by Yohan J. John

No one knows exactly how life began, but a pivotal chapter in the story was the formation of the first single-celled organism — the common ancestor to every living thing on the planet. I like to think of the birth of life as the creation of the first boundary — the cell membrane. That first cell membrane enclosed a drop of the primordial soup, creating a separation between inside and outside, and between life and non-life. Through this act of individuation the cell could become a controlled environment: a chemical safe zone for the sensitive molecular machinery needed to maintain integrity and facilitate replication. The game of life consists in large part of perpetuating the difference between inside and outside for as long as possible. Death, then, is the dissolution of difference. But the paradox at the heart of life is that the inside cannot survive without the outside. The cell requires raw materials — nutrients and energy — to sustain itself and to reproduce, and these must be sought outside the safe zone, in the wild and unpredictable outside world.

The cell membrane has a dichotomous role. It must preserve the cell’s identity as an entity that is distinct from everything outside it, but it must not be an impenetrable wall. It must be a gateway through which the cell can absorb raw material and eject waste, but it cannot allow the inside to become inundated by the outside. It fulfills this challenge by being selectively permeable, carefully overseeing the traffic between the inside and the outside. The cell membrane must also be flexible, because it serves the roles of locomotion and consumption. In a single-celled organism, the cell membrane is therefore a primitive sense organ, a transportation system and a digestive system, all rolled into one.

The birth of life was a moment of cleaving: when the first cell membrane enveloped its drop of primordial ooze, it cleaved the inside from the outside, but it also became the conduit through which the inside could cleave to the outside. Like Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and endings, of doors and passageways, the cell membrane is a sentry looking in two directions simultaneously. Given its role in cellular transaction, transition and transformation, the cell membrane’s function might even be described as a precursor to intelligence.

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by Tamuira Reid

Duck into the nearest bar, grab a stool, roll-up your sleeves. Get down to business. Take a shot. Take another. Take a third. Drink a glass of wine, a glass of beer, a glass of vodka. Rinse. Repeat. You remember how to do this. A pro never forgets.

You should call your sponsor but you won't. You should probably feel guilty but you don't.

Drink with the ones who have nothing to lose because they've lost everything already. Or maybe they never had anything to begin with. Some people are dealt a shit hand in life. You are not one of them. You had it all and fucked-it up.

It doesn't matter if you have seven hours or seven months or seven years. IT is always there, waiting. Disguised as a good time. A giant Band-Aid. The best lay of your life. Up the five flights of stairs to your studio in Harlem, or your loft in Soho, or in the family room of your green-shuttered craftsmen in Stamford. Right behind you.

The anticipation is over. The “what if” becomes the “what now”. You drink and drink and drink until body and mind unravel and you want nothing and feel nothing and coming undone like this is better than air. It's better than life. It's better.

Across town your family is getting ready for the party. Pink balloons hang from streamers stretched across doorways. Bowls of M & M's and potato chips are placed on a table next to the Dora the Explorer sheet cake you ordered, a massive number “5” candle jetting out of its middle.

Remember when she was born. All conehead and piercing scream. How she spread across your chest and fell asleep. How you felt your dark heart open up for a split second, then close again.

Let the man next to you buy another round. Don't stop him when he puts his hand on your thigh. Don't stop him when he leans over and breathes into your neck, face buried in your hair. Remember when your husband used to do this. Remember when he stopped.

You met him at a coffee shop on Bleeker Street five days into your sobriety. Talked about books and shitty local poets and how no one writes anything worth a damn anymore. Six months later you married. You wore a black dress and wrote your own vows and watched as your aging parents held hands and cried, relieved you'd finally found someone who could put up with your shit.

Let the man kiss you now. Hard. Let it remind you of how wild you were back then. How all of that crazy has been replaced by a certain brand of peace others mistake for weakness. But addicts are never truly peaceful. Not down in the soul where it matters.

The jukebox spits out some music and everything in you moves, shifts. The mute button on your life suddenly lifted.

Go home.

