On Saturday morning, when I entered my kitchen to make tea for my brother-in-law (BIL) – who was visiting for the long weekend – I found him sitting at the kitchen table, looking intently at a row of glasses of water: eight of them, filled up to the rim.

“No thanks, I will not have tea. I’d rather have this water.” He declared.
“All eight of them?” I sounded surprised.
“ To flush the toxins, that is how many you need.” he said.
“Eight glasses can’t flush your sins.” I teased BIL, the hedge fund manager.
“I said toxins, not sins.”
I sat there and watched him with curiosity: his eager gulps of the first glass waned into reluctant slurps of the fourth and forced sips of the last.

Relishing my tea, I envisioned the silent journey of this water through his body.

The water falls into BIL’s stomach, which absorbs some and pushes the rest into the intestines. The surface of the small intestines sucks it up – not like a sponge, but by actively creating an osmotic gradient. (Water travels by osmosis from lower osmotic concentration to higher. The amount of dissolved solutes in water determines its osmolality; more solute concentration generates higher osmolality.) The cells lining the intestinal lining actively absorb sodium ions (salt) and extrude them into the microscopic space between the cells, which creates a higher sodium concentration in this area. Water permeates into this space from the intestinal lumen by osmosis and then leaks into the blood stream meandering in the minute capillary blood vessels.

BIL’s intestine must cope with the massive deluge; about 90% percent of water will enter the blood circulation through the small intestine. The permeability and absorption of water will decrease as it travels to BIL’s colon.

Blood circulation carries water to the farthest cells and inundates them. The cells have been used to this; they remember the times when they drifted alone in the oceanic soup four billion years ago. After many mutations and missteps they evolved a wall around them – the cell membrane – to protect them from the surrounding poisons and maintain their internal chemical tranquility, which includes maintaining a normal osmolality of 285 to 290 mili-Osmols. The cell walls maintain this constant osmolality by rejecting the entry of sodium into the cell and preventing the escape of potassium and phosphate from inside.

When BIL’s consumed water arrives, it dilutes the fluid surrounding the cell and drags down the osmolality. The cell membrane lets only the water permeate into its interior thus maintaining the osmotic equilibrium. The dehydrated cells will keep the water but the already hydrated cells reject excess water.

Water also reaches BIL’s brain and heart – the two organs with sensors, which detect water load.

The hypothalamus part of brain senses variations in osmolality (solute content) and in response secrets a chemical messenger: anti diuretic hormone (ADH), which regulates the volume of urine excretion. An excess of ADH decreases and lack of ADH increases the urine production.

The heart has pressure sensors, which read the volume of circulating water and produce another chemical – natriuretic peptide – in response. Higher circulating water volume induces this peptide, which in turn coerces the kidneys to get rid of excess water.

BIL’s water binge does two things: it decreases the blood osmolality and increases the circulating volume. This shuts down production of ADH and enhances the manufacture of the peptide form the heart. Consequently, kidneys oblige and get rid of the excess water.

That is exactly what I observed. BIL got up after the 4th glass – and a few more times later- to ease himself. The water had flooded BIL’s kidneys; ADH from the brain and the peptide from the heart had assaulted his kidneys and poor BIL had to frequent the toilet.

I visualized the nephrons of BIL’s kidneys in overdrive. Nephron is the filtering and urine-manufacturing unit in the kidney. And there are 1.4 million of them. This exquisite, intelligent, U shaped microscopic tube is the final arbiter of the water volume in BIL’s body.

BIL’s water filters into one end the nephron, travels through the U loop and trickles out at the other end into to the urine collecting system. Since BIL has excess water in his body, each nephron makes more urine and the union of 1.4 million members of the urine production trade sends BIL to the toilet frequently.

The nephron has the ability to respond to the sum of blood volume or pressure, sodium concentration and the quantities of floating ADH. Through these mechanisms, it can produce varying volumes of urine of different solute concentrations. The function of the kidneys is to excrete solutes unwanted by the body and the water serves as a solvent carrier.

Kidneys have a maximum ability to excrete up to 1200 mili-Osmols (mOsm) of solutes per Kg of water. BIL has to eliminate, an average of 600 mili osmols (mOsm) of solute daily. Since the maximal urine concentration is 1200 mOsm/kg water, the minimal urine volume BIL needs to make is 500 ml to excrete 600 mOsm. With BIL’s normal kidneys, mere 500 ml should be enough to “ flush the toxins – and sins.” But BIL just inundated his poor unsuspecting kidneys with eight glasses of water and the penance for this ‘sin’ is the trip to the toilet.

BIL’s body handled the flood better than Bush managed Katrina. Water gushed to the heart, which pumped it vigorously to the farthest crevices of the body. As it traveled farther it slowed to a trickle, then seeped through the accommodating tissues and finally permeated into the cells. BIL’s body fluid regulatory apparatus sensed the deluge and the sirens went off.

OK, eight glasses is no Katrina, but we will agree BIL did it better than Bush.

Let us also be fair to BIL: 60% of his body weight is water and a mere loss of ten percent can be lethal. Water still surrounds and nourishes each cell, like it did when the cell was a complete organism in the waters of early evolution. When we left the oceans to venture onto land, we carried our share of water with us. The distribution of solutes and water is of utmost importance to normal cell function.

BIL maintains the volume of water in his body with exquisite precision of thirst, intake, absorption and excretion. His kidneys, hypothalamus, heart, cell membranes and the thirst mechanism work in unison and simultaneously.

On a normal day, he looses about 1500 ml in urine and another 500 to 1000 ml in breath, sweat and stools. He needs to replenish this by drinking 2 to 3 liters of water daily.

Should BIL drink plain water or a sports beverage?

Water is the osmotic slave of salt and follows sodium with utmost fidelity. BIL does need some sodium in his guts for efficient absorption of water and to absorb sodium the intestinal cells need a little sugar. Water with a dash of sugar and a pinch of salt will suffice. Sugar exceeding 8% of the beverage may actually slow the water absorption.

Here is a recipe: one liter of water; 1/3 cup of sugar; ¼ teaspoon of salt; add lemon or orange flavor; refrigerate and drink. This is the cheap homemade ‘Gatorade’. (BIL can use the other expensive one just for the ceremonial drenching of the coach.)

But BIL being a hedge fund manager lives by the dictum: nothing succeeds like excess; moderation is a fatal habit.

He inundates his cells in water with an atavistic compulsion and like so many other beliefs; he holds that drinking eight glasses of water in the morning cleanses the depths of his interior. It would be more physiological, if he spread his drinking through out the day.

BIL cannot drink water in the morning to hedge against the dehydration of the evening.

In the mid 1990s, urban economist and sociologist Richard Florida devised the “gay index,” a tool used to monitor and predict cities that could host profit-generating high-tech industries. The index essentially correlates the number of gay people living in an area and how many high-tech firms are located there. This, of course, is a good thing as it enables regional planners to better accommodate growth and accordingly adjust all of those terribly meaningful strategic plans that herald beautiful, functional cities. The gay index is directly linked to Florida’s argument about the economic advantages associated with attracting the “creative class” to cities, which will lead to revitalization, regeneration, and economic success. In addition to the Gay Index, Florida proffered the “bohemian index,” which measured the number of artists, writers, designers, and general “Cool” professionals located in certain cities against the presence of those same high-tech industries.

Between the gay index and the bohemian index, creative classes and cool factors, Florida established a lexical melting-pot (to borrow another phrase of his) of ambiguous social terms to describe economic patterns and predict cities that might next host this seething mass of culture and hip-ness. An attempt to tackle this subject comprehensively requires study beyond the scope of a blog-essay, and has been done by the author’s countless critics—detractors, deriders, and general disbelievers who have questioned his methodologies, data, and value as both an economist and sociologist—to which Florida has, admirably, responded (though, I must say, rather unconvincingly) in subsequent works.

Rather than attack him on economic grounds, then, or even within the discourses of urban sociology, I’d like to just take a moment to appreciate Florida’s use of and take on gayness for a brief moment. Seriously, just to back up a second. The gay index? Excuse me? So, somewhere along the way it became ok to pin tracking devices under urban homosexuals and exploit their flight into neighborhoods into which they are essentially exiled in order to capitalize on planning strategies and speculative development? Diabolical! It’s a scheme concocted by a Bond villain hit by the gay bomb (post-fabulous stress disorder!), it’s Jane Jacobs on poppers and ethnography written in Polari.

The million-dollar question, of course, is whether or not Mr. Florida is himself a card-carrying gay, ripe for the tracking and with a miraculous and preternatural ability to identify potentially hip—and therefore economically prosperous—cities. After repeated Google searches (“Richard Florida gay,” “Is Richard Florida gay?” “Richard Florida flaming homosexual,” “Richard Florida hypocrite,” “Is Richard Florida secretly or openly gay or he just a misguided economist who has no concept of how unbelievably offensive his social experiments and de-humanizing measures are?” and on and on) I am still not sure. Richard Florida has a tendency to wear his shirts with the top few buttons undone, exposing a curiously smooth chest. He is generally well-coiffed (or at least rather meticulously so). But that doesn’t really get us too far. I digress, however. His sexually isn’t really that important.

What is important, however, is Florida’s use of gayness as a fetishistic mechanism through which to identify market indicators. I’m only going to highlight several distinct ways in which his project demonstrates problematic views of gayness and thus renders his “index” fairly irrelevant, though there are innumerable reasons to find his argument ridiculous. The first is to look at his argument’s development. In his best-selling work The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002), Florida introduces the gay index in a chapter titled “Technology, Talent and Tolerance.” He begins by talking about the importance of tolerance in attracting high-tech industries to cities, citing past work by authors such as Pascal Zachary that point to the importance of racial acceptance and openness to immigration as paramount to innovation and economic growth in urban environments. Florida (and Zachary by proxy) cites key statistics of mass immigrations to American cities in the 1990s—many of which moved to New York, Chicago, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Florida highlights the correlation between patterns of migration and economic growth in these same cities, which provides the basis for his comparable correlation between gays and high-tech industries. Pausing, for a moment, on the migrant-growth relationship, it is crucial to highlight the misrepresentation at play here. As pointed out sociologist Saskia Sassen (who has seemingly endless empirical data to support her argument) the vast majority of immigrants to move to these cities support advanced industries as service workers—low-wage, low-skill laborers whose quality of life is vastly different from the “creative class” that earn the cities their reputation. Unlike Florida’s romanticized perception that countless model minorities are arriving, en masse, with tears in their eyes and hope in their hearts to start valuable enterprises across America, the reality is that most of these immigrants end up with bottom-of-the-barrel jobs that no one else will take.

