the varieties of prayer

A friend invited me to his baptism last week, which was held in the small, trendy pool of an upscale, design-conscious midtown hotel (congruously named Grace Hotel).  The pool was in a humid room planked in reclaimed wood, with art projected onto the ceiling. 

There were about twenty candidates for baptism, five pastors to counsel, immerse and pray over them, a many-versed hymn accompanied by guitar, and a short sermon on the meaning of baptism and on the old scene by the River Jordan that could have been delivered by a country lay preacher in the 1800s - though this pastor spoke from the notes on his iPad. 

All were in swim shorts and tshirts, street clothes.  One young man, his green hipster t-shirt had an oversized print of a cassette tape on the front, was flowing with tears as he went down, then rose from the water radiant, crying, overcome.  Through his wet tshirt, you could see the big tattoo of a sixteenth note on his back.  Two of the congregation reached down to help him up from the water, a third dried him, reaching for a folded towel from a mismatched stack. 

There was a crowding around this corner of the pool, as each of the baptized emerged, a sense of love and desire to create and hold a feeling of some kind - one I know well from my own baptist past, though I could only watch it at this phase in my life.  They had gathered by the river.  Deep in the city, the folk will have their ways.

the varieties of prayer

When Burmese Buddhists take leave of their elders - parents, great aunts, and so forth - they kneel before them, bring hands together and touch forehead to ground, give thanks, ask forgiveness, and receive a blessing.  This is the gadaw.  A great act of mutual love, which I have again seen in my home, this morning.

fitness to purpose

Androgyny is almost as beautiful as intellegence.  And both?  Man.

like ants

One function of lawyering - shameful but real - is as a form of offensive irritant deployed by well-funded or otherwise well-supported parties.  Won't talk to us, will you?  Fine.  We'll dump a can of lawyers on you.

hooked

Village connectors: U Bein's Bridge; the Roosevelt Island Tram.

vortices

Hell is an orgy of strangers, forced to the moist immediacy of unknown, interior flesh, pressed against an itching suburban globe of pale, tufted polyester, abraded by scentless smell, hotly unwarm, clammy but sweatless: ceaseless, empty intimacy.

simply so

Life is better with a spouse at one's side.

angels

Last night we watched Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist, a lovely, fragile thing - as tender as an old man's heart.  The animation is of a water-colored style, given its corners and shapes by thin, hand-drawn lines.  And then there comes a moment so beautiful, subtle, right and startling, my jaw actually dropped and I clapped my hands.  Do not let me spoil it for you:

Our gentle protagonist is in a little boat, nearing the dock of the village where he will perform his magic act.  We see his aged back and small stack of luggage in the boat.  And then, as if the dreamlike animation were in fact there, a couple of drops of water appear on the "lens" of the "camera."  It is an entirely aesthetic moment that sends one's whole mind racing.  A chill ran through me.  I wondered how many people even noticed it - it is there for less than a second.  I look online, and of course viewers do notice it. 

The moment is the second of three feats of special visual magic that exceed even the level of great animation.  The first feat, only a little less great, is that an animation of a magician performing his stage tricks should contain no magic at all.  And yet the magic is there.  It is only the drawing of a rabbit being pulled out of an empty hat.  And yet the viewer is still startled and pleased, as if by a real illusion.  As animation itself naturally is.

The third feat is the peculiar interlocking - deliberately not quite integration - of the hand-drawn with the computer effects that appear now and then to give the ripple of water in a bay, or the dance of a match flame, or the drift of countless feathers caught by a breeze.  The hand-drawn and the computer effects set one another off.  They work together, but not as one.  The effect, again, is to create a world that is meant not to become quite real, but to be artifice: to be seen as illusion.

water drop

One thinks of the wealth of detail - of data - that exists within a few moments in Dallas.  Movements, microphones, cameras, people, campaign politics, weather, civic arrangements, anatomy, emotion, dictaphone belts, school books, lenses, motorcycles, pavement, freeway intersections, mowed grass on a knoll, sunglasses, neckties, necks, chrome - on and on.  And as teeming a whole exists - but unexamined - in every collection of human moments, anywhere.  One really could write a book: Six Seconds in Your Kitchen: 12:30:00 to 12:30:06pm, Friday, November 22, 2013.

coming home

Why not marriages of more than two?  (Not as a matter of law or society, but simply as a matter of private good.)  Chiefly, I think, because the love of one other can be unconditional - and can be unwavering - in a way that a love of more than one cannot.  Because comparisons between two are inevitable, and there is something lovely and needful in present love of the incomparable.  And only one may be both incomparable and present.

