Edward B. Rackley

The final scene of the 1968 Planet of the Apes (Rod Serling script, starring Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall) is worth enduring the tortuous acting. It’s a very different ending from the 2001 remake with Mark Wahlberg, and distinguishes the original Apes as true science fiction. Marky Mark’s version is a generic action film.

Briefly: After his escape as a prisoner in an ape society on a distant planet, Heston discovers a damaged Statue of Liberty half-buried on a remote beach. He realizes that his inter-planetary voyage had in fact kept him on Earth all along. Humanity had destroyed its own civilization, paving the way for a Planet of the Apes.

I had a more mundane version of this vision recently: a post-petrol world where combustion engines were a memory and pedal-power had reclaimed the Earth. I like apes, but they didn’t play a role in this particular fantasy.

Embrace your inner redneck

Sound advice, perhaps. Not for me though, at least in this lifetime. My inner redneck will have to wait—I’m still recovering from my past life as Pavlov’s dog. But last weekend I had the opportunity to embrace that inner redneck in my first close encounter with the apotheosis of modern redneckdom–NASCAR. This was the Southside Speedway in Richmond Virginia, one of the sport’s earliest professional tracks, in use since 1959. NASCAR fans hail Southside as ‘the toughest short track in the south’, and I quickly learned why.

Thing is, I wasn’t there for the roaring engines or burning rubber. I came for a day of bicycle racing. These were track bikes primarily but a couple of road bike races were also scheduled. I arrived late and over-caffeinated to find the speedway grounds completely empty except for a hundred or so cyclists in the circle inside the track. Most were either preparing to race or recovering. I had not missed my start time, and ran over to get registered.

Under a gray sky and spots of rain, the place had the mournful feel of a fair ground or circus site after the festivities had ended, the cheers and laughter now gone, the animals and rides long departed. Here too, on the ground were crushed candy wrappers, gluey traces of melted sno-cones, tufts of cotton candy stuck to matted patches of grass where crowds had stood and cheered.

But absent any NASCAR fans and the roar of the spectacle itself, the quiet speedway also had the distinct feel of anachronism, of future-past. I gazed out at the empty bleachers and imagined the speedway as a relic of an extinct civilization, a NASCAR ruin in a post-petrol world.

‘I can’t control my fingers, I can’t control my brain’

Founded by a band of track bike racers without a local velodrome, the Sprint Club (think ‘Fight Club’) created its own race series called Go Fast Turn Left, in deference to Richmond’s long history of stock car racing at Southside, where many GFTL races are  organized.

The Sprint Club ethos is a direct descendant of old school punk rock’s DIY spirit. That means, in no particular order: (1) Appropriating a found environment, making it one’s own, at the expense of appropriate norms and behavior that belong to that environment; (2) In spectacle or performance, participation trumps consumption. Passive, polite observation is replaced by direct participation, eliminating the distance between spirit and seer, artist and viewer; 3) The ‘do it yourself’ mentality is self-explanatory–there are no experts, only students and practitioners, and all are welcome.

After getting my race number and quickly inhaling assorted carbs and sugars, I steered out onto the ragged tarmac to warm up with the other racers. A banked, tight oval track, Southside is only a third of a mile long. My group would race for 25 laps. From the previous night’s NASCAR event, there were fist-sized chunks of black rubber from exploded car tires, random nuts, bolts and metal fragments scattered everywhere. The racing surface itself was gritty, pock-marked and scarred from crashes and the elements.

Ass on fire

I didn’t win the race or even come close, but I learned a few things. First, cycling is a cruel muse. Glorious bouts of smoking and drinking never got in the way of my marathon running, years back. Marathons permitted me the dubious luxury of being a hedonist and a masochist at the same time–usually such joys cannot coexist. But competitive cycling is different than long distance running. Marathons require stamina and effort sustained over hours, as does cycling. Unlike marathons, however, cycling involves regular spikes of acceleration, troughs of radical energy depletion and periods of recovery within the course of a single race.

My fantasy of riding on a post-petrol, futuristic ruin of a NASCAR track was shared, I learned, with other riders, some of whom complemented me on my ‘sweet ride‘ before the race (have a look, it really is an amazing bike). These were the same guys who slammed into me as the peloton whistled forward at a bruising 31 mph. ‘Keeping the rubber side down’ was more challenging than I thought. At one point, I heard a crash behind me, but rubbernecking was not an option. 

Competitive cycling is a contact sport, I also discovered, with lots of intimidating banter between riders. Kind of like a mosh pit, I thought and smiled, as I managed to keep pace with the breakaway pack for much of the race. Surely I would finish in the top five, I thought. But with two laps to go, my legs turned to lead and a handful of leading riders pulled away from me. I hadn’t the strength to stay with them, or even maintain a spot in their slipstream. I crossed the finish line and thought, ‘Time to kill my inner Marlboro Man’. Alas, it appears my inseparable companions hedonism and masochism will finally be parting ways.

by Beth-Ann Bovino

A walk through the lower east side in New York can feel like Spring-cleaning at mom’s house. Back then mom would have a “Tag Sale, and everything, including my favorite childhood dreams, was priced to sell. Each item would have a tag on it. A stuffed animal from my crib priced at 25 cents. Barbie dolls, 50 cents, not to mention all the items I collected over time to make my plans to become a famous (fill in blank) come true. The U.S. is also cleaning house, again with everything priced to sell. .

Before, with the dollar a strong reserve currency and an interest rate differential that supported U.S. assets, the U.S. could easily cover its trade deficit with a capital surplus. The capital account surplus was attracted by the high returns and low risk in the U.S. financial markets. Even signs of the housing weakness in the U.S. didn’t slow inflows until the last few months. The financial tides have shifted. Now with oil prices at record levels, housing weak and home prices continuing down, the U.S. is in a recession.

This recession will likely be shallower but longer than previously anticipated. Like 2001, there might not be the usual two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. But it will still be a recession. It probably will be officially pronounced one by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research some time later, and certainly feel like one in the minds of most Americans.

Other things we used to take as given are no longer true. The relative bias in favor of U.S. assets has been reduced sharply, because of shrinking relative returns and increased credit risk. The financial shock that erupted in August 2007, when the U.S. subprime mortgage market was derailed by the reversal of the housing boom, has spread quickly and unpredictably, inflicting damage on world financial markets. Despite Fed action to calm markets, lending dried up. The resulting slowdown in capital inflows has pushed borrowing costs higher for both households and businesses, and brought the dollar down.

The U.S. has the largest and most liquid financial market, with about one-third of the global capitalization, and is not expected to give up this status anytime soon. However, as financial globalization continues to develop, other regions will gain prominence in world markets. Higher European interest bond yields, lower U.S. yields, and the weaker dollar have improved returns for European bonds relative to U.S. bonds, with less money coming in. Inflows into the U.S. over the last few years were dominated by fixed income private bonds. It has slowed. Flows are now shifting towards treasury bonds and equities. Real assets are cheaper because of the weak dollar. Foreign money will continue to buy up U.S. investments once investors believe the decline is nearing an end, but they will be buying more real assets and fewer fixed-income securities.

A Safe Bet?

In 2006, U.S. long-term interest rates were a percentage point above equivalent European bond yields. Money looking for the highest possible return on a safe investment thus flowed into the U.S. The surge was not pushed more by low interest rates abroad than by high U.S. interest rates. The U.S. interest rates were low by historical standards, but still higher than what foreign investors could get at home. In 2006, over 85% of the net inflow into the United States came from private sources, and increasingly went into the buying of private rather than government debt. (Only 13% of the inflow went into equities.)

The inflow of funds to the United States had made markets very complacent about risk. Investors’ struggle for yields meant that yield spreads above treasuries hit record lows. The spread of corporate speculative-grade bond yields over U.S. treasuries hit a record low in May 2007 as investors chased higher returns and ignored risk. Markets now aren’t as complacent about risk; they’ve been reminded by the subprime problems that risk is still a four-letter word. Yield spreads have widened well above normal levels corporate bonds (both investment-grade and speculative-grade), well above the historical average and over twice what we saw just over a year ago. The sharp swing from risk also hit household borrowing costs. They have climbed higher, if households can get a loan at all.

Climbing from 45-year lows, U.S. interest rates has now dropped back as problems increased. After raising rates 17 times, the Federal Reserve’s main concern has now abruptly turned to recession risk and the turmoil in financial markets. The liquidity squeeze that began last August, brought about by the U.S. subprime mortgage problems, forced the Fed and other central banks to change direction quickly. The financial shock spread far beyond the subprime mortgage market to a general crisis of confidence. Since then, the Fed has cut rates by 3.25 percentage points to 2%. The Fed cuts helped some borrowers with adjustable rate loans coming up for a reset on their loan. The Fed has also helped reduce corporate costs, but creating various term lending facilities, coordinated with other major central banks. Corporate yield spreads are, however, still wide by historical standards.

The decline in Fed-controlled short-term interest rates has not, however, been echoed in long-term bond yields. That’s because interest rates are determined by global markets. The globalization of bond markets means that a central bank has less influence on long-term interest rates than in the past. The U.S. financial markets have illustrated that in the last few years, as a Fed tightening by 4.25% was met by indifference in the bond market. The Fed has now cut rate by 3.25%, which was also met with similar indifference. European rates are now above U.S. rates, making U.S. securities less attractive and reducing foreign inflows. This has prevented U.S. bond yields from dropping in line with short-term rates.

Foreign net buying of long-term U.S. assets slipped in 2007, to $1.00 trillion from its $1.14 trillion peak in 2006. While stocks saw a record annual inflow in 2007, inflows into fixed income dropped sharply. Risk aversion was the dominant theme in the first quarter of 2008. The March report continues to show weaker foreign inflows, suggesting the decline in the dollar isn’t over. Long-term inflows that did come in, came from official sources (central banks, trying to stabilize markets) and less from private money—not a healthy sign. Foreign buying was dominated by money going into safe-haven government bonds, while private accounts sold off sharply. Foreign purchases of U.S. financial assets will likely remain weak through yearend. But, if investors outside the U.S. continue to worry about the risk of a dollar decline, the result could be both a sharp drop in the dollar and a sharp rise in U.S. interest rates, extending the recession at home.

At Bargain Prices

Recent financial market stress has had an impact on foreign exchange markets. The real effective exchange rate for the U.S. dollar has declined sharply since mid-2007, with the dollar down 8% over last year. Foreign investment in U.S. bonds and equities has been dampened by reduced confidence in both the liquidity of and the returns on such assets, as well as by the weakening of U.S. growth prospects and the Fed’s interest rate cuts. Weaker foreign inflows pushed the dollar lower. Now foreign investors have lost confidence in U.S. securities and the U.S. dollar, and money is not so easy to come by, and only at higher interest rates.

The silver lining is improving U.S. sales to foreign bargain hunters. The decline in the value of the U.S. dollar has helped boost net exports, bringing the U.S. current account deficit down to 4.9% of GDP by the fourth quarter of 2007. This is well below its 6.6% peak in the third quarter 2006. But, while improving, the current gap is still-high, and financing from abroad will now require higher bond yields.

The weak dollar will continue to attract money into some U.S. assets; at least once investors believe the dollar decline is nearing an end. Although yield spreads make U.S. bonds less attractive, the weak dollar makes real assets cheaper. U.S. firms are becoming targets for foreign buyers, who see current pricing, especially in euros, yen, pounds, or Canadian dollars, as a bargain.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, foreign direct investment into the U.S. was $199.3 billion in 2007, after $175.4 billion in 2006.and $101.0 billion in 2005. Outlays in 2007 were the fourth largest recorded and the highest since 2000. Foreign money bought a substantial amount of our real estate (this was already indicated, anecdotally). Outlays also increased sharply in manufacturing and wholesale trade.

Not Going Out Of Business

The massive inflow of funds to the U.S. once helped the U.S. easily cover its trade deficit. But things have changed. Now the relative bias in favor of U.S. assets has been cut, because of shrinking relative returns and increased credit risk. Fed action has helped reduce interest rate spreads somewhat, though they are still high. The resulting slowdown in capital inflows has brought the dollar down.

Foreign purchases of U.S. assets will likely remain weak through 2008. Higher European interest bond yields, relative to U.S. yields, and the weaker dollar have made investing in European bonds more attractive than investing here. As a result, the inflows into U.S. financial assets, once dominated by fixed income private bonds, are now smaller. What money that comes in has shifted towards safe-haven treasury bonds and real assets. Real assets are cheaper because of the weak dollar. We expect foreign money to continue to buy up U.S. investments once investors believe the decline is nearing an end, but they will be buying more real assets and fewer private fixed-income securities.

While we expect inflows to slow, but not stop, things could go wrong. We’re worried that with the increased credit risk and the falling dollar the U.S. investments will become even less attractive to foreign investors. That could push bond yields up higher and the dollar down even more than we had already anticipated. The ‘Tag Sale’ would feel more like a ‘Going Out Of Business’ Sale. This scenario is not likely, but neither were $130 oil prices a few years ago.

The following is an introduction to Péter Esterházy I delivered at the New York Public Library two weeks ago for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature.

If you want to talk about Péter Esterházy you have to dredge up the past a little. That isn’t always a fun thing to do, especially if you hail from anywhere in the between lands, Mitteleuropa. Still… somebody, as they say, has to do it and for whatever reason Esterházy is up to the task. Why does he do it? I think it is a simple as a line from his novel Helping Verbs of the Heart. “I’m terrified,” writes Esterházy, “yet I feel better now.”

The current situation in Mitteleuropa has to be traced back to the Hapsburgs, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the stupidest of several empires that kicked Mitteleuropa around for most of the last century. Still, if you’re going to have an empire, make it a ramshackle one, make sure it barely functions. It’s better that way. The dysfunctional aspects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were its most endearing. We know this from no less a doomed genius than Joseph Roth. True, most Joseph Roth characters drink themselves to death while gazing wistfully at portraits of Franz Josef, but on the positive side of the ledger there are lots of nooks and crannies to inhabit. There are lots of places the empire forgot to look and it is in those places where you could find the actual business of living and dying. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was lousy but it was human being lousy. For all the other evils, absolute evils, of the Empire of the Third Reich or the Empire of the Soviets, their chief crime against the varieties of everyday existence was in the obliteration of nooks and crannies. These were empires that didn’t want to leave a place where life could exist on its own terms anywhere, if they could help it. Steamroller empires. Empires of death for death’s sake.

You could say, then, that Esterházy has been producing a literature of the nooks and crannies. This is not a small thing. It is a giant thing. It means, simply, (and I hope you take this in its full ethical implication) producing a literature that is on the side of life.

There have, of course, always been nook and cranny writers. Catullus was one, lingering around the back alleys of Rome with a hard on and a smile. There is Cervantes and Rabelais. There is Lawrence Sterne. You catch the drift. Esterházy, I think, has a more specific lineage and that has to do, once again, with that sad and loveable place, Mitteleuropa (but do we call it a place really? More like a feeling, a way). Anyway, there it is. No place is as screwed up as Mitteleuropa and no people are more screwed up than Mitteleuropeans. (I say that with a fondness, by the way.) You either make that situation work for you or you’ve got nothing at all.

Esterházy is trying to make it work. It is a literary approach that comes down directly from that incorrigible drunk, Jaroslav Hasek, the author of The Good Soldier Svejk. Svejk is a rube all the way through and sometimes a scoundrel, but he always chooses life over death. It is there even in his way of talking, a style that Hasek gives his favorite literary creation which is both straightforward and evasive at the same time. It’s a kind of irony, middle European irony, that is neither Socratic nor the blasé irony of Western intellectual boredom. Actually I think it is much better than both of those things. Always it is a language, a style or a manner of comporting oneself that finds a way to skirt through the cracks. Again, life. Here’s Svejk on being locked up in an insane asylum, “I really don’t know why those loonies get so angry when they’re kept there. You can crawl naked on the floor, howl like a jackal, rage and bite… There’s a freedom there which not even Socialists have dreamed of.”

As the Austro-Hungarian Empire trailed off and more terrible events came to pass, the mantle of the literature of life was passed from Hasek to another great Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal. In Hrabal the language of Svejk becomes more contorted, more obviously damaged. It takes on a childlike flavor that allows it to hide even further, to seek what’s left of the rapidly disappearing nooks and crannies. It is a run-on language, driven by fear, driven by the knowledge that to stop for a moment is possibly to stop forever. It’s incredible, really, that Hrabal manages to be so damn funny.