I realize that I’m now attacking Florida’s methodology, which I said I would avoid, but here I just want to note that the logical fallacy of false causality—that the immigrants lead to increased creative industries—has a significant bearing on gays and high-tech industry. Florida is careful to point out that of course his argument isn’t that high-tech industries are full of homosexuals. In fact, few gays work in these profit-generating industries at all. What Florida points, out, however, provides a meaningful insight into the role gays serve these white (or Indian or East Asian—Florida’s favored minorities) engineers and computer-nerds: that they decide to locate somewhere suggests that that geographical space is open and accepting. In other words, if gays are allowed to live there, won’t nerds be too? (Seriously, this is taken straight from Florida. Page 258 of the paperback.)

If Florida’s hope is that a large number of gay citizens act as a predictive index for the potential of a city to house high-tech industry, what we’re really talking about is gays as guinea pigs. Florida’s cities are aligned with patterns of habitation within cities, particularly within gentrification arguments. The familiar narrative goes: first the gays move in, then the artists, then the yuppie hipster families, then the middle class. But obviously the gays weren’t first. The narrative implies a certain kind of urban grey-zone as a beginning point, where drug-addicts, non-model minorities, and general undesirables rove the streets, leaving opened fire hydrants, burning garbage bins, and a general gritty cacophony wherever they go. That Florida first equates gays (“the new outsiders”) with immigrants, and then as the precursor to the bohemian influx, demonstrates the role that the homosexual plays in this perverse narrative—bridging the gap between poor ethnics and young artists.

This role is inextricably linked with what French author Guy Hocquenghem terms “the criminalization” of the homosexual—by virtue of being gay, these citizens occupy a curious position of being criminal enough to live in the margins while white enough to make those areas appear safe. And yes, for the most part the gays in these neighborhoods are white—from London’s Vauxhaull (now also part of Brixton), Boston’s South End, and New York’s Chelsea to Chicago’s Boystown and Los Angeles’ West Hollywood. And so the gays are the guinea pigs, sent to the periphery to make it safe for young white artists and café-goers all the way through to middle class families, negotiating color and difference and mediating what is edgy and safe. Before I’m accused of setting up a straw man, though, I should acknowledge that Florida talks about cities and economic growth, not about neighborhoods and gentrification. But by evoking the argument of acceptance and tolerance, and of nerdy IT guys walking around without fear of harassment, I would argue that Florida is talking about cities on a neighborhood level. Clearly, even if the gay index for a city is high, there’s no argument that a tech-firm should locate in undeveloped, high crime neighborhoods. To reap the advantages associated with the diversity of the citizens, they must locate where those groups reside, furthering the process of development and gentrification.

And what after gentrification? Like neighborhoods that attract countless immigrants, where do these households go when displaced by the influx of suburbanites who can now walk the streets? It depends on the city, and the answer is rarely promising. But thank god we’ve attracted “the creative class” (read: college-educated, safe, “nerdy,” largely white or model ethnic), and attracted revitalization and economic growth. Thank god those gays have such a good eye for design and interior decorating, for building rehabilitation and kitschy stores, for gourmet food and fine living. Thank god they make neighborhoods consumable by all, indicate where cities should spend their money and where new firms should locate.

Forget that, according to Florida, those new firms don’t employ a number of gays proportionate to the area. Forget that the “new outsiders” (not to mention the old outsiders) see a relatively small benefit in the transformations of cities and neighborhoods (is there anyone left out there who sincerely believes in trickle-down?). Of course I don’t equate urban (mostly white) gays with low-income populations. Homosexual partners and households have been demonstrated to have inordinately high incomes—but these aren’t necessarily related to the industries they attract. Their role in the urban economy is far more complex. Florida, of course, digs his own grave by treating such a complex facet of the population as a singular unit—an “index”—and yet his ideas are hard to ignore. He is a pop-economist in the most ignoble sense of the word, promulgating stereotypes and recommending a business model that embraces gentrification and exploitation all within the language and presentation of a marketable “strategy.”

A final question: while gay men might be romanticized for their sense of aesthetic and design mixed with urban grittiness—the perfect combination for faux “thrill”-seeking city-dwellers—where the hell do lesbians fit in to Florida’s framework? I’m thinking of New York’s Park Slope and Stoke Newington in London, and I remain a bit unsure of how we can exploit them.

“If you don’t make masterpiece by time you twenty five you nothing,” went the advice of a drunk literature professor. I was a sophomore. The nineteenth century authors I admired had all first published before the age the professor put forward. Twenty five became the longitudinal line where my flat world ended. Twenty-five was crossed without masterpiece or incident. I found solace in the biographies of contemporary writers, most of whom first published at an older age.

Why the age difference from one century to the next?

To begin I posit that the apprenticeship period of a writer, before a publishable novel is completed, lasts approximately eight years and involves three components: 1) lots of writing, much of it crap, an unfinished or rejected opus or three, a novel that was talked about more then it was ever written, some short stories; 2) A fair amount of reading, not from any cannon in particular, enough to get a sense of what is out there; 3) Life experience—bullfighting and shooting heroin, sure—but more having lived and become aware of one’s existence in a way that can be processed many many times over to be used in stories. The healthy realization that instead of writing the greatest book ever one should focus on a good story one can tell well can be filed under the third component. Factor in necessary talent and the budding writer is on his or her way to a literary debut.

(The debut may never take place and occasionally occurs after less time).

Tolstoy completed his apprenticeship young in part because he was mind numbingly rich—he lived on a Rhode Island sized farm that was worked by slaves—and had lots of free time. By free time I mean the time to work as an around the clock unpaid writer, which in Tolstoy’s case meant he was able to pump out short stories thick enough to qualify as assault weapons by 23. Dostoevsky’s provenance was more middle class, his father was a doctor to the indigent, but a middle class that came with amenities far greater then full cable and a second car. The Western world was less equitable with a lot of poor people available to do chores and errands that would be done by the budding author today. Dostoevsky too, pre-gulag, had his free time, first publishing to great fanfare at 23.

For those with access to it, education was better in the nineteenth century. The richest writers had private tutors. The writers who went to school, Balzac, Dickens intermittently, received better more thorough educations then are readily available today. Memorization of poems was central to understanding literature, languages were rigorously taught, correspondence and the discipline to write constantly were imperatives. Without looking far beyond the routines that were handed to them as adolescents, they fulfilled large parts of their apprenticeship.

The broadly romanticized lost generation of the 1920s first published at a slightly later age. The middle class was larger, education was more universal. They came from a range of households and schoolings—Dos Passos, loaded, boarding school and college; Hemingway, not so loaded, public school and no college. But the available education was still better then today’s. Reading was more a core part of curriculums, correspondence remained essential, Greek and Latin were taught. And it is not that I believe a classical education is best, simply that writing is an exercise in shaping language and early knowledge of its anatomies feeds when a person starts thinking as a writer. The challenge was finding the time to write, which is part of why they all went to Paris—still reeling from the WWI, economically brittle Paris was cheap. The ability to live well for not much gave them the incentive and time to finish their first works. Getting to Paris meant time working and traveling and that interval tacked on about two years to their debuts.

Why and when people published in the 19th century was mostly a matter of pedigree. Why and when people first published in the 20th century was a matter of cheap rent. From Paris, to the West and East Village, to Berlin, writers roamed much of the Western world looking for cities in economic decline where they could work unperturbed.

Today education is essentially universal, but of mixed quality. In the United States the solution is a masters degree in writing where the differing levels of education can be calibrated, the safety of a campus buffering young writers from economic ebbs and flows. A student at NYU or Columbia can live in currently unaffordable New York thanks to subsidized low rent and money from a job teaching undergraduates once or twice a week. Because the youngest a person would likely enter grad school is 22, masters programs have pushed the age of debuts up as people fulfill the requirements of their apprenticeship at a later age.

I am ignoring will. Irregardless of provenance, schooling and available time, where the writer has had the will and talent he or she has published. Kafka had a full time job at an insurance company. The Chilean writer Roberto Bolano, the son of a truck driver, traveled the world, holding jobs no more exalted then security guard. Both men wrote at night and published late in life, their reputations propelled far into the future by the forces of their wills. Black writers of the mid-century, Baldwin and Wright, wrote their first works in the vacuum of a society closed off from their voices. They established places for themselves with their wills. Masters programs have had the positive effect of honoring and financing the bright talents who earlier pushed forward alone. But the rest must pay, a lot, and the programs have had the inverse effect of excluding those of mixed or still growing talent and little funds, and not just from an education, but from direct avenues to agents and publishing houses.

A corrective mechanism exists. During economic downturns the plights of the excluded are chronicled and sensationalized in pulp. Pulp’s goal of titillating is easier to achieve then literature’s goal of moving the reader. The apprenticeship is shorter and can respond to social changes more swiftly. New York currently has 800,000 millionaires and the poorest urban county in the nation, the Bronx, splitting the city between a community who can afford graduate schools and comes from a decent education and another which comes from stunted public schools, 20 percent and up unemployment and high crime. In the Gilded Age, when the Lost Generation fled to Europe, pulp was a local reaction by those who could not afford a ticket out of the country. The best pulp works are considered literature. The rest are no better then the genre exercises they aspire to be.

