Tell Me Something I Don't Know

Don’t tell me the earth’s a sphere
and the sun’s kiss planted there
amounts to half-day terminal bliss
with a dark end

or that winters have to do with angles
mystics have to do with angels
and lovers are about orbiting passions
that whirl like eclipsing binaries—
star pairs that pulse across light years
to come in telescopes
before they're spent

Don’t tell me the wind’s a metaphor
for a longing to fill vacuums
that sometimes spit typhoons

or that a red cardinal seen
in the high reach of a cherry tree
is no more sublime than worms
who burrow among turnip roots
for a living

Don’t tell me the chances of being
are equal to the odds of not being

—tell me something I don’t know

Tell me how to weave
tomorrow into yesterday
without tangling, without
strangling today

Jim Culleny
10/10/12

by Sue Hubbard

What is a portrait for? What does it tell us? Before the camera it was the only way of recording human presence. All other images of the human face were transient: a reflection caught in a pool of water or a pane of glass. To put paint on canvas was to render a person immortal and, in many cases, it gave the sitter authority, status and power. For women it was often a passport to marriage (though the perils of lying paint were demonstrated when Hans Holbein’s portrait of the dumpy Anne of Cleeves beautified the princess so that on her arrival in England in 1539, Henry VIII, already in his late 40s, sick and ageing and married three times, rejected his prospective bride as not attractive enough.)

But with the invention of the camera ‘truth’ became the domain of photography, while painting was left to ‘express’ the soul of the sitter though, as John Berger points out in his essay The Changing View of Man in the Portrait, town halls and provincial museums are full of lifeless, boring likenesses that reveal little skill and even less about the human soul. Berger asks whether you would rather have a photo of someone you love or a painting. Go on, be honest, you’re not really going to keep an oil painting propped up on the pillow beside you when yearning for an absent love, are you? This suggests, then, that the average painted portrait was traditionally – with honourable exceptions such as Rembrandt or Van Gogh – about something else: status, aggrandizement, a legacy to history. Each year the BP Portrait Award is full of achingly skilful works that say little about the sitter and even less about contemporary painting. Those that do manage to do so stand out like diamonds. So what is the point of the contemporary portrait and why has an artist such as Thomas Schütte returned to concentrate on figures and faces?

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by Quinn O'Neill

Everyone knows there are crazy people around. You probably know a few personally and you can find plenty on the television and internet. These are the days of Honey Boo Boo and political attack ads that feature Big Bird. We live in a crazy world.

Crazy, however, is a pretty subjective term. It might mean delusional or stupid, or maybe just of a perspective that’s radically different from our own. The people you think are crazy might think the same of you and almost no one thinks himself crazy. Craziness is in the eye of the beholder.

Craziness also takes many forms, including religious fanaticism, science denialism, daredevilry and behaviors that might be described as “all kinds of crazy”. Folks who partake in such practices are often referred to with a variety of colorful terms like wingnuts, ass-hats, and dumbasses.

Given the amount of senseless and stupid behavior that we perceive, it might seem outrageous to claim that people – all people – make perfect sense. The crux of my argument rests on the idea that behaviors are caused, and to the extent that they are caused – fully, I believe – they will always make sense if the causal factors are understood.

This seems to be the approach that we intuitively take when we observe unusual behavior in animals. We don’t blame the animal and label it a dumbass, we assume there’s something causing the behavior, like an illness, the presence of another animal, or the animal’s having been trained by humans. A bizarre behavior could also have a strong genetic component; maybe it’s evolved because it’s adaptive or maybe it’s the result of a spontanteous deleterious mutation. In any case, we're likely to attribute the behavior to material causes rather than to blame the animal.

As animals, we should look at our own behavior in the same light. We can think and reason, but reasoning is just one of many factors that shape our actions. If we consider all of the relevant causal factors, even the most extreme human behaviors become comprehensible. A man eating another man’s face, for example, can be understandable in light of drug abuse or psychiatric disorders.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

A dynamical system is a mathematical description of how some particular system evolves through time. These are often physical or biological systems, and dynamical systems are used to model everything from how the planets move around the sun and how earthquakes propagate to how neurons fire and how economies evolve over time. To build a dynamical system we need two things. We need some sort of abstract description of the properties of the system that will be changing; for example, if we want to understand the movements of the planets these would be their positions in space (relative to some coordinate system). We also need some rule for how these quantities evolve from moment to moment. Here, this would be a set of equations describing how the gravitational attraction between the planets causes them to accelerate in various directions.