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by Brooks Riley

As I hover over my life in cyberspace, I look down at the various trails emanating from me that find their way across the globe to multiple destinations, known and unknown, whether or not they were ever intended to travel that far. Interconnectivity has increased exponentially since 2009 when I bought the notebook whose recent demise forced me to confront a sea change. Up to now, I’d left a line of breadcrumbs, for Windows, for McAfee, for Google, for the NSA, for my e-mail contacts, for who knows who else. Now those breadcrumbs have become loaves and like the parable they have multiplied.

I loved my old notebook: Except for the odd update or security scan, it was just it and I, two symbiotic pals going about our business. Now I find myself constantly confronted with geek issues such as OS updates, software compatibility, multiple preference settings and cloud management. Is Microsoft my new best friend because it greets me (Hello from Seattle) and promises to guide me? Is Apple my new best friend because it promises chic design? Is Google my new best friend because it finds things, shows me where I live and offers to hardwire my nest? Is Amazon my new best friend because it delivers? None of the above. They fall into the category of useful acquaintances to whom I turn when I need them. My new best friend turns out to be my old best friend, Wikipedia, without which the world would be a poorer place for one who wants to know everything.

What does it mean to leave behind such spoors (to borrow language of the hunted), when most of the billions before us left only genetic traces in the form of offspring and descendants? An electronic version of each one of us will haunt the internet after we’re gone, as immutable and indestructible as the risus rigidus of a Guy Fawkes mask on the trash heap after the party’s over.

Facebook is beginning to deal with death, but only with issues of access, not with the fate of the pages themselves. Nearly 3 million Facebook users worldwide were predicted to die in 2012 alone, their pages achieving an immortality denied to their progenitors. Will famous last words be replaced by famous last entries? Will Stephen King write a ghoulish story about a Facebook user who updates his page from heaven? Will some start-up create a ‘dropped box’ in cyberspace for the dearly departed? And what about all those other clouds? Your stuff is safe and backed up. You are not.

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by Charlie Huenemann

In 1746, Hume returned to London after touring Europe as tutor and caretaker of the mad Marquess of Annendale. He was not sure what was next in his life. He was already 35 and somewhat ashamed of not having yet made a career for himself. He resolved to return to Scotland, but at the last minute he received an unexpected invitation to serve in a military expedition to Canada. The invitation came from Lieut.-General James St Clair, a distant relative of Hume whom he had recently met. The opportunity hit Hume at just the right time, and he wondered if this was the beginning of a career in the military.

The plan for the expedition was to approach Quebec by way of the St. Lawrence River in August. Hume set his affairs in order and reported for duty. But what followed was not the exciting onset of an adventure at sea, sails rippling in the wind, but three months of fits and starts. When the wind was not favorable, they were stuck in one harbor or another; when the wind was favorable, the orders from the Navy changed and kept them from going anywhere.

By the end of August, the orders changed dramatically. Forget Canada; the new plan was to invade the French coast and cause a distraction from the campaign taking place then around Flanders. But winds were unfavorable once again, giving St Clair the opportunity to remind the Navy that for this new assignment he had no maps, no military intelligence, no horses, and no money.

The Navy sent along a major and some ship pilots to help plan for an invasion – though, as it turned out, none of them could provide any helpful information. Thus, as Hume put it, the company “lay under positive orders to sail with the first fair wind, to approach the unknown coast, march through the unknown country, and attack the unknown cities of the most potent nation of the universe”.

On September 15th, they undertook to do just that, setting out for Lorient in Brittany with about 50 ships and 4500 men, with the guidance of a map bought in a shop in Plymouth. They arrived at the French coast in the evening of September 18th. But instead of invading right away, the commanding admiral waited to land until the following morning, and on the morning they encountered winds that prevented their landing for two more days. This of course gave the French plenty of time to see them, sound alarms, and prepare a defense of some 3,000 militia, plus cavalry. The wind finally relented and the invading British troops landed, diverting at the last moment to an unoccupied section of the coast. They chased some French soldiers into the hills and issued a general declaration to villagers in the area that they would not be harmed if they did not oppose. Hume was apparently so excited that he simply co-signed this declaration “David,” forgetting to supply his last name.