talking in tongues

It can be difficult to convince a secular person that religious fundamentalism is attractive to many people, here and abroad.  That it is the kind of religion they like and choose.  That hardly makes it good or true - but for some reason many secular folks want more.  They want to believe that religious fundamentalism is not only wrong and harmful, but unattractive.  This despite the fact that in other aspects of life - diet, excercise, fashion, what-have you - the same phenomenon exists in more trivial forms: a significant number of us will be attracted to things that are strenuous, demanding, alienating and - in their implications - both judgmental and potentially transformative.  Cross-Fit, vegans, goths, gamers.  And in the absence of liberal education or similarly special conditions, this will rarely express itself in the mode of liberal spirituality.

overheard

Two middle-aged friends walking down the crowded sidewalk in front of me:

"my head is spinning"
"that's because you have crystals in your ear"
"but my head is always spinning"
"once you get sick you have crystals in your ear; they keep spinning"
"my brain doesn't know where I am"
"there's an EMT who can flush out the crystals, not many doctors specialize in it"
"he can't hurt me?"
"you have to trust me on this one"
"I can't eat anything"
"I couldn't walk without my hand against the wall when I had crystals"
"I can't eat kale any more"
"I know it's not convenient but you have to see him"

Then a stranger, abreast of me and hearing all this, calls out:

"Jesus! Don't listen to her!"

Good.  The voice of a modern day Samaritan.

a feature, not a bug

A church (or synagogue or mosque, etc.) rises through mainstream social strata at its peril.  Ordinary folk do not want to join a congregation that reminds them of their place.  So how may a church survive the monetary fruits of frugal, virtuous living?  By separation - by weirdness - the creation of an alternative social structure set apart from the mainstream.  For example, the Mormons or the Hasidic Jews.

shibboleth

Freedom.

next

I will try my hand at some parables, which are populated aphorisms.

wrapped in foil, oozing hot fat

The difference between a city and a large city:  A city is a concentration of order, maximal at its center, that holds back the frontier, as a sodium vapor street lamp holds back darkness.  The large city is a cavernous order of frontiers within.  At night, on the trail and in the metropolis, the smell of charcoal, the occasional orange spark curves skyward, the chow wagon and ladle, the food cart at 4am.  Skewered meats, desires, ambitions.

Hillsong

I've been to camp meetings in South Carolina, folded chairs on sawdust under a tin shed roof, and I've been to what is in fact a camp meeting in New York City, folded chairs on the sticky wood floor of a dance club, making a buck on Sunday morning by renting to the only comer.  One had shape note, the other had PowerPoint lyrics.  One was loud, the other was - louder.  Both were thin intellectually, but filled with things to think about - the depth of yearning, the felt need, the hands stretched out and up.  The people will have their churches, and ambitious religious leaders will find the shapes and notes to gather them in.

what the internet is for:

To permit me, eventually, to discover the wrestler Gorgeous George.

policy

I'm told the Chinese call Burma "the beggar with the golden bowl."  Just so.

an abstract one

To be part of any group is to be a fraction.  To be whole, one must never ultimately be a member of any group.  (Unless, in concept, that group were ultimately subordinate to one, which is to say that the other members are the only members of the group, ultimately.)  To be incidentally, or even rather deeply in groups, or paired, may of course be good and is not my concern.

a technical one

Like a lever, or any of the other simple machines of mechanics, the lien is one of the simple machines of law.  A machine because it functions upon ownership and credit, two of the fundamental substances of law.  A creditor's lien upon that owned by the debtor secures the credit.  This assembly, taken as a unit, forms a security.  Because a security may be taken as a unit, it may be traded if there is a market that permits it.  This, of course, is true both in the abstract and in fact.  Securities, in their variety, multitude, combination and contexts, are the subject of much legal work.

Bankruptcy law concerns itself with the orderly resolution of unsecured credit.  This orderliness is the substitute for security.  All bankruptcy lawyers - and all good securities lawyers - are bilingual and can deal with the complex mixtures of secured and unsecured credit (including that logically necessary hybrid known as undersecured credit).  Yet the two modes are deeply different: secured lending is mechanized at its root.  Unsecured credit in its fundamentals involves no legal machine. 

They are as different as a cord of wood and a wooden wheel.

a modest one

The philanthropist's hand falls from the book half-read, head droops, and a half-dreamt, half-thought ogre reappears: that a painless plague that afflicted a random nine-tenth of the world with infertility, and the rest with the inability to have more than a couple of children, then disappeared after a generation, leaving the children normal, only to reappear every thousand years or so, yet unpredictably, might be a greater kindness than any good heart or head might do.  The philanthropist's reawakens, shudders, and turns the page.

eve

An evil, once boring, has nothing to commend it.  Goodness endures even its bouts of dullness.

photo essay

 

NYT: Obama’s Portable Zone of Secrecy (Some Assembly Required)

I request the cone of silence!

