by a stray dog almost as tall as she. The dogs' teeth are bared, inches from her own face, and she forgets everything else, but turns to face a truck, loaded with lumber, bearing down on her, close, fast, its headlights showing her face, eyes and mouth all open in wide terror, legs frozen with fear, the dog still hard upon her.

My throat constricts and my legs tense to run. But already an older nun has swooped in, grips the girl's shoulder, and heaves her back to safety, where she folds the frightened girl into her own robes, comforting and shielding her. It all happens in two or three seconds. The dust thrown up by the passing truck settles.

I weep. They move on, up towards the donation tent. A dog, a truck, and an orphan child, threatened and rescued. Dogs; trucks: all that menaces in animal nature and in the world of humankind bore down on her, the nightmares of children made actual. And just as suddenly she is saved and comforted. May she be kept so.

little I

2011-12-21T08:15:00.000-05:00

The image of the man sitting with his gold coins stacked on the table, counting them, counting them, is an image of smallness, even absurdity. Yet I log on to my retirement account every day, and look at the balance, look at the balance.

thy

2011-12-18T11:32:00.000-05:00

True love is a kind of inner work, neither passive nor discovered, but in a constant state of sustaining creation.

Willard

2011-12-16T09:10:00.002-05:00

No candle, by burning, ever raises itself up, but only, slowly, burns itself lovely down.

more steel

2011-12-16T08:54:00.001-05:00

The need to transcend death, and its handmaiden, age. This need, heightened and sharpened, is its own fulfillment. That is the truth of the resurrection.

steel of man

2011-12-15T13:31:00.000-05:00

I wait to cross 58th Street, where they have been working and temporary plates of steel have been placed to cover the trenches. Cars pass over the steel, an inch thick. It gives an inch or so, but holds. A dump truck filled to the brim with sand goes over. The steel plate holds - an inch-thick plate of steel spanning a five-foot trench, holding up that passing weight. A simple thing, but it awes me to think of what that material is doing, particularly on the stretching underside of the plate, the material holding itself together, no different than a cable stretched between two poles. The passing truck, in every sense, depending from above.

Lyndon

2011-12-08T10:13:00.000-05:00

Who isn't, partly, a scam artist? Particularly to one's self. Virtue in this is to be so slightly, and in a manner elevating and sound. But perhaps I think of it wrongly - for sometimes it seems to me that there is something of the scam even in standing up and walking around.

lens

2011-12-01T14:49:00.007-05:00

Long labored hours of heavy work deceive
The heart to rate all gained as earned
and fairly due: so much as we receive,
That much we take as our true worth discerned.

Or higher: for when return is meager,
Expectation is not meager but bold
To think its own work stole, and strikes eager
To block all implications loss may hold.

But let others lose, and implication
Leaps to see their loss as fair consequence,
Made vivid by that same expectation:
Our gain seems earned; their loss but common sense.

Each man’s sweat beads into a selfish lens
Reflecting worth on self, and on others, sins.

quantum

2011-11-28T08:32:00.000-05:00

Errol Morris's The Umbrella Man, a delight, put me in mind of one of those little historical facts that nearly awes me with its weird resonance: that Lyndon Johnson as a boy had a dog named "Bigham Young."

fought

2011-11-26T09:54:00.002-05:00

As a personal, practical matter, I sometimes wonder whether freedom is anything but a facet of courage.

ipso facto

2011-11-26T09:24:00.001-05:00

Within law - and I suppose within most fields - there are a handful of recurring ways in which research resolves. To take two boring examples: a topic may turn out to be simply unknown to the literature or else clearly settled. Some of the other pattern outcomes are more interesting. For example, a topic may turn out to be a false topic - something that is actually about something else. Or, a topic can be a unit finding exercise - really about whether an object is to be considered one or many. And so on.

Vague I know. But it enjoyable to get to the point in research where, even if I don't know the answers to my questions, I can at least look around and say ah yes, this kind of resolution again.

nearer

2011-11-25T10:32:00.000-05:00

I turn off the DVD player
and it goes "beep beep."

From the bedroom,
sorting socks,
my love says
"beep beep."

