baby

Judicial systems retain the core of what was useful in monarchy.  There's more than historical accident to our calling it a court.

seep

International travel, particularly to Luxembourg, a financial haven - I mean, center - makes one think anew about money.  One of my themes is that money, as such (that is, taken apart from value), is not an abstraction, but is abstraction.  Put differently, money is fluid value or the fluidity of fluidity.

Over here, my credit card company knows I am abroad, and keeps asking for verification.  The local acceptance company knows my card is foreign, and controls from its end is obvious.  But then I spend cash and there is: nothing.  Currency oozes through the frozen, viscous structures.

holidays

Human nature abhors a vacuum.

Magdalene

There is beauty in brokenness.

glories

The cruel beauty of "Bali Ha'i" of Rodgers and Hammerstein from South Pacific, both lyrics and music - the truth of early middle age told.

hollow walls

Some facts continue to surprise after they are known - even after they are commonplace.  The surprise of early nightfall after the time changes is the paradigm.  Or the anatomical shape of the tongue - that it is large, deep and mushroom like, rather than a flat surfboard-shaped extension.

yellow

The impression I get from old films and pictures is that the public use of yellow to caution or emphasize (as with school buses, taxicabs, street signs and wet floor cones) has shifted, over the years, moving from a relatively orange tone to pale fluorescence today.  What might account for that?

"the trick is not minding that it hurts"

Lawrence of Arabia rides on iron ribbons of design.  Take the script.  Nearly every word of the dialogue has an identifiable purpose either in propelling the story or exhibiting character.  Four hours adds up to a lot of words, but minute by minute, the dialogue is spare, elegant, heightened.  If words were shot the way a scene is shot, so these words would be.  The effect on a first time viewer reaches a break through at the first dangerous confrontation: the well.  Sherif Ali confronts Lawrence.  The words are few: "Are you afraid, English?", "A man's fears are his own.", "Truly."  I once had someone sitting next to me, who was seeing Lawrence for the first time, lean and say "Why are they talking that way?" - but not for long.  Once tuned to this channel of expression, the listener experiences why, even if he does not realize it.  Because it pierces deep.  Because it is clean.  Indeed, what is cleanest about the desert - which doesn't look it but is praised as such by Lawrence - is the expression.

wave matter

As quantity has a quality all its own, so too does process have substance of itself.

publico

Being a lawyer can be just a job.  But it shouldn't be.  And I don't want that job.  I want to be a member of a profession.  One that serves principles - equal justice under the rule of law - and one that serves others: clients that pay and client's that can't.

the grid

Everything is structured.  I never hunted before I lived in the city, and now that I do, hunting is even more distant to me.  (A few squirrels shot when I was a kid don't count.)

And yet it is there - not just the hunting, but the whole infrastructure supporting it.  You go to my grandmother's rural land, out where she grew up, and her neighbors have deer in the bed of the pickup truck, two pairs of antlers, cubed venison in the chest freezer, gear, clothes, schedules, ways.  That's one layer.  Then you talk to them and you realize there are game wardens, whole social interactions with outsiders coming in to hunt, welcome or unwelcome, permits, confrontations, conventions.  A culture of hunting.

None of this is a surprise when you stop to think of it.  But one doesn't stop to think of it.  There is more than we know, right inside.

steeple

Strange to go back to South Carolina and see that the more successful churches tend towards new buildings that resemble cinemas, or gyms, or even warehouses.

Perhaps this is about money - the most space per dollar - and perhaps about flexibility, too - a simple enclosed volume can accommodate most anything.  And perhaps in some cases this is a religious decision either to eschew ornament or to reserve money for greater perceived needs.

Perhaps, perhaps, and yet it remains strange, and I think a mistake.  A space that looks like a warehouse will feel like a warehouse.  Place me in a lofty cathedral and I will look up.  Put me in a warehouse and I will go hunting for the coffee pot and non-dairy creamer.

The old standard design for baptist churches - pedimented and pillared portico, classical gabled-box proportions - was a relatively economic way to make the building impressive and also harkened back to antiquity.  Supposedly Spurgeon popularized the look on the argument that this was a good thing.  And it probably was.  And probably a baptist church will not want to ape Roman (or Eastern) catholic styles (although they might learn a thing or ten).

It can be done right.  The contemporary interior of Daniel Chapel at Furman University works well, as an inspiring space that palpably belongs to its sect, its time - and to God.  Plenty of other modern spaces work beautifully.  This agnostic would advise Christians to build to awe, if they can afford it.  And if they can't?  At least dignity.  And splendidly spiritual music fills as space with a sense of awe very inexpensively indeed.

smile

Happiness, considered as bliss, works similarly to eternity and cleaves along the same line.  Happiness, considered as an experience, is rather more indirect, in that it is a form of indirection, and in so being, distinguishes itself from pleasure.

basso continuo

When we speak of immortality, we must take care.  Two very different things are meant by the same term.  There is the state of immortality and then the transition to that state.  Or, yet more precisely, the transition from the contrary state.  That is, the point of much of our talk of immortality is found in demortalization.  And then there is the talk, quite different, of radical immortality: eternal and unconditional stasis as to existence.

The contrast is best expressed in sacred music: demortalization comes as ascent; radical immortality comes as a basso continuo, from Bach to Mendelssohn to Glass to Part.

two others

The transitive property fixedly applies only to quantity.

Crews

More good is done by charm than by argument.

