not by bread alone

Begging on the subway is rarer in the morning.  I had guessed this is because people are in a less giving mood.  But watching the response this morning to a beggar in my subway car suggested a different reason.  More people gave, not fewer, but what they gave was fruit, bananas mostly, a few apples and oranges.  That is scant incentive to beg.

distracted

The messenger delivers a package while I'm on the phone.  I sign for it, distracted, and think "her perfume smells like bubble gum."  A few seconds later, my mind kicks into gear and I realize: no, dummy, she was actually chewing bubble gum.

on mute, nobody knows you're playing three-card monte

A massive conference call this morning was enlivened by one businessman calling another a mountebank!  Perhaps so, perhaps not.  But it made my morning.

yellow chalk

Burma's monuments are in the building, and in the forgetting.  Like Legos, the merit is in the doing, and is essentially an escape.  Little is therefore remembered, what is adduced is expendable.  Prophesies lost are easily replaced by stories of prophesies yet to be made, by prophets yet unborn, that foretell their own fulfillment.  Shwedagon is about the renovations, the new gold plate, the volunteers sweeping the platform, the water pored over marble.  The halos of LEDs pulsing behind the heads of statues are the proof of rude health, of heedless, adolescent spiritual life.

time machines

One who forgoes meter and rhyme cannot be trusted to hold fast to reason or love.  Such have lost awe, or never known it.

kettles and canons

The field I work in needs different virtues than the field in which I was raised.  What's called for here is fight, not submission.  Searching analysis, not synthesis or trust.  Virtues are regional and class-bound.

sylph

In Astoria I step up to the elevated subway platform and into the calm gaze of an angel. 

For a moment that was what I felt.  I could not, even by returning the gaze - forgive me, thou! - tell if this were female or male, child or adult.  Beautiful?  Oh yes.  But impossible to place.  Of average height, in sockless loafers, fresh khakis and button down linen shirt, new and glowing white in the morning sun.  A few inches of brown hair, lightly spiked and drawn to a soft peak in the middle.  Light-skinned, but neither discernably of one race nor obviously mixed.  Unplacable as a student, commuting worker, or tourist.  A half-smile between that of daydreaming and confrontation.  Entirely still, but without rigidity, eyes yet towards the stairs.

This person was so beautifully, so perfectly, at the origin of the graph of human coordinates, as if Mile Zero to the paths of human differentiation, teasing with implication.  In a different era, we would tonight, by moonlight roll a stone onto the platform, and stand it on its side, mute, to mark the place.

dumb and happy

What would be lost if all humanity were to become significantly - but not drastically - less intelligent?  Irreversibly and in one generation.  I'm here speaking of intelligence in its narrower sense of intellectual horsepower - the sort of intelligence that registers on IQ tests and the like.

Obviously there would be the intellectual loss itself.  And there would be losses to the allied capacities: the arts, for example.

But would people be less happy?  Less healthy?  More violent?  The answer to each is likely to be "yes" - but this is not the issue.  Nor does the possibility that we'd grow contentedly pastoral lessen the blow.  The issue is that we value the intellect for its own sake, not only for its benefits.  To lose intelligence would be a loss non pareil, as if one were to lose not a leg or a finger, but one's entire face.

the holy spear

Books are still the superior technology for time travel.  More payload than carved stone and metal, more persistence than electrics.

black tie

How easily we shift to seeming, to appearing, merely.  Not elevated, only straining.  Like hairless rats in shirts.

black tie

What is it to dress up?  It is a fully social act.  One shows that one is able.  One shows regard for others and for the occasion, and for one's place among others in that occasion.  One is a good guest recognizing good hospitality.  It is a signal of civilization.  One that blares too often with the vices of ego and luxury, but on the right scale and in its place, a rightful, humanizing thing.

That is the underlying connection between cities and dress.   Of course there are superficial connections as well: industry, money, etc.

he travels

Pleasures, like pats of butter, need the bread of ordinarily living, broken with others, to be pleasant.  Alone, pleasures are unpleasant.

Søren in his thirties

The subject of a successful biography, especially a long one, becomes a kind of guest in the reader's home. And there comes a time, especially when reading of the sad and petty ways of intellectual greats in their later, plateaued personal lives, when the reader feels the biographer's subject has stayed quite long enough. Begone, the reader thinks: die already. 

no, dude

It is painful - and at the root of many an ordinary "midlife crisis" - to realize that the awkward, dicey, heavy-laden transition from adolescence to adulthood is not a passage crossed through to adulthood, but simply the beginning of adulthood itself.  That adult life is no different than a home or - better - a farm: steadfastly there only because - if - constantly shored up and labored over, against the ravages of entropy, accident, and self-sabotage.  Simply to abide is to wrestle.

shut

When Oprah smiles, wide-eyed, from every magazine rack, she is creepy.  Oprah always smiles from every magazine rack, eyes wide.