As a simple example, imagine we are studying a group of immortal rabbits. Each year, 10% of them reproduce. If we started with 100 rabbits, in the second year we'd have 110, in the third year we'd have 121, and so on. We'd start having fractional amounts of rabbit very soon, but let's ignore that. Let's call x(n) the number of rabbits in year n. Then we can explicitly write out the rule as:

x(n+1)=1.1*x(n).

Again, this just says, “To go from year n to year n+1 take x(n) (the number of rabbits in year n) and multiply by 1.1, which is the same as adding 10%.” The rule tells us how to go from one state in time to the next one. If we started with 100 rabbits and kept applying this rule we'd get a sequence: {100, 110, 121, …}. This describes a trajectory of the system with time. “Trajectory” sounds like it should describe a path through space, and that's where the intuition comes from (see this article, for example). If we start with a different number of rabbits, we get a different trajectory (for example, starting with 90 rabbits gives us 99 rabbits at the end of the first year).

Say we start a system off in one state (here, state means number of rabbits), and wait a certain amount of time. Where will it be? One approach is to just replicate what the system would do. If we want to know what it'll do after 10 steps of time, we write down the description of where it is, apply the rule to it to get the new description, and do this ten times. This can take a long time, especially if we have many time steps. More importantly, it doesn't seem to tell us anything about the deeper structure of the system. For example, how would things change if we started the system off in a different state. Do all states end up in a similar place or do they differ wildly? If we see that the state is headed in one direction, will it keep going in that direction? In some cases, we can solve the system to get a formula that just tells us how many rabbits we'd have given a starting number and a length of time. This is typically impossible; simple update rules can give rise to systems that have no such formula. But this system does have one, and the formula is

Here x(0) is the starting value. Note that this formula doesn't need to be repeatedly applied; we can just put in the number of years and the starting value. Of course, given the simplicity of the update rule, applying the formula is not too much simpler than applying the update rule. The formula tells us that all of the trajectories of this system look qualitatively similar. The number of rabbits we have keeps growing and never stops, unless we started with no rabbits, in which case we'll always have no rabbits (within the assumptions of the model, of course, so we don't get to go out and buy some).

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WEDDING PROPOSALS

I.

She circles the room,
the two men cross-legged
on woven flowers,

her kohl-lined eyes downcast
to the fringe
of their shining loafers

the fluted foot
of a samovar, henna
petals on her toes.

“Look, my child has no flaws,
no need to give ear to rumors,”
her father tells the intended

father-in-law
who’s in Srinagar for the viewing
months before the wedding.

Intended father-in-law
shakes her father’s hand
deal-sealed.

He gives her filigreed silver
wedged heels with pointed tips
too big for the girl she was

bunions not yet formed.

–March 1938

For my grandfathers’, experts des objects d’ art.

II.

Again I ease her palm into mine
We stroll on the beach

Frangipani petals
Rushlight of dusk

Inks of her sarong
My bruised jeans

Gods on horses
Spark the horizon

It’s a sign I know
What sign?

I want you to be my wife
Ask me again—she jolts me

And again her gritty palm is mine
Bending a knee I ask

Will every flower from Kenya
to Kashmir bloom?

–March 1998

For Tabish Din, again.

by Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3 Quarks Daily

On Celebrity, New York, and the Movie in Your Mind.

by Mara Jebsen

I am looking at Jackie Onassis, young, wide-eyed and beast-like in one of the iconic photographs we’d all recognize. She has those startling beetle brows, and her little hat and big collar are so cute and polished that she seems somehow a Pomeranian, and like a girl you knew in 6^th grade, who could say something cloying like “pretty please with a cherry on top” and get away with it. She’s pixilated. The artist, Alex Guofeng Cao, made her out of a jillion tiny little photographs of a famous photo of JFK. As a looker, as a person with limited eyeballs, you have a choice then—you can look close at the endless dark and light iterations of charming young Kennedy, or you can zoom out, and see Jackie’s big fresh face. I guess the implication is that JFK is always on her mind. Or that when we see Jackie we’re seeing JFK, too.