Finally, tragically, the language begins to dry up altogether. If life plus the Hapsburg Empire equals tragicomedy and the disastrous if hilarious adventures of Svejk, life plus the Soviet Empire equals silence. You simply had to shut up or you’d be forced to say something despicable, to betray yourself, to betray somebody, anybody. Czeslaw Milosz mentions somewhere that a whole generation of writers took to writing for their desk drawer. That was the only safe audience. And then they waited. It must have been a terrible waiting for Hrabal, the man who was born to spew. But he couldn’t find a nook or a cranny to spew in. Finally he penned a terrible document praising the regime so that he might get to spewing again. That’s what it had come to, trapped between untenable choices the little human figure gives way. One’s strength gives out.

Esterházy is still strong, though a little cracked up from the whole affair. But all of Mitteleuropa is cracked up, like one of Neo Rauch’s displaced canvasses bubbling up with memory and trauma and a few jokes. The greatness of Esterházy is in taking up that thread of life, thin is hell much of the time, that got passed from Hasek to Hrabal and now resides in Budapest. He is trying to turn on the spigots of language again, to open up the linguistic floodgates of which Hrabal was once the keeper and Hasek before him. There’s a passage in Esterházy’s novel, The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn where the traveler compares himself to the Danube. “But seeing,” Esterházy writes, “or at least supposing, that there was something which connected Ulm with Vienna, and Vienna with Belgrade, and not wanting to call this something the Danube, that metaphysical, imaginary, hotch-potch of a river, he would arrive at the conclusion that it was he himself who connected Ulm with Belgrade, he the traveler. …But the boat was carried by the Danube, and the Danube by the weight of lived-out lives, that unbearable weight we carry with us, we travelers. That is why the Danube comes before he does. And that is why he sits on the bottom step of the quayside, watching the melon rind float away downstream—if that means anything to anyone.”

Well, it sure as hell means something to me, and I’m not even a cracked up Mitteleuropan staggering around under all kinds of unbearable weights. But that’s it right there, the joy and the incredible burden, to be a Danube man trying to put history and logic and language and memory back together again. Talking your way through it as best you’re able so that something painful becomes something funny, and also the reverse. That’s also why, I think, Wittgenstein keeps creeping into Esterházy’s work when you least expect it. Wittgenstein’s journey is merely the philosophical version of Esterházy’s narrative fable. The point is to get to life without losing the thing that makes it lived. In many ways, Wittgenstein’s journey from the Tractatus to the Investigations is a trip to find where language really is. In the beginning he thinks it might be below us or above us, locked away in the secret relationships between words and things. Then he gets older and he realizes it is just right there. And that is what Esterházy is looking for most of the time, a language that is constantly running away from him but that he finds in scraps and fragments like sediment at the bottom of the Danube. Finally, Esterházy and Wittgenstein come to a similar insight: Language is just us being us. It was all so stupid and so great. The trick is in simply remembering how to be. Mitteleuropa took a long scary detour away from the land of us just being us, it is heartening to know that there were a few crazy bastards in their skiffs on the Danube paddling wildly away in the other direction.

Then again, we shouldn’t let ourselves get too drunk and puffed up on all this weighty stuff. Here’s Esterházy again… “From so much Danube and so much talk of Central Europe I didn’t so much get sick—which is the wrong word—as get angry. All that stuff about Danubian thought, Danubian ethos, Danubian past, Danubian history, Danubian suffering, Danubian tragedy, Danubian dignity, Danubian present. Danubian future! What does it all mean? All that flowing became suspicious. Danubian nothingness, Danubian hatred, Danubian stench, Danubian anarchy, Danubian provincialism, Danubian Danube. Poor Gertude Stein, were she alive to hear this! The Danube is the Danube is the Danube…
According to a rather weak joke, the answer to the question of what holds a football team together is partly alcohol and partly a shared hatred of the coach. And that’s all. That’s all Central Europe ever was.”

Point taken. Eventually you have to move on or you sink into it like a bottomless pit. Esterházy is writing himself out of that pit daily. And that, in short, is writing in the service of life. It is something that Péter Esterházy has done for himself and also for all of us. And I hope that you’ll all take a moment later on in your homes or in your favorite pubs of worship to say, as I will, L’Chaim, To Péter Esterházy, to life!

///
Hazy Moon
Jim Culleny

Last night I almost hugged the hazy moon,
that crazy bubble in the sky
who is ever entering new phases.

She rose red, round, and huge
as a melon of imagination.

She loomed listening to the pine pitch
and birch bark, an ear for the night choir.
She tugged,
I leaned as she rolled higher.

Two hands from the horizon
she pulled in humble as a quarter,
levitated, and kissed
the high limb tips of a twisted
locust tree.

For a moment, free
in the circle of her gravity,
I understood what that chalkball moon
held over me.

She hovered like a lover on a balcony
waiting for a star to shoot.
She disappeared once each month
leaving the shadow undilute,
but she was never faithless.

Always she returned
sweet as an arc of canteloupe,
billowing like a parachute,
calling to the oceans in their cells,
reaching down to the tips
of the deepest roots,
coaxing up through the tender stems
of slender shoots,
dragging, even through the leather hearts
of old galoots
the purest waters of the poorest wells.
………………………………………
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………………………………………………………………………………

///

Frida Kahlo’s Brows
Jim Culleny

Who would not be blown away
by Frida Kahlo’s brows?

They soar over her eyes like a crow
broad      black      wings      spread

two hooded planets in its grip
scanning for a place to light and dine

the back-to-back parentheses of her nose
poised beneath, but above the pursed lips
of a rose

From portrait to portrait they fly
within the riveted space
of Kahlo’s face, changeless
as a signature

“This is me, Frida,”
they say. “This black crow
is my revelation to you

This raven mark is the sign of a Mexican girl
who realized her peculiar beauty with
bristles of brushes in odors of oil

“Once you see these brows,” says Frida,
“I will be indelible. My brows
will be stamped in your mind’s eye
until the day their pigments die
or till the descent of a crow
cradling two eyes in its claws
becomes impossible because
all the thoughtful will have
vanished.”

///

Elatia Harris

The year I was 9, I made every effort to turn Japanese.  I padded around the house in tabi and a kimono, elongated my eyes with my mother’s make-up – she wasn’t using it  – and did up my long dark hair in what I regarded as geisha poufs anchored with chopsticks. I even packed a small bag with tissue-wrapped favorite possessions, in case the opportunity to leave permanently for Japan came all of a sudden – as I had faith it would. Beneath the dress-up, however, and the very strong signal that I was not best pleased by life as a child in the West, was the real ardor I felt for the art of Japan. It looked so right to me, it just was right. Why was that? What was the secret? 

My mother knew what there was to know about how to look at Western painting, and together we looked at hundreds of paintings on the walls of museums and galleries and inside books. Though I might wait weeks for her to find an hour to page through a certain art book with me, I never pushed ahead without her until I began turning Japanese. She experienced the japonesque as chic, a deft touch in any environment, but the true family aesthetic was one in which Jules Verne duked it out with Henri Matisse. I will not forget what it was to be profoundly attracted to something my brilliant mother didn’t particularly get — it was a real rite of passage. From this distance, I see how kind she was to encourage me on my way away from her.  In the photo to the left, however, I appear a bit resentful. She had asked me to look up from what I was doing — assuredly not my homework — and I didn’t like my concentration to be broken. If at this age I was found drawing, then I was drawing something that looked — to me at least — Japanese. But I needed a guide to that universe of art and taste that drew me in, and it could not be my mother.

Enter Elise Grilli – a woman whom I suppose I never knew, although it does not feel that way.  I first encountered her name on the cover of one of my most beloved childhood books, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan. You can see the scan of my personal copy below left – it’s dog-eared the way a book gets if you sleep with it for many years. On the upper right corner, there is ink I spilled from copying something inside it. Akiyama Teruzawa’s big book from Skira, Japanese Painting, was similarly pored over by me, and is now obviously distressed, like the Modern Library edition of The Tale of Genji, written by the world’s first novelist, Lady Murasaki, and translated by Arthur Waley. Nobody in this bunch wrote for children, but in fact they all wrote for me. Especially Elise Grilli.

From the post-war years through the 1960’s, curiosity about the art and culture of Japan was likely to lead a reader of any age to a kind of book that would today be hard to find — one that unabashedly played up the otherness, not to say quaintness, of things Japanese. Asia was called the Orient then, and the modifier for anything east of Vienna was “Oriental” not “Asian.” (Well, I exaggerate — but not by much.) The Allied Occupation of Japan did not end until late in 1951, and even by the time I began studying the subject that would fill so much of my childhood, Japan was still Other. It was certainly the antithesis of the maroon sides of beef slathered in barbecue sauce, the morgue-temperature air-conditioning, and the fevered visual excess I considered to surround me, and that alone would have gotten it my childish attention — but perhaps not for long. And we are talking about long years of being absorbed in a subject, so that when in school I could pick my topics and write to please myself, I would write about Japanese gardens, Japanese creation myths, Japanese tea ceremonies, or some aspect of Japanese art. A teacher in the 6th grade made fun of me for this — gently. And even after years of child-time, it was not that I had learned so much, but that I had looked so much. For this was all about extreme optical seduction, the ideas and feelings it can give rise to.

It happened through books — tiny books, at that. In the late 50’s, Elise Grilli wrote two 7″ x 7″ soft cover companion books for Crown, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan and Japanese Picture Scrolls. Each is one-quarter of an inch thick, with about 30 pages of text and 36 plates, mostly color. They belonged to the “Art of the East Library” series, and they cost $1.25 each. My mother must have bought them for me at the local museum book store — I don’t remember wheedling her, but I wouldn’t have been above it. There was also the Kodansha “Library of Japanese Art,” brought to Western readers by an arrangement between Kodansha, an old Japanese publishing house, and the Charles E. Tuttle Company. These were amply illustrated soft cover monographs on leading Japanese artists, from Sesshu to Taikan. I see that the 7 volumes — about the height and width of paperback mysteries, but perhaps 30% of the thickness — I have owned since the age of 8 were marked down from $1.25 each to 75 cents. Of the Kodansha books I owned, Elise Grilli wrote or co-wrote the texts on Sesshu, Sotatsu and Hokusai. I’ve read them all many, many times. Her name became very familiar to me, as did her words, her beautifully chosen words.

The image under the title is a four-panel screen from the Room of Maples and Flowers, painted in the late 16th century by Hasegawa Tohaku and now in the Chishaku-in, a temple complex in Kyoto. Each gold foil panel is a bit under 6 feet in height. I first became aware of this work of art reading Golden Screen Paintings of Japan, my $1.25 book by Elise Grilli, and it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen, period. Paging through the book late at night, I would have to sneak up to it, because it was almost too much, and because the ravishing pleasures of anticipation were not to be disdained. The same artist, Tohaku, painted the monkey panels, above. These are ink paintings on paper, incorporating a gold wash, now in the Kyoto National Museum. Oh, their fur, their presence.

Unfathomably, it was the same Tohaku who painted the pair of six-paneled screens below, Trees in Fog, now in the National Museum, Tokyo. These are slightly over 5 feet high, just sumi on paper. No gold. If you imagined them side by side you would set the right edge of the topmost at a slight distance from the left edge of the bottom screen.  So that, considering the twelve panels as a whole, there would be two — almost three — largely empty panels in the middle.  Before I got a look at Trees in Fog, I didn’t know there were compositions of this kind. I knew it was bad composition to put something smack in the center of your drawing, but I did not know you could put so much nothing there.

Might you not be better off doing as Tohaku did in the Room of Maples and Flowers, and drawing a tree that reached diagonally across the center of your composition, while truly inhabiting areas just to either side of it? Trying to find the right way to draw things, I was instinctively attracted to an individualistic painter of vast and wide-ranging genius. My first sensations of wonder and bewilderment have stayed with me. They remain the correct response to the daring and naturalism I saw, that I was too young to know I could not as an artist aspire to.

Thanks to Elise Grilli, I was beginning to understand there were two long traditions in Japanese painting that occasionally inter-penetrated but were also separate. Very roughly, there was a tradition that overwhelmingly reflected the civilization-changing influence of China and Buddhism, and one that was Japan’s unique contribution to world art, with each flaring into greater vitality at different times over almost 1500 years. Another distinction to look out for was that between art of a private, contemplative nature — a scroll that is unfolded slowly in the hands, a poem card — and art best understood as a large element in an entire surround, like the screens above. In the West, the same distinction might attach to the difference between drawing and painting, the former usually done by artists for themselves, the latter having a necessarily public intention. In the West, too, the same artist might excel — that is, live equally — in both drawing and painting, but in Japan, with staggering though very few exceptions, art that was contemplative would not issue from the mind or hands of a great decorator-painter.

That was a matter of different trainings, temperaments and positions in society, I learned from Elise Grilli. Reading about Sesshu, the priest-painter who in 1467 had gone to China to study, returning to Japan to found an academy, I saw that for some kinds of painting, you needed to be a philosopher.  Oh, perhaps even an aristocrat. Not like Tohaku, whose birth as a dyer’s son conferred outsider status on him, making it anything but a sure thing he would gain a toe-hold as a screen painter in an elite studio — as indeed he did not. As a Buddhist priest born to a samurai clan, Sesshu occupied a troubling position too, however — he was both a master of ink painting, a suibokuga, and one in a long tradition of adepts whose first allegiance could not be to to anything in the samsaric world, not even to brushes and paper. And yet, this detachment was essential to his art — something that made no sense at all to me, until I was able to see that that was the point.

The painting above, left, Sesshu’s Winter Landscape, in the National Museum, Tokyo, to me sums up kara-e — Chinese-style painting as it is done in Japan. Because of a book that cost 75 of my mother’s cents when I was 8, I have had decades to think about Sesshu — not a task you can fully accomplish in a lifetime. A child of the mid-century, I could not look at the central area of the background of this landscape and fail to wonder how a priest in Japan the 1400’s had found his way to abstraction — which of course belonged to my own era. To painting an idea of winter and ice on rock, and not its appearance. I showed my mother, who knew everything about modern art. Her mind boggled, too, that the crowning achievement of the painting of our time — radically to simplify, to search for essences, to suggest — could have been thus anticipated. Much later as a college girl, I would learn from another wonderful teacher, Katherine Caldwell, how through the centuries Chinese painting veered towards an appearance of abstraction. For the time being, however, my mind was on a handful of long-dead Japanese painters. Among the very great benefits of turning childish attention upon the long ago and far away is a world view that, even if it is inaccurate, is thrillingly grand, that will impart the habit of looking for connections.  Sometimes, after all, they’re there.

That which was uniquely or at least especially Japanese in painting — yamato-e — stirred me beyond anything. Not always — occasionally yamato-e could look phoned in or precious, and, developing an eye for this stuff, I could see that something was amiss. Too much has been written on the differences between yamato-e and kara-e; whenever you think you’ve pinned it down, you can, yourself, produce an exception. Greatly to simplify, kara-e is line to which color or modeling is added, yamato-e the juxtaposition of flat areas of color. Looking again at Tohaku’s screen from the Room of Maples and Flowers (under the title), you see a blue curving shape in the panel second from left that you know to be a body of water receding into the distance — a winding stream. The gold ground stands equally for riverbed and sky — you sense this without needing more. That’s yamato-e, which could not and did not happen in China. Looking at Sesshu’s Winter Landscape, the primacy of line is apparent — it is specific, suggestive and expressive, and it is through the weight of the line, from dark and bold to faint and attenuated, that you apprehend the recession of objects in space. I am not so sure that, in the 502 years since he died, any painter has taken kara-e further than Sesshu. Or shall ever do.

But where do these distinctions leave us when we look at Tohaku’s Trees in Fog?  This shattering masterpiece, almost 24 feet long, and according to a 2001 poll, Japan’s best loved painting, is neither juxtaposed areas of color nor line in the sense of contour-line.  Using enormous brushes, Tohaku made a brush stroke the very shape of a trunk, a bough, a clump of pine needles. So that line is never exactly descriptive, in that you can’t separate it from form. The radiant fog here is what establishes distance, some trees standing before us, roots to crown, others veiled.  You know the forest is dense, for you can see trees that are pushed aslant by the upright growth of others, yet a shimmering bright fog is everywhere moving in and out. The painting itself has almost an aural quality — of deep hush. You can tell that if it were not for Chinese civilization, which changes everything it impinges on, and has always done, this work would not have come into being, but it’s transcendantly yamato-e.