Winchesters

My grandmother and her sisters would walk down to Stamp Creek Baptist Church as children for Sunday morning services.  And if the rain made the dirt road impassible, they'd stop down at the Poder's and sit with them before going back to their farm for dinner.  The question was whether to tell Dad they'd sat with the Poder's.  The sisters were divided on this.  One thought to tell the truth, another to lie and say they'd gone on down to church, and the third wanted to keep silent.

tacit

There's a middle path of silence between truth and falsehood.  And indeed all truth and all falsehood is admixed with silence.  Nobody says all, nor could.

the web

Culturally, of course, gay marriage does change what marriage is for others, too: at large and over time.  (That is, anyone who wants to have a specialized view of marriage - as an image of the relation between Christ and His church, for example - may continue to do so.  But this will not be culturally supported any more than it ever was.  It might, of course, become (yet) more culturally dissonant.)

The easy example is premarital sex.  Gay marriage, I predict, will lock in the cultural relocation of marriage from the beginning to the middle of a committed sexual relationship between the participants.  Overall, not only for gays who marry.

Indeed, the marriage will often mark the inflection point of the transition from a sexually magnetic relationship to a publicly committed, loving relationship with relatively less sex.  Gay marriage hastens, that is, the transition (in cultural perception rather than in fact) of extramarital sex to normal and of marital sex to extra.

eyes

Every day I teach myself lessons from my fellow passengers on subway cars.  From the delivery boys, with their heavy bike chains and weary faces: work harder; don't complain.  From the beautiful: look good, dress sharp.  From the old: life is a short day.  From the young: I am not young.  These obvious, shallow lessons, drop by drop, carve deep pools in my mind.

belief

Leave aside whether it is true or false: to believe in literal 7-day, young earth creation at this point conditions how one thinks of other issues.  Not because of creationism, as such, but because one must do something mentally and emotionally with the conflicting evidence.

MEW

Much of successfully, usefully sophisticated legal thought consists of resisting - or rather postponing - or rather timing - the resolution.  It must come at the right moment.  Until then, thought - the issue - remains layered, interactive, moving parts.  For legal ideas - in their legality - are not the cup but the handle, the rim, the glaze, the chipped edge and the superglue that reattached the chip.  These and not the cup itself are what the law works upon - precisely to produce, at last, the cup.

over-here'd

A convincing local, with the variety of Niw Yaw'ka's accent that borders on Bostonian, is taking is out of town relations sight seeing in East Midtown, near my work.  They drink it all in and snap pictures.  He narrates.

"And that's the 59th Street Bridge.  Or the Queensboro Bridge.  Or the Ed Koch Bridge!  All you have to do in this town to get something named after you is die.  When I die I guess they'll name a fire hydrant after me for dogs to piss on."

Of course, Koch isn't dead, but I take his point.

glories

The physical equipment of democracy: booths, boxes, lists, cards, indexes, folding tables, a flag on a stand shoved out of the way.

moiety

By the time one is ordering DVDs on Levi-Strauss from Netflix, rock bottom has been hit.  Excessive drinking, or almost any bad habit would be better.

substitute diligence

Ambition motivates hard work and is, in this respect, a virtue.

rolling stone

The subways had been down since Sunday, on account of Sandy.  But parts reopened this morning, including my commute.  So I got on the first train and exited my usual midtown stop.  Up the stairs to the sidewalk.  But look!  The iron treads of the stairs had gathered rust in the meanwhile - for a time not polished by the constant step of commuters' shoes.

cynical

The lady in line ahead of me at the drug store was buying elastic underwear - the kind that shapes your body and flattens your belly to make you look thinner.  The brand name: Truly Fit.

depending from

As Sandy passes, my building sways and my windows bow.  The door chain hangs, swinging, or rather, the building sways around its mass.

pop quiz

Describe the difference between aphoristic and homiletic expression in 140 characters.

twitter's doorknob

An aphorism is the spark that flies from the doorknob as one is leaving the room of thought.

red and white stripes

I've been going to the same barber for years.  He seemed to be an assistant manager at the beginning, but he opened up an outpost shop under the same ownership nearer my work, and since then I've been going there.  I have the sense that he bought in - at any rate he's the boss at the new location.  Everyone is Armenian.

At first, it was all professional wrestling on the televisions, and framed pictures of my barber mugging, thumbs up, next to some professional wrestling figure.  A wall of fan photos, in which you could watch him age - see the youth in his face melt away.  And the capes were printed with scantily clad bimbos.  Every morning I pass and he waves, or if he's standing in the doorway, he says hello.

I suppose he's matured.  Lately the television is soccer or, occasionally, market news.  The capes are plain, good cloth now, embroidered with "Premium Barber Shop" - the name of the place.  He's gained a little paunch.  And this morning, the sweatshirt was gone.  He was wearing a red-and-white striped dress shirt, with contrasting all-white cuffs and collar.  He said not "hello" but "good morning" and nodded a bit as he did.  He has become The Barber.

rooftop

In one's career - not just professionally, but creatively and in pursuit of knowledge - it is smart to ask whether an institution or situation is a platform or a shelter.  Whether it promotes but exposes, or else protects but conceals.  (And as always, with heuristics, whether it's even a useful distinction.)

threats

But once he does see something that isn't there, he might see it anywhere and will hardly be persuaded that it is nowhere.

Ramsey

The wiser and more wry of the pastors from my childhood said that during the darker periods of his life he had though to himself: "I've figured it out.  The Lord loves me, but he doesn't like me."  This is certainly true of people, myself included: there are those who love you, but don't like you.  And certainly those who love you do not always like you.

haberdash

Walk into a men's clothing store - eh, meh, bleh.  Drowsy employees, dreary picking at clothes in the clearance section.

