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.