Guofeng Cao, whose Jackie I came across in a Chelsea gallery, has completed, it turns out, a whole series like this—JFK’s face made out of a million tiny laughing sexy Marilyn Monroes; the Marilyn made out of a million tiny Brigitte Bardots. And Jimmi Hendrix– his face a collection of repeating purple pills. Everyone obsessing, amost in a circle.

You have to wonder what he’s saying with this—and also, why its so insanely fun to look at. You have to wonder if we are made out of a million little images of the things we love; if our obsessions would even show on our faces if someone looked in close enough. Its a terrifying thought.

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by Haider Shahbaz

Rain taps on their window. Tip tap, tip tap. She says to him: “Let’s go outside on the balcony”.

“Are you mad? It’s pouring.” he says.

“No, of course I’m not mad. You know I like being in the rain.”

“I think I’m getting a cold. I might head off to bed. Sorry.”

“Oh, it’s okay. Good night.”

She walks out on the balcony and shuts the door behind her.

There is a cold wind, a sad mist, and mammoth clouds pouring incessantly.

He doesn’t remember, she thinks. Her steps are slow, and her shoulders slouched. She feels weary, worn out. She thinks: the first time he hasn’t remembered in nine years. But his forgetting doesn’t even bother her too much. What makes her heart heavy is the burden of ten years of thinking that he was someone she knew he wasn’t. It isn’t his fault, she thinks. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s not that he doesn’t love her. He just can’t possibly remember every time. Can he?

Standing on her balcony, her hands gripped around the railing, she is looking out to the windows on the concrete apartments all around her. She is leaning forward. She likes the rain. She likes some of the clouds too.

Standing there, she feels that she has lost something in the passage of ten years. But she isn’t quite sure what it is. And she isn’t quite sure if she has lost it. For days now, she has gone around with bewildered eyes, asking everybody if they know how she can get it back. Some politely say no, others, perhaps, shrug off the question. Still others sympathize with her and weep with her and even walk with her for a while. But they can’t bear her bewildered eyes. The way they look so naked and depraved and hopeful. The way they are so ready to suffer. They way, often, her eyes gleam with a unique brightness and it charms you, as it seduces you, as it makes you take two steps closer. The way they are so earnest about love. Even after ten years, the way they love with a careless innocence. It’s all there, in her big bewildered eyes. She is rhythm, rhyme, long and short verses that break and lose themselves only to come back to meaning.

And she is with him, he who is prose. But prose that is obsessed with poetry, obsessed with rhythm, obsessed with rhyme, but prose that is never able to break and lose itself only to come back to meaning. He never does that.

But she doesn’t want to think of him right now.

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Schrödinger's Cat

being in two states at once in a box
alive and not —am I

Schrödinger’s cat?
rutting for grub nose to the ground

still, I can hear the high art of
sparrow sound

& catch sweet honeysuckle molecules
that here and now abound

in a sea of duplicity or worse
where neurons catch disparities in verse

in the nets of skulls split within
as two hemispheres in walnut shells

in heaven at times, at times in hell
they switch

right now!
can you tell which

by Jim Culleny
10/6/12

Schrödinger’s Cat: here

by James McGirk

America should be more open than ever. Women and minorities are no longer excluded from high-earning professions and, if you are willing to take on the debt, a university education is more accessible than ever before. But if anything America is less egalitarian than it once was. The income gap between rich and poor has been growing since the 1970s. More worrying than that, a permanent class system seems to be calcifying into place: people born rich are getting richer, while the poor stay poor. America's elite has found a way to protect and perpetuate itself within what should be an inclusive system.

Sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan has a convincing explanation for how they do it. For his new book, “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St Paul's School”, he spent a year doing ethnographic research, living among students as a tutor and conducting interviews at the exclusive boarding school in New Hampshire. “Elite schools exclude,” says Mr Khan “but today they frame themselves as doing so on the basis of talent.” Not necessarily money or good breeding, as many assume.