But walk into a nice men's clothing store with a serious intention to buy a couple of good suits and - zowie - the place springs to life.  The salesman that gets you turns on the charm, suggestions - surprisingly good ones - flow, and when he goes down to the storeroom to bring you your size, the other salesmen look at you a bit longingly.  Their eyes suggest "I would have taken such good care of you, you know?"  Which is probably all part of the play.  You know it's a play, but real too - you want a good suit, they want a commission.  It's the play of reality, the slicking of rails meant to carry real cargo.  The masculine compliments - "that looks nice on you," "the seat of those trousers don't need a thing," "I saw this down there and thought you'd like it."  And - whoa - the grey haired asian tailor in his beautiful tweed sportscoat, expertly marking alterations.  Playing his role too - the same basic compliments as the salesmen but in a quiet, almost priestly tone.  He half intones, half whispers, "it looks right."  And you half feel, half think: it is true - this suit on me is good.  The tailor has uttered it.  It all feels great - almost a congratulations for hard work and success.

Affluence, in moments like this, feels almost as good as a shoulder rub from a good friend.  Innocent?  For the moment, sure.  But one senses a snake in the garden.  Brooks Brothers has a line of suits called the "Golden Fleece" and I thought to myself - that's a rather brazen double entendre.

nocturn

Talents, of course, go to waste in any society.  This waste is taken as a sign of poor social order and evil of itself.  And surely much waste is evil.  Just as surely, the loss of something wonderful, glorious, is always risked in any waste, and if such is lost, that is evil, too.  But imagine a society in while nobody was wasted, in which all were put to use.  And one sees an overheated monstrosity.  Waste, in human society - that part of it that diverts excess ability - is as important as death in the world at large.

State College

There is a level of family affluence - what I grew up calling comfortable - that when combined with stable family structure and an intelligent, pacific outlook, is something near to heaven on earth and greatly to be wished.  I have in mind one of the families I saw at a wedding this weekend - which produced for the visitor happy moment after moment, as if from the opening scenes of Fanny and Alexander.

iphone

A think and highly absorbent sponge, ideal for sopping up cash.

transaction

Knowledge is not an unqualified good.  Certainly it is not a constant pleasure.  There are all kinds of stuff you'd have to pay me to know.  And people do.

Key

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 dangerous.  In most, it is a slight ailment.  And in the few for whom it is more - in either direction - the excess likely lies with them.  I speak of the readers, not the writers.

according to JK Rowling

You can't have sex near unicorns.  It's tacky.

Suu Kyi

What doesn't come across so well in a video, or at all when she speaks in English, is the love and lightness with which Aung San Suu Kyi communicates with her Burmese people.  She knows how to wrap an audience around her finger, but honor them as she does so, by high regard and a kind of giving of herself.  The reserve of her English-speaking style is reversed when she speaks Burmese.  All is serious, honest, even highbrow, yet there is a sense of play, of joy, of peaceful strength flowing to the people.  She can answer a serious question with stories that build through crescendos of laughter.  Some anecdotes, many folk takes.

Idiomatic Burmese is especially a matter of constant allusions to a common font of folk tales and proverbs.  Suu Kyi pushes this further by not only alluding to these proverbs and tales as static cultural references, but diving in and adjusting them, making them funnier, fresher, and more pointed.  The effect on a Burmese audience is when she does this to transfix them.  It is as if she has taken the cultural furniture familiar to all and made it come gently but definitely to life.

This would be offensive if she misappropriated the proverbs, or indeed if she wasn't so much held in awe.  But because she is held in awe, and because she does do it gently, her breathing of life into these cultural proverbs and tales works.  That is one of the ways - only one, but what a way - in which she has come to embody the Burmese people.  She breathes life into the shared cultural heritage and by means of it drives home points of responsibility and hope for the future, of shared purpose and recognition of need.  It is the glory of folk tales and proverbs to be so used.

There is something of Lincoln in all this.  Why hadn't I seen that before?  Is it because I could not imagine anyone even comparing with Lincoln?  Because so much of his place in my mind is defined by his peculiarity, his glorious strangeness?  Probably, but she does compare.  (Rather as Mandela always recalled Washington to me.)

Her pitch for non-militaristic, non-violent change (in Burmese) was her own take on the means/end trope.  Said she: the means define the end.

(She also has that mystical quality that comes of her long house arrest and release.  Assassinated political leaders become martyrs, political saints.  But are dead.  Her arrest gave her some of that - in this case deserved - halo, but left her alive.  She has something of the resurrection about her.  It is almost too much.  You can see why the Tatmadaw feared her, and how, in fearing either to release or to kill her, they made her more fearsome.  What a demon she would be if devoted to political evil and not to good!)

days

Familiar love is felt most tenderly at departure.

Bishop's storehouse

A welfare system is most readily premised on fellow feeling, or family feeling, or religious feeling.  An extensive state is a welfare state only by ideology or necessity.  Generally speaking.

recess

I often joke that people will never be as impressed with me, nor like me, so much as they do at the start.  I find that often true.  Of myself to others, and particularly of others, to me.  But this is not a decrease to zero - only to a happy moderate level, where love might grow, or not.

