Un About

snow glittered to the wavelength of a streetlamp
on swells and bellies of the yard slope
down across a white savannah
from asphalt to nirvana

at a window I stood looking out
forever in a moment
in today or yesterday or mañana
enmeshed, engaged, rapt
and un about

senseless to the dialogic loop ever playing in this headspace
of fruitless whys and how-comes a chronic head case

stopped now ….. still ….. synchronized ….. void

empty ….. apophatic ….. absent ….. unalloyed

vacant as a black hole

silent as the innards of a whole note
vibrating to the rhythm of sixteenths

unmoored, unsyntaxed
adrift and tuned

until a plow truck threw its plume across the driveway
and I was back and bound again, too soon

.
by Jim Culleny
2/8/14

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Perhaps a reasonable proxy for wisdom is the ability to stop thinking when you want, to interrupt the tortured spiraling progression of thoughts that serve no function and lead nowhere, the symbolic productions of a machine gone mad. Like much else, this can (and, I think, should) be approached as a skill that can be practiced, as part of a general package of cultivable techniques and approaches that help in being happy, especially for those not naturally gifted in that way and especially for the anxious neurotic, constantly harried by thoughts that something is not right and that it will all come crashing down[1].

As a (mostly) former obsessive I'm still not very good at this, but I'm thankful for all the time spent practicing. Obsessions and compulsions take an ordinary pattern (that of a persistent thought or behavior) and, by carrying it to an extreme, reveal a pathology that was always there. Being confronted by a thought that won't leave is a dramatic education in the possibility that perhaps the thought wasn't yours to start with and that its trajectory and dynamics are unsettling and alien. These moments shake the uncritical notion of a unified self. I imagine we all have these experiences as we grow and realize that a single unified self is either an illusion (for the Buddhists) or a distant goal lying at the end of many sublimations (for the Nietzscheans and psychoanalysts)[2].

What does one do with unwanted thoughts? The famous example of instructing someone to not think of a pink elephant shows that active suppression is generally futile. It takes constant energy and vigilance, which is exhausting. And anyhow, pushing thoughts away gives them increased significance and emotional valence making them more likely to return again and again. This is all the more true of obsessional thoughts, which are often terrifying; a panicked suppression does nothing but bring them back.

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by Omar Ali

This headline refers to two separate (though distantly related) subjects. First, to Pakistan. Apparently the Pakistani army is now conducting some operation or the other against some group or the other in North Waziristan and other “tribal areas” infested by various Islamic militant groups under the umbrella of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This operation was preceded by some farcical negotiations in which the Nawaz Sharif government nominated a group of powerless “moderate Islamists” to conduct negotiations with the TTP. It is likely that these “talks” were never meant to be serious, and that Nawaz Sharif and his advisors intended to use them to expose the bloodthirsty Taliban and their civilian supporters (like Imran Khan’s PTI and the Jamat-e-Islami) as unreliable and extremist elements against whom a military operation was unavoidable. This gambit had worked once before in Swat in 2009 when a peace deal was signed with the Swat Taliban and they were given control of Swat. They proceeded to behead people, whip women and begin marching into neighboring regions, thus showing that no reasonable peace was possible and only a military operation would work against them.  But the Taliban 2.0 have learned some lessons of their own. They announced their own farcical committee (briefly including cricket star turned political buffoon Imran Khan) to hold negotiations with Nawaz Sharif’s farcical committee.  Within a few days the airwaves were dominated by Taliban representatives asking Pakistanis if they wanted Islamic law or preferred to be ruled by corrupt Western dupes? The Taliban, who routinely behead captives and even play football with their heads, were suddenly respected stakeholders and negotiation partners, holding territory, nominating representatives and promising peace if the state acted reasonably and responsibly.  At the same time, their “bad cop” factions continued to knock off opponents and spread terror (including a gruesome video in which they brought freshly killed, blood soaked headless bodies of soldiers they had taken captive 3 years ago, in broad daylight, in an open pickup truck, and dumped them on a “government controlled” road in Mohmand).

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by Mara Jebsen

In 2006, when I had finished my MFA; when I had completed a poetry class with a famous professor I worshipped; when I had absorbed the fact that despite my increasingly panicky efforts to write a true good poem I had not only not been anointed but had not even been remarkable within the small class, I shut down completely. This shutting-down lasted almost a year, and it seemed to signal some real weakness of character. A real writer would not stop writing just because she had not been chosen by a professor. A real writer would just write.