What followed then was the sort of comedy of errors one could easily see coming. The British troops began to poke around the unfamiliar territory, engaged in some minor skirmishes, sacked a village, and entered into a firefight in which they ended up shooting at each other. Rain kept pouring, morale was low, and many soldiers just wandered off into the French countryside.

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“Did you like your father,” my friend asked?

The Tongues of His Black Boots Say

as my father sleeps the world goes on
his black boots are by the door
he left them there unlaced
the right run down at the heel
the left toe scuffed
his blue shirt hangs on a hook
wrinkled below the belt line
where every morning
its tails were tucked
there’s no forgiveness in pasts
just now and here, defeat
is the hardest epiphany
the tongues of his
black boots say
.

by Jim Culleny
4/13/14

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

All my life, I've been called a Madrasi. This is false, funny, and ironic. For those that live north of the Vindhyas in India, all four of the southern states connote a ubiquitous “Madras”, or in other words the land where people speak Madrasi (otherwise knows as four distinct languages Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, and Tamil). But Madras, or to call it by its current, official, and always locally more kosher name Chennai, was never home to me. I visited Madras, and I lived in Bombay. Madras was heat, provinciality, incoherence, and conservatism. For the longest time, it occupied the second position on a list of cities that I vowed to never inhabit. Number One is still held by New Delhi, and I hope it doesn't indulge in similarly stymieing my life plans. Hush I tell myself, lest the Gods have sharp ears. Evidence indicates otherwise, but you never know.

Madras, I am told by the many books I peruse in the hopes of gaining intellectual familiarity, is where modern India began. This old colonial outpost that had the likes of Robert Clive, Elihu Yale, and Arthur Wellesley pass through dates back to the 1640 settlement of Madraspatnam. For those seeking a primer, I highly recommend Bishwanath Ghosh's Tamarind City and of course, S.Muthiah's Madras Discovered.

Seeking this selfsame city of sepia fame, I wander off one bright Madras morning, dragging a friend and relucatant early riser to Fort St. George, one of the arteries of the colonial enterprise. Disembarking from the train at Beach station sharp at seven am, bright and caffeinated, we walk past a still sleeping old town through NSC Bose Road, and the various Chetty streets, named after differently famed members of the Chettiar community. Each street differentiates itself by the goods it sells; electrical appliances in one, upholstery in the other, plumbing equipment in yet another.

The art-deco buildings are magnificent, and often magnificently ratty. The politics of heritage preservation are apparently a nationwide phenomenon. I receive atmospheric consolation from this history that seems like so many other histories of so many other old towns. I do what any self-respecting debutante to urban studies might do, take many pictures. Fort St.George, the Armenian church with many buried Armenians and nary a community, Armenian Street, abandoned pushcarts, modernist architecture, all fodder for my newly obsessive need to know this city.

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by Michael Lopresto

Perceptual experience is a distinctly privileged way of knowing about the world. Not only is perceptual experience ultimately the bridge between mind and world, but it also trumps other ways of knowing. When another way of knowing about the world – inference, introspection, memory, and testimony – and experience disagree with one another, experience will be kept and the other will be dropped unless we have strong reason to believe that what we're experiencing contains an illusion or a hallucination. So, if you were to tell me that my sister is in Melbourne, and later that day I saw her walking across the street from where I am here in Adelaide, I would immediately drop the belief based on testimony that she is in Melbourne. However, an alternative situation may be this: I know that my sister has a doppelgänger who lives here in Adelaide. So in this situation, if I happen to believe that you're a reliable source of information, I'd probably believe instead that I'm actually seeing my sister's doppelgänger.

The moral is this: experience, privileged as it is, is still judged against what we already happen to know – as are the other sources of knowledge. When a proposition arrived at by inference or testimony disagrees with something I already know, I'm going to subject that proposition to much closer scrutiny than I otherwise would. Furthermore, experience, privileged as it is, always involves interpretation. In the first case, where I see my sister, and the second case, where I see my sister's doppelgänger, provide me with identical data. Each of the perceptual experiences are indistinguishable from my first-person perspective. The fact that interpretation is involved in perceptual experience is what explains how it's possible to come to different conclusions from identical perceptual experiences.

