tomorrow

What the ignorant bring upon themselves is the clearest testament to the value of what Ecclesiastes calls having eyes in one's head.

Tuesday

The irrational agents of an inevitable reckoning have arrived.

here

A good deal of professional entrepreneurship occurs in big professionals firms - the firm is simply offloading much of the difficult and unproductive back office and networking functions.  The big firm professional is often more independent, in practice, than the formally independent professional who is tied down arranging his own office space, and so forth.

bureau again

That place is going to take a while to make any sense of itself.  And to think of the headwinds.  And the unstable structure for provision of leadership!

hot

There's a plot of grass in Astoria, near Steinway Street, that has ring-shaped dead patches, not quite a meter in diameter.  Roughly the size of a manhole cover - and my best theory as to what caused them was that the sod was layed over manhole covers, and the seep of air - laden with who-knows-what, up from the lip of these unseen covers, was killing the grass.  Or maybe an oily tire had laid there and poisoned the ground underneath.  Or what?  But then, a while ago, I realized that the rings were worked into the soil - indented by an inch or so.

And this morning, I saw a pigeon pacing this ring - and another pigeon pacing one of the others.  Round and round.  What's going on?

Did the pigeons cause it?  Are the pigeons responding to something?  Why? What? How? Huh?

(My new best guess: manhole covers and pigeons.  I think that plot of grass used to be a parking lot, and the soil was just laid over it.  If there's a drainage system, and what had been drainways have been covered over with manhole covers, the soil may be just a bit cooler around those rings.  Possibly there's a tad of cool air flow, even, up from the dry pipes.  The pigeons may like that, and tread in a cool path, especially on a hot day like this.

Maybe.

induction

Thinking through the implications of trust and mistrust.  Time to pick up Hume again?

biblical

Truly, without vision, the people perish.

57/3

The power of the referential over the direct (which has advantages enough) is this: the reference is felt to be in the mind or ether, and is therefore felt more directly.  The direct is felt to be in the object, and is therefore more obdurate, more sure, but less directly present to the perception.  As smells are to the sense of smell, so is an evocative reference to the faculty of perception: like all parents, it looks upon the perception with a special and tender immediacy, made all the more poignant because it does not attribute this to its creation of the beloved, whose qualities, to perception, are therefore all the more affecting.  The angel that is not on the sidewalk, but merely evoked, is therefore felt as more noteworthy than the improbably planted trees, the passers-by, each a miracle, or even the wondrous assembly itself, that thin-shaved slide-sample of my city.

time-wracked

Very old men occasionally attain a sort of spectral quality.  A face that age has made almost not human, but humanoid - yoda-like or otherwise.  In a hospital, this is nothing - the context so explains the transformation that there is nothing remarkable to it.  But walking past you on the sidewalk in the sunlight, basically strong and self-possessed, an old man like this really can seem an apparition, a vision, an angel.

angel

Walking in to work I pass a stream of cars that block most of the sun light on the avenue.  And for a second, their traffic leaves a perfect ball of bright light on the sidewalk that arcs like a softball thrown underhanded.  The arc of that light was uncanny - it rose and fell as if by gravity.

Something passes through my mind, involuntarily - a feeling of apparition, of vision, and then I catch the eyes of a fellow pedestrian.  He saw it too, and felt it as I did.

How our minds seize on such things, nothings, as carriers of meaning!

you

The trouble of our decade is that it is under a lid.  That lid is the previous generation.  They will grow heavier until the time when we ourselves are weak.  There is nothing for it but to steam.

bad city

On the train this weekend I had a few minutes to overhear the ideas of a young teenage boy - I'd guess he was thirteen - talking to a girl who could have been a sister or classmate or girlfriend.  He was going a mile a minute, full of ideas.  The one I overheard:

"I don't think people should have to go to jail if they're bad.  If you want to obey the rules, you can stay here.  But if you want to be bad, you have to go to a bad city, and you can do what you want there, but other people there will be bad to you.  If you leave and come back here, you have to be good."

This is the sort of idea that bodes well for the kid's future, if he keeps it up.  Plenty is wrong with the notion, but that's the point.  Chasing down the flaws will lead him deeper and deeper in thought.  Also, his idea of "bad cities" has a fine intellectual and literary pedigree, leading all the way back to cities of refuge, both as real places (in various guises) and as the lovely but daft notion in the Pentateuch that forgiveness could be made politically spatial.

On a different subject, note that there was no way for me to tell from a few short minutes if the kid is smart or not - that is, to tell his intelligence.  All I know is that he is thoughtful.  And that is a more meritorious thing than intelligence.  Of course, I hope for his sake he has the whole mental kit.

Disraeli

The social capacity of England for drama is a confluence that grew self-reinforcing centuries ago, and strangely remains.  That it is an isle is one stream in the confluence - and the other streams are similarly innocuous, apart.

get off

A few people have complete leverage.  Only a few of them know how to use it.  Caro talks about LBJ knowing where to find power and knowing how to use it - that's a profound ability.

so and so

Oh, man, I've just got to say it, right here on my blog:

----- ----- is a real -----.

And I don't care who knows it.

tannins

There isn't going to be much of a popular constituency for doing less with more, even when that is what is required.

The trouble in here, and elsewhere, is that antiauthoritarian forces are in ascendancy because the means of communication are too easily available for effort - the old filter - to function as any barrier to thoughtless expression and coalescence.  The effects on institutions and on stable, orderly change are all too predictable.

pounds

By one account, education is a means to greater freedom, and to seeking the ends to which freedom is itself a means.  By another account, education is a means to income and security.  These are compatible accounts, taken at face value.  That the latter crowds out the further in practice indicates clearly that the face value of these statements is not the working value of either.

watchtower

I don't suppose there will be a Broadway play based on the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Too down-market, for one thing.

ting

Drop a coin on a hard floor.  Ting.  Sounds like the best sorts of departures feel.  A corner turned, sharply, soldierly.

music of the inner spaces

It isn't a difficult point to perceive, or make, but is worth registering:  we place sensations differently.  Sight reaches out, brings in.  Sound - logically no different - is often the same, but can give the impression of being internal - of driving one's consideration within.  Smell is about nearness and placement.  Taste and touch are contact, one within, the other upon.