But I didn't. Then, slowly, I did, but with a strange tic. I had to draw a line down the center of a page so that it was made of two columns. In the thin columns I could write strange little stories in the voice of someone like myself. They were emphatically not poems because I could no longer write poems. But they had to stop at the line, and so they were not exactly stories, either. I filled several notebooks with these little things, all the while still worrying that I was not writing, because I did not think I was writing. The pieces–I don't know what to call them–seem to me to be written by a woman named Lita. Lita has since become a minor character in a play I am writing about ex-patriot family businesses in West Africa. At some point in the play, she throws away her manuscript. It falls into the audience. Here is one of the pieces that falls.

In Which I Try to Tell A Frenchman What It Is Like To Grow Up Here

We lived near the ocean,

But it meant very little.

Almost Nothing appeared on the horizon

That thing just sliced

Your dreams crossways. Did you know, Alexandre

It’s the only straight line in nature, besides

The plumb line? I’ve heard

They credit geometry to sea-side peoples

Because of a circle’s enormous joke . . .

The rest of the world is a dance

Is a series of arabesques,

And who would have guessed

At the use of straight lines,

That they’d behave

So predictably and that the earth

Would fall under the sway of men

Enthralled by a magical stickish order?

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by Alexander Richey

Pessimism is on the rise among members of the older generation. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, only 36% of Americans aged 50 to 64 believe that today's youth will have better lives than their parents. And another poll conducted in 2013 by Rasmussen says that just over half of Americans think that their country's best days are in the past.

There are two ways of explaining this kind of negativity. According to the first view, it is understandable that such attitudes have formed, given both the political and economic turbulence of the last decade, and other long-term social and economic trends.

Recent literature is replete with explanations of this sort. In Thomas Frank's article “Storybook Plutocracy,” he classifies more than 30 recent books as members of what he has dubbed the “social-disintegration genre.” This genre includes David Packer's The Unwinding, Charles Murray's Coming Apart, and Hedrick Smith's Who Stole the American Dream?, among many others.

Although the authors of these books may differ in political orientation and policy prescriptions, they agree in matters of methodology and share a basis of facts. Moreover, they tend to agree that, with the right policies, America's situation can be improved and that the general mood of the country can be ameliorated.

The second type of explanation is bleaker. Its proponents argue that the worsening mood of the country is not due to transient events such as the Great Recession or to reversible political policies, but rather to permanent and essential elements of modernity itself.

Because of the cynicism intrinsic to this sort of view, its written expressions are comparatively rare among professional writers; its cultural manifestations, however, are prominent.

Members of the so-called the Prepper's Movement, for example, carefully pack and maintain “bug-out bags,” receptacles whose contents are intended to “see them through the collapse of civilization.” Preppers, as the movement's adherents call themselves, preach the virtues of preparedness and some of their more extreme members – people who build underground bunkers and stockpile things like gasoline, guns, ammunition, and Meals Ready to Eat – have been featured on National Geographic's reality TV show “Doomsday Preppers.” Many members of this movement believe that civilization itself is unsustainable and that the apocalypse is likely occur in our lifetimes.

Until recently, it has been difficult to apprehend the reasons that motivate such activities; however, in the last few months, authors Jonathan Franzen and David Mamet have published essays that express some of the reasoning which seems to inform this and other Malthusian endeavors.

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SUFI BLUES

How does it rain?
You rap a bead of sweat on your forehead

How does lighting strike?
You glance at me, and lower your eyes

How does day meet night?
You veil your face with hair

Where does music get its magic?
You lace your talk with honey

What good is yearning?
You snuff a candle with your robe's hem

by Rafiq Kathwari

by Ahmed Humayun

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz concluded a visit to Pakistan last week that was carefully orchestrated to signal the role Riyadh expects Islamabad to play in the wider Middle East. The two countries have long had strong ties but this trip underscores a deepening rapprochement— an escalation that will further embroil Pakistan, already bogged down by unprecedented levels of its own religious and political violence, into the sectarian turmoil ravaging the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia has long exercised a commanding influence in Pakistan. Political crises within Pakistani elites are more likely to be resolved in the golden halls of Saudi palaces than in Islamabad. When the country's current Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, was ousted from power in 1999 by General Pervez Musharraf, he was given sanctuary in Saudi Arabia, which was also responsible for brokering Sharif's eventual return in 2007. The first foreign visit of the current army chief, General Raheel Sharif was to Riyadh in early February, and followed visits to Pakistan from the Saudi foreign minister and deputy defense minister.

