by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The camera, on the roof of a teashop, was abandoned for two reasons:

In the winter mist of a Persian garden, the camera had caught a green-cloaked figure.

Then, at the moment a village lorry belched, tearing the song of a Snow Finch into confetti, there were five seconds of static on the camera before it ran out of battery.

Khidr — the “green one,” the wise, the longest-living saint of the road— is nearly impossible to pursue. I know that but I try. Often I’m woken up by the image of Khidr and the fur that shimmers green with him. What follows is an elusive map plotting the mornings I have lived and the ones yet to live. Mortality’s math is a fur map that smothers, so I rise and wander— the house, the street, land and sea.

And by wandering, rub against the possible particles of an answer— salts of the land are pounded desire, salts of the sea melt desire into shape. Between them, a green curtain that lifts and carries you into peace as if it were the planet’s mighty sail.

When the abrasions of the quest cool, I hear a footfall in the clock of my mortality. It is Khidr’s, who drank from the fountain of life to become the traveling sage, the saint of the lost. The metaphors are more real than me, and Khidr, a man of quest, is of common proportions and immeasurable grace.

I look for him in library lobbies, bazaars, cafes, festivals and conferences, on ferries and trains— all desolate places. Mortality’s helmeted shadow lengthens on my door. I recall that Alexander the Great wanted to conquer death after he had conquered the world. More fixed on finding the elixir of life than recognizing the journey itself as the elixir, he lost his way. When he lay dying he is said to have instructed his men to open his palms for all to see that he was leaving empty-handed; Khidr found the ancient fountain Aab e hayaat while quietly helping other children of the road find themselves. To get to the rest of the story, you must slowly climb the rickety ladder of wisdom.

The ladder is made of millions of weak magnets. I have yet to reach there but I hear the magnets are the voices of elders— the same voices we become adept at subduing.

The lorry has brought tourists to the teashop. Some are here for tea and sweets, some will buy postcards of the garden and pet the cats. Some know they are lost. They will keep their ear to the wall for broken songs, will strain to see through the mist.

Built by Thought

all that we are arises with our thoughts,
the Dhammapada says,
with our thoughts we make the world

………. one, tour the foundation
………. scraping down it’s roughness
………. with the edge of a hammer head
………. dissing the mason who left behind a lumpy job
………. who forgot what a trowel is for
………. who was halfway home already when he bent into his forms
………. smoothing like a dilettante, fatigue calling the shots,
………. the day’s dregs, the ache in his legs

with our thoughts we make the world

………. two, eyeball the foundation top
………. to get a handle on what he’s up against
………. noting bulges humps and dips, or not—
………. with luck he’s been left the work of a perfectionist,
………. a Michelangelic cement mechanic
………. doing god’s work as he smoothed loose Portland
………. to a chalkline while in the background,
………. the symphonic smell of oil-soaked wood
………. played to a concrete vibrator’s percussive drill
………. driving trapped air from aggregate,
………. time and chemistry turning wet concrete to stone
………. upon which a carpenter will set a sill

all that we are arises through our thoughts

………. three, set the sill straight to lines struck on the top of the wall
………. parallel and square and fix with bolts

the world is made with thought

………. four, make cycles to the lumber pile grabbing two at a time
………. snap to shoulder and carry over sun-baked soil raising dust
………. until the need for sweat and beams has been fulfilled
………. and the house is framed by god’s good must

all that we are by thought arises, says the Dhammapada.
we make the world with thoughts

………. thus a house, conceived and brought about
………. by hammer blows in the skull of a carpenter
………. driving nails through a sawyer’s vision of finished joists
………. its walls and roof arranged in architectural imagination, arises

………. because, as the Dhammapada says,
………. the world is brought about by thought

with our thoughts the world arises

………. when you think about it (as the verse apprises
………. and Buddha taught)
………. our home —our world, is built by thought
.

by Jim Culleny
8/16/13

by Liam Heneghan

1. On 16 June 1904 before leaving his home at 78 Eccles Street, Dublin, Leopold Bloom sat and took one of most momentous and leisurely shits in literature. Joyce reported: “Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper.” Bloom browsed a while, then “midway, his last resistance, yielding he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly, as he read.” A significant portion of those people from whom I recently solicited information on their favorite sitting places side with Bloom on this one. They confide this seated pleasure as if it was their secret alone. My father, in contrast, claims his favorite place to sit was beside the Minister for Education in the Irish Dail (parliament) during question time. My mother’s sitting drinking coffee in front of The Colosseum. Mine is on the Old Kenmare Road, near Killarney, my back against a rock, facing the mountains, bog cotton fidgeting,a stream murmuring in the middle distance.