And "beep beep"
I say back,
from the living room.

And all is well.
He and I
As two children
Amidst the snowy blank
That all the world is
But we to ourselves.

fissile

2011-11-21T10:52:00.002-05:00

As an individual, it is one of the scariest large truths. As an observer of mankind, it is one of the most beautiful: That the good human society is one that brings the twin suns of order and freedom into orbit around one another, and by orbiting around their center of gravity, itself empty, holds these fiery ideals in stable place, safely centered, far from the wider, cooler orbits of humankind within that greater social sphere.

110

2011-11-19T18:36:00.002-05:00

A sort of fog of work - diffuse and everwhere, impossible to cut through.

could

2011-11-17T12:22:00.002-05:00

Better than the veiled threat: the veiled promise.

transit

2011-11-15T07:08:00.000-05:00

In some ways, I feel most alive and content walking from home to the station, and then from the station to the office - and back. People's faces, all going somewhere.

Vergerus

2011-11-13T16:27:00.007-05:00

What is this body -
Fog obscuring,
Self itself
Or jug?

I wake;
I see light
And leap from bed
To feel myself young.

The body is time,
A seismograph's drum
Turning to record
Tremors amplified.

Instrumentation,
Organic springs
Uncoiling,
Trembling.

Wound once,
The tension
Drives, then slackens
Into reflection.

bifocal

2011-11-13T13:18:00.001-05:00

One may be moral in the method, or moral in the aim. Sometimes both, but either will do. Only that is immoral which can be neither. What is wrong aligns imperfectly with this.

olympia

2011-11-11T05:10:00.000-05:00

This morning's early subway ride was a poem of happenstance, all perfectly true:

1) Propped against a wall, sitting on the sidewalk, a woman, maybe 40, still pretty, dirty. Drunk, with her malt liquor can in a paper bag. I pass and she cries out, as if burning: You are an imbecile.

2) I step down into the subway station, and a Sikh, maybe 30, looking dazed, mutters at me then loses interest. As I pass, his eyes turn to the clock overhead and he says, mechanically and softly, as if recalling a truth: It is 3:52.

3) Waiting for the train. Construction workers climb up from the tracks, about eight of them, a Whitman's Sampler of manhood. They gripe, joke, and call out to their co-worker on the opposite platform. The thick-necked guy with the earring is laughing loud, square-bodied and cocksure. A just-smaller fellow orbits him without realizing it. The older foreman's face has started to turn jowly, but he is still in his prime, is given deference, stands just apart. And the miscellaneous men, actually looking miscellaneous, not quite belonging, waiting to go home.

4) The Sikh has walked over to them. He says, in an unsteady shout: Can I ask you a question? His tone is so unnatural, his loudness so out of range, that they take him for crazy and laugh at him nervously, but somehow not offensively. The Sikh sits on the bench they'd gathered around. He leaves them alone; they leave him alone. Somehow he seems the bird and they seem the tree.

5) The tree protects the bird. The bird quiets the tree.

6) The train comes, creeping in. Construction. An empty car except for one couple, walled in by their luggage, wrapped heavily in tape marked Аэрофлот: Russians. She is fat but beautiful. Cheeks like small apples, and a pink complexion. And he? Leni Riefenstahl would have cast him, and given him an undressed, sporting role. His elegant frame is just strong enough, and his face structure handsomely implies brutal capacities. But the blondness, as I focus in, is bleach. And his nervous eyes tell all, as he turns to her. She, not he, is their strength.

7) I arrive at my station and step to the escalator. I pass the small lady in a Muslim veil of cream-colored cotton and feel her tense. She is afraid of me, the passing presence behind, and in my mind I think to her: peace.

you mean now?