Each would appear to be open on the bottom.

why can't we have nice things?

Chiefly due to having other nice things.  The Beijing Olympic Stadium - the Bird's Nest - apparently cost half a billion dollars.  Even if it actually cost twice that, this is approximately the cost of a single underground corridor at the new World Trade Center in New York.  Surely wages and benefits, cleaner air and such account for much of this.

money and merit

One reason it is so difficult for people to think clearly about the relationship of money to merit is that the relationship clearly exists among small, adjacent differences (though imperfectly and subject to corruption), but hardly exists among big, distant differences (though occasionally).

For example, it is false to the point of offensiveness to think that the difference between peoples with high average incomes (say, the Swiss), and those with low average incomes (say, Cambodians), is merit.  Or that the difference between an American with average income and an American amongst the 100 wealthiest is merit.  Not so.  Across these gulfs of difference, merit and wealth hardly correlate.

But merit and wealth (or cost) do correlate reasonably well within small, adjacent groups of difference - that is, within a market.  The more expensive law firm in a given city is not always better, but is a better bet, absent more information.  The more expensive stenographers in a given city are probably better than those who are less expensive.  The more expensive can of soup of the same basic sort (presence or absence of meat, organic or conventional) on the same shelf is very probably better.

With a few sentences' development, this point is readily grasped, indeed one most of us already know.  But money is such a seductively easy, abstract quantity - such an available measuring stick - that it is a matter of constant occupation to some (and itself explains much of the market for success literature) to wonder why someone is a hundred times wealthier.  The reasons for this are unlikely to be within an individual's control.  But what such a person is far less likely to wonder about - but would benefit more from - is why a neighbor or sibling is, say, nearly twice as wealthy.  The reasons for that will usually include some items for action and improvement.

for example, St. John's

Western modernity is distinguished in part by the sheer quantity of entertainment ingested by each person, along with other matter designed for mass consumption.  It is impossible to see this as either neutral or an entire good, yet it explains much, perhaps most, of our differences with seemingly backwards people of other places and our own past.  Indeed, it goes beyond quantity - the chief quality of western entertainment is its capacity, like a powerful glue, to stick and spread.  We must be very careful to distinguish our considered mores from our cultural preferences.  This is one of many reasons why Westerners must be liberally educated: this work of self-separation.

thought experiment

I agree with Orson Welles that pornography cannot be great art.  Certainly erotic, even "pornographic" elements can belong to great art, as elements of a larger story, as a lure, as a heightening effect, or otherwise.  Just as phallic elements may be part of great Mayan architecture.  Or as illuminated tantric manuscripts may be artistically excellent.  In relation to that excellence the pornographic content is mere accident.  But leering at rutting cannot itself anchor aesthetic greatness.  I reach this conclusion more by the lack of counterexamples, but also by thinking through the capsizing effect that pornography would have on an artistic work.

I suppose if any art form could sustain greatness while being pornography - it would be dance.  One can hypothesize a ballet or other modern dance number involving actual sex.  But the problems - of dehumanization, of interruption, of capsizing - are obvious enough to reinforce rather than weaken the conclusion.

beyond Chagall, newly

Three sickle moons rise over a yellow chair.
Reeds whipped by wind beat the barns they grow beside,
A visible wind of grey chalk dust and blue,
A choking fog, dry, not cool or warm: color.

And only color, that cakes the fur of cats,
The slinking cats, each low to the ground to breathe,
Not choke in chalk, not cake their lungs by gasps
Of blue-grey wind that drives them to shuttered barns.

They squint for a gap, their noses to the ground,
Wanting some way inside, or under floor boards,
They crawl behind the bases of flogging reeds,
Circling the barn foundations, ever moonslit.

Chagall, newly

Three sickle moons rise over a fallen yellow chair.

gut feeling

To lack success is felt to be socially naked, as the destitute are naked.

yuck

To smoke a cigar is somewhat pleasant.  To have smoked a cigar is not.  One carries a dry, cottony mouth of bad flavors for hours.  Which is exactly what one would expect from putting a wad of smoking leaves in one's mouth.

olympia

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.

aday

Life must be more than waiting to die.

motive

It is nearly death to be truthful regarding the salience of luck.

up

In fact the city does sleep.

Carousel of Progress

• palimpsests
• blackboards
• transparency films
• display screens

palimpsest

The online headline is "Saudi Man Beats Servant."  One imagines the headline "Man Beats Servant" running continuously, from the beginning of the human race to now, not as mere fact, but as the endless, creeping flow of pitch that  bin d s    o  u  r    c  i  v   i   l   i    z    a    t    i    o    n.