Has yamato-e reached such an apotheosis with color? Oh, I have long thought so so. On the cover of Elise Grilli’s 1959 book, Masterworks of Japanese Painting, 15th — 19th Centuries, there is a close-up photo of an iris from Ogata Korin’s pair of six-paneled screens, Kakitsubata, below, painted in about 1705, now in the Nezu Art Museum, Tokyo. The screens refer to a wistful verse in a 10th century romance, the Ise Monogatori — everyone who looked at them would have known it. Unusually for an art historian, Elise Grilli writes about the in-and-out aspect of a folding screen — a byobu — which, standing on its own before you, would give an experience that cannot really be simulated in 2-D space. The irises would take on a different presence, with your seeing them as if from both above and below — a manipulation of your “felt axis” that would gently and pleasurably disembody you, putting you in iris-space the way Monet would place you among waterlilies, looking impossibly up at the high horizon of the pond. This is a perspective that Western painting discourages, and that you can enter through tiny portals — books only twice the size of a deck of cards.

I still have and read Elise Grilli’s books, although I no longer sleep with them.  In writing about their place in my childhood, I haven’t wanted to quote from them.  I’m turfy about her — she’s mine.  And anyway, what if readers found her less entrancing than I did, and do?  Hers is the voice of a charming, educated mid-century writer who gently impels you to see and to love what you see, who has the gift of creating interest before she imparts information. I don’t know if she was thought of as a formidable scholar — so many formidable scholars of the era are no longer consulted, yet, in preparing to write this post, I learned that her book on Sharaku, written in the 50’s, was just last year re-issued. For the most part, her books can be found on the secondary market, where they cost a lot more than $1.25.

Who was Elise Grilli, really?  I never knew in any detail until a few weeks ago. She lived in Japan from the late 40’s through the mid-60’s, and raised her children there. She spoke, read and wrote Japanese, and wrote articles on art for The Japan Times, for which her husband was a music critic. That figures — she was fond of using musical and also literary analogies to illuminate art that was still very foreign, comparing and contrasting what readers might know with what they probably did not, the better to facilitate optical seduction. It’s a habit I see I’ve caught — although my mother did it too. Her biggest book, The Art of the Japanese Screen, Weatherhill, 1970 — and you will never know a better treatment of the subject — I did not as a child get my hands on.  It was published posthumously. She died in 1969, at work at that time on a book about calligraphy in China and Japan. She was not much older than my mother — something I’d always sensed.

That’s a bad loss, that she did not complete and publish the work-in-progress. I only just found out, and I am passionately sorry, and sorry for her children too, who would have then been young adults.

At around the same time, I was beginning to learn about calligraphy, about the syllabary that Lady Murasaki used to write the Genji Monogatori, in the Heian Period, when men at Court wrote bad poetry in Chinese and, in Japanese, women wrote good novels. Chinese calligraphy looked to me then like ideas, Japanese like a language to record utterances. I went further back than the Heian Period, to the 9th century, to the time the Japanese, who did not write at all before contact with China and the extreme alterations that it wrought, began to develop a written language that diverged from the grafted-on Chinese, that was more suitable to their own spoken language. A calligrapher-monk, Kukai, may have been instrumental in this process. He had been to China, returning to found the Shingon Buddhist sect, headquartered at Koyasan. There, beyond the darkly forested Okuno-in, for centuries the cemetery of choice for Japanese Buddhists, beyond the Lantern Hall where two lanterns have burned for 900 years, in an underground chamber of Mt. Koya, Kukai had not died, but had entered eternal samadhi — deeply concentrated meditation — to await Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future.

I was a big girl now, and I was off.

Justin E. H. Smith

Romania has its share of track-and-field athletes, and even some marathon runners, but don’t ask me where they train. In all of my dozens of visits there, I am the only person I have ever known to run in public parks and along public streets. I do it expecting harassment. What choice do I have? I confess I experience groups of street kids the same way I do street dogs: as a threat. I also confess that in general I am repulsed by the swarming crowds, so familiar throughout the Balkans, of scowling young men in shiny track-suits with gold-capped teeth and gold chains. Of course I am. I want to be surrounded by people who look like they’ve been to college, who look ready to discuss Aki Kaurismäki, or the prospects for a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe, or the plausibility of the punctuated-equilibrium hypothesis. Shouldn’t there be a way of just admitting as much and moving on? Is this gut-based aversion really what needs to be overcome in order that a more just society might come into being?

Romanians will often tell me that the people triggering my aversion, the people to watch out for, are the Gypsies. I am finally beginning to be able to distinguish members of this legend-laden ethnos from their non-Gypsy neighbors, but I hasten to add that by no means is everyone a Gypsy who matches that particular thuggish description just given, and by no means is the ethnic boundary nearly so clear as the non-Gypsies insist. The Balkans are not so much an ethnic patchwork as a seamless ethnic continuum, and sharp boundaries are emphasized the most where they are in fact least secure. As one Romanian revealed to me, showing me photos of a recent trip to a Greek Island: “Greece is very very beautiful… Very clean… No Gypsies there… No Romanians.” It was clear from the context that the last two sentence fragments constituted one proposition, not two.

I have heard repeatedly that ‘Roma’, as a name for the Gypsies, is entirely unconnected etymologically with the capital city of Italy and the center of the Roman Empire, which lent its name centuries ago to Romania (i.e., the land of the Eastern Romans, in contradistinction to the Greeks and Turks and Slavs surrounding them), that it is a name that came with the Gypsies from India, but I have immense difficulty believing this. It is true that rom means ‘husband’ or ‘man’ in the Romany language, but this word itself has shadowy origins, and my guess is that it comes from the Southeastern European region in which the Roma people settled, not from the India they left behind. Rom- and rum- are too ubiquitous in the names of places and peoples in the region they would come to settle for the current preference for ‘Roma’ in denoting the Gypsies to be explained by chance convergence.

In France one often hears of the ‘Romanian problem’. French people will tell my Romanian wife that France is being overrun with ‘Romanians’, that you cannot go 10 metres without bumping into one begging in the street. When the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’or at Cannes for his excellent film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, a cartoon in a French newspaper showed him holding out his hand as if begging, and attempted a fairly uninspired jeu de mots involving ‘palme’ (i.e., the frond of the palm tree as well as the part of the hand a beggar extends). It is not clear whether the French believe they are being politically correct in avoiding the term ‘tsigane’, or whether they mistakenly believe that ‘Romanian’ is the proper ethnonym for the Roma people, but one thing is clear: the newly politically correct ‘Roma’ is not making things any simpler. 

I’m sticking with ‘Gypsy’. The newer term is simply confusing, and, I believe, responsible for the decidedly politically incorrect conflation in France and elsewhere of Romanians and Roma. (Again, this conflation is not just a product of French xenophobia. It is also a part of the Romanian identity itself: fear of Gypsies grounded in the fear of being a Gypsy.)

My wife and I speak only French in the streets of Bucharest, permitting us to prance around like 19th-century nobles (or at least me; for Romanians speaking French is de rigueur, like knowing your multiplication tables). We always choose to say ‘gitane’ rather than ‘tsigane’, since the latter has its cognate in Romanian, whereas the former enables us to talk about the Gypsies without, we suppose, being understood. Just like Brooklyn Jews used to talk of the ‘schwarze’. I do enjoy this opportunity to say ‘gitane‘. The word calls to mind not the Gypsies of Slovakia or Romania but those of Spain and southern France, as also the cigarettes, Picasso, Hemingway, and other stupid clichés. Les gitanes will seduce you; les tsiganes will send their toddlers to poke your kneecaps with needles until you turn over the contents of your pockets.

We probably shouldn’t be talking about them, using our secret code so that they won’t understand. I feel like an asshole but I keep doing it. I can’t not talk about the people around me. I just can’t.

*

For reasons I need not explain here, I found myself recently with temporary custody of a seven-year-old Romanian girl, whom I will call ‘Maria’. Our task was to kill a few hours in the provincial Moldavian town of Bârlad, where fortunately the warm spring weather had brought a sort of temporary amusement park to the central municipal gardens. I paid for Maria to go on a sort of blow-up rubber slide shaped like a castle, three lei for five minutes, and while she was climbing up and sliding down I stood and held her jacket, her umbrella, and a Romanian translation of the latest issue of the “Totally Spies!” comic book, about three high school girls in Beverly Hills –Clover, Sam, and Alex– who are, as luck would have it, not just high school girls but also spies. 

A Gypsy girl saw the comic book and exclaimed ‘Wow, Spioanele’! I smiled and held it out to show her.  She called over her two little friends, perhaps her sisters or cousins, and they all smiled and said many things, of which I understood mostly just the word ‘Spioanele’ repeated many times.  Maria saw me holding out the photo and yelled to me: ‘Hey! It’s mine!’ The girls continued to hover around me, their leader (the one to the left in the photo) smiling beautifully, the funny looking dirty girl (in the photo to the right) looking at me confusedly and seeming at instants to apprehensively extend her little palm.

When she was done on the slide I went with Maria to the ‘Wheel of Fortune’, a giant vertical roulette wheel that the kids are permitted to spin for three lei, after which they receive a Chinese toy worth far less than three lei corresponding to the number on which the wheel stops. The Gypsy girls followed us. Maria spun the wheel and won a particularly cheap little bird with a chip inside that played an annoying, greeting-card tune.  The leader of the Gypsies continued to smile at us. I asked her if she wanted to spin the wheel, and of course she said yes.  I paid the obese carny –visible from behind in the photo– and he grudgingly allowed the Gypsy girl to spin it. She won a cheap shiny plastic crown. She unwrapped it and touched the tiara and it lit up. A red light spun around in a circle at the center like a warning flash worn by a nocturnal cyclist. ‘It lights up!’ she said with joy, as if the cheap plastic Chinese toy were a real crown. 

Maria wanted to go back to the slide and she asked the girls to come with her. ‘Nu au bani’, they said. No money. I gave the newly crowned queen nine lei, enough for each of the three to join Maria on the slide.  They all ran over. Maria and the beautiful girl and the funny-looking girl tore off their shoes and scrambled up the slide. The third Gypsy girl, the one at the center of the photo, stayed at the bottom of the slide, holding the beautiful girl’s crown, staring up and frowning. Photographs lie, for looking at the three of them now it seems to me that the third girl, the one who stayed behind, is the beautiful one, and the girl to the left seems positively plain. In reality, the one who looks plain was radiant, and the one who looks beautiful was a distant shadow of the other two.

I bent down and asked the shadow if she wanted to go up. ‘Ce?’ she asked. I pointed up the slide to her friends.  She shook her head no. The parents gathered at the bottom seemed alarmed that I was talking to her.

The carny yelled ‘Gata! Terminat!’ after five minutes had passed and the three girls –two Gypsies and Maria– came down laughing and out of breath. ‘A fost super!’ they all exclaimed.  The little shadow girl who did not go up, but stayed at the bottom and frowned, held out the flashing crown to the beautiful girl.  The beautiful girl thanked me profusely and continued to smile. 

I wanted to cry. I had taken Maria out to treat her to something special, because I had felt bad for her, in view of her parents’ divorce, her little sister’s departure for Italy (along with so many millions of other Romanians) to be raised by relatives, the difficulty of growing up a girl in the harsh banlieues of Bucharest.  I had taken her out to treat her, to buy her Spioanele merchandise (there are puzzles and ‘detective kits’ and make-up cases and fake cellphones), to play Curious George games on the PBS website at the local internet café. When I met the Gypsy girls, my pity shifted, so it seemed, downward, and Maria seemed suddenly spoiled. And then the beautiful girl won the crown, and it lit up, and she and the funny-looking girl went up and down the slide, and now they looked like spoiled little queens next to their pathetic friend, who stood at the bottom of the slide, holding the crown, afraid for some unknown reason. Is there some little creature out there somewhere, I wondered, even more beaten down and meek than this one, who would in turn make her look like a queen?  Lord, how far down does the scale go? 

I left with Maria. ‘Those were nice little girls, weren’t they?’ I asked. ‘They were Gypsies,’ Maria shrugged. 

*

Gypsies were legally enslaveable in Romania until 1864, one year after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Abolition in Romania was not followed by Reformation, nor a civil rights movement, nor demands for reparations, nor separatism. The Ceausescu regime naturally had a lot to say, if not do, about the equality of all peoples, and this equality is something that Romania must continue to officially promote as a condition of its long sought-after accession to the European Union. But this is all strictly formal. There is no Gypsy Martin Luther King on the horizon, not to mention a plausible Gypsy candidate for the Romanian presidency. The current Romanian president, Traian Băsescu, has openly used “stinking gypsy” [ţigancă împuţită] as a slur, with only very minimal political repercussions.

*

The TV is always on in Romania. It’s what holds the nation together.  That’s the accent from Oltenia, the viewers can say. That’s how they talk in Maramureş. The format is Italian strada: glitzy never-ending review shows, always in dismally bad taste. There are peppy teen pop groups in coordinated neon sweatsuits doing dance routines, backed up by synthesizers, wearing headsets with mics in the fashion of Madonna circa 1990 (during the ‘Sex’ period, which I for one have not forgotten). They do jazz hands, they look at each other and nod their heads ‘yes!’ to the rhythm of the music. There are knock-offs of knock-offs of pop songs that were bad to begin with. There are drippingly sentimental give-aways of washing machines, deep freezes, and truckloads of goats to needy families, who are required to stand on the studio stage, under the spotlights, in the presence of the magnanimous host, and cry. There are four-year-old kids with gel in their hair, trained to sing little songs and to give the host a high-five. 

I’ve found only two channels that I can stomach. One is ‘Etno TV’, with non-Gypsy men and women on rolling green hillsides, dressed in traditional costumes, singing and dancing folk songs, sometimes minimally acting out the story the lyrics tell. That’s a dance from Bucovina. That’s a typical theme from Moldavia. The other is a lower-budget channel for Gypsy music videos, made with home-movie cameras in living rooms and public parks.  Some of the videos show young Gypsies performing manele, the cultural if not the musical equivalent of rap. They hold up handfuls of euros and show their gold-toothed smiles, sitting on plushly upholstered furniture, wearing track-suits. They boast about all the enemies they’ve brought down. Aesthetically and morally, the unacknowledged Urtext is 2 Live Crew’s unforgettable ‘Me So Horny‘. (Romanian rap, in stark contrast, has much more in common with the tediously indignant political stuff that has kept French hip-hop consistently mediocre since the early 1990s.)

Other videos are of older men, all wearing matching tuxedos, in what look like banquet halls. These men still seem connected to some ancestral past. They sing with their hearts and they pound their xylophones with heavy mallets faster than my eyes can take in. Those are Gypsies, the nation says. 

*

In Romania the ‘hippie’ look is described as the ‘Gypsy’ look. Maria wore a pink sweatshirt made in China, with an image of a girl named ‘Windy’ on it.  Windy was making a V-shaped peace sign with her fingers, wearing John Lennon glasses, a belt made out of bird-foot-shaped peace signs around her waist, and a bandanna around her head.  She looked, in a word, ‘groovy’. Maria’s family noted that Windy was a Gypsy, and wondered whether the little girl should be wearing such a thing, in much the same way that American parents might worry about vaguely gangster-like insignias on mall-bought clothing. 

The Gypsy/hippie conflation is not entirely incorrect, and indeed is one that would have made sense in America not so long ago.  One of the nodes on the ancestral chart of the hippies are the ‘Bohemians’, by which was meant urban people associated with the theater, music halls, and a free and rambling life style.  Now a Bohemian minus the scare quotes is not an ancestor to the hippies but a Czech. Most of the Gypsies of what used to be called Czechoslovakia were concentrated in the Slovak part, but from the perspective of a Central European from somewhere slightly to the north or west of Prague –Berlin, say– Czechia easily stood in for that place from which all the dark and uncouth musicians and actors hail.  Soon enough, a Jew from Minnesota could settle in Greenwich Village and electively take on the identity of a ‘Bohemian’.