Pillsbury giggle

The vaguely tough, muscled fellow who started working at the pastry shop where I get my coffee a few months ago?  The one with the striking, almost menacing stare?  Now vanquished, along with the rest of the staff, by the sweets.  He's now as round as a dinner roll, with the watery, becalmed, bovine gaze of the overfed.

second

To love, in the sense of loving one's neighbor, is a mysterious verb.  What is the act of loving, in this sense?  The difficulty is increased if we ask what it is to love one's self in the same manner.  What is it to enact self-love or neighbor-love?  Is it an act at all?  Surely it is not to be civil, nor to befriend, nor to interact more frequently.  But just as surely it is not merely a matter of regard or warm esteem or consideration.  Indeed, is the command to love one's neighbor as one's self even serious?  Or is it a crude approximation, useful against the ordinary run of selfish living, but only as training wheels and not an precision guide for decent, gentle souls?

Also, why does one love one's neighbor merely as one's self?  This is not altruism.  It is a sort of equipoise.

known by the blue glow of their TVs through windows

Let us accept, as a premise, that one should love one's neighbor as one's self.  And let us take neighbor in its ordinary sense, the sense that would have applied to most people centuries ago: one's neighbors are those who live near, and especially those who are not kin or in an economic relationship (such as servants and merchants).  That is, neighbors are - especially - those who would be strangers but for proximity.  The perfect neighbor is someone who would be a perfect stranger, except that they are so proximate that a steady connection results, but a connection that remains based on proximity (no friendly intimacy nor trading nor hierarchical relationship develops).

There will be nearly perfect neighbors, and imperfect neighbors. (that is, people who are not as proximate, or whose relationship is a mix of neighbor and something else - distant kin, occasional trading partner, et cetera.)

What does it mean to love one's perfect neighbors as one's self, and one's imperfect neighbors proportionately?  I think the meaning is intractably unclear.  But what results from the act of such love?

One of two things.  Either it privileges proximity, and this results in a close woven social fabric that is an accident on the large scale.  Not a bad thing, potentially.  Or it breaks down an excessive sense of individuality, family loyalty, and economic advantage seeking, by teaching each person to treat a stranger, not an abstract stranger, but the stranger that is nearby and therefore most real, as no different.  This is radical, and if accepted as a premise, does have meaning, that the initial act of neighborly love initially lacks.

So the commandment to love one's neighbor as one's self, from this perspective, turns out to be either a social boon that implies a benign social order, or an oblique political philosophy - quite a radical one - that implies fundamentally pietistic or communistic social reordering.

Marlene Dietrich

Not everything is about wealth, power and sex, thankfully.  But tuxedos are.

the genital eye

Sex amongst people is an indoor act done with the lights down low, or turned off.  Not even our sleep is as consistently so: siestas in the hammock can be in the bright afternoon, even if in the shade.  Why is this?  It is not my impression that animals seek out dark or enclosure for sex.  Nor is our sexuality, as distinct from our sexual activity, a darkened-room thing: nakedness, pornography, erotic poses - whether dominated by flesh or clothes - are generally well lit.  It is something to do with clothes.

motion lines

The more one does, the less there is to say.  Watch me, says the kid doing flips.  The school books and pencil are over there, somewhere.  George Washington was quiet because of a purposeful variation on the same phenomenon.

buying a table

Much of what is done "in the public interest" fails by a lack both of subtlety and of sincerity.  The shopkeeper may do more, and more honestly, than the head of a nonprofit.

worse than the disease

From unhappiness, bad habits are born.  Bad habits of response as well as bad habits of more immediate deformation.

vaseline

I walk to work through the park, a beautiful day, the flowering fruit trees full blown in pink and white.  I cross through a grove, and there, pass near a young foreign couple.  They have their picnic spread under a flowering tree that has something bright in it.

It is a flag: the flag of Iraq.  Their boy, perhaps five years old, has climbed up and spread it across the interior branches.  They let him play and pay him no mind.  He is standing in the tree, arms free, gripping four straddled branches with his bare feet and knees.

And there, in shorts, he fixes his calm cold eyes on me.  His hand is already raised in the cupped, regal, automatic wave used by beauty queens on parade and tyrants in the reviewing stand.  One of his eyebrows arches in permissive disdain as I pass by, and his intense, juvenile fantasy becomes perfect and obvious.  He is at play being the dictator.

Swan Lake

He runs to the subway, with the gait of a commuter.  One hand holds his rolled newpaper and keeps his his fedora planted on his head; his open trench coat waves in train behind; the thumb of his other hand stops the spout of the lid of his paper coffee cup.

sidewalks

The tall, thin men begin as knuckled birds in plume, work as leafy stalks of cane, and age as knotty planks, leaned against the shed.