2. Dr Dov Sikirov, an Israeli internist, studied the straining forces applied by 28 healthily defecating volunteers when sitting versus squatting. The defecators were equipped with stop watches and were asked to subjectively assess the intensity of their efforts. Each volunteer recorded six shits, producing data on a grand total of 168 stools. All metrics indicated that sitting required the most excessively forceful evacuations. The reason for this is connected to the human anorectal angle, measured between the longitudinal axis of the anal canal and the posterior rectal line. At rest the angle is typically 90°; sitting keeps us in “continence mode” whereas squatting reduces the angle for a smoother launch. Dr Sikirov holds a patent for a Toilet device (US 7962973 B2) designed to facilitate defecation in a natural squatting posture over a conventional toilet bowl. Others recommend elevating the feet on a small stool.

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by Jalees Rehman

The “Reclaim Scientism” movement is gaining momentum. In his recent book “The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions“, the American philosopher Alexander Rosenberg suggests that instead of viewing the word “scientism” as an epithet, atheists should expropriate it and use it as a positive term which describes their worldview. Rosenberg also provides a descriptive explanation of how the term “scientism” is currently used:

Scientism — noun; scientistic — adjective.

Scientism has two related meanings, both of them pejorative. According to one of these meanings, scientism names the improper or mistaken application of scientific methods or findings outside their appropriate domain, especially to questions treated by the humanities. The second meaning is more common: Scientism is the exaggerated confidence in the methods of science as the most (or the only) reliable tools of inquiry, and an equally unfounded belief that at least the most well established of its findings are the only objective truths there are.

Rosenberg's explanation of “scientism” is helpful because it highlights the difference between science and scientism. Science refers to applying scientific methods as tools of inquiry to collect and interpret data, whereas “scientism” refers to cultural and ideological views promoting the primacy or superiority of scientific methods over all other tools of inquiry. Some scientists embrace scientistic views, in part because scientism provides a much-needed counterbalance to aggressive anti-science attitudes that are prevalent on both ends of the political spectrum and among some religious institutions. However, other scientists are concerned about propping up scientism as a bulwark against ideological science-bashing because it smacks of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Science is characterized by healthy skepticism, the dismantling of dogmatic views and a continuous process of introspection and self-criticism. Infusing science with ideological stances concerning the primacy of the scientific method could undermine the power of science which is rooted in its willingness to oppose ideological posturing.

As a scientist who investigates signaling mechanisms and the metabolic activity of stem cells, I am concerned about the rise of some movements that fall under the “scientism” umbrella, because they have the possibility to impede scientific discovery. Scientific progress relies on recognizing the limitations and flaws in existing scientific concepts and refuting scientific views that cannot be adequately explained by newer scientific observations. An exaggerated confidence in the validity of scientific findings could stifle such refutations. For example, some of the most widely cited scientific papers in the field of stem cell biology cannot be replicated, but they have had an enormous detrimental impact on the science and medicine, in part because of an exaggerated faith in the validity of some initial experiments.

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by Misha Lepetic

“The whole arrangement is as cozy and comfortable as the
front basement dining room of a first-class city residence.”
~ Scientific American, 1870

Is there anything that is not deserving of disruption by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs? Last week the world came to understand that in addition to pretty much everything else, high-speed rail is heading for a makeover. The irrepressible Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, unveiled, in a somewhat anticlimactic press conference, what is essentially a giant pneumatic tube for people. Also known as the Hyperloop, it intends to shoot people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in something like 35 minutes, at a top speed of nearly 800 miles per hour. Remarkably, Musk declared that he has no intention to build the thing; as John Oliver said on the Daily Show, “That's like saying ‘Hey, you know what we should do? Find a vaccine for cancer…Someone get on that! I'm just the ideas man.'” I suppose this is the flipside of what Musk generously termed the “open source” nature of the project. However, the proposal is worth examining both for its implicit attitudes towards what is being designed, and what the real purpose of the Hyperloop might be.