Is it, I’ve often wondered, the proximity of real ‘Bohemians’ –the kind who send their children into the street to beg, who have a life expectancy of 50 and the lowest literacy rate in Europe– that makes the Romanian bourgeoisie place such value on tucking your shirt in, on polishing your shoes, on wearing cologne? In America and Western Europe, the ‘bourgeois Bohemian’ is by now a common figure, and may be the only social trend David Brooks ever correctly identified. The bourgeois Bohemian’s parents and grandparents did all the worrying about procuring durable goods and putting wallpaper on the walls and mothballs in the closets, only to find their children and grandchildren affecting an antimaterialism that communicated positively valenced class distinction precisely by downplaying the importance of appliances, by opting for exposed brick walls over wallpaper, sometimes even by wearing clothing pocked with holes. In Romania this  cultivated Bohemianism is, as far as I can tell, entirely unknown. Nobody has ever entered the bourgeoisie and come out the other side. The nomads’ encampments, the infectious diseases that underlie the hygiene that in turn underlies culture, are all still too close.

*

‘Gitane‘ is a deformation of ‘Egyptian’, and until the birth of Indo-European linguistics in the mid-19th century it was widely presumed that the Gypsies had wandered from Egypt into Europe.  In fact they wandered from India in the 11th century, and only gradually shed their Hindu identity.

The tiny kernel of truth at the heart of Nazi racial mythology –that there is a common background for civilizations spreading from northern India to Scandinavia, that there are recurrent gods and recurrent words for things like ‘horse’ and ‘night’ and ‘yoke’ that unite the Vedas with Homer and with the Icelandic sagas– was conveniently ignored so that the Gypsies could be persecuted along with the ‘Asiatic’ Jews. This is curious, since in fact one could not be any more Indo-European (or, as the Germans continue to say, ‘Indo-Germanic’) than the Gypsies: they are a living reminder of the unity of India and Europe, of the recent and artificial invention of two distinct continents. The Nazis claimed to approve a picture of European history that united Germany and Greece and Persia and India against the successive waves of pollution from the Semitic world, but were not ready to acknowledge the community with the Gypsies that it logically entailed.

*

My wife tells me that everything I attempt to write about Romania is comprehensively, systematically wrong. She’s probably right, but I have to keep trying.   

*

The TV is on. There is a woman in a sequined leotard charming a python. She wraps it over her shoulders and does Oriental things with her hands. She closes her eyes and smiles like she’s faking an orgasm. This is pushing the limits. This is moving into dark and uncharted places. The python hangs there.

Next she carries the python over to a little chest at the side of the stage, puts it in, and pulls out a greenish chameleon. She places her new dance partner in front of her at the center of the stage and again begins to do that thing with her hands. Chameleons have a naturally fixed expression of boredom but this one looks particularly bored. He begins to walk away, towards the stage exit opposite the chest. The woman is forced to interrupt her dance routine to bring him back. She tries to do this without allowing the exotic mood to lapse. She’s smiling ecstatically as she chases after the chameleon. She picks him up and twirls him around Orientally. She holds him out in front of her and attempts a sort of walk-like-an-Egyptian back towards the center of the stage. He’s now a pale grey.

Someone needs to put a stop to this.

—

Bucharest, April 30, 2008

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Michael Blim

It’s better to be rich – hardly a surprising claim.

But it is devastating to be poor, and this period of economic crisis it is deadly to be poor.

The effects of the crisis have been charted in many ways. There has been barely concealed panic on Wall Street. Big banks have wobbled, and many wallowed in debt. Many have taken on as much capital as anyone will lend them, as well as selling off big chunks of their equity. A major brokerage house failed, and was saved by the Federal Reserve Board.

On Wall Street, record numbers of people in the finance industry are being let go.

On Main Street, states and municipalities, as well as state authorities that back borrowings for universities, public schools, and public housing corporations, are having trouble selling their bonds.

Then there are the homeowners whose economic troubles triggered in part the crisis –apart from a financial sector whose blood lust for ever higher profits created the mess in the first place.

Who are the homeowners? Hard to know. Though you can learn a lot about the latest cure for something on the news every night, followed or preceded by drug commercials selling you pharmaceuticals, the efficacy of which seems to boil down to a smiley face and chocolate Labrador, you can’t learn much about endangered homeowners. A reporter may find one of the 7.2 million of families at risk of losing their home, but the bigger frame amidst the family’s well-earned tears is lost. Try as they might, or try as they don’t, the news industry presents a fuzzy picture. Who are these folks in trouble?

They are many: the 7.2 million households comprise 28% of all American households with mortgages. They owe $332 billion in loans, and 2.2 million have lost or will lose their houses without a federal remedy, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. A majority is white, but a disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos are vulnerable too. For instance, among whites, 17% have sub-prime mortgages; the figure is 55% for blacks.

I have come to the conclusion that only a specialist can understand what the Congress and the Executive are proposing for remedies. It is transparent, however, that they have done nothing yet to assist these vulnerable families.

(Parenthetically, where were the Federal Reserve, financial regulators and the Congress when the crisis had begun to show itself in October, 2006? Where are the US attorneys and the Attorney Generals of 23 states, all of whom are equipped with statutory authority to stop predatory lending and impose civil, as well as in some cases criminal penalties on perpetrators?)

Banks made greater profits on sub-prime loans because they could charge working class and near-power households more for their mortgages. They sold them in packages at higher prices to customers eager for extra profits. Everybody made out – except those purchasing the mortgages. Disaster was just around the corner.

Not even the poor without homes, I expect, would want these troubles. Yet, the poor along with those caught up directly in the sub-prime emergency face even rougher times ahead. Inflation is back. For the past five months, headline inflation, that is, everything we consume, has been 4% above the comparable period last year. Even the so-called core inflation rate, that is what we consumer minus food and energy, has been running at 2% for the last seven months.

I have written about how economic policymakers are attached to a measure – core inflation – that having dropped food and fuel seriously under-estimates the increased burdens on typical American households. (See my column, September, 2007)

But an interesting analysis by Neil Irwin and Alejandro Lazo of the Washington Post (March 21, 2008) suggests how even headline inflation misses a much higher increase in the cost of living. Their analysis of government data shows consumer prices for basics has risen 9% since 2006, and now costs a family making $45,000 a year an extra $972. The poor and near poor consume the basics too.

Fearful that the economic roof was falling in, Congress and the Executive agreed to a stimulus package. The idea is that American families need to keep the economy going by spending money.

Don’t put a down payment on the Prius yet. Individuals will receive up to $600 and couples $1200 depending upon income. Families with children will receive $300 for each child.

These are the upper limits. Being poor entitles you to no more than this, despite inflation and diminished or nonexistent employment opportunities.

Without employment, you may not get the money, even if you are poor because you are unemployed. You must have filed a tax return several weeks back and have declared at least $3000 in income. To get the check, Social Security and Veterans benefits, and low income wages count. But to qualify you must have income, a curious requirement when the easiest definition of poverty is the absence of it.

Thanks to the Clinton welfare “reform” act of 1996, welfare recipients are eventually cut off from further assistance, job or no job. The result a little over ten years later is that 20% of low-income mothers are without work or welfare benefits, a figure that has doubled since the 1996 law. How do they qualify for the “stimulus?”

It’s movie we have all seen before, I know. But the ending is meaner than usual: when times get tough, we make it tougher on the poor, near-poor, and the working class.

Once more:

7.2 million families holding sub-prime mortgages, disproportionately lower-income, black and Latino are in danger of losing their little bit of the American Dream.

37 million poor people (the definition of poverty for a family of 4 is an income of less than $20,000) can receive $600 a person and $300 per child if they have an income already. If not, then not.

In a society without justice such as ours, poor people, people with one foot out of poverty, and the working class are experiencing a crisis only guessed at on Wall Street where all the mischief began. Those becoming stricken by the crisis — they indeed are the chickens that are coming home to roost. Only for them, it is simply for delivery to Tyson’s.

///
On finding a lifelong friend and lover while reading
Martin Buber in a diner—

Over the Counter
Jim Culleny

I lean from behind Buber while
Thou serveth me caffein and smile.

I know my elbows rest upon the sky.
O! the blue formica shines.

I see your red cheeks blare
in oval frame of hair.

Arthur stares me down.
He’s an angry, sad, old,
ruddyfaced lecher. Alone.

He imagines you his young lover.
He pushes baked haddock past
tired lips.

The chrome coffee pitcher
belches water vapor.

It rises to your eyes
and there they are, cloud bourn,
as the brown liquid drops my buzz.

My soles float over the counter rail.

Never weaned from fantasy
I want to nail down my shoes,
not wanting to trust romance:
fool’s paradise. I say

love cool reason. Do it alone. No.

Oh, I’d love to do it right.
To give it up. Free
the hawks and doves and be slave
only to discovery.

///

My brother in law (BIL) has joined the jobless – the vortex of sub-prime debacle has sunk the hedge fund he managed. But please don’t pity him: he is without a job but not without money. Unlike a side-street plebeian, this Wall Street prince stays rich even when unemployed.

BIL – though ailing from derivatives deprivation – is now blessed with free time to reflect on the genesis of the hedge fund collapse. He thinks he suffers from sleep apnea; he snores at night and feels exhausted when awake. He blames this daytime undue somnolence for his blunders in trading.

Sleep apnea made its debut in medical literature in 1956. Dr C S Burwell and his colleagues told the story of an ever-sleepy 51 years old obese businessman who measured 5 ft 5 inches and weighed 260 Lbs. During a game of poker – with three aces and two kings in his hand – the businessman missed the prime chance to make a killing. The reason: he had fallen asleep! Dr Burwell titled the article, ‘Extreme Obesity Associated with Alveolar Hypoventilation: A Pickwickian Syndrome’.

‘Pickwickian’ refers to ‘The Pickwick Papers’ where in 1837, Charles Dickens introduced a gluttonous, “wonderfully fat boy” Joe, who had a hard time staying awake. He stood at the door after repetitive knocking “ upright his eyes closed as if in sleep” with looks of “calmness and repose.” Questioned thrice, he did not answer, but “nodded once and seemed —– to snore.” Then he “suddenly opened his eyes, winked several times, sneezed once, and raised his hand as if to repeat the knocking.”

Dr Burwell – with retrospective analysis – diagnosed ‘fat Joe’ and the somnolent obese businessman suffering from obesity-hypoventilation, which is now called sleep apnea. Joe still continues to live in the medical literature as the original embodiment of the Pickwickian Syndrome.

BIL thinks, he is the clone-reincarnation of fat boy Joe. Like him, BIL is also portly, short and overweight; his round head sits atop his stout neck; a cigarette often dangles from his wet lips and he finds the poker game goof akin to his hedge fund fiasco.

He wonders, “Do I have Pickwickian Syndrome?”

So, BIL goes for a check up – a sleep apnea study. BIL spends one night in the sleep lab, wired to gadgets, which monitor his blood oxygen, respiratory pattern, blood pressure, pulse and brain electrical activity.

During sleep, the muscles inside his throat relax and collapse into the air passage, which is already narrow due to his stout neck. The air cannot flow through the obstructed airway and his breathing stops for a moment (apnea), which plummets his blood oxygen. The oxygen-deprived brain startles and awakens him for a moment; the muscles at the back of his throat tense up, which opens the breathing passage allowing air to rush through. He breathes again. The gushing air vibrates the floppy throat muscles, broadcasting a sonorous snore. He falls asleep only to stop breathing again. He repeats this cycle of stops-and-starts, about 27 times every hour during the night.

BIL does not remember the sleeping-awakening cycles, but the video monitors, focused on him, capture his snoring, tossing and turning. A sleep-deprived night leaves him exhausted the next day.

The sleep lab verdict follows quickly: BIL does have sleep apnea. He is not alone. One in fifteen or 6.6 percent Americans have sleep apnea. Most are overweight mid age males, though skinny ones and women are not exempt. One in fifty snore through life undiagnosed – at work, while driving or in public places.

Now, the bear news: many years of sleep apnea are likely to give BIL high blood pressure and heart failure. He also has higher chances of suffering from a paralytic stroke.

And the bull news: sleep apnea is treatable and simple interventions yield satisfactory results. BIL can, once more, enjoy a restful sleep at night and profitable derivatives during day.

What should BIL do?

He should stop smoking and avoid alcohol. (Alcohol relaxes the throat muscles, enhancing the obstruction.) He should loose weight. His Body Mass Index or BMI is 33, which classifies him as obese; if it were over 40, he would be morbidly obese. (BMI is weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters. A Belgian statistician, Adolph Quetelet, who was friend of Charles Dickens, first described this concept in 1869 and called it Quetelet index.)

He should sleep on his side and may use a mouth appliance to keep his throat open. BIL may have to use a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine, which forces air under pressure into his obstructed airway. If these methods don’t help, he may have to undergo surgery, where the surgeon will remove the triangular floppy muscle hanging form the roof of his throat (uvula and soft palate) and also some of the surrounding tissue, to widen his airway.

BIL, in his insuppressible bullish manner, is determined to get his trading prowess back. No more daytime slumber! The night in the sleep lab convinced BIL of his infirmity. “See, I told you I am Pickwickian.”

BIL: the answer is yes and no. You do have sleep apnea but you may not have the Pickwickian Syndrome; the two may not be the same disease.

You remember, Dickens describing the nonstop knock at the door at the Pickwick mansion, which prompted the opening of the door leading to discovery of a “wonderfully fat boy” standing “upright” and “in sleep”. Some experts tell us that people suffering from sleep apnea do not fall asleep during vigorous action like incessant knocking. If Joe did fall asleep, he would not be standing but would have dropped to the floor with flaccid muscles. His snore would be loud and not ‘feeble”. Joe probably exhibited a different sleep disorder: narcolepsy.

BIL still insists in washing off his guilt. “ But, you do agree that sleep deprivation was the cause my poor judgment and hedge fund collapse?”

Dear BIL, the cause of your bungled trading was not apnea-when-asleep but avarice-when- awake. You are less like Joe from Dickens and more like Malcolm from Macbeth:

“With this there grows
In my most ill-composed affection such
A stanchless avarice that, were I king,
I should cut off the nobles for their lands,
Desire his jewels and this other’s house:
And my more-having would be as a sauce
To make me hunger more; that I should forge
Quarrels unjust against the good and loyal,
Destroying them for wealth.”

by Ahila Sornarajah

Stuck in a traffic jam in hot, dusty and dynamic Chennai (formerly Madras) recently, I started thinking about the far away elections for the Mayor of London and what this will mean for Londoners. While America is obsessed with the groundbreaking race for the democratic nomination between Clinton and Obama, we’re proud to be having our very own tightly fought contest in London this year.

Labour’s Ken Livingstone and the Tories’ Boris Johnson are neck and neck with the finishing line in sight at the end of this week. Compared to national politics – the general disappointment of Gordon Brown’s first months in power and the seemingly inexorable rise of the baby faced David Cameron – the Mayoral race is truly nail-biting stuff. Livingstone and Johnson are the only men in the country with sufficient personality to be instantly recognizable by their first names. In the left corner, is “Red Ken” the maverick leftwing politician with working class roots whose love of London politics is only matched by his love of newts. And in the right, posh toff “Boris” or to be exact, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, one of Cameron’s buddies from Eton who is often labeled a gaffe-prone buffoon but has an 18th century satirist’s wit when it comes to words and has been as much of a regular on the current affairs comedy circuit, as he has been in the shadow cabinet.

Mayoral elections in Chennai just can’t be as exciting. In Chennai, while the Chennai Municipal Corporation headed by the Chennai Mayor is ostensibly responsible for public transport, the Mayor’s tenure only lasts a year, and being vested with very little real power, the role is largely that of a figurehead. Perhaps the fact that there is no one to champion Chennai shows in its roads. Chennai roads are catastrophic and everyone drives as if they are wielding a wheeled weapon in the greatest game of bumper cars there ever was. Traffic signals are few and far between, and the number of lanes dependant on the different permutations of traffic in front of you: a bus, and an old Morris Oxford make a two lane road, the auto rickshaw, three scooters, and a bicycle in front of them will conspire to add a few more lanes to the fun. What’s more, having to contend with people driving against the traffic is commonplace. I read in the Hindu a few days ago that more than 1600 people died on Chennai Roads last year. 60% of these were pedestrians. This might not be surprising given that pavements in the city sprout from the ground, transform into rubble and then disappear fairly frequently. The total also compares rather unfavourably with the 316 people who died in road accidents London last year – a city five times the size of Chennai.