What defines talent is actually an arbitrary thing. When these students apply to university there is little to distinguish top applicants from one another, yet all want the academic boons such as research opportunities, close relationships with professors necessary for a postgraduate education, or the fast-track to elite employers. Attaining the highest board scores and grade point averages is no guarantee of admission, so decisions are instead made on the basis of narrative. A successful applicant must recommend him or herself through extracurricular achievement and other, squishier categories such as character and public service. All the more reason to be groomed at an elite secondary school that can foster students’ hobbies on top of their academic studies.

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Tomorrow
.. (listen below)

Often the guard
will just take a rest
his eyelids come down
he drops his chin on his chest
don't blame him tomorrow
don't blame him today
he only does what he can
to let himself get away

Like I choose your eyes
and I choose your hair
and I choose your skin
ah, what a lift to somewhere
don't count on tomorrow
and forget yesterday
and if they ask for your name
say, You can call me today

It's all special concern
and no religion but this
to pray with our hands
and confess with a kiss
don't count on tomorrow
and forget yesterday
and if they ask for your name
say, You can call me today

No harps in the sky
and no voices from the clouds
just the plain, simple truth
that even a fool is allowed
there's nothing to borrow
there's nothing to weigh
except the natural power
you come to gather today

don't call me tomorrow
my name is today
do you want to live losing
try to drive me away

Hey daughter so small
hey daughter of the smile
hey daughter so strong
hey daughter so wild

don't count on tomorrow
and forget yesterday
and if they ask for your name
just say, You can call me today

don't call me tomorrow
my name is today
do you want to live losing
try to drive me away

Do you want to live losing?
… try to drive me away

by Jim Culleny, 6/12/71
© Oct, 1993

by Maniza Naqvi

On a Saturday, in the crisp air and bright light of the highlands, hundreds of people, a flood of people —made their way to and from the market place, as has been done for centuries, carrying on their backs and shoulders, their precious babies and bundled loads of produce and goods. A miracle, this, how they had walked as far as forty kilometers up and down mountains for as long as five hours in one direction to reach the market with their livestock while carrying on their own backs and on the backs of their donkeys vessels of grains, honey, firewood, baskets, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, green chilies cauliflower, lettuce, live chickens, cabbage, Tef, Tej, sorghum, maize, wheat, rice, baskets and so on. In Lalibela, the sun drenched and bustling Saturday market right outside the walls of the dark, cool, quiet and largely empty inner sanctums of the stone churches reminded me of Jerusalem. The sacred it seems, all over the world must have a market. Or is it that commerce must have temples or that what is of value rings around itself the sacred?

In the market there are lemons for sale. And the guide picks one up and takes aim saying that over here if someone throws a lemon at you it’s a declaration of love. I can’t think of something clever so I say, “I bet they say that to all the older women who come through here”. He laughs, rubbing the back of his graying head, “Yes! See that motel there? It belongs to former guides who were helped by a lady tourist who was very happy with their services.” I pick up a lemon and do a mock throw at a kid who has been trailing alongside giggling and testing one liners on me in German, Italian and French.

My guide points out things that must be noted by me, “King Lalibela had divine intervention on his side, look what he accomplished, look how he carved this wall, that pillar, this step, that window, that cross and that detail of a divine eye watching over us.” My guide talks of King Lalibela as though he constructed the churches all by himself, single handedly. I point this out. Well that’s the folklore he says. “If there is anything divine,” I say, “Then surely it is the labor of the people who made these churches, no?” The guide agrees. I continue on “The rest is a King’s ego. Perhaps if rulers had focused on works that fed people instead of works that only nourished their own need for immortality then the centuries to follow would have been of plentiful crops. Kings who build such things and the places like the Taj Mahal seem to condemn generations forward to misery. A King who made his people labor for 24 years on carving out these churches with their hands and tools made of stone must have done this at the cost of producing food and security. No wonder the neighboring warlords marched right into these valleys…everyone was busy cutting stone.” The guide leans against an embankment of stone watching me silently. I ask whether there are irrigation channels, water storage cisterns and wells in the area that date from the same time as the churches. “No”, replies the guide, “There was no need at that time because the land was plentiful with water and forests. Now the hills and valleys have neither and depend on the rain. The new road built in the valley recently destroyed the water sources. Besides, the King’s granaries were full. He provided his people food for work.”