Once Musk had finally opened the kimono, the critics naturally pounced. It's easy to dish on a multi-billion-dollar design proposal that is all of 57 pages, and contains such breezy gems as: “short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where things get tricky” (p3). Tricky, indeed.

But it's not so much the technology, or Musk's indifference to building it, that is at issue here. Most of this has been developed and is fairly uncontroversial. In fact, the idea of using some combination of air or vacuum to propel people through tubes was successfully prototyped back in the 1870s. Of course, the issue of scale will certainly produce its own set of challenges, but this will arrive in due time. Nor is the cost “where things get tricky,” either: even though critics have called out the $6bn price tag as laughably low, since when has an infrastructure project ever been priced realistically?

What is more interesting to me is the way people themselves are considered in the design proposal.

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by Maniza Naqvi

A woman, her cart of belongings next to her, sits on a park bench, feeding the pigeons, squirrels and ducks. She throws bread crumbs to them, and calls out in a voice, cured by cigarettes and gin: “Have a nice day working for the war! You know we all work for the war! Even these pigeons are eating off the war!” She must be seventy, she wears a string of pearls, a checkered white and blue gingham dress, her eyes are bright blue, her hair silver and long, her skin tanned and weathered. I stare at her, for a moment I think I know her and then I move on.

In front of the White House, another diaspora pleads and protests against a repressive regime, as if the White House were a temple, for such things. Helmeted curious tourists whoosh by on their Segways. A few days earlier, it was the Egyptian diaspora, here, demanding that the White House recognize the ouster of Morsi's government by the military as a coup d'etat. But this prime temple, the White House, has maintained a monumental Sphinx like silence on this term, surrounded as it is, perhaps, by so many edifices to Generals. Now over one thousand Egyptian protesters are dead at the hands of their military. Who manufactured the bullets, guns and gas? But there are balls and chains that stop the White House from breaking with its tradition of supporting the military in Egypt—weapons sales from US companies based on vouchers considered as aid to Egypt. This is the way the world is organized, trapped like insects in honey, unable to resist the viscosity of an elaborate system of commerce, war and aid: vouchers as aid to militaries overseas to purchase from the weapons industry —and subsidies to the food industry for surplus maize as aid to the impoverished citizenry of those places overseas.

I look at the sculpture of General Lafayette at the Southeast corner of the park, at whose base a statue of a woman, half crawling half naked, reaches up to him to hand him a sword: Lady Liberty, I presume.

Even so, there is another protest—a monumental piece de resistance —in fact, an act of supreme resistance installed, quite literally, in its own back yard.

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by Mara Jebsen

First day of May, and the roses on my block
all boiled into bloom, as if following a summons–
water-logged and lewd they nodded as I passed
and I wanted to touch them, but didn't have time–
Then I watched a rat pull an entire poppy-seed bagel
along subway tracks. He kept falling. I'd never seen
a rat so happy. Give us this day
our daily bread, I thought. But then came the next part:
something about forgiveness and daily
trespasses. When I was a kid, I found it silly. Only once
I'd trespassed on the way to school-drawn onto private
property– by roses, in fact–it was a rich person's garden
In Philadelphia. My mother had warned me
not to take the back-paths, but that's where I'd found
a secret city–whole shadow-alleys crammed with azaeleas
crocuses, roses, one actual
No Trespassing sign. It did not strike me
as bad to be there. It seemed a strange thing for God
to fuss about. Once, in a period after my college years,
I could not find a job and it made me weep. When I came home
I thought to myself: I am lost. I'm lost. In a big fat
onion. No one can find me
here. It is a wonderful thing to be in
the right place; to trust the arrival of daily
bread, tossed by some invisible
hand. After work, I saw a man
with his pants around his thighs
rest his bare bottom
on the warm concrete. His flesh was loose
and wasting; his head lolled forward like a rose.
I could not see his face. He was dreaming on the steps
of the the public library. I have been lately feeling
very grateful, as if all were falling
into place. May is the month of the possible,
of roses and bread.
Forgive me my daily trespasses.

by Omar Ali

The first thing that strikes you on landing in Pakistan after a few years is how much more “modern” it is and how dramatically (and frequently, painfully) it is changing with every passing day. One is reminded that Pakistan is as much a part of “rising Asia” as India, Bangladesh or Thailand and is not all about terrorists, conspiracy theories, Salafist nutjobs or the clash of civilizations. But since more qualified people are writing about the economics of rising Asia, the destruction of the environment, the breakdown of traditional society, the future of the planet, and the meaning of life, I will try not to step too much on their turf. And since there are countless articles (and more than one famous book) detailing the Westernized elite’s view of how the underclass lives and dies in rising Asia, I will not intrude too far on that well-trodden terrain either. Instead, without further ado, here are my personal and entirely anecdotal observations from 3 weeks in Pakistan.