Clearly to compare London with Chennai is rather simplistic given the comparative lack of financial resource in the latter and historical developments in infrastructure in the former. However, it is difficult to see the new shining IT companies off Chennai’s main roads, the new shopping plazas, and food courts, without contrasting these with the rubble and chaos that lie on their doorsteps. People in Chennai, always on the go, always off somewhere to do something, must find the impediment of their choked and chaotic roads infuriating. Could a strong city government make a difference?

While road traffic in London has never compared, London in the nineties was a very different place from now. There was very little care taken about the look of London under the depressed aegis of John Major. London’s neglect was clear from the pollution, grime and graffiti evident on the streets. I still remember the long awaited, but still half built Canary Wharf tower along the London skyline in utter defeat after it was almost bombed by the IRA in 1992.

Until 2000, all London’s policies were fragmented across several local boroughs controlled by either Labour or Tory politicians. The results of this are evident today. You can travel a few stops along a London tube line and life expectancy rates will decrease from north to south, from west to east. Every trip across London is accompanied by the constant hum of the postcode lottery.

The creation of the post of Mayor with its larger strategic role in cross cutting issues such as transport, policing and the environment enshrined in the Greater London Authority Act 1999 has, most agree, truly made a difference. It has meant that someone really cares about London, overseeing the way its riverside skyline looks, the cleaning up of the city as well as, most importantly, the control of road congestion at its centre and the reduction of vehicle emissions. It also means that someone is directly accountable to the city’s voting public, rather than the central government of the day. Given the recent successes of the mayoral post, the London Authority Act 2007 will extend the mayoral role to include powers to direct housing policy in the capital as well as extend its environmental remit. It is hoped that some control over the capital’s health policies will follow.

Red Ken has, in the round, been a good Mayor. His greatest achievement is likely to have been the introduction of the congestion charge; the city now charges vehicles for entering the city centre at particular times of day, thus booting more people out of cars and onto buses, tubes and trains. He has also introduced a more efficient ticketing system for public transport, free transport for pensioners, and secured cash from central government for a new cross-city rail service. He has helped London win the Olympics for 2012 on the basis that it will help regenerate the more impoverished areas of East London. Importantly, Red Ken who, in his former incarnation as member of the General London Council in the eighties despised the capitalist pigs of the city of London, has realized that they are not such bad chaps after all, and cleverly used his power of veto on planning permissions for major London construction projects to get private business to contribute to building adjunct affordable housing for the poor. Even where Ken has proved slightly megalomaniacal, self-importantly concluding a deal with his friend, Hugo Chavez, to supply London transport with cheap Venezuelan oil, people were rather willing to forgive him. They like that he, like London, is a little more than eccentric.

Boris Johnson despite his playing the lovable buffoon in years past has actually floated a number of good ideas in his campaign, some of which Ken unashamedly announced he would be happy to implement if he were elected given that there is no intellectual property in public policy. He has some good ideas about getting kids off the streets in the wake of gang related stabbings that killed 27 kids last year, and has suggested new cost cutting measures to get more policemen on the beat. His housing policy is almost lyrical; in a veiled reference to the ugly public housing blocks that stud London’s landscape with dark stairwells and identikit flats, Boris says that “we must build houses that will still be loved and respected in a hundred years, dwellings of distinction and grace that satisfy the instinct for differentiation that is deep in the human soul”.

Despite the promise of the role, and even the candidates (I have ignored the candidacies of a number of others including that of the man currently polling third in the race, the impressive Liberal Democrat candidate, Nick Paddick) the mayoral race has now descended into the usual mudslinging. Ken has been accused of cronyism as one of his top mayoral aides has been accused of using city funds inappropriately. Boris, perhaps more worryingly, is constantly reminded of politically incorrect articles he wrote in the Spectator while editor of that publication. He once accused the Queen of only loving the Commonwealth because it supplied her “with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picanninies”. While this could well be an accurate representation of how the Queen views her third word subjects, it wasn’t exactly choice language. On Africa he once wrote “the problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore… the best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers or their citizens scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty”. The unearthing of these quotes does not bode well for Boris in a liberal London stacked to the rafters with ex-colonials. His defence has been equally quaint. He has suggested that he couldn’t possibly be considered racist because his great grandmother was a Circassian slave (a genealogical defence that sounds as if it has been cribbed straight out of a Captain Flashman novel).

Notwithstanding its entertainment value, from the perspective of a Chennai traffic jam, the way in which the London mayoral race has descended into sheer spectacle seems like a colossal waste. Unlike in Chennai the role of Mayor in London has tangible power. While Chennai may lack a strong personality to champion it, it seems a real shame that Boris and Ken are letting allowing their personalities to get in the way of a truly effective public office.

The Uncashed Metaphor of Natural Selection

Justin E. H. Smith

1.

In their classic 1979 article, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,” Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin fault the adaptationist program for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin; its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales, and, as they put it, for “its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of non-adaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features… the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of nonadaptive structures.” They announce that in the critique they are offering, they are proceeding in the spirit of “Darwin’s own pluralistic approach to identifying the agents of evolutionary change.”

Spandrels, or the tapering triangular spaces formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angles, are, as they explain, “necessary architectural byproducts of mounting a dome on rounded arches.” In other words, you can’t have an arch without a spandrel, and you need an arch in order to support a roof. If you ask the architect why he put the spandrel there, he will tell you you don’t understand architecture.

Gould and Lewontin believe that this architectural example has much to tell us about biological evolution. In particular, they believe that many of our efforts to account for some given trait of an organism as having been selected-for is a futile project: it is often the case that traits were never selected at all by environmental pressures, but only came into being, like the spandrels, as ‘free-riders’ on the traits that these pressures in fact selected. The beautiful paintings that cover the spandrels are in turn the architectural analogue of exaptations, that is, features that were never selected-for, but once having come into existence as free-riders on different selected-for traits, turn out to have some fortuitous utility.

How do we know which traits of an animal are like the arches, and which like the spandrels?  This might be harder to determine than Gould and Lewontin’s predecessors had thought, but the difficulty only means that greater attention should be played to the role that the Bauplan of the integrated whole plays in evolution, not that natural selection as such should be rejected. 

Jerry Fodor in contrast –in several books, including The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way (his response to Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works), as well as in a fiery polemic with Simon Blackburn, Philip Kitcher, Dan Dennett and others in several recent issues of the London Review of Books— wants to say that since any trait is always coextensive with another, it is impossible to say which of the two (or more) was the one that was selected-for.  This is not in his view an epistemological problem, but an ontological one: the problem is not that we cannot know which trait was selected, but that it is meaningless to talk about the one or the other being the trait that was selected.  It’s all spandrels, and it’s all arches, and there’s no architect we might ask to help us tell the difference.  Fodor writes:

“Getting minds in general, and God’s mind in particular, out of biological explanations is a main goal of the adaptationist programme. I am, myself, all in favour of that; since I’m pretty sure that neither exists, I see nothing much to choose between God and Mother Nature. Maybe one can, after all, make sense of mindless environmental variables selecting for phenotypic traits. That is, maybe one can get away with claiming that phenotypes are like arches in that both are designed objects. The crucial test is whether one’s pet theory can distinguish between selection for trait A and selection for trait B when A and B are coextensive: were polar bears selected for being white or for matching their environment? Search me; and search any kind of adaptationism I’ve heard of. Nor am I holding my breath till one comes along.”

The consensus among Fodor’s critics is that he has systematically misunderstood the point of Gould and Lewontin’s argument.  My own impression is that his argument is either irresponsible and stupid or so subtle that none of his adversaries, defending a status quo interpretation of the theory of natural selection, have been able to get it yet.  The principle of charity pushes in favor of the latter view.

What Fodor wants to know is whether the polar bear’s coat was selected-for because it’s white or because it matches its environment. According to Blackburn et al., the familiar adaptationist account, which they do not see as in need of revising, would have it that “[i]n some ancestral population there was a variant type that differed from the rest in ways that enhanced reproductive success. (White polar bears, for example, more camouflaged than their brown confrères, were better at sneaking up on seals, were better fed and left more offspring.) If the variant has a genetic basis, its frequency increases in the next generation.” For Fodor however, this is a “potted polar bear history,” since “for any trait X that was locally coextensive with being white in the polar bear’s evolutionary ecology[, s]election theory is indifferent between ‘the bears were selected for being white’ and ‘the bears were selected for being X.’” A good theory, Fodor thinks, should be able to generalize over possible but non-actual circumstances, that is, it should be able to support relevant counterfactuals, and this is something that natural selection doesn’t do.

If you are not satisfied with the polar bear story, Fodor also offers a well-known example from the real world: in a certain variety of foxes, whenever they are bred (by humans) for tameness, the offspring come out not only tame, but also floppy– floppy ears, floppy tails, etc.  These are ancillary effects that are observed in many species of domesticated animal, and they are much harder to account for, Fodor thinks, than the fit between arches and spandrels, since the connection between tameness and floppiness is, he thinks, perfectly arbitrary. (Actually, I can think of a perfectly plausible potted story as to why floppiness and tameness go together: it is advantageous to a domestic animal to be cute; roundness and softness are more likely to get a domestic animal to reproductive age than jaggedness, prickliness, and other visible vestiges of its feral past.)

Fodor seems to have failed to note that in each of the three cases in question –the spandrels, the whiteness, and the floppiness–, at least three different kinds of coextensiveness seem to be in play.  In the first, we are dealing with two traits that are non-identical but logically coextensive; in the second, with two traits that are in-this-world identical even if they support different counterfactuals; and in the third, with two non-identical and contingently linked traits.  It could have been the case that the gene for floppy ears be located somewhere such that breeding for tameness would have yielded tame, pointy-eared foxes, but there is no possible scenario in which brown bears could have matched their snowy environment, even if counterfactually they could have had a non-snowy environment, and all this for reasons having nothing to do with genetics.

In the case of the polar bear, the traits are not entirely identical, since again, as Fodor puts it, being white and blending with the environment support different counterfactuals.  The environment could have been orange.  So it is not that coextensive properties are indistinguishable in principle, but only that there is something wrong with natural selection to the extent that it fails to distinguish between them. Yet, one might reply to Fodor, environmental pressures do not operate on counterfactual states of affairs, only on the actual one, and in the actual one no decision had to be made as between whiteness and blending. In the sort of counterfactual, experimental situation Fodor imagines –such as painting all the snow orange–, the decider would be whoever set up the experiment, and not nature.  So we seem either to have an identity of coextensive traits, or we have human agency, in which case there is a fact of the matter as to which of the two coextensive traits was selected.  We will return to this point shortly.

Fodor has certainly been right to draw inspiration from Gould and Lewontin’s argument in his crusade against the rampant plague of just-so stories that one hears from evolutionary psychologists. This crowd often assumes that what homo sapiens is in its essence is a hunting-and-gathering species, and that therefore whatever it is that we do must have some adaptive explanation as being somehow beneficial for hunter-gatherers. The result is often a caricaturing of human behavior of the most transparently Flintstones variety.

Gould and Lewontin however did not want to reject adaptation tout court, but only the view that every trait must be accounted for in terms of selection-for. How though do we distinguish the traits that may be accounted for in this way?  Blackburn et al. appear to want to say that it is just obvious, while Fodor responds that it never is.  A moderate balance of these two approaches would be to hold that adaptationism seeks to offer plausible accounts, based on counterfactuals, of what selection pressures would have to have enabled to come into existence so that the currently existing species might persist in existence.  Certainly, a different standard will be brought to bear here than in laboratory science –plausibility rather than falsifiability– but what other choice do we have?  Fodor’s ahistorical approach to the philosophy of mind seems to lead him to the rather extreme view that the past must remain off limits to science because it demands a different methodology  than the most secure and unproblematic disciplines, such as aerodynamics, that he habitually holds up as models for his own domain of inquiry.      

It is, again, interesting to note that the one really useful example of coextensiveness of traits in the biological world comes from an example in which human beings –fox breeding scientists, in the event– are making the decisions, just like the cathedral’s architects. There is a way to distinguish, not just in principle but in fact, which of the two vulpine traits in question was selected, since it was humans who were doing the selecting.  Indeed, one of Fodor’s arguments for the incoherence of the adaptationist program, an argument in my view more compelling than the argument from the lack of support of relevant counterfactuals, points out that not just in the case of the foxes and the polar bears, but with respect to all observed traits we can only arrive at a secure understanding of what was selected-for when we are able to interrogate the selecter. This is of course something we are never able to do in non-experimental cases, and so, for Fodor, any talk of natural selection is strictly metaphorical, and a great problem with Darwinism is that it never gave us any instruction as to how to translate this metaphor into a proper scientific account of things.

2.

Fodor claims that history is not relevant to the philosophy of mind, but in the end relies on historical considerations much more than he himself notices, admittedly not concerning the evolution of species, but concerning the history of Victorian natural history, and Darwin’s place in it. He writes:

“[T]he present worry is that the explication of natural selection by appeal to selective breeding is seriously misleading, and that it thoroughly misled Darwin. Because breeders have minds, there’s a fact of the matter about what traits they breed for; if you want to know, just ask them. Natural selection, by contrast, is mindless; it acts without malice aforethought. That strains the analogy between natural selection and breeding, perhaps to the breaking point. What, then, is the intended interpretation when one speaks of natural selection? The question is wide open as of this writing.”

Given that nature lacks a mind, it, or its environmental pressures, can’t really ‘select’ anything, any more than the ball in a roulette machine can select a color to land on. Metaphors are fine things, Fodor acknowledges, and “science probably couldn’t be done without them.” But they are supposed to be the sort of things, he thinks, “that can, in a pinch, be cashed. Lacking a serious and literal construal of ‘selection for’, adaptationism founders on this methodological truism.”

Fodor is absolutely right, and not just about the current Darwinist orthodoxy, but about the historical Darwin himself, who explicitly borrowed the notion of selection from the domain of animal husbandry, and left it to his followers to cash the metaphor. Few before Fodor have noticed just how problematic is the legacy that Darwin has bequeathed: on the one hand, a thorough-going naturalism about how animals come to have the traits they have, and on the other hand a fairly blatant personification of nature as breeder. 

Surprisingly, Fodor’s critique of natural selection on this point echoes in important ways certain pre-Darwinian arguments against natural theology, that is, against the view that God’s wisdom can be discerned in the order of nature.  Most early modern natural theology took it for granted that the relation that God bore to his orderly creation was something very like that of a machinist to his machine.  In the Dialogues on Natural Religion, Hume has the natural theologian Cleanthes declare:

“Look around the world: Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines… All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, exceeds the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work, which he has executed.”

Hume, in the guise of Philo, proffers several arguments in reply to Cleanthes, but certainly the one most relevant for our purposes is the argument from the incomplete analogy at the heart of natural theology: because of our experience with artefacts and their artisans, we can tell the difference between artefacts and natural objects, and give an account of how the former sort of thing came into being. But in order to properly pick out a designed universe, we would need to have an experience of that universe’s maker, which we obviously don’t have.  If you find a watch in the forest, then you are entitled to infer to the existence of a watchmaker, but only because you already know quite a bit about not just watches but also about watchmakers themselves: you can go, and may already have gone, to check out their workshops and examine their tools.  But in the case of the world, we only know the ‘watch’, and come to think of it, Philo muses, there is nothing particularly watch-like about this particular world.  In fact, notwithstanding the fashion for the watch-world analogy that had found such eloquent defenders in Boyle, Newton, et al., Hume prefers to return to a much more ancient and deeply rooted vision of the cosmos as, in Aristotelian terms, a natural being rather than as an artefact:

“Now, if we survey the universe, so far as it falls under our knowledge, it bears a great resemblance to an animal or organized body, and seems actuated with a like principle of life and motion. A continual circulation of matter in it produces no disorder: a continual waste in every part is incessantly repaired: the closest sympathy is perceived throughout the entire system: and each part or member, in performing its proper offices, operates both to its own preservation and to that of the whole. The world, therefore, I infer, is an animal; and the Deity is the SOUL of the world, actuating it, and actuated by it.”