Adams

There's something wonderful - albeit aspirational - about John Adams insisting that the government of Massachusetts be constituted as and named a commonwealth.  This is what the government was to be: neither a libertarian gossamer thread confederation, nor yet a ideologically tinged republic.  And especially not a state: that heavy word.  Of all these words, of all these ideas, commonwealth suggests an organic and inseparable expression of us: the river of the people's intent and action.

eat not

Consumption becomes consumptive when it is not directed.  The liberated (that is, self-directing) person consumes for ends beyond adhesion to what is pressed on him or her in the marketplace.  And thus that liberated person directs the economy through their consumption.  But when consumption is not externally directed but a compulsion, the openness is driven from the structure, which compacts into an animal - or nearly plantlike - knot of illiberal instinct.

seen through her eyes

One kind of love is a tenacious innocence.

nosin

One of the difficulties of an egalitarian, democratic culture is that it obscures the value of different virtues for different situations - different stations, to use that word with its older connotations.  There are times and places - but I more mean roles in life - for which self love, or aggression, or restlessness - are virtues.  And in which humility, or acceptance, or quietness are virtues - or vices.

cliches

Great realities may grow from mustard seeds, but that which was tiny had never been not nil.  Nothing comes of nothing.

hundred million

Simple things, places, homes - these can look good with little trouble.  Lively, clean, intelligent - little more is required.  But expense looks well only with great trouble and greater taste.  I'd bet the truly beautiful interiors among great Manhattan penthouses and townhouses could be counted on your fingers and toes.

stasis

Part of adulthood is how one deals with the simple social vices: drinking, gambling, smoking, gossiping, etc.  A iron-sided giant, I suppose, avoids them all.  A lucky person perhaps finds none of them appealing.  But for most of us, the ordinary and sufficient path is maintenance.  To continue to avoid most of these vices - those that never appealed much in the first place.  And if one or two have their hooks in us, to moderate them in quantity and effect.  And then to take pleasure in that moderated remainder - that we not seek pleasure elsewhere.  To keep them trimmed back and then take what one can from them.

Porgy and Bess

My cab driver this morning is an old opera singer - he toured with Porgy and Bess as "Robbins" for years.  We talked about shape note singing and Bach, chromatic temper, and the best cheap seats at Carnegie.  He sang for me a little "Woman is a Sometime Thing."  We were a joy to each other and the ride was too short.

Thinking of Disraeli

We do not live in the present because we live through our minds.  We only exist through the present.  My mind is a quantity of eternity, bounded by time but not of it.

arrow point

Less is more.  Usually.  Open space clarifies the essentials left central.  Choices made benefit from open options going forward.  But this is only because of how we inhabit time.  If time were not unidirectional, less would not be more.

next

In an emergency, energy is wisdom.

smart cliches

Someone was just telling me that a draft "Succeeds almost in spite of itself."  Seconds later they're telling me that it's obvious that the writer "put a lot of effort into it, but some things don't quite come off."  While there isn't a strict contradiction in these two statements, it is easy to see that something has gone wrong.

And what went wrong was facilitated or caused by the unmeaning slip into a cliche, here, succeeding in spite of one's self.  The trouble is that this is an intelligent cliche, in that it actually expresses something that is hard to put into a few words without having advance formulation.  So the expression has utility and carries meaning.  And that's the rub - it was being misused.  All the speaker meant was that the draft was a mixed bag of things that worked and didn't, but on balance better than worse.  Perhaps feeling - wrongly - that this observation was too thin, the speaker reaches without realizing for a "smarter" way of putting it - and instead found something smarter that says something else.

fifty-seventh

Tomorrow a new Whole Foods opens a block up from my work.  I pass it every day and have watched it complete.  But today!  Whole Foods' Eve, I suppose.  A crush of activity, inside and out.  Cement workers listen in disbelief to their foreman as he tells them what they're going to rip out, pour, smooth and replace today, just outside.  Carpenters with long grey beards and (carpenter's) pencils stuck over their ears, cutting wood for last adjustments to the check-out counters.  A line of trucks, with drivers perched in their cabs, as amused as me, waiting, watching the hive of activity, taking it all in.  Stacks of empty boxes and scraps that, for once, dwarf the big garbage trucks waiting to haul it all away.  Everyone on the ground with "Hello my name is" tags on their tshirts, somebody's idea of bringing order - or at least identity - to the mass of effort.  Shopping carts, unscratched chrome shining, with blue protective plastic still clinging to new grips.  Potted orchids, already in place, stems trembling in the blow of an air conditioning vent.

sow

Marriage and children: the great wagers.

voting booths, voting boxes

small boxes, reliquaries

Traveler's Rest

The field gate is always shut
But is not a wall.


Silent winds and still hinges
Test the latch and lock


That hold monogamous, and
Wait for a lost key.

glories

Trollope's first-person narration.

Plantagenet

Lovely: The idea that one would half fill a committee, so that one's choices could bring their own choices, and thus serve happily.  The committee is, in terms of independent voices, half its apparent size, and includes helpers that are happy to be at the table.

up from the ooze

Illiteracy - or other forms of disconnectedness - localize and the human spirit and help it congeal into the strands of culture, with their funky tang, that give color and eventually substance to the broader, more sophisticated, all-too connected culture.

This is part of the magic of childhood - within which we were each aboriginals, then with our little tribe.  The smell of fire pits and drying meat.

I remember the mark of lost virginity.  My body had this tang, this slight scent in the crevices.  My own culture of odor-producing skin bacteria.  And the first time I really got up against another person, skin to skin, a hardier and more widespread colony of bacteria crossed over.  And my sweat came to smell like anyone else's.

Trollope

What is snobbery but overt observation?

checkers

Being physically attractive in the ordinary ways: fresh clothes, cut hair, upright gait, pleasant expression.  It's probably the most common, and most benign, game adults can play.

lawyering

The difficulty of service is that it cannot be faked or multiplied.

abstract

There is something spiritual about the internet.

screenname: journeytotheworld

I call this the traveler's chant, 
Sittin' on a train or in the back of a car,
Thinking: Maybe it's me, 
Yes I do have places to be;
And I'll be there.

choose

"Preserving options" is a terrible life strategy, with few exceptions.  Yet few strategies are more common or more express among my peers than this: let no door close.

tranquility of print

Scriptures, potentially the most damaging aspect of religions, are in practice the most reassuring.  This is entirely a matter of medium and age.

today

Endure.  The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all

ever

Energy exceeds intellegence.