So, how are we to understand “interpretation” in the context of perceptual experience? It's certainly not anything like conscious deliberation, otherwise its presence would be salient to us (and it's not at all), and further, experience would be much more plastic than it actually is, in that it would be affected by interpretation in a much more thoroughgoing way. So our background knowledge influences our perceptual experiences in a way that is automatic and unconscious. Should this consideration lead to scepticism about the reliability of our perceptual faculties giving us objective knowledge of the external world? I think the answer is clearly not.

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by Mara Naselli

Minds cannot help but make meaning, even with only a suggestion of direction. When I taught manuscript editing, to put the mechanics of the work in perspective, I would write out a line of taspyograpgucal noasihfsnesnse theat qwe kcgan reasdsdo to illustrate the point. Your eye, reading the jumble above, found the letters to make the words. We make corrections and connections without thinking about them. We bend the contours of a line. We want order, not confusion, and will bring it into shape if we can.

This hunger for order applies to memory as much as it applies to reading. We know memory is plastic—it can even be invented. What interests me are the choices that occur someplace between consciousness and unconsciousness—our grasping letters that make sense and eliding the others so that the coherence of our interpretations and blindnesses are preserved. But what would a more careful reading look like? How do we allow a memory or fact to break into our consciousness and disrupt our domestic intellectual and emotional order?

On April 18, 1939, Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa urged her to write her memoirs, before her memory might fail her. Woolf was ready for a diversion—she had been working on a biography of the painter Robert Fry, puzzling out the difficulties of writing about another human being outside of the events of his or her life. Who was I then? she asks, turning the question onto herself. For the next year and a half, she wrote her recollections, conjuring the dead and their vanished Victorian world. “A Sketch of the Past” was edited by Jeanne Schulkind and published posthumously in 1976.

Which is to say these writings are, for all intents and purposes, works in progress, and to read them is a bit like editing them, interpreting and weighting the content, discerning a shape that might give contours to the genius they contain. To read Woolf’s draft of a memoir is to sit with her at her writing desk, after she has gone for a walk, read Chaucer, made notes on Robert Fry, written instructions to the housekeeper, or heard the drone of German planes overhead. She settles in, and we watch her wade into the past. Woolf’s writing is not simply recollection, rather her encounter makes the convergence of past and present an altogether new thing—waters not yet crossed.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

Parenthood is coming under increasing criticism as a selfish lifestyle choice. Parents' private choices to procreate impose expensive obligations on the rest of us to ensure those children have a decent quality of life and come out as successful adults and citizens, and that means massive tax-subsidies for their health, education, and so forth. We also pay to support parents' self-conception of parenthood, such as by providing lengthy paid paternal leave to allow them to ‘bond' with their children.

In addition there are environmental costs relating to the consumption of the children themselves. The choice to become a parent massively increases one's environmental footprint because it adds consumers who otherwise wouldn't have existed, and who may then go on to have children of their own. The environmental impact of a population is a function of population size multiplied by consumption per capita. Therefore, adding consumers must either lead to a greater environmental impact, or else to a politically directed reduction in per capita consumption to avoid that impact. With regard to carbon emissions, for example, it has been estimated that an American woman who has a child increases the carbon emissions she would have been responsible for by a multiple of 5.7 (source). If lots of people have children, the planet will be in even greater danger of cooking, unless all of us make very severe cuts to our consumption practices to keep humanity within the bounds of sustainability.

One might argue that children don't only impose costs on the rest of us. For example, because they may be expected to become productive workers as well as consumers, they will repay their ‘debt' to us by supporting the economic sustainability of our pension system (and thus allow us to continue to afford our habits of affluent consumption). But even if that were true to some extent, it does not affect the core criticism of the selfishness of parenthood, which is that parents do not stop to consider how their procreative decisions may affect others, including other would be parents. Since parents aren't motivated to have children by their commitment to supporting the social welfare system or otherwise contribute to society, they can claim no credit if that is how things happen to work out.