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by S. Abbas Raza

Once again, I present my own translation of two lovely couplets by Faiz Ahmed Faiz side by side with a translation of the same by the late Agha Shahid Ali. I do this not to criticize Shahid's translation in any way but actually to pay tribute to him as well as to Faiz and to show how very different translations can both, I hope, work. I have indulged in this sort of exercise before. You may see that previous effort here. This time, my translation is deliberately not as literal as it could be (although more so than Shahid's) and I have tried to retain the rhyme scheme and even, to some extent, the meter of the original Urdu. The original has no title, by the way (it just says “Couplets”), and Shahid and I have both made up our own. (My translation on the left; Shahid's on the right.)

AS IF

Last night my heart recovered a lost memory of you,
As if a desolate place had impetuously bloomed,

As if a moist breeze had washed over a parched desert,
As if a man, suffering, had a sudden peace assumed.

And here is an informal Urdu transliteration as well as the original:

ASHAAR

Raat yoon dil mein teree khoee hoee yaad aaee
Jaisay veeranay mein chupkay say bahaar aajaaey

Jaisay sehraaon mein hollay say chalay baad-e-naseem
Jaisay beemar ko bay-wajah qaraar aajaaey

I await suggestions for improvement from my Urdu-speaking (and other) readers!

by Akim Reinhardt

Historian Francis Jennings (1918-2000) didn’t take the fast track to academic fame. His first career was teaching high school English and Social Studies. After serving in World War II, he returned to the classroom and also became president of his union. Soon thereafter, he became a victim of the Red SCare; the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) fingered him during its 1951 “investigation” of organized labor in Philadelphia.

Jennings became disgusted and quit. Despite having small children, he abandoned a safe, established career and began pursuing a Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania. It took more than a decade, but he finally earned his doctorate in 1965 at the age of 47.

It would take another decade for Jennings to establish himself in academia. He could not immediately translate his hard-won Ivy League pedigree into any prestigious appointments. Instead, he taught at little known schools like Moore College of Art and Cedar Crest College.

Jennings finally arrived on the scene in a way that could not be ignored in 1975 after publishing his first book at the age of 57. The very title was a shot across the bow of America’s received history: The Invasion of America.

The book defied many academic conventions, not to mention popular, mainstream history. It disputed the romantic notion of the European “discovery” of America, redefining it as an invasion and recasting North America’s hearty pioneers as the brutal agents of colonial conquest.

The Invasion of America was a direct challenge not only to famous U.S. historians of yore such as Francis Parkman (1823-1893) and Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), but to entire generations of scholars that helped establish America’s founding mythologies. According to Jennings, these glorified apologias for European colonialism sometimes resulted from error and sometimes from the intentional manipulation of sources. Either way, he deemed them to be little more than crude propaganda that had nevertheless evolved into conventional scholarship and infected popular culture.

To overturn that mythology and reinterpret the colonial invasions, Jennings relied on French historian Marc Bloch’s theories of feudalism. For Jennings, the dull thud of feudal butchery and elitism explained much about European attitudes and actions in North America during the 17th century. The European invaders were a product of their times, and their times were decidedly feudal. They would arrive in America striving to be lords (if they weren’t already), and seeking to reduce the Indigenous population into vassalage.

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Talking With My Guru
—1.0 Nothing & Emptiness

G: What exactly do you mean by emptiness?
Me: I mean nothing.
G: Why then are we wasting time discussing it?

Take your tiny Tao shears
and snip emptiness out of Webster’s
and heave it into the void. It’s another
self-serving euphemism like time
or collateral damage

Cut wood, draw some water
and stop sound-biting things to death
and travel light (and lightly)
till no sun remains

nothing and emptiness
are for advanced students
with nothing to lose
and nothing to gain

…………………….
Jim Culleny, October 2007

by Liam Heneghan

Theories of war provoke snarling debate because we are never at peace. Similarly, calls for sustainability nettle us when accompanied by declarations of civilization’s imminent collapse. Certainly there are several lines of investigation indicating that the collective needs of humanity cannot be met in perpetuity and that current demands are already imposing an undue burden on systems that support human life on Earth (my 3quarksdaily colleague, Kevin S Baldwin, writes about it here). Sustainability initiatives, therefore, require us to consider a range of corrective actions. Consistent with what sustainability advocates call the “triple bottom line” of people, planet and profit, changes are needed in the economic, social and ecological realm. Beyond these immediately pragmatic considerations, calls for environmental sustainability also amount to calls for ethical change. The 1987 Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. The definition suggests an ethical dimension to sustainability. That is, sustainability requires a reflection on balancing the obligations of the moment against our obligations to humans both unknown and unborn. But why should we be concerned about these humans of the future, anymore than we are about those who went before us? Certainly they are of curiosity value, but are they ethically of concern to us? Sustainability may necessitate a vigorous upheaval in values.