Leland

At a certain age, older relations stop filtering their memories.  The 1930s, back on the red clay lot in back of the lumber mill, the rough old house, its walls patched with waxed cardboard.  The older sister that gave her a second-hand bicycle.  The younger sister that rode it to the cotton field, played around with Leland and got pregnant.  Her papa took the bicycle and cut it into pieces.

the grammar of blows

From a spiritual perspective, violence is indistinguishable from magic.

agrarian

Who that writes and reads to live (or to maintain one's place) wouldn't prefer - or say he prefers - the plow?  It isn't just the agrarian myth, it is the agrarian fantasy.  (I don't mean that, as such, it is unreal or insincere.)

magpie

The adult version of the juvenile mistake of happiness: a search for purpose or meaning.  Of course, many adults never graduate even from the juvenile mistake.

highest class

I am daily impressed (in both senses of the word) with lawyering as a form of service.

Ousley

Redemption, outside a theology, requires proportionality from the subject unless the medium is fungible (money, or in some cultures, blood).  This is the dark side of secularism for a wrongdoer.

flesh

The practice of law is the service of those who need to work upon - and under - power and integrity by means of authoritative words.  To understand authoritative in the preceding is to understand the sense in which an attorney represents.  And this is the beauty of the bar: it is a sort of incarnation of words.

counterparties

Most people are a little slippery.  Many people are downright slippery.  This is less by craft or malice, and more from laziness and cowardice.

Caro & Michelle

Power or alcohol: neither corrupt.  Either magnifies and therefore reveals - albeit selectively.

scape

Our capacity for dreaming suggests magnificent mental capacities.  I dream of someone I know, fairly shy, but in the dream bolder and talkative.  It is a subtle transformation - his personality is transformed, but not warped.  This is impressive mental work.  Imagine the talent of a novelist who does this with a developing character.

And yet.  This is all taken from my observations of my own dreams.  I suppose we have all woken to a brilliant idea, occurring in a dream, to find that the idea is not only not brilliant - it isn't even an idea.  Perhaps the brilliance of dreams is only the false glory of observations made in a uniquely credulous state.

glories

The words flat and sharp as they apply to music.  The acuity of the metaphor, an accident of language.

Wolf Hall

We all know what ghosts are like.  Music and books are ghosts.

more faith

Gambling and religion.  This much in common: evocation of the absent object of desire.

Darius

In an office setting one has involuntary pee-mates.  Folks who are coming to, going from, or in the restroom as you do the same, more often then chance would have it.  They're on the same rhythm, somehow.

faith

A religion is known and properly judged by its works precisely because it is spiritual.  All its works - particularly the numberless ordinary examples of kindness, waste, joy or blindness.

nearly perfect, perfectly wonderful

The Tampa of Magic Mike.  The drywall stacked up beside preposterous condos, faintly desperate, the thinning commercial thoroughfares where the bars are (I think of Greenville's old Silver Fox, placed exactly where Soderburgh puts his strip joint, the beach scenes all seen through the sickly tint of sunglasses, the cement picnic tables under fiberglass umbrellas outside fast food joints, the Ford F100s.

melting

On a summer weekend, Coney Island is the New York of New York.

forebears

A half-serious proposal: now that we're done with the 50-state quarters, I'd like to see 234 quarters with ordinary Americans citizens on the back, one for each year of independence.

The criteria: they must be dead, they must have lived ordinary lives, committing no crimes and reaching no great achievement, none may have been elected to higher than municipal office; each must be randomly selected from a demographically representative sample of thousands from each year.

Unnamed on the coin, each would of course receive some description on a website somewhere.

And then I would have an artists' competition for the engraving of each - with the only artistic criteria being that the subject be recognizable, individual and dignified.

The American Citizens' series. And if an interest group (veterans, lawyers, whatever) hijacks the idea, I'll disavow it - it has to be about ordinary people of our past, full stop.

petty

I flip my 3-month wall calendar and now see September creeping up.  Alarming.

all you can eat

Overwhelming popular support is only occasionally a sign of an idea's goodness. It more often indicates an all-round payout.

contract

Surfaces and interfaces, par excellence: lungs, skin, words.

Cupertino

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.

more popular

Do not think about your amusements.

unpopular

The trouble most people have with truth is that it is unsatisfying.

the social gospel

Raising up the humble is appealing, particularly when linked to the casting down of the proud.  But this depends on it happening in a moment, at least in a mental moment.  As an ongoing promise, the appeal is lost - all that is left is a continual raising and lowering - an unhappy human churning, by divine agitation.

glories

Bojangles Robinson and Shirley Temple

power

Two complaints, superficially identical, may be of two distinct species.  One is a prayer, the other, a command.

across

I'd rather be my kind of fool than his.

Pearl

It isn't that she decided to tell the truth.  She simply ran out of anything else to say.

clipped

Why were coins round?  Because it is easier to see that something has been removed from a circle than from other shapes?

shorter tailoring

Law is the courtesy of power - the veil by which it avoids naked display.

narrowly tailored

Law clothes power, diverting it from violence.  Power imbues the mantle of legal words with movement and shape.  The practice of law is the provision and understanding of authoritative words for life among others' power, thus clothed, and the dressed discharge of one's own power.

Paper money, and the non-violent society required for its value, is the ultimate expression of law.

viscosity

The banker's jargon of "leverage" when speaking of debt is an apt metaphor.  Like the lever, debt is the fundamental economic machine.  And it has much of the same character - steepness, stiffness, gradualness, slip and grip - all are readily carried from metaphor to situation.  The market needs the right amount of slip and grip.  And the right range of levers within it.  One propeller works in water, another in air.  For wood, a screw is needed, unless one seeks a bit to drill.