2011-11-10T08:04:00.000-05:00

what time is it
what time it is
is it what time
time what is it

another shimmering in the distance

2011-11-10T06:12:00.001-05:00

More distant, fainter, but one feels a tremble of awe. Not for the effectiveness, nor the faith, nor even the bravery. Simply for the wonderful strangeness of mankind: Angels in Ciudad Juárez.

wtc

2011-11-09T06:14:00.000-05:00

I look out my office window this morning and catch a steady sliver of lights, high behind the Chrysler Building to my south. Stop, think, triangulate. Ah! It's the new World Trade Center, now peeking over the Midtown highrises, bare floors strung with temporary lamps.

silent

2011-11-08T09:23:00.002-05:00

The conscience is useful fear.

to be seen

2011-11-06T18:04:00.000-05:00

How little removed from animal is a man with no need for the regard of others.

jig

2011-11-06T18:00:00.000-05:00

Intellegence is not likable. And that is the upended floor tack that made you dance.

fleur

2011-11-06T11:50:00.000-05:00

BBC News is a very choice flower to have sprung from the corpse of empire.

clang

2011-11-03T13:24:00.000-04:00

We all have to struggle with a social perversion of the golden rule. It is not enough for society that we treat others as we would be treated: society would have us want to be treated as others would want to be treated. Resist.

I do not mean to concede to the golden rule. It is a crude awl, meant to punch some approximation of decency into hardened hearts.

For a decent, loving soul, the golden rule is too crude. For the good, I say this: Fear not to do unto others as must be done; and when nothing is necessary, do then unto others as ought to be done; and then, when - as is usual - there are many right options, do unto others as they would have you do unto them, not as you would have done unto you.

For we are not alike, one to another, in what we want, even when we are alike in necessities and rights.

And in doing unto others as they would have it, fear not to be yourself: serve, but as an equal serves and not as a servant.

In short, when you can, give others what they want, but do it in your style. Seek to live, insofar as possible, in a fertile succession of dancing pairs: be not a loner, or a crowdsman, or a cog. Only and exactly two humans may look one another in the eyes. Serve in this heart and in this style: it is communion.

Cupertino

2011-11-02T10:44:00.000-04:00

This child, by love, grew heavy with self
To bludgeon others, and boil under pressure.
His parents knew his power and fell to serve him;
Greased his rails and raised a locomotive
That Dreyfuss might have streamlined.

Steam built and flanges gripped. Late they resisted,
But as pennies on the rail resist.
He flattened them into mementos of his coming upon the world.

He whistled. A high note, shrill. An evangelistic pitch.
John the Baptist without humility,
Not from the wilderness but through it
Like a steel stab through flesh.

The multitudes came, and he was full of bearings
That he gave to the throng like orders, like blows,
And they received his hardness like bread, like water
And worshipped him and the wounds he gave them.

Lovely stigmata, blessed touch.
As lepers they received of him.
And though it was but Hal and sham
It was more certain than they,
So that they loved and sang:
Was it not piercing?

And I say nolo contendere.
I would not lay my neck across such tracks
To have the Atcheson, Topeka and The Salome
Sling that child of chrome down the line.

sparta

2011-11-01T09:17:00.000-04:00

Can the military aspects of a culture be beautiful? I do not mean the ephemera of marching bands, uniforms and physicality, but the military as such. The answer is yes, in the same way that the artistic, academic, child-rearing or sacred aspects of a culture may be beautiful. The reason the question is hard is that violent killing - which is not only contrary to beauty but also to the good - is necessarily a capacity of military culture, and potentially its point. But a military may be instead fundamentally about the control, regimentation - and thereby sublimation - of the violence naturally in man. If and as a transcendence of violence, then, a military may be beautiful, even an object of proper love. That appreciation is borne, though, of a hatred of violence, not a love for it, and that remains a control on the appreciation. A bloodthirsty military, or a bloodthirsty military culture, cannot be beautiful.

genesis

2011-10-31T08:13:00.001-04:00

The hatred of bloodshed is the beginning of wisdom.

wickedness in the public square

2011-10-30T11:59:00.001-04:00

The rhetoric of "99%": bogus, arrogant and evil (because it viciously marginalizes and lies about those it makes into outsiders). No different than its cousins on the right, the corresponding appropriations of "patriot," "American" and so forth. I hate no individual, no group, but how I hate mass politics. Right, left, whatever. To be clear: mass politics is not the same as democracy.