One of the important implications of such a cosmological model, Philo soon realizes, is that it compels us to think of the order in  the world not so much as made, but rather as generated:

“[I]n examining the ancient system of the soul of the world, there strikes me, all on a sudden, a new idea, which, if just, must go near to subvert all your reasoning, and destroy even your first inferences, on which you repose such confidence. If the universe bears a greater likeness to animal bodies and to vegetables, than to the works of human art, it is more probable that its cause resembles the cause of the former than that of the latter, and its origin ought rather to be ascribed to generation or vegetation, than to reason or design.”

The design of the world, in short, is more like a physiological process than a mechanical one.  It is not that it does not have order or design, but only that this does not come from a machinist.  It comes from a progenitor. 

Hume’s rejection of the argument from design is connected, one might argue, as much with the decline of the 17th-century mechanical model of nature as it is with the skeptical concern about the incompleteness of the watchmaker analogy.  A world-machine would need a maker, but a world-animal could in principle be immortal, as it had been for Plato and later for the Stoics.  What we need to consider, then, in order to understand the continuities and discontinuities between natural theology and natural selection, is precisely the ontological difference between artefacts and natural beings, which at once dictates the degree of control the ‘designer’, whether mortal or divine, may have in each of the two cases.  Most significantly, natural machines can at most be sculpted by environmental forces or by intervention; they cannot be brought into being in the first place.

In this connection, on the reading of Darwin I shall proceed to sketch out, natural selection isn’t so much a shift from theological thinking about design in nature, as it is a demotion of the designer from the role of creator to the role of modifier, and from the relatively prestigious role, one might add, of inventor, to the relatively humble job of animal breeder.

3.  

In the opening pages of his 1859 masterwork On the Origin of Species, Darwin praises the expert knowledge and artisan’s skill of domestic pigeon breeders. Their expertise, Darwin thinks, lies in their ability to discern barely visible traits and to amplify them over the course of generations by selecting appropriate mates for the pigeons who display them. “The key is man’s power of accumulative selection,” Darwin writes, “nature gives successive variations; man adds them up in certain directions useful to him. In this sense he may be said to make for himself useful breeds.” Darwin goes on to praise the great skill of England’s finest breeders, who, while admittedly working with pregiven Baupläne, are able to achieve results comparable to those of a divine creator:

“Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organisation as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please. If I had space I could quote numerous passages to this effect from highly competent authorities. Youatt, who was probably better acquainted with the works of agriculturalists than almost any other individual, and who was himself a very good judge of an animal, speaks of the principle of selection as ‘that which enables the agriculturist, not only to modify the character of his flock, but to change it altogether. It is the magician’s wand, by means of which he may summon into life whatever form and mould he pleases.’ Lord Somerville, speaking of what breeders have done for sheep, says: ‘It would seem as if they had chalked out upon a wall a form perfect in itself, and then had given it existence.'” [Italics added].

While Darwin is impressed by the way in which some skilled breeders of pigeons and other domestic species choose to summon into life new forms, he is just as interested in the way in which domestication has led to the emergence of new and unforeseen traits in animals and plants.  This is the result, Darwin thinks, of a sort of ‘unconscious’ selection on the part of the human masters of domesticated animals:

“At the present time, eminent breeders try by methodical selection, with a distinct object in view, to make a new strain or sub-breed, superior to anything existing in the country. But, for our purpose, a kind of Selection, which may be called Unconscious, and which results from every one trying to possess and breed from the best individual animals, is more important.”

Darwin repeatedly mentions that ‘even savages’ grasp the basic principles of selection.  “If there exist savages so barbarous as never to think of the inherited character of the offspring of their domestic animals,” Darwin observes,

“yet any one animal particularly useful to them, for any special purpose, would be carefully preserved during famines and other accidents, to which savages are so liable, and such choice animals would thus generally leave more offspring than the inferior ones; so that in this case there would be a kind of unconscious selection going on. We see the value set on animals even by the barbarians of Tierra del Fuego, by their killing and devouring their old women, in times of dearth, as of less value than their dogs.”

Why does this supposed practice of the Yaghan matter to him? Darwin seems to think that “savages” provide the sort of low-level, unconscious guidance of the breeding of animals for preferred traits that even more closely approximates the guidance provided by nature than, say, the highly developed science of animal breeding described by Youatt, Somerville, et al.  Nature is in short the ultimate savage: though herself uncultivated, she can’t help but cultivate. Her selections are not like the conscious moulding of new races by England’s finest breeders.  But neither are they totally unlike this either.  They are rather a low-level, mind-like force guiding the emergence of orderly forms.   

Even in the case of England’s expert breeders, the creative capacity involved is rather less than that of the artificer. “Man can hardly select,” Darwin notes, “any deviation of structure excepting such as is externally visible; and indeed he rarely cares for what is internal. He can never act by selection, excepting on variations which are first given to him in some slight degree by nature.” Selection, then, involves in all cases less of the creative power of transferring an envisioned form into matter than had earlier been imagined in the model of nature as machine and God as machinist.  The selections a savage makes, moreover, involve less conscious imposition of an envisioned form than the selections of a master breeder, and nature’s selections even less still. Selecting, unlike making, has to proceed with some pregiven thing, within the limitations dictated by its preexisting Bauplan.

Darwin’s ‘Mother Nature’ then, as Fodor understands it, even if a theological hold-out or a metaphor still in need of cashing, is given a role in the designing of creatures rather less fundamental than that of the creator in natural theology. But it is just a metaphor, for all that, and Fodor is absolutely right to call it by its name.  Fodor is right, I add, in just the same way that Hume was right to inveigh against the argument from design as resting upon an incomplete analogy.

Since, as Fodor might say, we can be morally certain that Hume never read Darwin, it might seem that what is at stake here is not so much the viability of Darwinism, but rather only of a certain philosophical position that has often been associated with Darwinism but that can exist without the fundamental insights of the theory of evolution and that indeed precedes that theory.  Darwinism would then only be in serious trouble if it necessarily relies upon this philosophical  position in order to explain the particular features of the world its defenders hope to make it explain. Kitcher and Coyne believe that “selecting-for” is largely a philosopher’s invention, and would probably maintain that even if Darwin allowed nature to remain a bit too motherly in failing to cash the metaphor with which he begins the Origin, this in no way compromises the basic insight at the heart of the book, namely, that traits emerge gradually as individual members of a population that prove to be more fit for survival in given environmental circumstances manage to reproduce in greater numbers.  They apparently do not expect Darwin the humble naturalist to offer a satisfying metaphysics of evolution, but only to tell us how evolution works. Fodor disagrees, on the grounds that unless a certain metaphysics is defended –that is, the one on which nature continues to have at least some minimal motherly capacity to guide the emergence of traits– then we cannot coherently speak of one trait’s being selected rather than another coextensive one. Therefore, Fodor thinks, natural selection does not support relevant counterfactuals, and is bad science.   

4.

I will not come down on one side or the other, but instead will wrap things up by a brief consideration of what I take to be the alternative path Fodor would like to see the philosophy of mind, and perhaps all disciplines concerned with humanity and its place in nature, go down. Fodor mentions evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo, as a promising new path of scientific research, seemingly taking it to be a radical break with the Darwinian orthodoxy of the past 150 years, rather than taking it, as leading scholars in the field such as Sean Caroll do, as a supplementation of the adaptationist program. For Fodor, evo-devo appears to point to a way of accounting for adaptive phenomena largely by appeal to endogenous constraints on phenotypes, though he also admits that this is at best a plausible guess.

In the end, Fodor doesn’t really believe that he or anyone else needs to come up with a convincing alternative to adaptationism in order for him to keep on doing what he does best, since in his ideal version of the science of explaining both behavioral and physiological traits, the function of a trait could come to be understood in the absence of any understanding of its evolutionary history. 

But can this really be done?  Fodor rightly notes that evolutionary explanation is always diachronic: it tells you what an organ’s function is now by giving an account of what it “was selected for way back then.”  He goes on to ask:

“Imagine, just as a thought experiment, that Darwin was comprehensively wrong about the origin of species (we all make mistakes).  Would it then follow that the function of the heart is not to pump the blood?  Indeed, that the heart, like the appendix, has no function, and that neither does anything else in the natural order?  If you’re inclined to doubt that follows, then the notion of function you have in mind probably isn’t diachronic; a fortiori, it probably isn’t Darwinian.” 

Fodor considers the example of William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, announcing that “Harvey didn’t have to look outside physiology to explain what the heart is for.” But is that really the case?  Did Harvey understand the function of the heart?  He discovered the circulation of the blood, but he also thought that the blood was returning to the heart because in some deep sense comprehensible only within the framework of Aristotelian natural philosophy, it longed to return home.  In other words, Harvey looked way outside of physiology in order to explain what the heart is for. 

While we’re at it, we may as well also ask whether a modern-day creationist can understand the function of the heart. It depends what you mean by ‘understand’. Fodor and a pentecostal preacher in Alabama would both agree that the heart is for pumping the blood, but would surely disagree as to why the blood is being pumped at all. My hunch is that Harvey’s complete account probably has more in common with that of the preacher than it does with Fodor’s own. Yet it seems that Fodor is not interested in complete accounts, or at least not in accounts complete enough for the differences between his, Harvey’s, and the modern-day creationist’s respective opinions as to why the blood is circulating to come into focus.       

Fodor disagrees with Dennett’s assertion that “Darwin didn’t show us that we don’t have to ask [‘why questions’]. He showed us how to answer them.” The disagreement seems to stem from a deep conviction on his part that in order to understand a thing one need not consider that thing’s history, that an adequate explanation of a thing’s nature does not require an inquiry into that thing’s origins. It is a deep, deep question whether this is true or not. It seems that as a programmatic point, the rejection of historical considerations might be perfectly acceptable for the purposes of psychology and the philosophy of mind. But Fodor wants to move from the partis pris he had earlier taken up in his groundbreaking work in these areas in order to denounce diachronic accounts not just of human minds but of biological entities in general.  Indeed, as a result of his aversion to just-so stories, Fodor seems positively hostile to the scientific effort to –as Elliott Sober describes the task of evolutionary theory– reconstruct the past. 

But if diachronic considerations are excluded outright from the scientific answer to the ‘why’ questions concerning the nature of animals and humans among them, non-scientists will be more than happy to offer their own diachronic considerations, in the form of biblical citation and crypto-creationist ID-theory, in their own very different answers to the very same ‘why’ questions. It is the minimalist answer to the ‘why’ questions –it is, in other words, the naturalistic account of functions– that the adaptationist program makes possible, and that is all too easy to give up once it is assumed –and not just as a thought experiment– that Darwin was comprehensively wrong about the origin of species. This is not to say that natural selection should be retained as the myth the naturalists offer up in answer to that of the supernaturalists. It should be retained as the most plausible hypothesis, towards which the consilience of all sorts of inductions invariably points, even if Fodor’s concern –like that of Gould and Lewontin– about runaway adaptationism is a legitimate one, and even if we must acknowledge with Fodor that there are some scientific, and naturalistic philosophical, endeavors, in which evolutionary considerations have no place.

—

Berlin, April 22, 2008

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Edward B. Rackley

I’m spending this month visiting a clutch of countries in East Africa defined, in part, by their history of armed conflict and failed governance. This is a causal relation, not just collective misfortune: conflicts ignite and humanitarian crises ensue because of poor governance. Felonious states, murderous regimes and the eternal recurrence of la politique du ventre.

Somalia being the sole exception, the rest of this neighborhood is entering an ‘early recovery’ phase now that peace was bought on the cheap. That means no justice for victims; impunity greases all palms. Rebel leaders lay down arms in exchange for posts in the national army, government, or some other enticement. No sticks, just carrots–it’s donkey heaven. Let all the asses come home to papa. The international community who funds these charades can only pray the juice is worth the squeeze.

Lower on the rungs of power, paramilitary thugs and drooling militiamen get their reward too: a poorly run disarmament and demobilization program and the chance to return to village life without trial or sanction for all the bloodshed and rape in their wake. La politique du ventre started these wars; in turn it offers an incentive to end them. I recall Goethe saying that however complex man’s psyche may seem, the ‘circle of his states is soon run through’. Or in this case: ‘me want you got’, as they say in Sierra Leone.

So besides an Empedoclean dance of love and strife, what drives this dynamic of power and suffering, of ‘grievance and greed’, I see a perfectly balanced Pavlovian equation stuck on infinite repeat: Oppression, rebellion, reward. Oppression rebellion, reward. Hunger for power starts wars as easily as it ends them. Keep justice and culpability out of any peace negotiation and the powerful can remain atop the dung heap for generations to come. Laundry detergent dreams for evermore! Even Pavlov’s dogs could have smelled the rot of this seamlessly conditioned feedback loop–a mile high stench totally lost on the big brains at the UN Security Council.

But what about the African Union–are they not capable of some form of leverage, an anchor of reason in this ocean of impunity? Alas, the AU still worships the ‘brotherhood of African leaders’. In practice this means Mugabe gets a winking tisk-tisk from Mbeki; Obasanjo offers exile to Charles Taylor. The AU says nothing, which is consent. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of ZANU-PF supporters continue believing the absurdity that to vote for Mugabe is their only hope against ‘imminent British invasion’. A successful politics of the belly thus appears to confer mass hypnotic powers to the demagogue over the hoi polloi. If the AU ever awakes from its hypnotic state of genuflection, maybe it will stop facilitating the dingdongs at Africa’s helm and roundly condemn them.

Taking Tiger Mountain

So who’s taking Tiger Mountain by storm? Here comes a warm jest. Given the colossal scale of human suffering this madness entails, this post-conflict neighborhood is swarming with massive UN operations, hundreds of NGOs doing relief and development, philanthropists, human rights activists and do-gooders of every stripe. It’s easy to dismiss the humanitarian circus as futile or naively quixotic; it is a most imperfect enterprise, full of disappointment and disillusion. Nor can it fix any of the political dysfunction and self-serving governance at the heart of Africa’s problems. Still, I find hope in the humanitarian movement because it is the only full-fledged assault on dystopia going in this part of the world. Everyone else is either getting crushed under a boot, or donning boots to do some crushing.

I’m in Rwanda right now, and haven’t been here since 1994 just after the genocide. It offers a significant exception to my rant above. An amazing transformation of the country has occurred; it stands in complete opposition to its immediate neighbors, particularly DRC and Burundi. Under President Kagame’s rule, it is not exactly a democratic place, and there is no independent media or much civil society to speak of. But security and the foundations for economic development are clearly here, and Rwanda has prospered as a result.

One thing I agree with Kagame on is his ambition to wean the country off of international charity as quickly as possible. I too want a world where there are only workers, no expatriate labor force or foreign donors at the top of the food chain in developing countries. International financial assistance to private and public sectors will be needed, but the vast machine of intermediary entities–international NGOs, UN agencies, the World Bank country offices–should disappear, the sooner the better. Direct support to indigenous efforts, providing human capital and capacity are sufficient, will get everyone off the ground and into the air. Hence my visit: our little initiative (called ‘PRISM Partnerships’) aims to connect local civil society and NGOs with financial backers elsewhere.

I’m surprised how many positive reactions I’ve gotten from people across the board: locals, internationals, cynics and dreamers. From the bottom of the well at night, one can only dream–not of utopia but of resistance strategies, of the infinite possibilities for effective assault on dystopia.

14 ans depuis…

This week is the national commemoration of the 1994 genocide here in Rwanda. Two Rwandan friends took me to the Kigali Memorial Center today, amongst thick crowds. A grenade had been tossed into the place the day before–perpetrators and survivors do not cohabit well, and anti-Tutsi ‘genocide ideology’ is still very much alive and well in the region.

The experience was heavy and I choked up, but emerged strangely grateful that I had been in the country for the immediate aftermath of the primary wave of killing. The visit also brought back a lot of memories from that period of my life that had faded or simply been repressed. I’ve always contextualized my time in Rwanda in 1994 as just another relief mission to a war-torn country, but I now realize that it was something else entirely.

It’s easy to say, but genocide is the most extreme human transgression. That thought needs a visceral connection; otherwise it remains purely intellectual, subjective and forgettable. Today I grasped in my bones that there is nothing else at the bottom of the human psyche after all other trap doors have given way. Beyond madness, beyond reason, beyond fantasy, beyond brute physicality, genocide is the final cul-de-sac at the bottom of human consciousness.