On fold out tables on 125th Street in Harlem, near the court houses on Chambers Street, on Fulton Street in Brooklyn and on Third Avenue in the Bronx, a new pulp is sold under the moniker of urban literature. A handful of titles have sold in the hundreds of thousands; Borders and Barnes and Noble, depending on the store location, dedicate sections to the genre. I have attempted reading some urban literature and found them on the whole unmoving and conventionally titillating; but I am open to attempting more titles. I contacted the office of Triple Crown Publications, which specializes in the genre, wanting to know what the average age of their authors was. The answer was between 20 and 30, the youngest, Mallori McNeal, was 16 when she first published. If literature is what Ms. McNeal wants to write, a couple drafts and some experience from now, she’ll be 24.

I can’t pinpoint the specific day or time that I fell in love with Adam Michnik. Most likely it is something that crept up on me slowly. I liked him, I read him, I liked him, I read him some more, and then suddenly, I loved him. I finally came to see all of this just recently, thumbing through the essays and interviews collected in “Letters From Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives.”

These are the thoughts of a man who was of his time, acting in his time, and yet simultaneously able to see it all as if from on high, as if a version of himself was hovering above the other him, watching himself and reassuring himself from the late ’60s until the early ’90s as he turned into one of the preeminent dissidents of the Eastern Bloc. Anyway, something must have been guiding him, some impish little daimon sitting on his shoulder and convincing him through imprisonments by the communist government in Poland that history was on his side—or at least basic decency—although that proposition often must have seemed utterly laughable. Perhaps he now takes on a special glow precisely because he won, because he was right that a dogged emphasis simply on telling the truth, on the basic dignity of an individual human being, would rise to the top through tough times.

If he had been wrong, if he had failed, if history had broken differently, then Adam Michnik wouldn’t have the glow. On the cover of my copy of “Letters From Freedom” there’s a picture of Michnik. He has his right hand on his forehead and he’s looking out through the crook of his arm with a faraway gaze. It is the gaze of a cocky son-of-a-bitch who got it right. And he not only got it right, he got it right and refused to gloat about it very much, was constantly aware that you never get vindication until you stop looking for it and even then life goes on. That’s why he always stressed that all he really ever wanted for Poland was normalcy, boredom. “Grey is beautiful,” he said, and “democracy is a continuous articulation of particular interests, a diligent search for compromise among them, a marketplace of passions, emotions, hatreds, and hopes; it is eternal imperfection, a mixture of sinfulness, saintliness, and monkey business.”

He was tired of all the crap, all the weird and shitty historical promises that continuously clowned the 20th century. That’s the truly funny, maddening, and then eventually loveable thing about his cocky son-of-a-bitch gaze. It is the cockiness of modesty. This is a man who wrote a book in prison that concluded with a delicate quote from Julian Tuwim directed to the communists of the world: “Kiss my Ass.” He’s pretty sure he’ll get the last laugh because he’s the only one in the room who isn’t promising much, who’s just fighting for a political arrangement whereby everyone has the opportunity to make an ass of himself. That is his vision of civil society and it is inspiring in its mundanity. Let us have, Michnik says with a Polish twinkle in his eyes, a civil society whereby we can parade down the street like the fools we are and be reasonably sure that none of our neighbors are reporting that fact to the local branch of the secret police. There are loftier visions for humankind no doubt. But I’m not sure that there are any more humane.

It is that goofy beautiful vision of civil society that enabled Michnik to put his cocky son-of-a-bitch gaze on and stare down General Jaruzelski from across the historical divide when martial law was declared on December 13th, 1981. Let us not forget that those were scary times, big times. Michnik had his gaze but Jaruzelski had his huge tinted glasses that he must have smuggled out to Kim Jong-il after The Wall came down. Michnik stuck to his guns, the small and harmless guns of a civil society for normal people. He was convinced that he would eventually emerge into “the bright square of freedom” but he also worried that he and his contemporaries might “return like ghosts who hate the world, cannot understand it, and are unable to live in it.” He prayed that “we do not change from prisoners into prison guards.” After Michnik got his victory he was still happy to sit down with General Jaruzelski and have a friendly chat about those days and their disagreements. You can read the exchange. It is published as “We Can Talk Without Hatred.”

And that is why, I suppose, I have fallen in love with Mr. Michnik. It is a special category of love. Its broader genus could be labeled ‘literary love’; This is when we fall in love with those individuals who have written things that confirm for us our deepest and innermost sense of what we hope the world can be, if only in bits and patches. This kind of communication is intimate and powerful, and literary love—for its lack of physical expression—can be a swoonful and insistent kind of love. One must read ever more works from the hand of the beloved. Even the crappiest short story carries with it portentous weight and is scoured for secret messages from the writer to the one and only person who truly understands that writer, ‘Me’, whoever that ‘me’ may be. Within the species ‘literary love’ is the genus ‘dissident-writer love’. ‘Dissident-writer love’ has all the intensity of ‘literary love’ with the added bonus that the dissident writer not only pens brilliant essays, but is also wrapped in a veritable halo of personal courage and potential martyrdom made all the more enticing if, like that cruel seducer Michnik, the dissident downplays and sidesteps every attempt to crown him as hero. It certainly worked for me. I confess myself a man in love.

Confusion reigns in many popular discussions of evolution, and 3QD is not immune. I was inspired to write this Monday Musing today at least in part by a comment left by Ghostman on a post about autism a few days ago. In it, among other things, he theorizes that:

…autism, far from a brain disorder or malfunction, is an evolutionary reaction to the electrified, computerized world, and that once our brains iron out the wrinkles, we will come to look at modern autism as the first difficult steps toward a biological advancement of the human brain—an evolutionary improvement in the way we think, compute, and, yes, imagine…

…I believe the electrified, computerized world is actually changing the makeup of our brains. And that autism is one of the effects of this change…

…Consider the two most well-known symptoms of autism: lack of social skills (encompassing language, empathy, etc.) and enhanced recognition of and appreciation for patterns (often including improved memory and mathematical ability). These, I thought, do not seem to be the characteristics of a human; they are the characteristics of a computer. Computers are bad at emotions, language, social situations. Computers are good at math, memory, patterns. Furthermore, as one reads the literature, one is struck by how many teachers, parents, therapists, etc., comment on how compatible their autistic students, children, patients are with computers. Half of them seem outright amazed. But if one thinks that autism comes largely from computers, one would not be amazed by this, one would expect it…

—Ghostman, June 5, 2007

It’s late at night. It is too hard for me to attempt a sympathetic interpretation of this, and in the space that I have, I really cannot even seriously address the various confusions about evolution that are displayed here. (Even if brains were changed by “electricity” or “computers,” whatever that means, you should know, Ghostman, that ONLY changes to the DNA of the nuclei of sperm or egg cells can possibly be passed on to one’s offspring—and that is just one of the many misunderstandings of evolution that you betray.) Ghostman, I have no doubt that you are well-intentioned, but, my friend, you’ve got to learn something real about evolution before popping off, okay? Instead, all I can do is make my column today all about how Ghostman and others can most quickly educate themselves about evolution and its surrounding theory.

Unlike, say, quantum theory, the theory of evolution is something a lot of people think they understand pretty well. After all, no advanced math is required to understand the silly and tautological phrase which for some represents all there is to know about evolution: “survival of the fittest.” (Who are the fittest? Why, those that survive, of course!) Evolution is an elaborate and broad and subtle theory, with which one needs to spend some years to even begin to get a sense of its richness. (And parts of it do happen to be best expressed mathematically.) Luckily for non-biologists like me (and Ghostman) there exists a beacon of hope in the form of a book: thirty-one years ago, Richard Dawkins wrote what in my mind must be the best presentation of the complexly intertwined ideas and concepts that constitute the theory of evolution, since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species itself. I am referring, of course, to Dawkins’s magisterial work, The Selfish Gene. My column today can be seen as essentially an exhortation, a request, even an abject plea: if you haven’t read this book, please click here now, buy it, and read it from cover to cover as soon as possible. (Get the 30th-anniversary edition, which restores Robert Trivers’s introduction to the original, which had been deleted from subsequent editions, and which also contains a brand new preface by Dawkins detailing the book’s history, in addition to the then-new preface by Dawkins for the 1989 second-edition, and, of course, the original preface. The bibliography has also been updated.) If you haven’t read it but think that you already know what it is about, you just aren’t getting my message. Even Dawkins’s foes (such as H. Allen Orr, who recently trashed Dawkins’s recent book, The God Delusion, in the New York Review of Books) usually admit that The Selfish Gene is one of the most beautiful and clear expositions of science ever written. And it is not about some one thing or idea that can be easily summarized Cliff Notes-style. You just gotta’ read it. Even in an earlier Monday Musing in which I mostly criticized Dawkins for unnecessarily implicitly defending a certain philosophical theory of truth in some of his writings, I also had this to say:

Richard Dawkins has been an intellectual hero of mine since college, where I first read The Selfish Gene. Though I thought I understood the theory of evolution before I read that book, reading it was such a revelation (not to mention sheer enjoyment) that afterward I marveled at the poverty of my own previous understanding. In that (his first) book, Dawkins’s main and brilliant innovation is to look at various biological phenomena from the perspective of a gene, rather than that of the individual who possesses that gene, or the species to which that individual belongs, or some other entity. This seemingly simple perspectival shift turns out to have extraordinary explanatory power, and actually solves many biological puzzles. The delightful pleasure of the book lies in Dawkins’s bringing together his confident command of evolutionary theory with concrete examples drawn from his astoundingly wide knowledge of zoology. Who doesn’t enjoy being told stories about animals?

What I’d like to do in the rest of this column today (in my admittedly ever-desperate hope that it may actually convince someone who hasn’t, to read the book) is give a small example of just how brilliantly Dawkins explains questions in evolutionary biology and then answers them in a profoundly satisfying manner in The Selfish Gene. I have chosen this particular topic out of the extravagance of interesting biological issues that Dawkins presents in his book precisely because I had never even thought to formulate the problem, much less guess its elegant and (I think, I hope!) easily-grasped solution before reading him, and because I think I can present it reasonably briefly (we’ll see!) . So without further delay, here’s the problem: Why are there so many men?