student loans

2011-10-30T11:49:00.000-04:00

I love the American people and count myself among them. But the great body of the people ever shows its incapacity for self-governance. Occupy Wall Street rivals even the Tea Party for obvious stupidity, sham, and bovine self-preoccupation. Fortunately governance continues to come from the elite, who must create an ever more elaborate pantomime of democracy. It is that necessity to create an ever more convincing show that is weighing us down. Alas, even the elite must be anchored, and perhaps it is just as well that this be the mode of encumbrance. It shunts so much malice and vengance away from bloodiness and towards language. It pacifies, but is costly.

epithet

2011-10-30T11:43:00.000-04:00

I think my father's epithet must be: Father of children, child of God.

abba

2011-10-30T11:36:00.001-04:00

One of the pillars of my life is that period of written correspondence between my father and me while I was in college. We would write great, long letters to one another - thinking through the mysteries, the practicalities, the mechanisms of life. I do not have these letters, except as digested into me.

We never planned it - it just happened - and it drew to an easy close as I neared graduation.

As my mind expanded and matured, my father was there, not as physical presence, still less as a guide, but as the most resonant correspondent possible, a loving and joyous fellow traveler. These letters were the secret backstory of my successful entry into adulthood, and of my time at St. John's. The warmth, the thoughtfulness, the loving wisdom and playful theorizing we drew out from each other! They were a beautiful flowering of my father's peculiar genius for being a father. The greatest blessing of my upbringing was that: my father had a genius, and it was not for work, nor pleasure, nor even exactly for being a husband - it was and is for being a father. My relationship to him was and is through his most exceptional facet.

We were each in a sort of prime then: he of early maturation, I of new adulthood. I think we are each in a more foolish stage at present - productive middle passages where the deeper faculties wait: his for retirement, mine for maturation.

Someday we will resume our correspondence, and in the same way, resume ourselves.

old

2011-10-26T06:32:00.002-04:00

It doesn't do to be too frank about what a burden we all are to one another.

regal

2011-10-25T10:43:00.001-04:00

The motivating power of ideals and illusions are well known. Why do these motivate better than realities? Answer: when they are stark, realities motivate just as well as ideas, but realities are rarely stark. Artifices may be made simple and stark. That is one why self-projection has value. One may make one's self motivating by simplified projection. Others may do the same with their image of you, and this is what your loved ones do - they simplify you into lovability - but most will not love you until you are idealized, and this is likely only if you take the first steps yourself.

years ago

2011-10-24T06:05:00.001-04:00

He turned to me at the bar, and talked to me until his beer went warm in his hand. A mama's boy, finishing college, majoring in zoology. He wanted to be an elephant keeper at the San Diego Zoo. That was the only thing he wanted, all he had wanted since he was a child. He wanted it with the simplicity of a saint's faith. I probed, conversationally: Was there any possibility the job would not be all he hoped? None. What if he couldn't get the elephant-keeping job at the San Diego Zoo? He would, but he allowed that there were a few other zoos he could imagine working at. Already he was keeping exotic livestock behind his mother's trailer. And what if even those jobs were not available? He would have this job, period - he was absolute. I marveled. He gave off the scent of cedar chips, and ever since they have been to me the smell of his beautiful fanaticism.

bowing

2011-10-24T05:25:00.002-04:00

Passing at 5am in a cab by a diner, I see a drunkard, not so old or far gone, beg from a bus boy, neither young nor instantly dismissive, coming off his shift.

The drunkard stretches his begging arms out in front of him, at a low angle, close together. Please, he gestures. The bus boy exchanges a few words. The drunkard points with his whole right arm horizontal; and then makes large, arcing circles with his hands, from him mouth to his belly. Over there; listen to what happened. The bus boy detaches and walks on. The drunkard follows for a few paces, bowing and scraping, still talking. And then, seeing he is getting nothing, straightens up, turns, heaves his shoulders, and walks away. All this time, the drunkard has had an orange, hanging in a plastic bag he's knotted onto the front belt loop of his jeans. The orange swings in the bag as he walks away, like a sight gag, like truck nuts. The light turns green and my cab drives on.