Saudi Arabia's enjoys enormous ideological clout around the Muslim world as the ‘protector' of the holy cities in Islam.* More important, however, is its unrivalled petro power. Saudi Arabia has provided subsidized oil, bailed Pakistan out during severe financial crises, and funnelled more aid to Pakistan than any other non-Arab recipient since the 1960s. According to Pew, Saudi Arabia enjoys a 95% approval rating in Pakistan, the fruit of both a sustained propaganda campaign since the 1970s and the aspirations of successive Pakistani leaders who have sought out the Saudi embrace.

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by Carl Pierer

George Gershwin's “Porgy and Bess” is probably the first piece that comes to mind in the line of folk opera. However, unlike this early predecessor, modern folk operas are entirely different. The following is an attempt at definition: The term can be applied to concept albums that fall in the vague genre of Indie-Folk-Rock. An album that hosts a couple of different characters, voiced by different singers. Tying each song to the next, they unfold a coherent narrative, divided into several acts. Most of the time, it starts with a pair falling in love, only to take a tragic turn later. Intriguingly, they usually end with the death of one or more protagonists. By combining traditional and modern elements of music with captivating story-telling, they develop a way of recounting a tale in a modern way. The story works on many different levels and its meaning is open to interpretation. While they definitely transport a criticism of society and modernity, they can be read to purport an existentialist parable. To defend this claim, an existentialist interpretation of three folk operas shall be presented.

In 2010 Anais Mitchell released her album “Hadestown”, retelling the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Her narrative takes up the original story and infuses it with several layers of metaphorical meaning. The four main characters are Orpheus (Justin Vernon), Eurydice (Anais Mitchell), Persephone (Ani DiFranco) and Hades (Greg Brown). The first song depicts the love between Orpheus and Eurydice in a very poetic way but the important topic of financial insecurity is already hinted at. After rich Hades and his mining underworld are introduced, Eurydice is approached by Hades who wants to seduce her to come with him. Starved and tired, she accepts an offer she could not refuse. While the fates (or Haden triplets) sing an interlude defending Eurydice's decision, Orpheus prepares his descent to the underworld. On his way down, first doubts about Eurydice cloud his mind. Hades, realising that a living man managed to enter the underworld, is enraged and wishes to thwart the riot, which Orpheus' arrival incited. In a duet with her husband, Persephone manages to convince Hades to let Orpheus and Eurydice leave together. However, as a businessman, Hades knows how to set conditions. Since he is primarily concerned with the smooth running of his mining industry, he allows them to ascend together, Eurydice following Orpheus, on the sole proviso that he must not look back. But on his way back, the doubt that she may not be following plagues Orpheus. Finally, it overcomes him and as he turns around, Eurydice, who had been with him all along, disappears.

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by Charlie Huenemann

In his middle to late thirties (over the years 1679-85), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent more than three years in his visits to a silver mining region in the Harz mountains. He believed he could devise new and more efficient ways of pumping water out of the deep shafts, enabling miners to dig even deeper and extract more silver from the earth. Had he succeeded, he would have doubled his salary and freed himself from the drudgery of his service to the House of Brunswick.

But this effort wasn't just a ploy to gain financial independence. He had a bigger plan in mind. Indeed, Leibniz always had bigger plans in mind. He was born into the aftermath of the Thirty Years' war and he believed his genius could go some way toward healing Europe's countless fractures. And so he wrote theological works aimed at convincing Catholics and Protestants that the differences among them were not so big after all; he wrote political works advocating for unity across Christendom; and he wrote logical and scientific works aimed at truth, or course, but also aimed indirectly at supplying a common foundation to learned societies across Europe.

The project in the Harz was meant to play an instrumental role in these ambitions. Had it succeeded, the money would have gone to support one of Leibniz's greatest dreams: the development of a characteristica universalis, a rigorous calculus of pure concepts that would itself be a lasting theoretical framework for constructive dialogue among scientists, philosophers, theologians, and politicians across the planet and, indeed, for all time.

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by Mara Naselli

In an introduction to a seminal collection of Faulkner’s work, published in 1946, Malcolm Cowley called William Faulkner’s story “Spotted Horses” “wildly funny”—“the culminating example of American backwoods humor.” The collection resurrected Faulkner’s career and made his work teachable, part of the American canon. Nearly forty years later Cowley called it the funniest story he had ever read. “I was lecturing at Stanford once,” Cowley recalled, “and a very bright young woman in the class said, ‘Professor Cowley, referring to ‘Spotted Horses,’ why did you say this story was funny? And I said, ‘I don’t know what funny is, but let me read you part of this story,” and I read part of it where the horses had broken loose and were running through the town and one sailed through the house over that boy, and the class was in stitches. And I said, ‘Now do you think it is funny?’ She kind of flushed and said, ‘Yes.’”