The varieties of debt are the same and properly as varied.  But tools require discipline too - as many useful shapes as there are, useless and dangerous shapes will ever be more numerous.

red letter

Servants be patient with your masters, for this is as much your service as the laboring.  I speak of lawyers and their clients, of course.

shadows

It was Fleet Week (more precisely, the Rendez-Vous Naval de Québec) in Quebec City, and we watched a presentation on Canadian Naval history.  To an American, accustomed to highly nation-centric public history, it was startling to see that the presentation was mostly about the French, the English and the Americans - and only slightly about Canadians, as such.  Canada exists - and always has existed - in the Northern shadow of great powers, and is the better for it.  It gives a cosmopolitan spine to the sprawling, rural flesh of the nation.

Before me, Église Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, à Québec.

Within her stone walls, an inner space of wood and plaster, painted dead white, a gilded alter before.  None of this is remarkable: the tender Marie, the bleeding Christ, in their glossy painted colors.  But suspended, mid-space, a model ship, perhaps a meter long, her mast a meter high, a ship - a French colonial ship, warlike and vulnerable, an armed fetus, its Falu red keel above me like an infant spine, curling in on its viceral crew and settlers in passage.

She possesses the volume of the church.  It responds by seeming less church air than Atlantic terror made breathable transparance, centuries ago but here the way an old tomb is both then and here, the way oceans are at once ever and now.  And in a mind's moment, the walls respond and the atmosphere of the church seems not water but the ship's ethereal aura - it has held at bay the deep demons, and this is its ambit, a walled protection, a fortress of faith.  The ship has cast out death and we are safe within the stone perimeter of its colonizing fierté.  As we are dry and living, so we are catholic.

The windows of the church are not large, but small-set, as jewels - as glass carried from the old world must practically have been - and also as threats - as any opening to this cold, hard world must have seemed: practically a invitation to savage leaks, a cascade of danger that could swamp the hardy, terrified faithful below, and set the suspended model above, afloat, adrift, into the terrible, Canadian vastness.

Babylon

Cities spell effort before they speak improvement.

motion practice

Being in court is a peculiarly stressful form of happiness.

presidente

One of our in-house catering staff wheels a cart of breakfast items and dozens of bottles of Presidente beer into a conference room.  Dominican beer at 8:30 at a law firm meeting.  Qu'est-ce que c'est?

law

"That is an old idea: tell me something more modern."
"I can tell you a more recent idea, but not a more modern one."

an obscure one

An old fashioned satisfaction: Search for case law all day on the online databases.  Nothing great.  Search PACER - one good thing, not enough.  Search the treatises.  Nothing great.  Get ready to return them and think to yourself, "Oh yeah - the pocket part."  And therein - gold.

post-ideological tissue

The poor boy.  He has the muscles of anger but none of the bones.

roman

Will identity be the skin of your palm, its ligaments, the nail, or your cross?

brag and beg

I passed by some elemental marketing this morning - a handwritten sign on the side of a sidewalk food cart:

Our Halal Food IS THE BEST.
PLEASE
try us for once.  

building the wall

What could be harder than writing - productive, technical, mind-changing writing?  The gathering of materials and their selection, the mixing of these materials into thought, almost like the combination of cement mix and water.  Then the kneading, working, coaxing of this material into shapes - shapes that are discovered in the shaping.  And then, the rediscovery of your voice as you trowel the shaped material into final form.

here

Luck is placement at its beginning and end.  Through its middle, placement is wisdom.

senses

Sometimes competence registers, to the competent, as a kind of numbness.

trouble brewing

I shouldn't take so easily to William Burrough's writing.  It's too much like seeing the sidewalk littered with broken umbrella handles before the storm.

who

One of the distinctive experiences of being homosexual is detection and managing detectability.  Is he?  Can others tell I am?  I think this aspect is more central and telling than the actual sex.  It is, anyhow, much more frequent.

Putting centrality another way - detection is central to the social experience of being homosexual, and homosexuality is experienced socially.  In bed one doesn't feel homosexual.

This is hardly an original observation - but then it wouldn't be, would it?

polite

A spam email that didn't get caught by my spam filter began thus: "Thank you for continuing to receive our emails."  From there it's just usual spam.  Well - you're not welcome, spammer.

to myself

Persistence is as unglamorous a virtue as could be.  But what could be more needful?  Having decided, absent a clear change contrary, grip tight and hold fast.  And we you do change, turn a square, neat corner, charting a straight course before and after.  Don't wander.

register

Now and then, I toy with whether there are fundamental time units - or at least minimum intervals - of human perception.  I'm sure this is a scientific subject, but I'm more interested in it as a mental toy.

For example, what is the minimum time for facial recognition - for meaningful eye contact - for recognition of danger?

Take meaningful eye contact.  My guess is that you can look at someone and tell that they are returning your glance in about a twentieth of a second.  I wonder whether this time - whatever it is - stays consistent across ordinary humans.  Or does it change with age? Socialization? Genetics.

Well, as you can see, toys turn into subjects rather easily.  Probably I should just go find the answer.  I wonder how long that will take.

sinister out of context

"Above thy deep and dreamless sleep. The silent stars go by."

cohere

This pulley pump, the body, presses and lazes

In measures near equal – not quite

And we tip the balances.

We tilt to ambitions or hopes

And think on ourselves,

Perchance bodily.

And we see a wet machine,

A crime scene in waiting,

A tadpole a mermaid

A Hubble gas cloud.

Left toes pinch a right toe,

And the feeling is so

Down there, so far,

That I am a beam.

Or walking so far

Even my shoulders ache from pacing

And my calves, oh

I am a sirloin.

Or this or that messy wonder,

Fearfully and sloppily made.