His gestures were each that of the silent movie pantomime. Where did they come from? Partly he is imitating - imitating from childhood, imitating movies, even imitating other drunks he's seen. A little of it is the shift to major muscle groups that anyone makes when alcohol impairs fine motor control. But mostly, it is a combination of that innate to us, and the physical interpretation of basic words.

But to see the naturalness of that bowing, the crooking at the hips as the drunkard made his last try! This is real bowing, the kind that comes from the heart and says damn it I want something from you!

heat

2011-10-23T16:35:00.002-04:00

In terms of taste, what is trash, really, and what is its place? It is that, and so placed, as to destabilize just such questions.

infrared

2011-10-23T14:55:00.000-04:00

The good horse balks
At something sensed;
So rider knows it too.
An animal connecting
The thing, perception, you.

The eyes glance round and
Will would press on but
Wait for confirmation.
You know this horse is true,
Senses something here.

The small hairs raise,
Ganglia flash and small breaths
Through the nose
Smell nothing.

But by your steed,
You know danger is nigh.

You hold your reigns and
Pace slow
And arrive
By instrumentation.

Missa Solemnis

2011-10-22T14:43:00.001-04:00

Listening to the London Symphony and their choir last night, something about Beethoven became clear to me: that he is serious about degree of loudness as a scale, as a compositional dimension. I realized this after becoming frustrated with it. If loudness is a secondary or crude quality of music - and it usually is - then Beethoven's constant alterations in loudness come across as a cheap trick, overwrought, or just ugly. But Beethoven means to treat loudness more seriously, more dynamically, and if you can make that shift as a listener, the beauty and craft are there to hear. What we do now with reprocessing of sound - of electronic manipulation - is a further elaboration of the same.

Petrie Court

2011-10-19T15:31:00.000-04:00

I like museums, good ones anyhow. But how much museuming I can take at a time is a function of what's within. I can spend a full day in the best large historical or scientific museums, and not just gain from it, but enjoy it. Art museums I can spend a day in, but I fatigue: far better is a smaller, ninety minute visit to some corner.

One of the luxuries of being in New York City is that I can handle the encyclopedic art museums (the Met and MoMA) in just this way: buy a membership allowing me unlimited visits and drop in every month or so for a little while.

The MoMA has its joys, but it is the Met that provokes real feelings, thoughts, even works on me. Probably not entirely, though mostly, to the good.

One sits in a museum cafe, in sight of Rodin's Burghers of Calais, looking out windows across Central Park at the Cleopatra Needle. There is a burble of conversation within, a stream of joggers without. One thinks of Tahrir Square, of Les Bourgeois de Cairo. One thinks of how Rodin has made the hands and feet of his burghers relatively massive, there's a sense of movement and gesture dominating. One sees the perfection of the bronze turtles bearing up the rounded, worn corners of of the Needles, the hieroglyphics rising up in ancient language to a point that is not stone - long broken away - but a sort of cheap modern prosthetic point, apparently of painted cement. One sees that waiter pass, yet again, the dark Indian with the half turned smile and thrown back shoulders. What does he know? He looks as if he is the unrevealed king of the play, and knows it. He owns.

And of course, in some sense, he does. Look at where he is. Glory surrounds him. And I, sitting with my coffee and bread, feel the same way as I imagine he does, although I don't think my smile or shoulders betray it. One sits with coffee, or another waits tables, and we - he and I - at least I - feel utterly rich. A museum, a park, a gifted sculpture taken by a culture from its own ancient patrimony and given to the people of its modern patron, each offers itself. And one partakes, one takes, one has. There is no illusion here, no fantasy of ownership. Not at all. What there is - being rightly placed here, as a visitor or employee, is quite real, and if one is taking it in - seeing and feeling and being - then one is taking all that is on offer, and that is such an all, that for a time one cannot imagine needing more of anything.