1. The uncertainty is real and deep. Not only are people unsure about what may happen next, they are unsure about how uncertain they are! Someone can start off by saying life will go on, it will probably be more of the same, things will slowly get better but there will be no big sudden transformation. Then, as the conversation proceeds, report that he (or she) is afraid it’s all going to fall apart next year in one big apocalyptic disaster. A few minutes later, the same person confidently assures you that we are about to turn the corner and Pakistan will be the next China (or at least, the next Chinese colony, which is pretty much the same thing). If asked which of these three theories (more of the same, impending disaster or turning the Chinese corner) he thinks is more likely, he seems genuinely surprised to learn that he has just confidently predicted three different outcomes. This seemed like a new trend. Different people used to have different theories about what may come next but now the same person has many different theories and seems equally unsure about all of them. It did cross my mind that maybe this happens everywhere but is just more noticeable here. But the fact remains, it was more noticeable this time than it has ever been in the past.

2. “Real life” economic calculations so consistently trump ideology that one can be excused for starting to believe in the crudest forms of Marxism. Of course, no one I met actually believes in crude Marxism because the people I met were anything but crude. A number of them claimed to be Marxist, but mostly in the latest postcolonial postmodern post-industrial sort of way. Anyway, coming back to “real life” in Pakistan: Islamists and anti-Islamists seem to run very similar (and similarly profitable) schools and colleges all over Pakistan. Friends who were in the Islamic student parties and friends who led their leftist opponents and battled on the streets with club and guns, now run the same private clinics and hospitals and take the same pharmaceutical junkets. Their children go to the same colleges and take the same Cambridge and SAT examinations to go to the same elite institutions of higher education in the developed world (of course, a world that now includes Shanghai and Singapore in addition to New York and London). They start businesses, launch careers and file patents the same way, though the Islamists all say Allah Hafiz and the leftists still resist by saying Khuda Hafiz. In short, capitalism is thriving. But the environment and social harmony are not. The water is literally undrinkable all across Pakistan. No one can drink tap water and avoid typhoid or hepatitis, but even if you only drink genuine Nestle bottled water, your dishes are still washed in tap water, your veggies are grown in raw sewage and your milk may be mixed with it. This probably sounds like typical expat griping, but this was the universal opinion of every doctor I met. Public health is a nightmare and since an unhealthy proportion of public intellectuals is either waiting for Mao or dreaming about the caliphate (see below), no one seems to be able to fix mundane things like water and sewage.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Cigarette smoking is an insidious and on-going public health disaster. If a new virus were killing as many people – more than 400, 000 Americans each year – there'd be widespread panic. Yet smoking-related deaths and disease garner little of the public's attention.

Perhaps we reason that smokers deserve the consequences of their actions because their habit is a choice. But according to the American Cancer Society, almost 90% of adult smokers take up the habit before the age of 18. Adolescents aren't known for their level headedness and a lifetime of addiction seems a harsh penalty for a bad teenage decision.

Tobacco advertising is an important influence on teens' smoking-related decisions. We like to believe that we make free choices as consumers, but the tobacco industry, which better appreciates how impressionable we really are, spends 8 to 10 billion dollars per year on marketing in the US alone. And it works. The CDC acknowledges that there is evidence of a causal relationship between advertising and tobacco use by young people. Studies confirm that teens are exposed to cigarette advertising and that these ads do increase their desire to smoke.

We would never allow ads to feature cartoon characters encouraging kids to drink toxic household cleaners; but for some reason, when it comes to smoking, we do tolerate the marketing of toxic substances to young people. Tobacco advertising will predictably influence teens' behaviors and many of the new smokers it creates will develop serious or fatal disease. The marketing of cigarettes is essentially criminal and it isn't those who succumb to its influence who deserve to be punished. Today's youngsters need protection from the sinister tactics of the tobacco industry. A complete ban on advertising would be ideal, but doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. The CDC offers suggestions on how to reduce the influence of these ads on teens, which may be especially useful to parents.

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