the time machine of selfhood

From Mark Twain's chapter in Following the Equator on Mumbai:

Our rooms were high up, on the front. A white man – he was a burly German – went up with us, and brought three natives along to see to arranging things. About fourteen others followed in procession, with the hand-baggage; each carried an article – and only one; a bag, in some cases, in other cases less. One strong native carried my overcoat, another a parasol, another a box of cigars, another a novel, and the last man in the procession had no load but a fan. It was all done with earnestness and sincerity, there was not a smile in the procession from the head of it to the tail of it. Each man waited patiently, tranquilly, in no sort of hurry, till one of us found time to give him a copper, then he bent his head reverently, touched his forehead with his fingers, and went his way. They seemed a soft and gentle race, and there was something both winning and touching about their demeanor.

There was a vast glazed door which opened upon the balcony. It needed closing, or cleaning, or something, and a native got down on his knees and went to work at it. He seemed to be doing it well enough, but perhaps he wasn't, for the burly German put on a look that betrayed dissatisfaction, then without explaining what was wrong, gave the native a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him where the defect was. It seemed such a shame to do that before us all. The native took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any resentment. I had not seen the like of this for fifty years. It carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one's desires to a slave. I was able to remember that the method seemed right and natural to me in those days, I being born to it and unaware that elsewhere there were other methods; but I was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher. 

My father was a refined and kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation. He laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not heavily; once for telling him a lie – which surprised me, and showed me how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort. He punished me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses. My father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature. When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly – as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man's skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. 

I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it. Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it.

It is curious – the space-annihilating power of thought. For just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native's smitten cheek was not done tingling yet! Back to boyhood – fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe-all in two seconds by the watch!

Some natives – I don't remember how many – went into my bedroom, now, and put things to rights and arranged the mosquito-bar, and I went to bed to nurse my cough. It was about nine in the evening. What a state of things! For three hours the yelling and shouting of natives in the hall continued, along with the velvety patter of their swift bare feet--what a racket it was! They were yelling orders and messages down three flights. Why, in the matter of noise it amounted to a riot, an insurrection, a revolution. And then there were other noises mixed up with these and at intervals tremendously accenting them – roofs falling in, I judged, windows smashing, persons being murdered, crows squawking, and deriding, and cursing, canaries screeching, monkeys jabbering, macaws blaspheming, and every now and then fiendish bursts of laughter and explosions of dynamite. By midnight I had suffered all the different kinds of shocks there are, and knew that I could never more be disturbed by them, either isolated or in combination. Then came peace – stillness deep and solemn and lasted till five.

storm within the storm

Even as a snowstorm bears down and Third Avenue in Manhattan is white with fresh, blowing snow, the cars honk for movement the instant the light turns green.

say

Only after they were cursed, was it that they had eaten.  Only after her son murdered her son, had Eve already had her eyes opened.  The consequence makes the cause, and this is the root of law.

cry

Our concepts of God are shaped less by contemplation of the innocent and the virtuous and the beautiful - these instead supply the substance - but instead are shaped by our need to understand, to limit, to avoid, and to move on from awareness of evil.  It is sickness and not health, infection and not purity, that teaches us what it is to keep a hospital clean.

olive trees and buffalo

Deep within the visceral feel of America for Israel is our conquest of the West.

glories

The expression come true.

lyrical tempo

Psalm 135 builds, builds - and builds - its mockery of idols, stretches the bow of the hearer's patience to the point that one doubts the psalmist's basic skill.  And then the arrow of attention is released in verse 18 to strike both the idol maker and the idolator in a quick, snide arc that explains the buildup.  A fine example of pacing that works entirely when sung or chanted - imagine what it must have been like in a setting where idolatry was a current events topic - but is lost when read at the pace given to print.

Switching frames, Psalm 135 is the sort of psalm that calls out for an Anglican boys choir.  The artful, seeming naivety, the delight, and occasionally - as here - the mockery: each sounds naturally in the refined playground of their voices.

America Today, Benson

If your eye is good, an artist must serve you by method, by presentation, or by difference of eye. If your eye is not good, it is more important and enough that the artist help you to see. 

an orchard of Bloomberg boxes

I am convinced of the value of monetary liquidity.  This is a neutral value, in the sense that it its goodness is nothing but an avoidance of cost: the cost to individuals and enterprise of capital being unavailable.  To the extent we avoid it we remain at the starting position, rather than behind it.  That is valuable.

And I'm not optimistic that we could regulate what people invest in, or the forms investment may take, to the point of having a clean and simple menu of options that meet with general approval.  Or rather, that we could, but that the cost of this would, in illiquidity and diversion of greed to enterprise and the illicit, exceed the benefits.

Yes the markets are where the scoundrels are, and we can, do, and must keep cleaning the markets.  We must regulate and disclose and interfere and devote some of our best minds to this endless janitorial work.  But we can't fully clean up - or even nearly clean up - the markets.  We need them too much.

Because illiquidity would result from such the restrictions necessary to a total cleanup, and greed would divert rather than die.  The greed, the thin, logical, oily greed, rampant in the secondary securities market, would simply open shop and concentrate its vices there, or move under the table, to the extent it doesn't already (much as it already does in real estate or natural resources).

Greed is deathless in human affairs, although it can be squeezed, herded, diminished and made to do some productive work.  This is the great lesson of the US corporate bankruptcy system, which is a virtuous engine powered by channeling the driving steam of vice.  There is much more to so great a machine, but that is how it is driven.  It is beautiful, and sad, and works.  To an extent greed serves this role in the markets, but there is more steam and less machine.  It is not an iron judicial engine but an open rollicking hall.  Vast work is done, but with vaster waste.

On earth, in commerce, that is often the best we can hope for.  To make hell the downstairs kitchen of heaven.  To feed cool heaven with the cooking of hell.  To make that hellish kitchen a place where as few as possible are held to labor and instead a place where the greedy or vicious bring themselves and toil.

gondoliers

Mark Twain would have been Walt Disney if he could, and damn the wit. 

gallery 690

The pastel never fixed, her feathered face
Is, ever, delicate, fresh from bathing.
More present than today or here, her case
Keeps ambrosial air in glass and lathing.

And all of that costs money: lots of it.
Outside her case, the museum hums with wealth:
A twenty admits, but that’s not profit;
Rich patrons keep her pastel cheeks in health.

In fact they lended her, you read each name
On the placards beside, but only she
Breathes perfumed pastel strokes within the frame
And seizes men who pass her gallery.

Wisdom does not ask who is using whom,
But knows the dance that keeps her cheeks in bloom.