Our species is great. Mankind is unfathomably great. We are each rich by inheritance. You and I were born with silver spoons in our mouths. Let us live worthy of our privileges.

rust

2011-10-19T14:53:00.000-04:00

Let sureness like beauty
Draw all eyes to
Virtue and power,
That in unity
Ring as bell and tongue
To tell all drawn
That truth like dew
Is pure and new
But burning ever,
Into rust of light.

owing

2011-10-18T10:54:00.000-04:00

Society is constructed of many elements, but the chief elements are few: debt, reproduction, optimism, limits, honor, fear and love - on an instant's thought, these come to mind.

welcome

2011-10-15T15:30:00.003-04:00

I love that my undergraduate college had an open admissions policy. But it sure shows in the quality of graduates produced. Remember that input is the better part of output.

Doug the Ford Spokespuppet

2011-10-12T08:24:00.000-04:00

Tunionaire. Great moments in comedy.

depending from the lining

2011-10-12T06:05:00.003-04:00

You know the trope from old television where the shady man, brim of his hat turned down low, opens one breast of his trenchcoat to reveal obviously stolen goods and says You wanna buy a watch?

I saw this today. I'm in a cab to work, 5am, and the driver stops at a light in Queens. Prime taxi location: on one side, a gas station with a taxi at every pump, fueling up for the morning shift. On the other side, a dark sidewalk and a stocky guy in a heavy parka (it's warm out), wearing sunglasses (it's dark out). With one hand, he opens his parka, and there, faintly glowing, is a Garmin nüvi GPS, clipped to the interior pocket. He makes eye contact with my driver and with his other hand, points out the GPS. In a second, it's over. No deal.

I say he pointed, but really he used that shallow cupping gesture a model on a game show uses to emphasize a small-sized prize. A year's supply of Dawn dishwashing liquid. Back to you, Bob.

gazing

2011-10-11T09:26:00.000-04:00

I read this morning that there are more birdwatchers than classical music concert goers in this country. I suppose that makes sense. Birdwatching costs less, is less well defined, more widely available and the optic nerve is bigger.

Burma

2011-10-09T13:08:00.000-04:00

The greatest of all historical precursors to political freedom is having been a British colony. Objectively speaking, there is no greater modern national blessing than that, for a country not actually in Europe.

immaculate conception not required

2011-10-09T13:06:00.000-04:00

It is of crass things that true virtue is often born. In the public arena, false virtue can give birth to true virtue when fertilized by little more than ambition and honor-seeking. John Adams believed that, and so do I.

To put it a touch more fully, history teaches me that the birth of civic virtue is a rare thing, but can result when, all together, merchants seek opportunity, political leaders seek approbation, and there is some form of national discourse about right and wrong. The latter is and must be objectively weakest, but even a little will suffice.

formation

2011-10-06T08:23:00.002-04:00

What makes my mother happy these days is clearing a path. When I was eleven and twelve, clearing paths made me happiest, too. Paths through the wood, or two paths, meeting at the brambles, passing the lovely stump, with its crumbling interior forming a pool for rain water. Saw and pruning shears, hoe and rake. Birds and rabbits, snakes and ivy.

on his shoulder

2011-10-04T21:35:00.003-04:00

Probably the saddest of sentences, if only you know it's context: "Am I standing straight enough, uncle?"

2011-09-29T10:35:00.001-04:00

Who would be at his ease in this wicked world?

gamble

2011-09-29T10:19:00.000-04:00

We make so little of our will. "Strange males, unfamiliar hands, the touch of a foreigner's blood."

irony

2011-09-29T08:59:00.000-04:00

A feeling of independence is usually borne of insulation.

cost

2011-09-27T14:01:00.001-04:00

You know things are getting serious when someone asks what money is worth. I sure am.

to do

2011-09-22T09:33:00.000-04:00

To be professionally excellent, one must be good at everything, or seem so.
Nobody is individually good at everything.
Therefore, professional excellence is a matter maximizing one's own good abilities, and then of seeming, or of appropriating through staffing, the good things one individually lacks.

logic

2011-09-18T14:53:00.002-04:00

Here in the office,
Blue wool carpet
Does not imply blue sheep.