But all adheres
Till escapade.

today

One intimacy forgoes another.  Choose well.

movies

Well, you know, it's set in the early 50s, before sexual intercourse was invented.

oh dear

The new blood donation poster is up in the pantry at work.  Looks like the old one but - wait - what's this in the lower corner?  A depiction of a plastic membership card, captioned "Ask about our rewards program: Red Cell Advantage."  I remark on this to the new paralegal pouring herself coffee and she says "Oh yeah, you can get movie tickets."

The mind, it boggles.

scent

I remember more during my highs and my lows than otherwise.  The air, the humidity, the temperature feel a certain way, and I am back camping, or a sophomore, or in the back field, or driving that sorry maroon Cadillac Cimarron.

eyeye

Law usually doesn't - couldn't - attain to the quartz-like perfection of the following provision of the Uniform Commercial Code's section on checks:

Forged checks are valid  - against the forger.

sturdy

Reading and reflection have fostered in me the suspicion that it is unhelpful to visualize one's soul -- one's being -- as located deep within, either in the chest cavity or lodged inside the skull. Instead, one's most essential being is better visualized as seated at the skin, at the interface between one's self and all else. Did I say at? I meant as. It is not that surface is substance, no. More that interface is substance.

This is a visualization, of course, not a spiritual anatomy. And even if it is wrong (might be), or simplistic (surely is), the visualization is still heuristic. One's soul, visualized as an inner dark, safe spot apart, is usually a wildly unhelpful excuse and an opportunity for avoiding the truth that one's outer being is what one is, as much as anything else.

Mind you, if I were helping someone cope with an abusive, torturing or otherwise hellish environment, I would advise retreating within. That is, if the person abused were ordinary and weak like me and you. If a saint, I would have her live the glory of being most herself right at the surface of suffering.

compliments

To have a wide perspective is rather too like standing, tip-toe, on a swivel chair.

From the New York Times

"The format of chess boxing is simple: rounds of boxing alternating with rounds of chess, until either a knockout or a checkmate."

descent

Boredom - what is it, really?  It feels like the next step after disillusionment.  And like the step prior to confusion.

cadences

One thing I miss about belief is the room it gives for the sincere use of cadences of voice, singing of hymns, and other modes that are so clearly part of the natural and beautiful human tone range.  As they are employed in worship alone, they are lost to me, except as yearnings.

rico

My eyes open as the morning light breaks over our knuckles, like a dawn through the mountain tops.

lately

If relaxing doesn't resolve the fatigue, the problem is position - or constitution.

heroic

But what is a hero, if not a conspicuous devotee of necessity, one who runs to what must be rather than be dragged by it?

glories

"What's the Use of Wondrin'"

obvious

The people you connect with while you are in a certain frame of mind, connect to you in that frame.  Their affinity is a snapshot of that moment, and yours.

briefing

The high road to persuasion: identify the question and its several contexts, then select the two or three most regular - repetitive - of these contexts.  Then identify the relation of that question to these regular contexts.  Bring your audience this far, and help them through the last step: discerning the answer those regularities give to the question.  Upside: truthful and reliable.  Downside: you're stuck giving a valid answer.

Vicki

Walking down the street during the morning rush with a paper coffee cup in my hand.  A short firecracker of a girl, in her waitress uniform, nametag "Vicki", is moving fast in the opposite direction with a grocery bag.  I suppose they ran out of something back at the diner.  She locks eyes with me and, smiling bright, she says - "Is that coffee you're drinking, my man?"  She says this in a way that is somehow both sunny and sultry, a bit of a Mexican accent, too.  I say "yes" and she says "Oh my man!"  Neither of us slows and she's past.  A couple of others in the morning rush crowd turn their heads slightly.  And I think,  "Huh? ... Cool."

glories

The globe scene and the ending speech of Chaplin in The Great Dictator.  The pantomimes and crowd scenes in Children of Paradise.  Creation in The Tree of Life.

curmudgeon

A high school student passes me on the street and his tshirt reads, on its back, that "it is better to have what one does not need, than to need what one does not have."  And who could argue with that?  One who questions the general ability to register need, to count the cost of surplus, and to anticipate the options of improvisation or later supply.  That's who.

ache

Some of what passes for virtue, and some of what passes for vice, is mere tiredness.

elementary

There are coercive moves and there are subtle moves where we seek to tip the other in a direction.  But then there is persuasion and appeals to desire, by which we take the other not as an object, but as a motive subject.

thinking fast

I've heard researchers of human psychology claim that, under ordinary circumstances, we understand statements we hear by trying to believe them.  That is, we ordinarily attempt to integrate rather than to analyze, and evaluate a claim based on the results of the attempted integration.  That rings true to me.

Jackie Brown

Melancholy, the long middle march: we associate these with blunting, dulling, dragging.  But they can also spur, sharpen, quicken.

small

I was pressed against two readers on the train in today.  One was reading Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and I was so close to him that I could see where his eyes fell on the page.  He was reading intelligently - stuck on the sentence that sticks.

The other was reading a legal brief that cited to a case written by a judge I've appeared before.

The whole world: kin.

tactile illusion

My office computer was replaced this morning, but the same old keyboard and screen remain.  And yet, when I type, my fingers tell me the keyboard feels different.  Obviously not, and yet, even knowing obviously not, it feels so.

system 2+1

But remember, polls may awaken the respondents' sense of play, mischief, anger or annoyance.  There's no cost to failing a poll question.

Yangon

Three elements of human systems in which order and freedom may subsist together: hierarchy, rules, trust.

All actual cultural systems are comprised of significant amounts of all three elements.  But the relative predominance of one or another changes how order is seated and how freedom flows.