I’ll explain. Women, because they must carry a child for 40 weeks, can only have a rather limited number of children in their lifetimes. Of course, there are limits to the number of children that men can have too, but they are much higher in terms of the actual numbers. (I used to be a big reader of the Guiness Book of World Records, and vaguely recall reading at some point that some king or other of Morocco holds the confirmed record for men with more than 700 children! Look it up if you like, but you get the idea of the difference.) Now, those who believe that evolution works for the benefit of groups of individuals, such as species (they are called group-selectionists, and the late, great essayist Steven Jay Gould was one, but he turns out to have been wrong in this, as in quite a few other things—punctuated equilibrium, anyone?), must answer the following question: in a population of humans, fewer than 10% males in a population would suffice to succesfully mate with all the females, so why are 50% (roughly speaking) of humans males? Well, maybe women need men around in some marriage-like situation to take care of their children, otherwise not enough of their children would survive. This is plausible, after all. But then, why is the proportion of men to women almost exactly 50/50? How come it’s not 45/55, or 55/45 for that matter, depending on exactly how much the males are needed? Look at some other animal species: we find that cats have the same almost exact 50/50 ratio of males to females. So do dogs, cows, mice, fish, chimpanzees, birds, and walruses. Some species of animals share parenting duties equally between the male and the female, while in others, the female puts in almost all the effort in raising children, but all the ones I have mentioned have the same 50/50 ratio of sexes. Why?

(I am not even mentioning the fact that even before the conception of a child, the female has already put in much more effort in producing it than the male has: consider a species of bird in which the male and female spend equal amounts of time hatching the egg after it is laid, and then also spend equal amounts of time and effort feeding and caring for the hatchlings into adulthood: the female has already made a much greater investment by laying a relatively huge egg—imagine the effort a female chicken expends finding and eating enough food to lay one of the super-nutritious eggs in your refrigerator. Sperm, meanwhile, are a dime a dozen-million! This greater investment of energy on the part of females is the reason, by the way, that human females produce one fertilizable egg a month, and I produce several hundred million sperm a day.)

Let me tell you something about walruses: most walrus males will die virgins. (But almost all females will mate.) Only a few dominant walrus males monopolize most of the females (in mating terms). So what’s the point of having all those extra males around, then? They take up food and resources, but in the only thing that matters to evolution, they are useless, because they do not reproduce. From a species point-of-view, it would be better if only a small proportion of walruses were males, and the rest were females. In the sense that such a species of walrus would make much more efficient use of its resources and would, according to the logic of group-selectionists, soon wipe out the actual existing species of walrus with the inefficient 50/50 ratio of males to females. So why don’t they?

Here’s why: because a population of walruses (substitute any of the other animals I have mentioned, including humans, for the walruses in this example) with, say, 10% males and 90% females (or any other non-50/50 ratio), would not be stable. Why not? Remember that each male is producing almost ten times as many children as any female (by successfully mating with, on average, close to ten females). Imagine such a population. If you were a male in this kind of population, it would be to your evolutionary advantage to produce more sons than daughters because each son could be expected to produce roughly ten times as many offspring as any of your daughters. Got it? Reread the last few sentences and convince yourself that what I am saying is true. Look, suppose that the average male walrus fathers 100 children, and the average female walrus mothers 10 baby walruses. Okay? Here’s the crux of the matter: suppose a mutation arose in one of the male walruses (as it well might over a large number of generations) that made it such that this particular male walrus had more Y (male-producing) sperm than X (female-producing) sperm. In other words, the walrus produced sperm that would result in more male offspring than female ones, this gene would spread like wildfire through the described population. Within a few generations, more and more male walruses would have the gene that makes them have more male offspring than female ones, and soon you would get to the 50/50 ratio that we see in the real world. The same argument applies for females: any mutation in a female that caused her to produce more male offspring (though sex is determined by the sperm, not the egg, there are other mechanisms the female might employ to affect the sex ratio) than female ones, would spread quickly in this population, changing the ratio from 10/90 closer to 50/50. Do you see?

No? Well, that’s why I keep urging you to read Dawkins’s book. He is a much better writer, and a much better brain, honestly, than I am, and even if I can’t, I really think that he stands a good chance of winning you over. Get the book. Now!

Here’s a bonus video for your having read this post to the end:

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

I’ve just returned from a few short days in my hometown, a very different part of New York than the more urban(e) one I now experience each day. Ten years have passed since I left, and in unconscious recognition of the anniversary I went back to visit the spots that, in their—or my—absence, have come to hold some of my most formative memories.

I returned, laptop in hand and loads of work to do, to the small town settled in 1787 where I grew up walking ten minutes to school with my brother each day, playing AYSO soccer, climbing trees, walking in the woods, building tree and snow forts, and generally having tons of time to pursue whatever it is my vivid imagination might have desired. By my teens, like so many others in villages of under 2,000 inhabitants, in graduating classes of about 125 kids, all I wanted was out—out to the big City, out to the world, out to work, out to life. Being the incredibly lucky girl I am, I was granted my wish, and went off to study one of those subjects that simply wasn’t considered viable, or respectable, or much of anything but marginalized by the nevertheless superb public school system that was all I’d known until then.

But before I took flight, and without really thinking about it (though my parents likely had), I’d spent years filling those delightfully unstructured hours after school with activities that, while important, I had a suspicion would someday have to be demoted to mere hobbies: workshops in painting, drawing, ceramics, and other craftsy stuff. It was with this attitude—the mindset that tells you something is enjoyable yet trivial (at least to the rest of the world)—that I went to my first painting class at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute in Utica. A ten-minute drive from my own quaint little college town, Utica was a real pit: the traffic lights on the city’s main drag, spaced at what seemed to be one-block intervals, were synchronized for the speed cars moved in the 1940s. The most memorable ads in the paper, even for a little kid, were either for used car dealerships or strip clubs. Graphically, the newest sign for any business looked like it came from the 1950s. Curiously Anglicized Polish and Italian names abounded, with even more curious pronunciations on local radio and television commercials. None of this has really changed much, except for the schools’ installation of metal detectors. The Polish and Italian names are giving way to Bosnian and South American names, accompanied by a growth in barely literate “my-grandpa-learned-English, why-can’t-these-scrappy-people-get-it?” old-timers’ letters to the editor in favor of declaring English an official language, whatever that might mean.

Not that I intend to get sidetracked: Utica seemed like such a pit to me, moderately privileged kid from a small liberal arts college town, that I just assumed—assigning guilt by association—that anything found there couldn’t possibly lead to much. So when this painting class I took with Ms. De Visser brought us into the museum portion of the Munstitute, as we called it, I didn’t expect to see much on the walls. They told us Philip Johnson designed the building, constructed in 1960, and we just saw it for the brutal, foreboding, windowless box it appeared to be. We were to choose a painting from the permanent collection and copy it in drawing, then choose another to copy in drawing and a more developed painting. Docents made a big deal of Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life (though a second set is in the National Gallery in DC, the original set is here) and Jackson Pollock’s Number 2, 1949, but I was taken with the obscure, more figurative stuff: an 1888 neoclassical canvas by Francis Davis Millet titled After the Festival, of a wistful young woman in flowing robes with rose-bedeck’d hair, her graceful wrist perched on a tambourine; and a 1948 panel called Double Date Delayed, No. 1, by Isabel Bishop—whoever Millet and Bishop were, whoever Johnson was…. Apparently I indulged my predilection for depictions of missing, absent subjects from an early age.

I came across these two works on Friday after forgetting all about them and the hard work I put into copying them. In the meantime Cole’s other major cycle, Course of Empire, has gained renewed attention thanks to a band named after it and newer works by Ed Ruscha. I took a closer look at the old Voyage of Life again, noting the fairly didactic little changes from one canvas to the next to facilitate viewers’ reading of the fixed narrative—the hourglass on the ship’s prow marks time, vanishing by the last scene, and the sculpted faces on the ship’s side reflect the mood of each season of life—and picking up an amusing little activity booklet for kids to help them decipher devices such as allegory, symbolism, etc. Across from this cycle was a remarkably kitsch, not-so-famous 1826 Audubon, Two Cats Fighting, painted in two days in his Edinburgh studio, quickly enough to toss the rotting carcasses out before the stench of the two cats and their coveted squirrel overcame the space.

Leaving the gallery of Audubon, Cole, and Tiffany silvers, I strolled past Dan Christiansen’s 1968 Draco, predecessor of his more recent works with similar title and gift of Philip Johnson (who’d ever have known…), whose colors echoed those of Pollock’s Number 2 across the way. Warhol’s 1967 purple and silver Big Electric Chair was there, along with David Smith’s 1950 The Letter and two surprising Gustons—a classic 1975 Table at Night and a surprisingly Shahn-esque, Lam-esque Porch No. 2, dated twenty-eight years earlier, hanging right next to Shahn’s 1958 painting of what seems to be a drowning man, The Parable.

Jenny Holzer’s 1984 truism THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR WILL BE SECRET, acquired in 1993, oh-so-timely then as now, was just about the last thing I’d expect to see here—but, then again, so was a large Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture, along with most of the other works. This surprisingly strong collection was begun in the 1860s and carried on by the two daughters of James Watson Williams and Helen Elizabeth Munson Williams, who both married entrepreneurs interested in collecting, had no children, and hence had loads of money to dedicate to that end. The institute was established in 1919, and the core works were joined by post-war acquisitions. 1940s director Harris Prior worked with collector Edward Root as acquisitions consultant, and Root’s bequests were later joined by those of architect Philip Johnson, Musa Guston (Philip Guston’s wife), and other people who saw art as the keystone of their lives, as it has since become for me.