There isn’t anything more embarrassing than not getting the joke, but I admit, in this case, I don’t. The story teems with violence. A string of feral horses, tied together with barbed wire around their necks, is driven to Frenchman’s Bend in Yoknapatawpha County. They are beaten with wagon stakes, grabbed by their nostrils, fed enough corn to kill them, and move with such fury that no one can handle them. They are brought to town by a stranger in cahoots with Flem Snopes. Snopes, who arrived in Frenchmen’s Bend about thirty years after the Civil War, is so tricky, said one of his neighbors, he “don’t even tell himself what he is up to. Not if he was laying in bed with himself in the dark of the moon.” “Spotted Horses,” which was first published in 1931, set the writing of the Snopes trilogy in motion.

Humor needs tragedy, and the genius in “Spotted Horses” is the strong presence of both. “The hard and sordid things of life,” wrote Mark Twain, “are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence.” Twain might be saying that we need humor to withstand the cruelty in the world. Or, that we need humor to see it.

There are two ways to read “Spotted Horses,” as if it were one of those trick paintings that is both a duck and a rabbit at once. You can read the people or you can read the horses.

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by Brooks Riley

You can’t take it with you. That’s what they always tell you about possessions. When you die, everything you own will be left behind: Good-bye, beloved steel chair; farewell, feline; adieu, artichoke; bye-bye books, and so forth. All those objects, great and small, animate or inanimate, will exert their protracted existence on some other visitor to the kingdom of life, after you have moved on.

Like a going-out-of-business sale, everything must go. Everything? Not everything. There is something you’ll take with you when you go: memories. Whether you’re actually going somewhere is a question not only to be avoided here, but irrelevant.

Here are some of the things I’ll be taking with me: all my phone numbers since childhood (memory is a senseless hoarder); the time I threw my peas on the floor from my highchair, when the cook threatened to tell my mother; my fall down the steps of the Palais de Chaillot; the sudden whiff of Paris on the corner of Madison Ave. and 61^st Street; accidentally meeting a childhood sweetheart on the roof of a lockhouse on the Panama Canal; the infra-red glow of instruments before dawn on the bridge of an ocean liner; the two courting praying mantises who flew into my Manhattan apartment and stayed for days; the moonlit pair of flying swans I mistook for UFOs; the baritone whoosh-whoosh of their wings as they flew over me; the opossum who watched me practice piano at night from its perch on the wisteria. I won’t go on. There are millions of them, most of them like confetti–tiny, colorful and insignificant.

Then there are the ones with heft (morsels for a memoir manqué), like the time the headmistress of my grade school told me I’d never be a writer (I was 12); or the two times Eisenhower waved to me from a limousine in Paris (when I was 6 and when I was 14); the time I stopped the orchestra during Act 2 of Tristan und Isolde (like stopping an oncoming train); the time I argued with Max Frisch at a dinner party over who composed ‘An die Musik’ (I was wrong, oh the shame); the time Jean-Luc Godard tricked me into acting in his test footage; the time I wept over Wagner with Susan Sontag during an intermission of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Met; Abel Gance’s devilish compliment. There are hundreds of these, weightier than confetti, more like stones collected on a beach—some smooth, some rough, all memorable, to me at least.

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by Michael Lopresto

It's commonplace today to think that the argument for design, with the aim of rationally establishing the existence of God, was refuted by Darwin in 1859, with the publication of The Origin of Species. This view is not only held by evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins, but also top-notch philosophers such, John Mackie and Elliot Sober (and to some extent Arif Ahmed). Against this commonplace, the philosophers Simon Blackburn and Graham Oppy object that on logical grounds, David Hume (1711 – 1776), the great philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, dealt the argument for design its fatal blow. This was done in Hume's magnificent and delightful Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, but written over the middle years of the century.

So, what exactly is the argument for design? It's an argument intended to demonstrate the existence of God—and here we're concerned only with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God who's defined as being omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good—from the observation that there is apparent design in the world. The term “observation” is crucial here; the argument's not intended to proceed purely from the armchair like the ontological argument is, for instance, which seeks to deduce the existence of God from the mere concept GOD (the being which no greater can be conceived), and the ancillary premise that existence is a perfection. Indeed, the world could be any way at all—it could contain much more gratuitous evil, say, and the ontological argument wouldn't claim to be any less valid. This is because the ontological argument is purely a priori: it's an argument that proceeds independently of experience (observation) of the world.