Tatiana

2011-09-18T13:58:00.000-04:00

There is this strange, opalescent, dialog near the middle of Smiley's People. Smiley meets Tatiana, posing as a man sent to substitute for her minder. She has been locked away, but gently - in a far away health clinic. All the forces that hold her there are shadowy, distant, yet somehow paternal. Smiley asks her if she knows who her father is. "He is a man too important to exist." And a few lines later, she asks if Smiley is God. "No. I am an ordinary man." "I have heard that a little of God exists in every ordinary man," she replies. And Smiley says "I too have heard that said."

Hearing her and he talk so obliquely about what Job talked about, in tones like those of an oboe and bassoon - well, I marvel at it.

metaphor

2011-09-16T08:44:00.002-04:00

Let's take Manhattan?

press

2011-09-13T09:16:00.002-04:00

Real men don't moan. Not often or long, anyhow.

take

2011-09-12T08:20:00.000-04:00

This feeling of being an outsider, an underling. There is no point to thinking it can be excised. I shall have to continue to leverage it, but better.

interact

2011-09-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

No functional system is all even exchange (even over time), nor is any functional system all exchange-agnostic (communistic). There are ebbs and flows. This is true emotionally as well as functionally. One reason for the intensity and strangeness of the right-wing American attachment to the military is exactly this: it is a communal institution to which patriotic homage can yet be paid - a noneconomic element of common life.

Lothian

2011-09-04T20:35:00.002-04:00

Never take a circuit court's word for it.

provision

2011-09-03T11:15:00.000-04:00

Law is the stable interface by language of force, resource, and personal integrity.

well

2011-08-31T08:14:00.000-04:00

So this new book on debt is ok so far and I'll learn things and have thoughts to think through. Fair enough - not a classic. But it is useful to see that the moral valence of indebtedness in general is both ambivalent and not worse than that of the creditor.

the chicken did

2011-08-30T08:42:00.000-04:00

A new book on the history of debt? Yes, please. I haven't started yet, but apparently it's going to say that debt came before currency, and even before barter, in human history. (The usual notion is that barter came first, then currency addressed barter's limits, and currency enabled complex movements like debt and credit.)

So I'll wait to see what the book says. But for now, just the idea is exciting and plausible. A goat, field or hour of labor can be borrowed even more easily than it may be bartered. And a pre-existing debt would expand the range of goods a creditor might feel willing to accept. Indeed, it might expand that range all the way across to a token.

It also addresses the economy of prophesy and religion, which is never a matter of barter, but always of promise (that is, of debt).

Can't wait to start this book! (Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.) Hopefully it won't disappoint.

know

2011-08-29T09:47:00.000-04:00

Experience beats intelligence nearly every time, although not by a mile. Novel situations demand intelligence. Indeed, much of the value of intelligent experience is to see the novel aspects of an otherwise long-experienced situation.

poking

2011-08-25T11:30:00.000-04:00

I would guess that the first function of an intelligence agency, even after it becomes capable of spying, remains the work of finding and sifting information that is simply out in the open.

presentation

2011-08-25T08:22:00.000-04:00

Fact + force = truth

Myth has greater impact than fact over certain parts of every human mind, and over certain human minds. And these are significant parts and many people.

Facts must be made weighty, given the stained glass coloring of awe, the distant quake of canonnade, rolling into position. Or else they are only facts.

ˉ ˘ ˉ

2011-08-22T10:31:00.000-04:00

Now is our glorious summer made a wintry discontent.

(By the way, note the special metrical qualities of discontent, particularly at the end of sentence.)

Key

2011-08-19T07:42:00.000-04:00

A little more than half of the people I know who have read much philosophy are worse off rather than better off for having done so. But the real condemnation is this: the worse off are only a few more than half, and they are only a little worse off - philosophy appears to be not only not very good for people, but not even very bad. In most, it is a slight ailment.

more gravity

2011-08-18T11:46:00.002-04:00

One source of intellectual lift is a desire to impress others, the sense of an audience - mating displays, as it were.

gravity

2011-08-17T12:25:00.002-04:00

I always have felt the need to be both substantive and connective in my writing and even thoughts. But this can leave me feeling mentally sticky - glued down - weighted.

makes the whole world kin

2011-08-17T08:30:00.001-04:00

Just an hour at a major international gateway - I spent one at JFK's Terminal 4 yesterday - and you see that what business enables is the travel of families, of loved ones, of others of one's tribe and place. It is beautiful, although in cold fact it is only the releasing of tensions caused in the first place by commerce, and by the same means.

more Warren

2011-08-17T08:27:00.000-04:00

Remember that this is still, basically, the working off of a housing bubble atop a consumer credit bubble.