There are several genocide memorials around the country; this one is both a museum and an unmarked cemetery with enormous mass graves in submerged cement containers. Name plates are fixed to an adjacent wall, somewhat like the Vietnam Memorial in  Washington.

Survivor stories are playing on video screens positioned throughout the tour, which occurs largely underground. That of Valentine runs: “I lay down again among the dead bodies. It was three days after the killings, so the bodies stank. The Interahamwe would pass by without entering the room, and dogs would come to eat the bodies. I lived there for 43 days . . .” [read rest here]

Rwanda is recovering slowly; there is security and infrastructure, the two main ingredients for human prosperity in a post-conflict country. Latent tensions between Hutu and Tutsi are spreading, however, and many I’ve talked to are not optimistic about the prospect of peaceful cohabitation.

A book through my fingers

Once in a while you stumble on a book that’s been out for a while and ask, ‘How could I have missed this?’ Chris and Katy, my PRISM partners, have an excellent Africa library in their Nairobi home. I picked up a historical musing by Sven Lindqvist called ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’–the reference being Conrad’s Kurtz character in Heart of Darkness.

Out in Swedish since 1992 and in English since 1996, how did it slip by me? Old and lazy, I surmise. To make up for my failings, I’ve been trudging around with it for the last couple weeks, letting its thesis seep into my veins, like a slow-drip IV.

Lindqvist writes with a delectable dryness, like Kapuscinski (Guardian obit here), one of the few western writers on Africa I respect. Lindqvist also travels ’embedded’, and his content is driven by his encounters and their always unpredictable unfoldings. A man infatuated with Fortuna is a kindred soul.

Unlike Kapuscinski, always meek before taxing geopolitical questions, Lindqvist is a gleeful slaughterer of sacred cows, an iconoclast and anti-ideologue par excellence. The thesis of this book is that the Nazi quest for Aryan supremacy and Lebensraum was at its core an application of the expansionist and racist principles of imperialism and colonialism that Europeans had long been applying to the Third World.

In this light, there is little exceptional about the Holocaust itself, given that its precursors were myriad. No one notices this historical continuity because the victims of European expansionism and subjugation were not Europeans, until Nazism–itself a culmination of certain trends in European thought and action over centuries. Is this so shocking a thesis? I think not.

Among the African countries I know well where large scale human massacres have occurred, I’m finding that debate in Rwanda over justice, reconciliation and root causes is relatively free of the usual blame game and denial of responsibility that goes on elsewhere. All are aware that colonialism did much to poison Hutu-Tutsi relations here, and post-independence relations with France have been dubious to say the least. France was forced to pull its diplomatic presence here in 2006.

But Rwandans are not blind to the fact that a homegrown logic was unleashed here: it was not imported or forced down anyone’s throat by outsiders. What I’ve found so uncanny is that many here read the metamorphosis of mind that led to Hutu Power and the ‘Intent to Destroy’ (the name of Lindqvist’s new book on the methods of genocide) that were unleashed in April 1994 in almost identical terms as Arendt’s elucidation of the origins of totalitarianism.

A group I met today, Never Again Rwanda, made this case quite clearly, despite no one knowing Arendt or her work. Their efforts revolve around creating a ‘culture of reason’ in a country where a ‘culture of silence’ predominates, and automatic obedience before authority is expected and assumed. Critical thinking is rare, and not rewarded. NAR are trying to inculcate these values in schools and among local authorities.

Genocidal ideology is resurging, and eyewitnesses to the genocide who survived and can now testify are being targeted and killed. ‘Survivor’ and ‘perpetrator’ are the new categories for Tutsi and Hutu. Although everyone knows that ethnic hatred is an organizing principle to the violence and not its root cause (which is unequal wealth and power sharing), many remain susceptible to ethnic rhetoric. NAR is doing good work; we hope to find them more funding to expand their efforts on a national scale.

Ugali in Kigali

I feel like the Cookie Monster when I’m in this part of Africa – can’t get enough ugali. Doesn’t help that I’m a vacuum cleaner by nature, generally eating anything within reach of my arms or legs. My gaping orifice welcomes anything remotely edible, except manioc ugali (foufou); I like the maize version.

The most recent leg of my journey took me from Bukavu to Kigali, where I would fly back to Nairobi. It took a while to figure it out, but my cramped minivan was filled with Banyamulenge (Tutsis of Rwandan extraction born or raised in Congo). Politics was the primary discussion point during our six hours together, and lots of laughter about life in general. In today’s ethnically charged climate, Banyamulenge are no longer welcome in Congo. Many felt forced to immigrate to Rwanda, a country they don’t consider home, and that does not accept them. Many never learned to speak Kinyarwandan, as pressure to assimilate in Congo meant speaking Swahili and French. Unwelcome in Congo, in Rwanda they must assimilate again, this time to a society controlled by Tutsis from Uganda—English and Kinyarwandan speakers.

JG, a friend here, was born and raised in Bukavu to a Tutsi refugee father and a Congolese (Shi) mother. In his final years of study towards priesthood at Bukavu’s prestigious seminary, his mentors and colleagues turned on him. Because he was half-Tutsi, he had to leave. With no English or Kinyarwandan, he came to Kigali and found the professional ranks occupied entirely by Tutsis who’d followed the RPF from Uganda. Along with the Hutu majority here, JG is essentially excluded from participating in the bright and prosperous Kigali of today.

Over ugali and beer yesterday, JG and I recalled the French expulsion from Rwanda in late 2006. For a government that brooks no dissent, no opposition politics and barely a peep from civil society, it was logical that they eject a threatening foreign presence: recall the Kagame indictments issued by a French court (and more recently by a Spanish court). However consistent the logic of this regime—brook no dissent—it is a recipe for open hostility, sooner or later.

JG wants a country where ‘all Rwandans are one’; his NGO works with former prisoners (ex-genocidaires Hutu) to reintegrate into society. Very brave, and essential if the time bomb is to be diffused. But JG’s work is a drop in the ocean, unfortunately. And as long as the government treats everyone except the Ugandan Tutsi community as potential traitors, the supposed center will not hold.

South Kivu Rising

Overnight shelling in downtown Bujumbura last week by the FNL, a Hutu extremist group in Burundi; attacks on the Rwandan genocide memorial and commemorative activities in Kigali during my visit the week before. Is there a link? Re-read the Hutu Ten Commandments, in case they’ve slipped your mind.

Hutu Power is once again raising its fist across the region. For the uninitiated, Pouvoir Hutu is the local species of genocidal ideology that unleashed the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It is also largely responsible for both Eastern Congo’s ongoing mess and Burundi’s failure to consolidate peace, some two years after a formal peace agreement and national presidential elections. Besides ongoing battles between the FDLR/Interhamwe, Laurent Nkunda’s troops and the Congolese national army, the last major assault on Tutsi civilians was the Gatumba massacre in August 2005.

The ideology covers the region; its supply lines and popular support base criss-cross Rwanda, Burundi, Congo and Tanzania. Eastern Congo’s unruly wilderness provides excellent camouflage for extremist Hutu groups of Rwandan or Burundian extraction. Their rear bases are reportedly concentrated in the deep south of South Kivu. If Kagame and Kabila are able to find common cause on confronting this problem, it will likely see renewed conflict in South Kivu. Kagame has already stated that if Kabila gets no results, the Rwandan army will invade to deal with the problem. If that happens, we can expect the resurgence of a regional war.

If I could change one thing about international assistance to Africa, it would be to drop the democracy and elections obsession. Security and infrastructure are the most basic conditions for progress. Democracy bakes no bread, stops no bullets and prevents no rape in this part of the world.

///
Sugarphone
Jim Culleny

Your voice on the telephone
is sugar to my ears.

Your electric breath nudging magnets,
eating miles as it comes —
meeting relays, swelling,
exciting antennae…

Your voice runs with light.

It enters at absurd gates
convoluted to catch frequencies
of love and death; appendages
that on my young freshcut head
once stood out like pink wings.

Now on this motel phone
buried in blankets they catch you,
or what of you electricity brings.

Geography disappears.

Squeezed to bits by chips
you come juice sweet, and ease
through the earpiece of this
sugarphone.

///

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate’er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o’er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

Horace, Ode 4.7. The great English poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman thought this poem the greatest in all of ancient literature. This is his excellent translation. It’s an amazing poem in how quickly Horace takes it from a meditation on the rebirth inherent in Spring to the inevitability of death. But that was Horace. He had an eye for decay. He looked at nature and he saw the mask of death.

Sometimes the early days of Spring are the most death-like. In New York City, just as the newest buds are sprouting a period of grayness sets in. Always. Days of gray and a cold wind coming from who-knows-where. It’s a reminder of that transience whereby Spring already slips into Summer and Summer into Autumn. Horace’s Latin bumps along here, driving the words forward with the time. A brief reflection on the advent of Spring is already a glimpse at winter, “when nothing stirs.”

Horace can barely think on this one moment of Spring without time tumbling out in front of him, running away with the world. And so it does. About this, Horace was always unforgiving. You cannot escape the brute reality of nature, which is death. To be human, is to be an animal, is to die. Horace will have no other reality, above or below us. He flattens the cosmos into one terrestrial reality, that of the infinite pointless cycle of living. No Gods, no demons, will disrupt it.

Upon this bleak plain Horace builds his modest ethics. Housman translates it as a simple four-word phrase, “Feast then thy heart” (the Latin does not specifically refer to feasts but the gist is there). Under the eyes of death, living is a temporary feasting. But more than that. The feasting is what it is because it is under the eyes of death. That is to say, what makes our feast, what gives it its specific tension, is recognizing that it is acted out in the face of oblivion, in spite of and because of that oblivion. We are meant to know that we will die and in that knowing, to have added some urgency to our feasting.

A melancholy feast, perhaps. But Horace refuses to extricate melancholy from joy. That’s the essential genius of his poetry. Joy is a worldly thing for him, an earthly thing, a thing of dirt and food and bodies. The early days of Spring are thus particularly Horacian. The hovering zone between life and death that holds the two together. Fragile green sprouts on otherwise dead branches. A cold wind cuts an otherwise sunny day in half.

by Ram Manikkalingam

I recently visited Somalia to attend a meeting of religious leaders, clan elders and women leaders. 

Somalia is not a very stable place. But like all unstable countries – there are pockets of relative stability. While this is true of most countries that have an internal armed conflict, Somalia has the additional problem of having no state, though they have an Ethiopian backed government, and a number of militias, ranging from clan-based and Islamist-led to business-run.  The meeting I attended could have been like any meeting of activists in the world concerned about their own country, except the discussion was about how to reconcile the conflicting groups in Somalia. The question was how does one move from a situation of semiorganised-chaos to organised-chaos and then stability.  As the only outsider present, I was asked to speak about “Western and other methods of resolving conflict”.  The Somalis were keen to learn about the world from me.  But, as usually happens in these situations, you quickly find that the two worlds are not that different, and that you (who were supposed to teach) learn as much, or even more, than they (who were supposed to learn).

The meeting consisted of three parts. The first was on the Koran and conflict resolution, led by a sheikh from a local mosque.  The second was on traditional Somali methods of resolving conflict, led by a clan elder. And I led the discussion on western and other methods of conflict resolution.  After my session we went to have a Somali lunch of rice and goat meat.  As I was tucking into my food, one of the participants – a Mufti from a large town – inquired politely through my interpreter – if he could ask me a small question. 

And as I invited him to, he blurted out:

“Prof. Ram, how can we solve this problem between Islam and the West?”

This was not an easy question to answer over lunch.  And while it had featured tangentially in our discussions over two days – we had focused our thoughts on the far more pressing issue of the civil war in Somalia.  With my mouth full of tender goat meat – I struggled to think about how I could even begin to answer his question.  Unable to do so, I fell back on asking the question back, rather than providing an answer.  I said:

“Mufti what do you think the problem is between Islam and the West?”

It was clear the Mufti had given much thought to this issue, because he responded immediately.  This is what he said:

“In Islam there are things we must do as a Muslim and things we must not do.  For example, the Koran says that we must pray a particular number times a day, and that we must contribute a certain part of our income as charity.  Similarly, we must not eat certain food and we must not blaspheme. And as a devout Muslim, I follow these religious injunctions.  At the same time there is another category of things that we may or may not do.  Here Islam does not stipulate what we must do, but permits us as devout Muslims to make a choice, one way or another. But the extremists do not accept this category.  What they are doing is to seek to reduce this category, so that everything comes under their control.  They try to reduce the choice available to Muslims, by saying that we are required to do something or not do something, when Islam, itself, has made no such demand of us.

Even if we disagree with these extremists, we can still argue with them. They can live their lives and we can live ours.  But the problem really begins when some people use guns to tell us what to do and how to practice our religion.  Not only do they argue that Islam requires us to do certain things, when it does not, or that it requires us not to do certain things, that we believe it permits us to do, they also threaten us with violence, if we do not follow their injunctions.  This is the problem we have in the Muslim world” 

“What is the problem with the West?” I queried.

He had an answer to that as well.

“The West says that they cannot integrate Muslims into their societies because they are Christian and we are Muslim.  So they discriminate against us.  When we respond that we thought you are tolerant of all faiths, and that your state is not linked to any one religion, they quickly change their position.  They say we are not Christian, we are secular. We have no place for religion and the problem with you is not that you are Muslim, but that you are religious. So we cannot integrate you into our societies.  The West is not sure if it is Christian or it is secular. But it is sure that it does not like Muslims – either way.”

I was impressed with the Mufti.  He had summarized a quite complex debate into a very succinct articulation of the tension between Islam and the West.  But there was still one question nagging me about his answer.  How different is violent extremism from extremism without violence. Don’t the two go hand in hand? Isn’t extremism the first step to violent extremism?  And to fight violent extremism, shouldn’t one also fight extremism.  The Mufti’s toleration of Muslim extremism, even when he disagreed with it, sounded misplaced to me, given his resistance to violent extremism.

A General from a South East Asian country dealing with violent terrorism set me straight, at another seminar I attended .  I asked the General a question about engaging extremists.  He said:

“We make a distinction between extremists and terrorists. We like extremists, because extremists are 50-50.  Half may go the violent side, but the other half will not.  And it is these extremists who have an impact on those resorting to violence, not moderate or secular Muslims like me.  To convince those killing and bombing, to stop, we need the help of the extremists. So we must not alienate them. Rather we must work with them to tell those using violent and terrorist methods – your views are alright, provided you express them within the democratic political system without resorting to violence.  And you must convince those who share your views and are using violence to do the same.”

His basic point – which was counterintuitive to the standard approach against terrorism – was that extremists are the allies, not necessarily, the enemies in the fight against terrorism. 

His explanation began to make sense as I thought about the other war that had been a priority for the US – “the war on drugs” – until it was eclisped by “the war on terror”.  In many ways “the war on drugs” is much like the “war on terror”. It has been going on for a long time; it has engaged a lot of resources; it has put a lot of people in prison; it has cost a lot in money and lives; it is indefinite; and it is not clear how much progress has really been made, when compared with the approach taken in other countries – such as The Netherlands. 

Just as those fighting terrorism argue extremism must be fought because it leads to terrorism, those fighting the war on drugs, argue that “soft drugs” like marijuana must be eradicated, because smoking marijuana, leads to the use of harder drugs like heroin.  But most of us who have smoked marijuana (though I never inhaled) do not end up becoming heroin addicts.  Clearly some do, but they are in the minority.  And expending resources on fighting marijuana, which has a relatively smaller social cost, does not help with fighting heroin use.  And lumping the two together can be counter productive.

So extremism, while a challenge, does not invariably lead to violence and terrorism. And tolerating those with extremist views need not imply tolerating those who use violence and terror to propagate them.  Moreover, it is those with extremist views, rather than others, who are more likely to understand the motivations of those who resort to violence and terrorism and therefore can be a source of support in the struggle to move towards more stable and less violent societies.

The other day I had an email from an angry reader. He accused me of maligning the good name of scientists in my cultural history of superweapons. Scientists were not “doomsday men” and the phrase “an organization of dangerous lunatics” should not be applied to the secret laboratories where scientists developed superweapons. As someone who had worked in the nuclear industry, he wanted to make it plain to me that it was only thanks to such “lunatics” and their many scientific discoveries that I could enjoy a comfortable and healthy life, free from the fear of Nazism and Communism.