One of the newest pieces on exhibit was Elaine Reichek’s Sampler I, a cross-stitch done in 2000. Taking Emily Dickinson’s 1862 poem, #640, “I Cannot Live with You,” Reichek crowns that wrenching verse with an image from Henry Peacham’s 1612 book Minerva Britannia. The emblem pictures a weeping eye floating in the sky and the motto Hei mihi quod vidi (“Oh woe is me because I see”). If I’d had my red pen with me, I might’ve made a correction to their catalogue, so it would read Heia, gaudio mihi quod vidi. That sentiment will just have to remain part of the personal catalogue I’ve been amassing for the last few years, begun and unexpectedly enriched in the humble Mohawk Valley of Central New York.

Other Lunar Refractions can be read here.

by Alex Cooley

In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Alex Motyl posed the question, “Do past empires hold lessons for U.S. foreign policy today?” In a review of two new books (an edited volume by Craig Calhoun and a study by Charles Maier), he concluded that “efforts [to show that they do] yield little payoff.”

To be sure, the use of the term “empire” has become commonplace in descriptions of contemporary U.S. foreign policy. Yet, save for a small group of exceptions, American political scientists until now have mostly neglected the theoretical investigation of empires and the dynamics of imperial relations. Filling a massive gap in the literature, political scientists Dan Nexon and Thomas Wright’s new article “What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate” published in the May 2007 American Political Science Review is one of the most thought-provoking and policy relevant scholarly articles to appear in recent years in the field. The article builds on much of Nexon’s previous work on the network properties of early-modern empires, but applies these insights to some of the central problems confronting today’s U.S. foreign policy community.

Central to Nexon and Wright’s analysis is the contention that the term “empire” has been stripped of much of its analytical content and, instead, is now used (and over-used) to describe the aggressive or domineering foreign policy actions of the United States. Accordingly, the terms “empire” and “imperial” have become fused with normative connotations about unchecked expansionism. Consequently, policymakers disdain the term’s implications, while they ignore coming to terms with the actual political logics and trade-offs produced by an imperial political order. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous quote that “we don’t do empire” comes to mind, although some now would add the word “well” to the end of that particular musing.

In a theoretical tour-de-force, the Nexon and Wright suspend the current normative use of the term in order to explore the actual structural or network characteristics of imperial systems. In doing so, they upend many of the assumptions of the international relations discipline.

The authors propose that two structural properties distinguish imperial systems from other types of hierarchical political orders such as unipolar systems or hegemonic orders. First, empires are systems where a central power exercises control over peripheral polities indirectly through intermediaries or “informal” rule. Second, these imperial arrangements or contracts differ across a central power’s different peripheries. So the terms of governance of imperial rule over “Periphery A” are not the same as those over peripheries B or C. In this way, the authors distinguish imperial rule from a federal arrangement under which all contracts with subordinate units are equal. In turn, the various peripheries of an imperial system remain segmented or walled off from one another as their relations are mediated and managed by the core power. In visual terms, imperial systems resemble a rimless hub and spokes of a wheel, rimless because the individual peripheries at the end of each spoke remain segmented.

This simple network analytic has three major consequences for how international relations theorists should think about systemic dynamics. First, traditional balance-of-power concerns, the supposedly timeless practice of states playing power politics against each other, are supplanted by divide-and-rule dynamics. That is, empires seek to control, manage and extract resources from their peripheries, but must also prevent the formation of collective ties among peripheries that might become the basis for future anti-imperial collective action.

Second, the axis of relevant political relations shifts from interstate relations to intersocietal within peripheries, as imperial centers empower intermediaries to govern local populations according to specific markers of social status and hierarchy. From the center’s perspective, there is a trade-off between controlling the actions of an intermediary (or the “principal-agent” problem), while allowing them to retain local legitimacy as a ruler.

Third, empires face perennial problems of legitimating their control, especially when they try to maintain authority across a wide audience of multiple peripheries that have very different demands and expectations from the center. Thus, a justification of rule to one periphery may completely contradict the rationale given to another. Accordingly, imperial centers must be mindful of their mixed messages or, more precisely, the structural capacity for peripheries to realize they are receiving mixed messages. As the authors observe, “Multivocal signaling is most effective when the two audiences either cannot or do not communicate with one another. (p. 264).” All of these theoretical claims are illustrated with loads of fascinating anecdotes drawn from such seemingly disparate empires as the British East India Company, the Mongols, the Hapsburgs and the Soviet Union.

The “real world” implications of all of this rigorous theorizing are too numerous to summarize, but let me flag four important issues that the Nexon and Wright model raises.

First, this account of international relations provides a more robust account of Cold War politics than traditional balance-of-power accounts that focus just on the inter-state bipolar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Nexon and Wright model explains both great power competition and why the United States and Soviet Union took such pains to intervene in the internal affairs of peripheral countries and reinforce the client status of allies (the Shah in Iran, Marcos in the Philippines, Park in South Korea) by providing them with private goods. Cold War politics exhibited both balance-of-power and divide and rule dynamics, even though the legitimating strategy of the latter was one of systemic anti-Communism.

Second, in terms of the Nexon/Wright model, America’s actual resort to imperial governance since the end of the Cold War has been declining, not increasing. Of course, the post 9/11 military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have drawn more attention to the practice of “American Empire” and the authors acknowledge that “empire”-like qualities of continuing U.S. intervention in these countries. But the more counterintuitive point is that America’s use of overtly imperial systems is actually not as widespread as it was during the 1960s and 1970s.

One major reason for this decline is that globalization – contra the claims of many globalization critics – undermines the conditions necessary for effective imperial management by the center. Today, imperial powers can no longer monopolize globalizing processes such as transnational information flows, media broadcasts, NGO activity and economic exchange. Such transnational flows undercut the informational firewalls that imperial managers have traditionally erected between their peripheries to maintain segmentation and prevent collective action. For example, Al Jazeera and other Middle Eastern cable news networks can instantly and effectively undermine U.S. legitimation strategies regarding its Middle East policy by broadcasting daily images of how America and its political clients routinely disregard human rights concerns and democratic ideals. The contradictions of multivocal legitimation strategies are more quickly, and effectively, exposed in our global era.

The U.S. experience with Uzbekistan is a good case in point. To support its military campaign in Afghanistan, the United States established a military base in southern Uzbekistan in fall 2001 and signed a security cooperation agreement with the Uzbek government. Under its terms, the United States aided and armed Uzbek security services in exchange for basing rights. However, it turned out that the Uzbek government had little interest in adhering to its human rights obligations and used its international support as a partner in the war on terror to eradicate all forms of domestic opposition, not just Islamists with ties to al-Qaeda.

The most egregious of these actions was the so-called Andijan massacre in May 2005 when troops that were dispatched by the Uzbek Ministry of the Interior killed hundreds of demonstrators in the eastern city of Andijan. Following these events, the cross-periphery dissonance between the justifications for promoting democratic state-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and supporting the heavy-handed actions of the Uzbek regime became an international embarrassment to U.S policymakers. Even William Kristol, editor of the hawkish neo-conservative Weekly Standard, pointed out that the administration’s Uzbek policy simply was no longer compatible with the public logic of America’s involvement in the Middle East or its support of the colored revolutions in the other former Soviet states. In the end, the United States military was shortly after evicted from its military base, as the Uzbek government grew increasingly concerned that U.S. officials were actually intent on fomenting democratic change. Multivocal signaling, in the Uzbek case, delegitimized U.S. relations with the Middle East, but it also lessened American credibility with the Uzbek government.

Again, the analytical point here is not that the United States is hypocritical in the conduct of its external relations; rather, it is that traditional “multivocal” appeals and legitimating strategies can no longer function effectively in a global setting where contradictory justifications cannot be restricted to specific peripheries and political clients.

Third, Nexon and Wright correctly focus our attention on the formal structures of hierarchy operating in the contemporary international system. But we should be aware that states and international actors often employ a mixture of different types of hierarchical organizational forms, some of which require intermediaries and others which are more direct. Thus, Iraqi reconstruction has been delegated to intermediary private corporations and contractors, most of them American, however the U.S. military continues to directly play the major security function within the country. Moreover, some states may also find themselves at the periphery of multiple “imperial centers” and their dictates. The former Communist countries of East Europe may be a case in point, as they implement both the conditions and expectations laid out by the EU while they integrate themselves into the security network of the United States (including its overseas basing network and/or global missile defense shield).

The fourth – and most unsavory – implication of the Nexon/Wright model concerns what an “effective” U.S. strategy would look like in Iraq. The authors convincingly point to some of the control problems that using unreliable intermediaries in Iraq has generated for the United States. But their own analytic scheme points to the broader problem inherent in current U.S. efforts to preserve Iraqi unity while maintaining a political balance among Iraq’s factions in a quasi-democratic setting.

In fact, the extreme implication of the Nexon/Wright model for U.S. policymakers would be to more vigorously pursue “divide-and-rule” policies in Iraq instead of its contradictory nation-building policies of “unite and rule.” This would mean, practically, to empower or even openly arm Shiite and Kurdish factions against the Sunni minority and to license such action in exchange for American patronage. Now, to be clear, the authors do not advocate such a policy (and nor do I), but some others have, drawing upon this structural imperial logic.

All of this points to the fact that U.S. officials have not learned basic lessons from past imperial experiences. Indeed, the very explosion in the recent use of the term “empire” by critics of U.S. foreign policy merely highlights the failure of the U.S. to adequately manage its imperial cross-pressures and multivocal contradictions. Moreover, from this perspective, the rapid erosion of American legitimacy throughout the world – as evidenced in surveys like the Pew Survey on Global Attitudes – should be a much more central concern for the current managers of the American Empire than it was for its discredited recent champions.