Warren

2011-08-16T09:53:00.000-04:00

To be governed by the people is to be governed by what governs the people. And that may be many things, and shift for any given people over time. Fortunately a governing desire to live is more or less a popular constant.

think again

2011-08-15T06:57:00.000-04:00

Middlemarch has long been my nominee for the finest work originally written in English. But I wonder, on this re-reading, whether Eliot would agree. I think there is more than narrative voicing behind some of the doubt the narration betrays. Eliot seems ever to be shoring up her entirely sound literary structures. It is strange to see the Rock of Gibraltar, buttressed.

middle age

2011-08-12T06:54:00.000-04:00

Eliot describes the lost radiance of a character not by saying she had "dimmed" but by describing her as "rayshorn" - that is beautiful.

bridges falling down

2011-08-11T12:47:00.001-04:00

Rioting and looting are mere criminality? Not so. It is theatrical criminal behavior: an acting out of unposessed power, apparent solidarity, unfulfillable appetites and greed. They put upon their heads the ancient crown of stones, because it is has presented both itself and a stage, upon which, one may feel momentarily that one is not a eunuch, a crowdsman, almost an animal, although yesterday and tomorrow and tomorrow, one is. Rioting is a sort of public masturbation, and as empty and offensive - and telling - as that.

parch

2011-08-11T12:33:00.002-04:00

My mind has gone rather terribly dry. There must be the right sort of water around here somewhere.

subway types

2011-08-11T06:10:00.000-04:00

Guys - busboys, deliverers, construction laborers - earnestly writing in little spiral-bound lined notebooks, in big round block letters, with a blue ball-point pen. Not studying or communicating, just writing to - well, what? I tend to think of these as calmly-contained but inwardly passionate people. Or hotly intelligent without much scope for opportunity of thought. Self-contained or context-bound, that is. A small whorl of inner life. Comparatively talentless brethren of Emily Dickinson, but brethren all the same. That last sentence could be applied to me, I suppose, though none of what preceeded it. Makes the whole world kin - the subway, I mean. That and unfounded assumptions about others.

take 3

2011-08-09T14:50:00.000-04:00

No, your opponents are not crazy. Their arguments are tactical and they are fighting an adjacent battle.

kept

2011-08-08T09:45:00.000-04:00

Would you be king? Then make a small kingdom. But make it here in the world, even as expressed fiction, and not internally.

2011-08-05T10:00:00.000-04:00

The political situation is an improved reflection of, the electorate. Nothing has happened that would have been avoided, or even been as good, if the people ruled directly.

oh, for a...

2011-08-04T16:05:00.000-04:00

I return to reading Middlemarch, and feel the sort of despair that comes in the presence of beautiful greatness. If Eliot is human, how can I be? Or so runs the feeling.

say

2011-08-04T13:56:00.002-04:00

The more intelligent you are - or more precisely, the more often right you actually are - the more aggressive you should be. Do not hide your light under a bushel basket.

day

2011-08-03T12:42:00.000-04:00

I would be far more intellegent, were it mine to give myself. But would the world not be a happier, even better place if we were all less intellegent?

risk

2011-08-03T09:34:00.000-04:00

I know my limits too well, because it is in my knowing them that they have their being.

pointing

2011-08-03T08:07:00.000-04:00

Most rudeness is symbolic violence or exposure. Or, most politeness is symbolic nonviolence and covering.

ask again

2011-08-02T14:42:00.002-04:00

Having worked with a client to get him ready for a cross-examination, I can say: interrogation can be a beautiful thing, in itself, and wonderful for truth-seeking.

Hamilton

2011-08-02T12:08:00.002-04:00

One thing I just realized: each institution (House, Senate, Executive) acted in the debt ceiling wrangle exactly as designed.