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by Carl Pierer

In the book “Existentialism – A Reconstruction” David E. Cooper devotes an entire chapter to inquiring the relation between philosophy and alienation. Cooper's interest is to make the point that “the issues of alienation are pivotal in existentialist thought” ([1], p.31). To do so, he includes a brief sketch of Hegel's and Marx' ideas concerning alienation. In line with these two thinkers, Cooper gives a rough outline for an argument that alienation is at the heart of the philosophical adventure. Since he is right in claiming that this take on philosophy amounts to a drastic shift in perspective for the (analytic) philosophy student, the idea deserves to be argued for.

The term “alienation” is strongly associated with the allegedly impenetrable, obscurantist writings of thinkers such as Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre. Sentences like “(…) the terminology in which I have so far discussed alienation – ‘at home with', ‘separated from', etc. – is both vague and figurative. It may be that the sense of alienation is resistant to literal, analytical definition” ([1], p. 25) hardly make the concept more palatable. Yet, in spite of many different thinkers stretching the concept of alienation to fit their needs, it seems that there is a core which can be distilled. The aim is not to find a one size fits all, but to establish a tentative runway from which the various writers can take off. In this context, such a proposed fundament must be general and abstract enough so as to account for various pulls into different directions. However, a rigorous stress test would go beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, testing the proposed definition with Marx and Heidegger, two writers in whose thinking alienation plays a crucial role, will have to suffice. With a sketched definition of alienation an argument for understanding philosophy as an attempt to overcome alienation, rather than acquiring knowledge, can be proposed.

Upon encountering the world, there is – at the very least – a perceived dichotomy. On the one hand, there is something that belongs to me, and there is something external to me. There is an I and a not-I. To realise this is to experience alienation. To take up Bertrand Russell's example in his Problems of Philosophy: “(…) let us concentrate our attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives a wooden sound.” ([2], p. 11) For the sake of argument, let us grant Russell the concept of table, of sense data, etc. Even if we strip ourselves of scepticism about these, there is an object presupposed. A something we can concentrate our attention on. This subject-object distinction is inherent in the grammatical structure of transitive verbs. To see means to see something. Without leaving the surface level, it appears that – intuitively, in our way of living – we distinguish between two entities: the I and the not-I. Alienation, then, denotes the partition of our existence into these two subsets.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

In January this year, I visited Hospitalito Atitlán, a health care center for the Tz'utujil Maya in the town of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. There were two reasons for this visit. First, much of my healthcare work has been limited to the US system; I wanted to get a sense of what was going on in other places. Second, for many years I've been trying to learn about the indigenous cultures of the Americas; this had led me in the past to Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. I welcomed, now, this chance to spend a few days in a Mayan town in Guatemala.

Santiago Atitlán, a town of 30-40,000, is a 3-hour drive from Guatemala City, at the southwestern edge of Lake Atitlán. The lake fills a caldera formed in an eruption 84,000 years ago, and is surrounded by lush-green volcanoes, rising to over 8,000 feet. The majority of the people who live in the surrounding towns belong to one of two Mayan groups: the Tz'utujil and Kaqchikel. Santiago Atitlán is almost entirely Tz'utujil, while San Lucas Toliman is mostly Kaqchikel. Tz'utujil and Kaqchikuel also refer to two of the twenty odd Mayan languages in Guatemala (there are a few others in Mexico). All of them are still spoken, in sharp contrast to the fate of indigenous languages elsewhere in the Americas.

I arrived in Santiago Atitlán on a Sunday morning. The town is set along a slope that eases into the lake; Volcan San Pedro rises dramatically across a narrow section of the water, dominating the view. For a small town, the streets were a maze, and I lost my way each time. Many of the homes were make-shift; the farther I ascended away from the town center, the poorer the homes were. Almost all the Tz'utujil women wore brightly colored yarn based textiles with intricate patterns. On the main road along the lake's circumference, Toyota pick-up trucks – a common mode of shared local transportation – carried passengers who stood in the open rear. Then there were the brightly colored tuk-tuks, exactly like the three wheeler autos I knew in India – every one of them that I saw in Atitlán was made by Bajaj.