Alex Cooley is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, author of Logics of Hierarchy (Cornell University Press, 2005), and also served as 3 Quarks Daily’s World Cup 2006 correspondent.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3 Quarks Daily’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Edward Elgar’s birth fell on June 2, 2007. This anniversary has been the spur for some strange commentaries in Britain: Elgar’s music isn’t modern enough; its tub-thumping pomp and circumstance state music doesn’t reflect contemporary, multicultural Britain. How symbolic, some say, that Elgar’s face has just disappeared from the twenty pound note to be replaced by that of sensible Scottish economist Adam Smith. 

This is political correctness gone barking. It is sobering to see that true greatness can still be blithely consigned, by some, to an imaginary junk heap of artistic detritus. Sensibly, the general public won’t have a bar of these musings, and no doubt Elgar’s music will continue to be comprehensively celebrated and performed.

Australian artists, for many years on the receiving end of condescension from points north, can relate to Elgar’s long struggle to establish himself as composer and artist in a hostile cultural environment. Anyone who tries this face-to-face on Australians these days is in for a rude surprise, though there really isn’t any cure for parochialism and snobbery, which are without end. However, in some parts hereabouts, there is now, somewhat inevitably, an Australia-first campaign whereby anything English is hammered—they think—into the ground: psychic punishment for past colonial sins of omission. Percy Grainger, for example, is held up a preferable alternative to Elgar. As a republican, I have no desire to linger in antique realms, but I’m not going to be bludgeoned into rejecting greatness when it is there before me. English critics are partly to blame for Elgar’s reputation abroad with their endless references to Elgar’s Englishness. Elgar’s music belongs to the world, not just to England. (There is a specific Australian connection in Elgar’s music. He sets Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poem ‘The Swimmer’ as the last song in Sea Pictures—‘O brave white horses! you gather and gallop, / The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins . . .’) If I stand on Bondi beach on a wild afternoon, hearing the surge of Alassio in my head, or, in mourning, recall that last restatement of the ‘Spirit of Delight’ theme at the end of the Second Symphony (‘the passionate pilgrimage of a soul’), this is not reflux nostalgia. Here is the music equal to the depth of life. If you want, there are certainly plenty of alternatives to choose from.   

Grandeur of spirit, and passion, in art, will never be consigned to a use-by date. Elgar’s story is a remarkable one of persistence through the awfulness of the English class system to the creation of great music, the first Britain had experienced since the time of Purcell. Elgar had a large chip on his shoulder because he, and his wife Alice, had to pay heavy dues in getting to this position of eminence. If, as I read, Elgar tried to wangle a peerage for himself, it was only what he deserved. Such splendour in the Malvern grass—the symphonies, the Violin Concerto, the Cello Concerto, the Enigma Variations, The Dream of Gerontius, Falstaff, the mass of ceremonial, occasional and salon music: all this music speaks of the seriousness and loveliness of the world, often with nobility, sometimes with wistfulness and melancholy.

You don’t have to be Roman Catholic to enjoy The Dream of Gerontius. What sort of mindset is it that can’t enjoy music of this kind because it doesn’t fit the listener’s prescriptive personal agenda. There are people who claim to be living, mentally, always in the present moment. The radical, the cutting edge, are what they crave. When you have the pile of bicycle parts waiting for you at the Whitney Biennial, why go mooning over some Degas? How tedious to sit through hours of Tristan when some hipster rap group is about to let loose at the latest in venue. But what if Elgar or Degas or Wagner are, emotionally and creatively, more radical and cutting edge, than they they have ever begun to conceive. I live only in, and for, the present moment. Too bad if the present moment is dullness enbalmed and then overhyped by the usual organs of capitalist increase.

Thus do some go their weary way, unaware of the marvels about them, forever out of reach because of ideological posturing or just plain ignorance. Well, I’m not forsaking Elgar for any whim of contemporary fashion and, if you don’t know the music of this composer, do yourself a favour that will repay you in kind one hundredfold.

Knowing he had composed a masterpiece, Elgar wrote at the end of the score of Gerontius the following words of Ruskin: ‘This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved and hated, like another; my life was as a vapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew; this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.’ However much these words apply to Gerontius, they also apply to the whole. The grocer’s daughter who became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom once told the nation, in very different circumstances, to rejoice; and we may well say of the piano tuner’s son who became a composer of world renown: rejoice that such a person may triumph, and that such music can be. 

Michael Blim

I lost my family doctor last week. Or rather, he has decided to undertake a boutique practice, and I can’t afford the annual fee. So, in a way, he is leaving me, and I am not happy about it.

Last week a friend of mine received a “Dear John” letter from her family physician. He is cutting 400 patients from his list, and he had selected her to be one of them. He is leaving her, and she is not happy either.

My friend and I are medically well connected. Both my partner and my friend work at a major research hospital in Boston. They know lots of doctors who know lots of doctors. And still, both of us are scrambling to find a family physician. Many have closed their practices to new patients, and even a well-placed word doesn’t always unlock their availability.

There must be primary care doctors who are not being overrun by patient demand, but in my quest to find a new doctor, I haven’t come across any with good track records in Boston that are not.

There are a lot of reasons why my friend and I have lost our doctors. First, it would seem pretty obvious that some doctors, particularly primary care doctors, would like to make more money. The average salary for an internist in 2005, according to the US Department of Labor, was $166,000, while surgeons, for instance, made $282,000. My now former family doctor and his new partner plan to serve only 800 patients at a time. As minimum annual membership in the practice costs $3500, this means that they begin each year with $2.8 million in income from their patients that is in addition to insurance reimbursements they will receive for services rendered. Clearly, money is an important motivation.

(For the record, it should be noted that the federal government limits the number of doctors that can be trained, and the medical profession has not founded new medical faculties that could produce more doctors. As the number of doctors has actually declined 17% since 1983, according to the federal government, this would seem to be an odd set of decisions given the rising demand for medical care.)

Second, if we consider the doctor reducing his patient load, money is not likely his concern. He sold his practice some time ago to a large research hospital that covers all office expenses and pays him a very good salary, much more I would guess than the national average. The load-reducing doctor easily earns his keep by providing the hospital with millions of dollars in “billables” through referrals for treatment.

The load-reducing doctor doubtless wants to return some sanity to his professional life, and the same could probably be said for my doctor starting up the boutique practice. My doctor going boutique is doing it with money by increasing his yield per patient, and in effect lowering the demand for his services. He is also no longer subject to the possible productivity demands of hospital overlords who seek in turn to boost hospital profits. He is regaining some professional autonomy, though at a very high price for his patients.

The rub, it seems to me, lies with the load-reducing doctor who has remained with the hospital. It likely makes good sense to slim down his patient list, unless his hospital is paying a per capita bonus, or it pays him for exceeding a goal for the number of patient he sees per year. He probably will not be paid less because of his market value and reputation. His practice has been closed for years, and his remaining patients are likely to cling to him for his competence and for the security of having a family doctor. He will not want for patients, though the hospital might miss some referrals.

In all though, I bet he will barely feel the difference. It might work out a bit better for his patients, whose access to him might marginally increase. But his workload and work routine probably won’t change much, as the remaining patients will take advantage of the opportunity to get more care.

This is because our health is so valuable to us that we will seek as much care possible because we can never tell what is enough. The more opportunities that are offered, the more care we seek. As our demand for care increases, more care is offered.

Here are a few examples of how our consumption of medical care is growing. In 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control, Americans made 1 billion doctor visits, and the rate of increases in doctor visits is running about three times the rate of our population growth. We made 35 million visits to the hospital in 2004, and the number of stays is growing by about 3% a year.

Services such as diagnostic radiology and commodities such as prescription drugs are growing much faster, both in quantity and cost. Radiology billings are increasing at the rate of 20% a year, hitting $100 billion in 2006. Americans now consume an average of 11 drug prescriptions yearly, and their costs are rising faster than the rate of inflation.

We spent $2 trillion on health care in 2005, a figure that amounts to 16% of our gross domestic product. By 2015, we will be spending $4 trillion a year, thus devoting 20% of our gross domestic product to health care.

We are definitely consuming more health care, even though we cannot determine how much health care is enough. In addition, as the population ages, and our collective health faces more challenges, we are likely to seek more care. And as one national scheme or another covers millions of uninsured Americans, they can finally and fully meet their health needs, and will consume more care. The good news for the currently uninsured, if Medicare is any guide, their health status will improve measurably, as did the health status of the elderly.

Thus, there is surely unmet need, even in the face of galloping demand. This anomaly dissolves once one recognizes that there are many in America who don’t get enough, and many who can’t get enough. For people who just can’t get enough, their desire for more is transforming health care into a “quality experience,” from boutique medical practices to boutique wings of hospitals.

In the past, rank and wealth surely had its privileges in towns and cities where the rich could support society doctors and special hospital accommodations. The new, more numerous class of well paid managers and professionals that has grown up since World War II has recreated American health care as a growth industry which they run and from which they profit. They have pushed the medical profession to provide care as Henry Ford pushed his workers to make Fords. Doctors, once accorded elite status by virtue of their profession, now pursue entrepreneurial projects via boutiques, incorporation and refusing insurance. Many are converting medical practice into a business model.

Even as some doctors rebel, escape, or go out their own in some out of the way place, others like the load-reducer looking for sanity for himself and better service for his patients, are becoming cogs in the wheel of large vertically integrated firms. They refer clients to a capital-intensive medical machine run by managers and doctors with profit-based business plans. Every hospital caught up in the race believes that it will soak up the growing demand by providing an ever growing supply of machines, beds, day surgeries, and importantly innovative cures for the very sick.

As the supply grows, so in turn does demand once more, fed by our unquenchable desire for more health and more well being. We return once again to the question: What is enough? The answer is presently unknowable for three reasons.

First, enough is defined now in terms of differential resources. If you have money or even proxy money such as insurance, private or federal, you can answer the question much more robustly. The lack of money or insurance for others defines in effect what is enough for them. The fact that persons making less than $20,000 a year spend 15% of their income on medical care and those making more than $70,000 spend just 3% of their income on medical care suggests how much more low income individuals are affected by medical costs than those with high incomes. I suspect, though I cannot prove it here, that high income individuals not only are better protected by insurance, but that they have more disposable income to devote to more health care consumption. This last might explain why hospitals are installing those hotel-like hospital wings complete with chefs and concierges, and thus making health care into a “quality experience.”