Sustainability ethics, a subspecies of environmental ethics, refers to a set of positions that emerge when the environmental state of things is not simply regarded as irritating, but as immoral, bad, wrong or evil.[1] Environmental ethics in general and sustainability ethics in particular shares a framework in common with the rest of contemporary ethical philosophy, though it also has a suite of unique problems. Although most environmental ethics is human-centered in which environmental damage is largely considered reprobatory because of the consequences for human welfare, there are, more controversially, a set of ethical positions that center on concerns beyond those of our own species. In common though with other normative ethical frameworks, environmental ethics can be approached from a so-called consequentialist, deontological, or virtue ethical perspective.

Briefly, consequentialism, as the name implies, determines the rightness of actions based upon the consequences of actions. Typically the consequentialist strives to maximize the greatest good among a range of outcomes. One can determine the greatest good solely in relation to the agent making the decision – me, for instance, though this egotistical consequentialism can produce unpalatable results from the perspective of others (the non-mes!). Agent-neutral versions are more typical. I might, for example, make ethical decisions that produce the greatest good for all sentient beings, and in this way we can environmentalize consequentialist ethics. Deontological ethics are those that emerge from an examination of principles or rules rather than the value of those things that are affected by actions. Finally, virtue based ethics, deriving from Aristotle (though really they predate him), argues that there are certain human virtues that should be cultivated in order for people to live good lives. One would preserve aspects of the environment, or concern ourselves with the needs of others, in this view of things because to do so corresponds with the exercise of a particular virtue, the practice of which simultaneously brings us pleasure.

From here on I am concerned only with Aristotle’s ethics. Not because other approaches are irrelevant but because Aristotle’s ethical approaches seem to accord with the needs of sustainability in ways that, I think at least, has not been adequately explored.

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By Rishidev Chaudhuri

I

He was the masseur of persimmons, and he attached himself to that statement with as much precision as he could. It would be so easy, ever so easy, to let go, to slip away, to fade into one of those reddish, tannic, slightly yielding fruit. Every morning, every hour, every lunch break, every minute, he had to remind himself that he was the masseur of persimmons (and not the persimmon itself).

Like many days, he woke in a mild panic, scrambling to congeal an identity before the warm light of day smoothed out the lumps of his self and left him nowhere. He brushed his teeth and bathed, because that is what one does, and dressed in a cream shirt with a floral motif and beige, slightly ragged pants, all the while repeating his name and the fact of his existence to himself. He stepped down the stairs and onto the street, hiding slightly from the bright glare of the ghoulish sun, and then on, down the pavement, blinking owlishly and wondering how many new clients he would have.

His studio was atop a tired warehouse, south of the city center, amidst intersecting streets and cars in the process of being stolen. He stepped up the stairs to his studio, nervous that he'd find himself back at home and relieved to walk into the familiar room. Small, wood-panelled, with a flat desk and a high chair with no arms, so that his hands could freely range up and down. The persimmons lay in little crates, stacked sideways on the floor, and as he sat he kept his gaze fixed on them (the threats to his self, his reason for existence). He sat watching them for at least an hour, perhaps more, barely moving to scratch or fidget and only occasionally moving to remind himself of the contours of his body. Then he got up, bending forward from the hips, spine straight and counterbalancing upwards with the grace of a natural athlete. He approached the crate, slowly, a little scared and reached forward. Eyes shut he hesitated, not breathing, then let his fingers brush the smooth surface of one of those round objects. As he did, he felt a shudder of contingency pass through his being and he pulled back sharply, suddenly desperate to remember his place and time. But, of course, he was the masseur of persimmons and he had to massage persimmons or he would be nobody. And, besides, who would massage them if he didn't?

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