The pick-up trucks, the tuk-tuks, and even many of the paved roads were all new, I was told – part of the economic growth here after decades of conflict. In the last half of the 20th century, Guatemala, like other nations of Central America – El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras – went through a violent upheaval. The Guatemalan Civil War lasted from 1960-1996. A brutal right wing government fought against insurgents in the largely indigenous countryside. The Lake Atitlán region did not go unscathed; hundreds of people from Santiago were killed or disappeared; “everyone you talk to lost someone in his or her family” [link]. Since 1996, there's been a return to normalcy. While the region still remains relatively poor, its coffee plantations have done well, and the beautiful lake setting draws plenty of tourists.

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by Tom Jacobs

– Do you know the expression, “Let sleeping dogs lie?” You are better off not knowing…

– I have to know…

– Very well…

~ from Polanski’s Chinatown

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

~ Dante

So there is a dark tunnel that stretches out into indefiniteness. There is the faint light of the lobby behind but really there is no direction to go but forward into the darkness. To do otherwise, to go back towards the light would be weak, cowardly—a failure of curiosity. After it is all over, the directions that are meant to explain what to expect and how to go about navigating the otherworldly blackness will become apparent; these directions and explanations would have clarified and demystified the whole thing and were right there for the seeing but somehow they went unobserved. But that comes later. Perhaps it is better to have passed them by, to not have seen them. So, again, nowhere to go but in.

There is nothing but darkness and no light, no wind, not even the faintest draft. Seemingly nothing ahead and, once the lobby light fades, nothing behind. Just a meaningless blankness that begins to seem weirdly seductive. Nowhere to go but in.

The air is filled with fear and ignorance and it is all ridiculously thrilling. To not know. To not know but to go on anyway, just to see.

Eventually the end of the tunnel presents itself, as do two chairs. After five minutes or so of sitting in the soundless nothingness the magic of proprioception becomes a kind of revelation. There is really nothing to observe but the rhythms of breath and blood.

After ten minutes the dark adapted eye begins to see, or at least to discern. An amorphous gray blob begins to shimmer and pulsate in the distance. This gray blob fascinates until eventually it doesn’t anymore and it’s time to leave.

Groping through the darkness of blackness, a vaguely irritating question emerges. What is actually out there in the darkness? What is that faint pulsating gray blob? Nothing? Something? An illusion? And where does the inner eye stop and the world of things out there begin? There is the certain knowledge that a trick of some sort is being played. The senses are being manipulated and played and the confusion of inner and outer is offered as a kind of weird gift. Enjoy it and don’t ask questions; float and luxuriate in the strange equilibrium of Turrell’s dark solution. But then, just then, the cell phone presents itself as something that might cut through Turrell’s riddle. A flash of digital light might cut through the murk.

The consequences of wrecking the mystery are considered and dispensed with, completely supplanted by the desire to know what’s really out there in the darkness.

The cell phone’s light flashes and a very mundane, delicately curved white space appears for the time of the flashing and then is gone again.

So that’s what it was. An empty space, a bannister, and two spare chairs. That’s all it was and nothing more. Maddened by the absence of anything, the dark-adapted eye seizes upon whatever light finds its way in to bounce off the blank walls and a confused and hungry retina. That’s it. It’s hard to say whether the plainness of the thing makes it more or less intriguing. More, probably.

Finally the lobby presents itself again, a far duller place than it seemed just ten minutes before, even if the inner ear and the inner eye take the rest of the day to realign and find concordance again. A certain regret begins to gnaw, an unformed inkling that perhaps it would have been better not to know. To just let the mystery ripen and be. It is funny that the pleasures of pursuing resolution and clarity and coherence almost always destroy the deeper pleasures of the enigma, the cryptic, the befuddling.

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“Faith is a fine invention…”
…. ……… —Emily Dickinson, 56

Different Choice

faith is a fine invention,
a spade to shovel doubt away
and bury apprehension,
keeping disbelief at bay
it sidelines skepticism,
confining incredulity to a box
it becomes a soothing salve
or cell with locks

faith may boost the probability
of inattention and final answers
discounting anything that challenges its ends
so that, faithfully, no mind will bend
to newer sets of circumstances

faith’s the up and the under side of willing
—it has a mothering voice,
but it’s also not averse to killing
anyone who’s made a different choice

by Jim Culleny
4/5/14