Second, the private system of medical care today is driven by the profit motive in which expanding our notion of what is enough in part creates greater demand for their products. For them, more is better, particularly as professional medical knowledge and ethics are being subjected to a business model. They can answer for their own interests, but their opinions of necessity are partial, and would probably boil down to the argument that we can never have enough, as health is more generally treated as an immeasurable human good.

Third, self-preservation being keenly desired by many does not necessarily encourage rational choices. To the question of what is enough, for many, the answer is simply the egoistic reply of what is best for them.

Our two practitioners, like us, are struggling to answer the same question in their ethically loosened and bureaucratized world. Their choices – one to ration care by making it expensive, and the other to ration care by eliminating patients – are the unfortunate products of a system incapable of rationalizing itself.

When we think of national health insurance, I believe that we think largely of satisfying the unmet demands of a near majority of Americans for quality medical care. However, we often fail to realize that any national health system will come to pass as a descendant of the one we have now, one in which the question of what is enough is answered by an anxious, insatiable demand for care in an environment of relative indifference to the needs of others. As so often happens in America, it is hard to note the suffering of others at the same time resources are expanding for the things that other individuals value.

A new national system must not only provide medical care equitably for the first time in American history, but it also must develop a collective answer to the question of what is enough. It involves answering the practical question of how much of our national income we want to devote to medical care as against other goods and services. It also involves re-setting the moral terrain through collective agreement based upon an ongoing investigation of what care is necessary for a decent life.

James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster movie Titanic broke box office records and garnered bushels of awards; it remains one of the top-grossing films of all times. A large part of its appeal lay in the central (fictional) story of the doomed young lovers, London socialite Rose DeWitt Decatur (Kate Winslet) and impoverished American artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who ultimately sacrifices his own life to save hers. A good tragic love story is a time-tested recipe for cinematic success.

But even people whose heartstrings remained untugged by the tearjerker tale couldn’t help but be entranced at the spectacle of the great Titanic brought to life on the big screen, and the lavish re-enactment of its tragic sinking makes for stellar cinema. There’s just something about the Titanic that resonates with us on a deep, subconscious level, and it is that element that ultimately raises Cameron’s film above mere Hollywood bathos.

It’s tough to put one’s finger precisely on just what that “something” is, but sci-fi author Connie Willis managed to do just that in her 2001 novel, Passage, which I recently re-read for the umpteenth time while recovering from a virus. I’ve been a Willis fan for years, ever since I read her short stories, “At the Rialto,” and “Even the Queen” (included in the collection Imaginary Things). She has the skeptical mind of a scientist — her husband is a physicist, which probably helps — and the soul of poet, mixing science fact, science fiction, literary allusion, and metaphor with memorable characters and terrific story-telling. Her broad popular appeal is evidenced by her winning nine Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards (thus far), making her “one of the most honored sci-fi writers of the 1980s and 1990s.”

Willis has tackled time travel, chaos theory, and the sociology of fads (Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Bellwether), but in Passage, she immerses herself in what is for many the Ultimate Question: is there life after death, a part of our consciousness — a soul, if you will — that continues even after the body dies? And to explore her theme, she delineates the science of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs): the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, at least if the estimated 7 million people who claim to have experienced an NDE are to be believed. Written accounts of NDEs date back some two thousand years,and hail from all over the world. There’s even a research foundation devoted to the study of NDEs.

The man responsible for coining the term “near-death experience” is Raymond Moody, an MD who has written several books on the afterlife based on patient testimonials,  who believes NDEs are evidence of  a soul (consciousness that exists separately from the brain), and evidence of the existence of an afterlife. He’s even boiled the typical NDE down to a few key features. First, there’s a strange kind of noise, alternately described as a ringing or a buzzing. There is a sense of blissful peace, and often an out-of-body experience (feeling as if one is floating above one’s body and observing it from that vantage point). There’s that light at the end of the tunnel, being met by loved ones, angels, or other religious figures, and a kind of “life review” — seeing one’s life flash before one’s eyes. But as the Skeptic’s Dictionary helpfully points out, Moody’s books ignore the fact that as many as 15% of NDEs are outright hellish experiences.

It’s not all mystical New Age spiritualism, or even overt religiosity. There have been some solid scientific studies of what happens to the brain during such events, most notably a 2001 Dutch study published in the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet. The researchers examined 344 patients who were resuscitated after suffering cardiac arrest, and interviewed them within a week afterwards about what — if anything — they remembered. The results were a bit startling: about 18% reported being able to recall some portion of what happened when they were clinically dead, and between 8 and 12 percent said they experienced some form of an NDE.

Neurochemistry offers some convincing alternative explanations, namely, that NDEs aren’t evidence of an afterlife, but illusions created by a dying (oxygen deprived) brain. Cardiac arrest and the anesthesias used in ERs are capable of triggering NDE-like brain states. The Dutch researchers found that “similar experiences can be induced through electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe,” for instance, as can neurochemicals such as endorphins and serotonin, and hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and mescaline. Last October, an article in New Scientist described a new theory by University of Kentucky neurophysiologist Kevin Nelson attributing NDEs to a kind of “REM intrusion” : “Elements of NDE bear uncanny similarity to the REM state,” he told the magazine. He describes REM intrusion as “a glitch in the brain’s circuitry that, in times of extreme stress, may flip it into a mixed state of awareness where is is both in REM sleep and partially awake at the same time.” Something similar might be happening with NDEs, he reasons, although the jury is still out on that particular hypothesis.

Karl Jansen has managed to induce NDEs with ketamine, a hallucenogenic related to PCP, but far less destructive; it’s an anesthetic that works not just by dulling pain, but by creating a dissociative state. According to Jansen, the conditions that give rise to NDEs — low oxygen, low blood flow, low blood sugar, and so forth — can kill brain cells, and the brain often responds by triggering a flood of chemicals very similar to ketamine to protect those cells, which would produce “out of body” sensations and possibly even hallucinations. Jansen claims his approach can reproduce all the main elements Moody attributes to NDEs: the dark tunnel with a light at the end, out of body experiences, strange noises, communing with god, and so on.

Why do so many people see a light at the end of the tunnel? Susan Blackmore, a psychology professor at the University of the West of England in Bristol, thinks she might have an explanation: neural noise. During cardiac arrest, in the throes of death, the brain is deprived of oxygen, causing brain cells to fire rapidly and quite randomly in the visual cortex. There are lots of cells firing in the middle, and fewer towards the outer edge, producing white light in the center fading into dark at the outer edges. That feeling of peace and well-being might be due to the fact that the brain is pumping out endorphins in response to pain, which can produce a dream-like state of euphoria. That same cerebral anoxia might also cause the strange buzzing or ringing sound people claim to hear when they enter an NDE.

Willis takes that tiny bit of factual thread and spins it into a complex scientific mystery, skewering cheap spiritualism in the bargain. She got the idea for the book when a friend insisted she read a book on NDEs, insisting she would find it inspiring. Instead, Willis loathed it. In fact, it made her angry: “I thought it was not only pseudoscience, but absolutely wicked in the way it preyed on people’s hopes and fears of death, telling them comforting fictions.” She channeled that anger into the novel, creating the character of Dr. Maurice Mandrake, a physician who has abandoned all pretense of scientific objectivity, prompting his “witnesses” to say what he expects to hear — a strategy that has made him a best-selling author of just the sort of book that triggered Willis’ creative rage. (The savvy reader will note some striking likenesses to Moody.)

Mandrake’s foil in the novel is the main protagonist, Joanna Lander, also a doctor studying NDEs, but her approach is far more rational, firmly grounded in the scientific method — which puts her at odds with Mandrake and his minions. She finds an ally (and potential love interest) in neuroscientist Richard Wright, who has contrived a way to induce NDEs using a psychoactive drug called dithetamine. (I guess one could say he’s the fictional counterpart to Jansen.) His theory is that the NDE is a survival mechanism, part of a series of strategies the brain employs whenever the body is seriously injured. The NDE is a side effect of neurochamical events.

While NDEs seem to have some striking similarities in the various recorded accounts, what specific form the NDE will take depends on the individual, and for Willis, this provides an opportunity for a clever twist. Recall the now-famous final scene in Cameron’s Titanic, when the elderly Rose, having lived a long, full life, dies quietly in her sleep. The camera follows her “soul’s” journey out of her body, towards a white light, then down into the ocean depths until she reaches the present-day wreck. As the camera moves into the main dining hall, we see the shipwreck morph back into its former unsunken glory, and all those who perished are on hand to welcome Rose back to the fold. Waiting at the top of the grand staircase is Jack himself, who takes Rose’s hand, her youth restored, and the lovers are reunited in eternity. (Cue violins and a thousand sobbing fans, followed by that overblown — and overplayed — Celine Dion ballad.)

But what if Rose hadn’t willingly gone into the light? Then she may have popped back to her reality as an elderly woman  in the middle of the ocean, on a complimentary junket to re-visit the sunken ship because she alone might know the secret of the fabulous lost diamond necklace. And her “vision” would have classified as a classic NDE. Joanna would definitely have wanted to interview her. Not only would Rose have made an excellent witness, but the two share a common NDE framework. When Joanna consents to let Richard induce NDEs in herself as a subject, she also finds herself on the Titanic — the very day of its sinking.

Of course, it isn’t really the Titanic: she knows that, even though the experience feels uncannily real, nothing like a typical dream state. But Joanna is convinced there’s a reason her subconscious has picked this particular framework in which to place her NDE. The Titanic is the perfect metaphor for what is happening as the brain strives to make sense of things even as it is dying (or pseudo-dying, in the case of induced NDEs). The body is a sinking ship, the chemical signals and electrical impulses are SOS messages trying to find some form of rescue, some way of jump-starting the body before brain death sets in, within four to six minutes after the onset of oxygen deprivation. The metaphor of the Titanic, says Joanna’s former English teacher, is “the very mirror image of death.”