I must admit I was slightly taken aback by the heartfelt anger of his email. It was clear there was not going to be a meeting of minds. But in the end we did have an amicable and interesting exchange of emails.

I explained that the title of my book, Doomsday Men, was borrowed from JB Priestley’s 1938 novel of the same name, about how an atomic doomsday device is created at a secret laboratory in the Mojave Desert. My correspondent found the title provocative and even cheap. I hoped other readers would see the irony, and, as my book is about how film and fiction prefigures our obsession with superweapons, insisted it was appropriate to use a title that wouldn’t have been out of place in the pulps.

Indeed, the whole point of the book was not to blame scientists for weapons of mass destruction, but to show how humankind’s most terrible yet ingenious inventions were inspired by a desperate dream, one that was shared by a whole culture, including writers like Jack London and HG Wells, a dream of peace and scientific utopia. In a sense, we are all doomsday men. After all, it was Wells who coined the phrase “atomic bomb” before even World War I. And it was also Wells who in 1933 described scientists developing weapons of mass destruction in a secret laboratory as “an organization of dangerous lunatics”.

The great scientific romancer HG Wells could hardly be described as hostile to science or scientists. It was his anger at the misuse of science to create weapons of mass destruction that led him to condemn such scientists. I share that anger and it prompted me to explore the cultural reasons why people from all walks of life came to think that superweapons were a solution to human problems.

Readers of Wells’s fiction were familiar with mad scientists – Griffin or Moreau, for example – as well as those who hoped to improve the world, men like Holsten and Karenin in The World Set Free (1914). In the early years of the twentieth century, popular culture turned scientists into saviours who freed the world from war with awesome superweapons. But the experience of gas warfare, then biological weapons, and finally the atomic bomb gradually changed public perceptions. As fears grew about superweapons, their creators who had transformed the laws of nature into instruments of total destruction were increasingly depicted as mad scientists. Those who had been raised up to be gods, were later cast down as devils – or at least as acolytes of that master of megadeath, Dr Strangelove.

In the atomic age, as the public learned to live with first the A-bomb, then the H-bomb, and finally the world-destroying cobalt or C-bomb, scientists were stereotyped as mad, bad and dangerous (to borrow Christopher Frayling’s phrase). “What you are doing is mad, it is diabolic,” says the scientist’s assistant in Ernest B. Schoedsack’s movie Dr Cyclops (1940): “You are tampering with powers reserved to God.” In the classic science fiction film The Thing (1951), based on John W. Campbell’s story about alien invasion, the sinister scientist Dr Carrington is prepared to sacrifice human lives in the cause of science: “Knowledge is more important than life… We’ve only one excuse for existing: to think, to find out, to learn…It doesn’t matter what happens to us.”

Such scientists would be the end of us all, people feared. “What hope can there be for mankind…when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in the brilliant Cat’s Cradle (1963). As far as film and fiction were concerned, scientists were not just Strangelovian doomsday men. Their whole outlook on life was positively warped. “If the murders of twelve innocent people can help save one human life it will have been worth it”, reasons Doctor Necessiter in The Man With Two Brains (1983).

But these are, of course, mere fictions. As physicist Sidney Perkowitz points out in his enjoyable survey of Hollywood Science (2007), although they may on occasion appear somewhat arrogant, most scientists are not megalomaniacs: “few scientists have a burning desire to rule the world; typically, they don’t even enjoy managing people and research budgets”. He does, however, concede that one stereotype may have a basis in truth – the image of scientists as being sartorially challenged: “The rumpled look is a badge of authority; to scientists, the ‘suits’, formally dressed bureaucrats, are members of a despised race.” (I’m aware this may be a controversial view. In the interest of balance, I urge readers to also consult the excellent Geek Chic, ed by Sherrie A. Inness, especially chapter 2, “Lab Coats and Lipstick”, by L. Jowett.)

But Freeman Dyson suggests truth may be every bit as strange as fiction. The physicist, who worked on weapons projects as well as the Project Orion atomic spaceship in the 1950s, thinks there’s more than a grain of truth in the Strangelove stereotype. “The mad scientist is not just a figure of speech,” says Dyson, “there really are such people, and they love to play around with crazy schemes. Some of them may even be dangerous, so one is not altogether wrong in being scared of such people.”

Recently, I was powerfully reminded of Dyson’s comment while reviewing the reissue of Dan O’Neill’s classic nuclear history The Firecracker Boys (1994). In 1958, physicist Edward Teller, the self-styled father of the H-bomb, turned up in Juneau, Alaska, and held an impromptu news conference. He was there to unveil Project Chariot, a plan to create a deep-water harbour at Cape Thompson in northwest Alaska using thermonuclear bombs. Seventy million cubic yards of earth would be shifted instantly using nuclear explosions equivalent to 2.4 million tons of TNT. That’s 40% of all the explosive energy expended in World War II. Some firecracker.

Locals said they didn’t need a harbour. They also raised understandable concerns about radioactivity. After all, the year before, Nevil Shute had published On the Beach, one of the best-selling of all nuclear fictions (four million copies by 1980), in which the world dies a lingering death caused by fallout from a nuclear war fought with cobalt bombs. Teller was unfazed by the criticisms. That year he had defended atmospheric nuclear tests, claiming such fallout was no more dangerous than “being an ounce overweight”. He tried to reassure the Alaskans: “We have learned to use these powers with safety”. He even promised them a harbour in the shape of a polar bear.

Teller and his fellow scientists at the Livermore Laboratory in California were on a mission to redeem the nuclear bomb. They wanted to overcome the public’s irrational “phobic” reactions to nuclear weapons. “Geographical engineering” was the answer, said Teller: “We will change the earth’s surface to suit us.” The Faustian hubris of the man appeared to know no bounds. Dubbed in the press “Mr H-Bomb”, Teller even admitted to a “temptation to shoot at the moon” with nukes. You need a new Suez Canal? Blast it out with my thermonuclear bombs. Or how about turning the Mediterranean into a freshwater lake to irrigate the Sahara? All you need to do is to close the Straits of Gibraltar by detonating a few H-bombs (clean ones, of course, absolutely guaranteed). No problem. We can do it – trust me, I’m a physicist.

Dan O’Neill interviewed Teller. Or at least he tried to. As soon as he started asking questions, Teller “cursed loudly and with great facility” and tore up the release form he had just signed to allow O’Neill to use the interview. Despite Teller’s hissy fit, O’Neill’s remarkable book shows how government agencies lied to local people, attempted to bribe scientists with promises of research funding, and manipulated the Alaskan media, which demonstrated “more sycophancy than scrutiny”. But a grass-roots movement of local Alaskans – Eskimo whale hunters, bush pilots, church ladies, and log-cabin conservationists – joined forces with a few principled scientists to successfully oppose America’s nuclear establishment, and in so doing sowed the seeds of modern environmentalism.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Teller devotes a mere page to this episode in his 2001 Memoirs. Les Viereck, a “soft-spoken and shy” biologist, whose research helped expose the real cost of Teller’s plans, lost his university position because of his opposition to Project Chariot. In a letter, he told his employer: “A scientist’s allegiance is first to truth and personal integrity and only secondarily to an organized group such as a university, a company, or a government.” Now there’s a scientist you could be proud of. HG Wells would have turned him into a heroic character, the kind of scientist who might really save the world.

But perhaps that’s where the problem lies. As the Marquise von O tells the Russian Count at the end of Kleist’s great novella, “she would not have seen a devil in him then if she had not seen an angel in him at their first meeting”. We burden scientists with such impossibly high expectations: they’re going to discover a source of unlimited energy, invent a weapon that will make war impossible, and along the way find a cure for cancer. But when the philosopher’s stone turns into a Pandora’s box, we turn our saviours into Strangeloves. Despite their miraculous discoveries, scientists are only human. We shouldn’t forget that.

O’Neill is rightly scathing about Teller’s role in Project Chariot: it seems Teller and his colleagues were more interested in improving the public image of nuclear weapons than in the lives of Alaskans. A Los Alamos colleague of Teller accused the brilliant scientist of becoming corrupted by his “obsession for power”. According to Emilio Segrè, Teller was “dominated by irresistible passions” that threatened his “rational intellect”. Another colleague said simply, “Teller has a messianic complex”.

Thankfully, for every Teller there is a Les Viereck. If you don’t believe me, then read Mind, Life, and Universe (2007), a wonderfully inspiring collection of interviews with scientists about their lives and work, edited by Lynn Margulis and Eduardo Punset.

But despite this, sometimes a dark suspicion creeps up on me, a nagging fear that somewhere out there a Dr Hoenikker is hard at work, intoxicated by his own genius and the desire for ultimate knowledge. Like Teller, this phantom Strangelove has forgotten Joseph Rotblat’s wise words: “a scientist is a human being first, and a scientist second”. All I can do at such moments is console myself by reciting the well-known Bokononist Calypso:

“Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,

And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.

And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,

Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.”

///
The Tao that can be thought of is not the real Tao
so the Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao either
soooo, the Tao that can be named is likewise nothing too.
.………………………………………–Lao Tzu, sort of

'The spirit of the best of men is spotless,
like the new Lotus in the [muddy] water
which does not adhere to it.
………………………………………. –buddhanet.net

………………………..
…………………………
………………………..

…………………………..

……………………………

…….………………………………
…………………………………………………………………….
My Religious Life
Jim Culleny

I was Catholic,
but was not universal enough
when I was.

I was Protestant,
but did not protest enough
when I was.

I was a Transcendental Meditationist,
but was not transcendent enough
when I was.

I was a dilettante Buddhist,
but (unlike the lotus) I failed to bud
when I was.

Now as a Taoist
in an inscrutable plan
I’m most content, because
it’s nothing I can really talk about
if I am.

Listen: Here

///

There’s no getting around it: My Blueberry Nights wasn’t good.  As impossible as it is to deny that Wong Kar-Wai is a powerful and important filmmaker, it is equally impossible to deny that My Blueberry Nights is tone-deaf, spaced-out, and derivative.  Strangely enough, one of the things it’s derivative of is Wong’s own film In the Mood for Love, which was a pitch-perfect, zoned-in original–My Blueberry Nights even reuses the piece of music that’s burned into the memory of anyone who saw the earlier movie. 

The other thing Blueberry is derivative of is the semiotic universe of American film, and David Lynch in particular.  The movie conjures its world with the following elements: diners, pie and ice cream; hardbitten but kind proprietors; ingenues on the run from painful pasts; cuckolded alcoholics with good hearts; huge Nevadan landscapes in telephoto with suns gloriously setting; a superficially multicultural (read: multi-racial) but culturally unspecific set of characters; whooshing New York City elevated trains used as scene transitions; a score by that living piece of American film history, Ry Cooder.  Each element the film uses feels drawn from other movies rather than from the observation of life; the charming moments that do occur are drowned in a feeling of being observed themselves, looked for and wished for rather than found and delighted in.

It might sound unfair, simple, and even xenophobic to call Wong to a filmic tourist.  But his imagery, usually utterly assured, here feels just off, just clumsy; the sharpness of his cuts slightly dulled; his direction of actors unfocused.  I think it’s essentially right to group My Blueberry Nights with a general class of films we could call lost director.  Filmmakers, after doing great work in a particular locale, often make an inexplicably tinny movie elsewhere (often, the U.S.).  They have a tendency to lose their ear.  An example would be Danny Boyle, who, after producing such sharp portrayals of young Glaswegians in Trainspotting and especially Shallow Grave, came to America and made the laughable A Life Less Ordinary.  Martin Scorcese’s movie about Tibetan monks?  Emir Kusturica’s attempt to make an American movie, with Johnny Depp and Vincent Gallo?  Lost director.

Think of films that really work: they tend to emerge from near-ethnographic knowledge, from a profound feel for a time and place.  This is true of the best films I’ve seen this year, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, The Band’s Visit, No Country For Old Men.  Actually, make that the best new films; the best one I’ve seen at a cinema this year is an old one, Le Mépris, rereleased–which is about a film production in Rome and Capri, with beautiful French starlet-kittens; vulgar, potent American money men; and elderly, cultured European directors.  Talk about a world Godard knew well.  (If it is being screened near you, see it immediately.  IMMEDIATELY.  Even if, no, especially if you’ve seen it before.)

Two objections.  Number one, since you mention Godard, what about A bout de souffle, with all its allusions to American noir and police procedurals?  Well, exactly: they are allusions, not the direct subject matter.  The movie’s about a beautiful French man and a beautiful American ingenue in Paris, and it’s loaded with allusions and references and non-diagetic stuff concerning a French cineaste-auteur’s fascination with American film–entirely the right way of going about things.  The fantasies are based in and stem from realities.  If Godard had, in his love of John Ford or Howard Hawks, decided to come to America to make Westerns, then: lost director.

(A point of clarification here.  I liked Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate quite a bit, despite its superficially seeming like a classic case of lost director: French director makes a film about an American man and an Italian woman starting in London and ending in Hong Kong and Shanghai.  Here’s the difference: the characters in Boarding Gate are simply contemporary globalists, multilingual frequent flyers.  Assayas gets them.  The characters in My Blueberry Nights are romanticized creatures, idealized archetypes; Wong doesn’t know them so much as fantasize them.)

Objection two: Isn’t this whole thing simply a long-winded way of saying, shoot what you know?  Not quite.  The interesting thing is, the slogan seems quite obviously true for films, but quite untrue for its close relative, photography.  That is, photography as a discourse or a formal language has from the very beginning seemed to encourage the documentation of what is foreign rather than the communication of the familiar.  Consider Henri Cartier-Bresson, with his ability to snap off perfect compositions fifteen clicks out of twenty.  We don’t complain of his lack of empathetic understanding of the ice skaters or Indian train porters he so magically resolves into visual chords; his art is more formal, more spatial than that.

Or to take a recent, favorite example: Wolfgang Tillmans.  Maybe the thing that impresses me most about him is that, unlike filmmakers, whose ear and eye tend to be keyed to particular psychogeographic locations, his work produces a sense of unity despite subject matter of great variety.  He is able to impose his particular way of looking on clubgoers, bowls of fruit, bunched clothing, astronomical eclipses, trees, the Concorde, photographic paper bent and photographed.  There is, in Tillmans, a kind of opposite tendency to that which plagues Wong in My Blueberry Nights: Tillmans turns everything into a photograph, forcing us to mediate on representation, on himself as a maker of images.  You may remember one feature of his beautiful still lives: the grocery-store stickers that are occasionally visible on an orange or an apple.  Those unremoved stickers suggest an immense amount, more than I can type, about the relations between the world and artwork, aesthetic tradition and social duties, the real and the ideal, and the twin roles of the artist: to imagine and to reproduce. 

Yet where still photographs remain essentially formal and non-narrative, the motion of motion pictures introduces narrative, in the form of time visibly elapsing.  And when time visibly elapses at roughly the speed we tend to experience it elapsing in the real world (yes, I believe in it!), there emerges a fuller form of another representational aspect: character.  The observation of character, in the sense of human behavioral particularities, is required of the narrative filmmaker in a way that the still photographer does not confront.  (Please don’t think I am claiming that filmmakers are thus more comprehensive in some way than photographers–if anything, the implication may be that photographers are better able to take on subject matter beyond the level of humanism, as with the structural analyses of Gursky or the conceptually rich dialectics of Jeff Wall.)  But back to character, which emerges when pictures move: hence the need, I believe, for a filmmaker to understand a locale not only visually, compositionally, but characterologically–dare I say it, emotionally.  Which is what Wong didn’t do, this time out.

P.S. If you happen to visit Mexico City before June, I highly, highly recommend seeing the Tillmans retrospective at the Museo de Tamayo–he helps us make sense of modernity, while remaining highly idiosyncratic.  And if you are in Mexico City this spring (and I think you should be, the jacaranda trees are in full bloom… go now and thank me later), please go have the exquisite black beans, stewed with oregano, onion and bacon, at El Califa.  Please do.  (Black bean information courtesy of 3qd lurker Alan S. Page.  Thank him later.)

My Blueberry Nights (2007)
dir. Wong Kar-Wai

Le Mépris (1963)
dir. Jean-Luc Godard

Wolfgang Tillmans
Museo de Tamayo
México, D.F.
14 February-25 May 2008

El Califa
Condesa
22 Calle Altata
México, D.F.
tel. 52 55 52 71 76 66

See the rest of my Dispatches…