In the U.S., for example, rules predominate.  When an American thinks "So long as I follow the rules, I may do as I please," the feeling is one of freedom.  (Unless the rules are very overbearing or novel.  Most Americans go through airport security and feel inconvenienced, but not unfree.  Libertarians, that is, Americans who do see many common rules as impinging on their freedom, are a quite American phenomenon but they prove the point about Americans in general by 1) their inability to grow in numbers despite intensity and 2) their naive unawareness, for the most part, that where rules recede, hierarchy and trust relationships will advance - in short, they have a poor grasp of human nature.  To put that last point a little differently: most libertarians are neither anarchists, nor elitists, nor communitarian, which shows that this majority among them are simply unaware of the stakes set by human nature.) 

When one comes from a different culture, this same thought - "Now that you am in the U.S., so long as you follow the rules, you may do as I please" sounds like sophistry (in that the rules are felt as interfering with freedom).  The flow of freedom around rules feels like continuity to an American, but feels like interference to someone from a culture unaccustomed to regularly enforced rules.

Take an American and put him in, say, a class-bound society in which the haves can pay to get their way and the have-nots stay that way.  Let that same society be one where connections are everything - if you know and trust someone, you'll look the other way.  In that culture, people will often feel free - rules are not getting in the way, so long as you know the right people, are trusted, or have the right position and means.  The American will say this group only feels free.  But so does the American "only" feel free.  One has the freedom to blow through rules, given other elements.  The other has the freedom to do without trust or station, so long as the rules are followed.

Various kinds of societies can work.  And no cultural structure is without deep flaws.  Americans are right to prefer a rule-predominant structure, because Americans value individualism and rules are optimal to individual life spans and life paths.  A hierarchical or trust based structure is optimal to those who value the strength of families and groups.  These are simple examples only - I could go further and say it more completely.

AO

It might actually be an interesting role: a sort of judicial teacher?

stronger than caffine

This morning's cab ride featured a talkative cab driver.

w-W-where are you going?

55th and Third

w-What?

55th and Third

Ok.  Fifty-fifth. ...  I sure am glad you got in this cab with me.

Hmm?

Oh yeah, you're the first guy I've picked up in 6 days.  I haven't w-worked in 6 days.  Have you?

Yes.

For partying.  I partied.  Its good to talk to someone, it's good.

...

You understand.  They don't understand.  They put me on 6 days' leave.

I was partying, bourbon and meaningless sex.  Do you drink?

Yes.

Are you married?

Yes.

My girl is the worst girl.  We're not married.  I wanted to marry her but I wasn't sure.

You have to be sure.

It's good at first they say.  My parents died last year - I'm fifty-five and alone.

I'm sorry.

If you have kids too late you're old when they're eleven.

...

It sure is good you're in this cab.  I've been alone for six days.  Now that my parents are gone.  They lived with me.  You gotta live, this is all there is.  That's what I'm saying.

We must each die.

Yes, yes.  y-You know that Jesus Christ, Jesus married a bad woman - did you hear that?

He associated with them.

Yes.

One washed his feet with her hair, in tears and perfume.

Yes.  That's partying.

It's hard for you to be alone.

I don't have any kids.

---

We arrive at work.  I unbuckle.  First time I've worn a seat belt in a New York cab since I don't know when.

---

Thank you very much.

Thank you.  Have a good morning.

reminder

As to work requiring mental effort, multitasking is impossible.

really

I've never understood the use of artificial as a slur, except where it is used inaccurately, as a substitute for inopportune or inaccurate.

Broadus

It is asking too much of religion that it be true.  Rather it for religion to call us to be truthful.  Insofar as it does, it is good.  To ask that religion be good in that manner is to ask quite enough.  For some are not, and no religion is good altogether.  When a religion is largely good, and calls people to goodness and truth, it is worthy, and has done all that may be expected of it.

years

Friendly professional conduct is a good thing.  But it is a mistake to expect friendship from one's profession.

brief

The need of the hour: a fluidly alternating grip on metaphorical thinking and direct manipulation.

HGA

When I see people living more fully and broadly on the outside, I count the cost of getting so far inside.

corporate

By law, we refine aggression into a purer, more aggressive, and yet less irritating form.

First

Adam is a useful conception.  (Pun not intended.)

Useful because he focuses the ambiguity of man's place.  Supreme yet nothing.  Naught but wonder.  Angels merely appertain, which is the chief reason that Lucifer is as hard to think of as Satan is easy. 

misty

Transitions are movements into the unknown.  Some transitions are like corners turned - sharp and obscured by known barriers to foresight.  Others are like a passage through mist - thickly shapeless, with knowledge baffled even as to the nature of what intervenes.

ba

To learn Burmese, before you learn numbers, before you learn letters, before you learn much of anything - you must learn how to pay respect verbally - to suffix what you say with a little acoustic bow.  It is that basic.

caesura

For better and worse, I find that gaps in the intensity of my work feel like - and largely are - gaps in the intensity of my life, or worse, gaps in my self.

Ferguson

"Intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism."

profession

Partly, one is being paid for accepting pain.  And again partly, for accepting unschedulable happenstance.

becalmed

There's no better word for the problem of heaven: one would feel becalmed.  Or not - once heaven is supposed, an altered mental state is a short leap.

universal solvent

You know what would clean that right up?  A million dollars.

grouchy

It is strange to watch Snow White straight through, as an adult, thinking of where it led, creatively.  The ambition is there, but all is in a creative state of becoming.  The movie is unsuccessful in so many ways, but alive to itself and adult in its muscular ambition as nothing that followed would be.  A glorious mess, and not very long.

paya

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

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

announcement

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

Yenangyaung 5

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

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

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

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

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.