The argument for design isn't like this. Rather, it's an a posteriori argument, deploying contingent truths about apparent design garnered from experience. Indeed, the argument can't even be deductively valid, as there is no valid inference from apparent design to intentional design. So the argument needs to be empirical in nature, namely, an inference to the best explanation (explanatory inference for short), which is an empirical inference par excellence (I think it's also probably the central inference of philosophy, but that's another story). So the argument for design, for the existence of God, is that the best explanation (philosophical premise) of apparent design (empirical premise) in nature is that nature was intentionally designed by God.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

I came to the United States from India in August 2000 to start graduate school in engineering. I had just finished a college degree and had no idea of the history of any place, including India. I did not, for example, know that Judaism referred to a religion, let alone the religion of the Jews. Many students get radicalized, develop a political and historical consciousness during college. For some reason, during my own college years in the town of Trichy in south India, I did not develop an interest in either India's past or the world.

The milieu in the United States, in the sprawling desert city of Phoenix, Arizona, was a curious one. On the one hand, graduate school was full of highly motivated students from all parts of Asia. On the other, the neighborhood I lived in, a ten minute walk from the university, was home to immigrants from indigenous or mixed race communities in Mexico and Central America (the closest genetic relatives of the North American Indians). Many of the immigrants had made life-threatening journeys across the southwestern desert into the US, and now did restaurant and construction jobs, legally and illegally, for a living.

This change in my setting was as invigorating as it was confusing, a first glimpse of how complex the world was. Suddenly history, which I had long ignored and thought boring, became indispensable. I began to read a lot more. I remember what a revelation it was to learn that Muslims had been dominant in Asia, Europe and North Africa before the Renaissance; that Europe had experienced something called the “dark ages”, a fact that had once seemed unimaginable, and now somehow comforting; that Genghis Khan, a man born into a nomadic tribe, had through a combination of brutality, shrewdness, and military strategy, built an unimaginably vast Eurasian empire. I was equally surprised that India too supposedly had had a great past, a “golden age”, a claim that had earlier, living with Indian realities, sounded hollow and untrue. Without realizing it, I had, like millions of people the world over, internalized the idea of Western superiority. The fact that non-Western people could be dominant, that the fortunes of all regions and cultures fluctuated, was liberating.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Yes. Why not? You paying? Well then— make it a double. So let me return the favor by telling you a story—something I've been holding on to for a while. Well—who knows, anyway— I think it's interesting. Maybe you've already heard this but here goes—You know—-I said make it a double. So yeah—I heard it shortly after the war in Afghanistan took up were it had left off with a bit of change your partner—do si do. This guy that I met—where—yeah—where else— So this guy back in October 2001 told me about how he and the UN delegation he was with had met Mullah Omar—yeah Mullah Omar—about eight months earlier back in the bitterly cold winter of February 2001 in Kandahar.

Anyway this is what happened—it's a hoot! You're sure to get a good laugh: It was the dead of winter, people were dying of cold and hunger and there was a boycott on Afghanistan by the world because of the Taliban Government. A UN delegation was meeting Mullah Omar in his tent and he asked them for help: “My people are starving says Mullah Omar-They are freezing and there is a famine—please help us.” And then there's a back and forth—the Head of the UN delegation trying to explain the problems in being able to do this. And then finally the Head of the Delegation takes out the UN Charter—a thick document and says—”This is for us, like our Bible, we follow rules—Our charter on Human Rights”—-and then he says—”You know— We do precisely what is written here we follow these rules. You know? How you say—this is our Koran. It is, for us, how you say–carved in stone”. Mullah Omar is staring at the guy —bug eyed—with that one eye of his. The Head of the Delegation is thumping the document “You understand—Absolutely, certainly, but we cannot assist any country that violates our charter. And your Government has, isn't it so, violated, our charter of human rights—girls' education, war and so forth.” There is silence.

Again Mullah Omar repeats his plea—-“There is a famine, my people are dying.” The Head of the Delegation shrugs, sticks out his lower lip—thinks and replies “You are responsible for that. Are you not? Your actions are not our responsibility—you can change. Our hands are tied by you. We cannot do anything about that–Well I can't do anything about that—that is for sure—our rules, bible you know—Koran—as you know because of the attitude here, there is an economic embargo on Afghanistan. You must change your behavior.” There is silence. Mullah Omar stares at him.

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