Willis knows a little something about death, having lost her mother quite suddenly when she was 12, an experience she has described as “a knife that cut across my life and chopped it in two. Everything changed.” But she didn’t take refuge in the popular Hallmark sentiments that often pass for profundity in this country. [“[O]ur American culture is especially in denial about death,” she said in a 2003 interview, and while writing Passage, “I wanted to make sure some reader who had just had somebody die… would say, ‘Thank you for telling the truth and trying to help me understand this whole process.'”

And what a brutal truth it is. The novel ends by taking us right into the dying brain of one of the characters, quite conscious and very aware of what these visions represent: synapses firing randomly, memories falling away, even language being lost, before the visual cortex shuts down completely. The depiction is unflinching, and all the more powerful because it never resorts to easy platitudes. It’s not an easy book to read; it’s decidedly unsettling, yet I return to it again and again. Maybe it’s because Willis stops short of letting everything go dark; in the end, she acknowledges that perhaps some things cannot  — and need not — be known. By leaving things open-ended, Passage reassures us that it’s okay for this to remain unknown. Our only job, as human beings, is to make the life journey as rich and meaningful as possible — in whatever way we choose to do so.

It’s safe to say that a vast majority of the world’s population professes to believe in some form of life after death, even if the form it takes differs from culture to culture; it’s far more comforting to them. No doubt many of those resist any attempt by scientists to explain their experiences from a rational perspective. Like Maurice Mandrake and his fawning acolytes in Willis’ novel, they want their mystical/spiritual trappings, and consider alternative scientific explanations to be a kind of cheapening of such beliefs and experiences.

Even before I became a science writer, I never understood that attitude. How much more magical and wondrous to discover that there is a rational reason why we experience such things. “[P]eople are trying to validate their experience by making these paranormal claims, but you don’t need to do that,” Blackmore told ABC News when the Lancet study was published in 2002. “They’re valid experiences in themselves, only they’re happening in the brain and not in the world out there.”

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette blogs about science and culture at Cocktail Party Physics. Her most recent book is The Physics of the Buffyverse (Penguin, 2007).

by Matthias Matthijs

The curtain is finally falling over Tony Blair’s tenure in 10 Downing Street . After ten years as prime minister, Blair will step down on June 27. He will be succeeded by his stoic chancellor, Gordon Brown, although many Labour Party faithful are far from enthusiastic about the pending “coronation.” After almost ten years of Blair in Number 10, there is a widespread sense of disappointment – across the political spectrum – with the man who promised to create a “new Britain” and pledged to forever change the face of British society. On the left, there is frustration with New Labour’s slow progress in poverty reduction and the unacceptable levels of income inequality; while on the right there is criticism for excessive micro management and endless tinkering with the tax system, which supposedly harms the country’s international competitiveness. An overwhelming majority of the British population disapproved of his foreign policy, seen as too close to the Bush administration and often actively harming fundamental British interests.

What started out as a potentially brilliant premiership in 1997 was halted by excessive caution in domestic politics during the first term and his controversial decision to join US forces in what most Britons saw as an illegal war in Iraq during his second term. Where Thatcher was able to fuel nationalistic fervor and pride in 1982, and mask her initial failure in economic policy with a resounding military victory over Argentina in the Falklands; Blair’s disastrous adventure in Iraq would soon overshadow his successes in the domestic economy. History will judge Blair as a rather weak consolidator of Thatcherism, both in domestic and foreign policy. During his first term, most of Thatcher’s economic reforms were made all but irreversible by formally institutionalizing them (Bank of England independence forever banished the goal of full employment to the dustbin of history, and Brown’s “golden rule” made a virtue of fiscal austerity). Market mechanisms have been infused in all parts of government, something even Thatcher would not have dreamt of. In foreign affairs, Blair’s knee-jerk reaction to relations with Europe and America has been the same as Thatcher’s. However, Thatcher was much more independent from Washington than Blair, more ready to defend the plight of the Palestinians and criticize Israeli policy if she felt it justified. And whatever has been said about the Falklands, it could be defended in terms of the British national interest, which is not the case for Blair’s participation in the Iraq war.

Given the vague ideas of New Labour and Blair’s internal Party reforms while in opposition, one should probably not be so surprised that Blair and Brown acted the way they did once in power. It was never their intention to attack the emerging Thatcherite consensus in economic policy – even though they could have made the case and definitely had the overwhelming majority to do so – most of which they saw as inevitable in an increasingly globalized world. From the very beginning, Blair’s goals in government were much more modest than Thatcher’s were in 1979, and consisted in merely tweaking what he saw as a fundamentally sound economic system inherited from Major and Clarke. The fact that New Labour had such a large majority in the House of Commons, the widespread disillusion with the Tories after eighteen years in power, together with the ceaseless rhetoric and promise of “a New Settlement for a New Britain,” created too high hopes and unrealistic expectations – especially on the left – for the incoming government.

After ten years in power, it is clear that Blair is not in the same league as Attlee or Thatcher, and will never be seen as a politician who “changed the weather.” Maybe he was unlucky in this respect. Both Attlee and Thatcher came to power supported by a changing tide of the dominant ideology. It should have been clear from the start that The Third Way – or at least the interpretation given to it by New Labour – was ideationally too close to Thatcherism to create widespread enthusiasm and significant change. In the end, Mrs. Thatcher herself is perhaps the best judge. During her 81st birthday party in London last October, a guest asked her what she thought of new Tory leader David Cameron. With a smile, she answered: “I still prefer Tony Blair.”

But what are the prospects for Gordon Brown? Maybe he is secretly hoping that he can repeat the stunt of John Major in the general election of 1992. He is wrong for two reasons. Firstly, Major – for all his shortcomings – was a relatively new face which Britain seemed to trust. He had only been in high politics for about a year and a half when he got the top job. Brown is as much – if not more – associated with New Labour as Tony Blair. Secondly, the opinion polls in October 1990 showed that 34.3% intended on voting Conservative at the next general election against 46.4% for Labour. Just two months later, in December 1990, after the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher, 44.6% of the electorate told Gallup they would vote Tory compared to 39.1% for Labour. It is unlikely that Brown can bring about the same dramatic change in public perceptions. One recent poll by The Guardian gives Cameron’s Conservatives a lead of 10 points if Brown were to face an election as Prime Minister. The similarities with Al Gore in 2000 become more striking by the day.

The author is a Professorial Lecturer in Economics at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.

Sometime during the early part of the twentieth century the foundations were laid for a new civilization. Czeslaw Milosz once described it as being ‘behind wire’. That phrase has stuck with me. That it was a new civilization, a new way of looking at man, there is no doubt. Just what that means for us, now and forevermore, is something we’re still thinking about—as we should be. It will take a long time to stew this one over and there is good reason not to rush, not to miss any of the details. The new civilization behind wire was based on a seemingly contradictory pair of assumptions. One, that human beings are dangerous. Two, that human beings are nothing. But in the end there was a master logic that held these two propositions together. The civilization behind wire was to take dangerous human beings and prove to them, in the brutal schoolyard of experience, that they are, in fact, nothing at all. Dangerous human beings, in the face of their nothingness, tend to become less dangerous. Most of the pupils died convinced. Those that staggered out of the camps alive (sort of) were a mixed and mixed-up bag. Most of them came out simply broken. Another way to look at it is to see men like Stalin and Hitler as theological figures. They were interested in the soul. They were interested in experimenting with the soul. And with a remarkable audacity that can almost be admired, if with a shudder, they wanted to defeat the human soul. Aleksander Wat, the Polish poet and philosopher who spent some time in the Gulag system, once opined in his extraordinary memoir My Century:

I want to stress this point: the essence of Stalinism is the reforging of souls. … The point was not to correct the five or fifteen million in [the corrective camps] because they were a minority and Stalin was concerned with large numbers, large percentages; the only point was the population as a whole. … The point was for everyone to feel that threat at every moment, to know that the camps were terrible and that this could not be spoken of because this was something holy, sacral.

The wager at the foundation of the civilization behind wire was a brash one, it was absolute. The bet was that human beings could be made into slaves completely and utterly. The bet was that there is nothing in human ‘nature’ that makes them any more creatures of freedom than creatures of absolute servility. The bet was that men will become slaves and like it; will, in some cases, thrive in it. It is unclear exactly what is the final outcome, the final lesson of the civilization behind wire. Did it succeed in its basic proposition and fail for other reasons? How much did it reveal man to be a nothing? How much did it shatter the last illusions of men? These are uncomfortable thoughts, unsettling areas for human inquiry. That’s why the region of literature that deals with the civilization behind wire sits in a special and ghettoized region of the mind. I’ll confess a physical feeling of apprehension mixed with something close to electricity when I pick up certain books by Primo Levi, Aleksander Wat, Imre Kertész, Tadeusz Borowski, Danilo Kis, Gustav Herling, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and so on. I’m always sickly amused that such books are often betrayed already on their back covers by the promotional quotes that invariably adorn them. It is as if we are so zealous to inoculate ourselves from these books, to mute their terribleness, that we coat them even on their front and back covers with what amounts to a tissue of protective misrepresentations, lies. We understand that this literature is important, but at the same time we want it to go away. My copy of Gustav Herling’s ‘A World Apart: The Journal of a Gulag Survivor’ is furnished with a quote from The Observer that opines it “will be read for its humanity and beauty of expression.” I suppose that is true. But it would not have been my first choice in characterizing a book that contains the following description of the logic of the civilization behind wire:

A prisoner is considered to have been sufficiently prepared for the final achievement of the signature only when his personality has been thoroughly dismantled into its component parts. Gaps appear in the logical association of ideas; thoughts and emotions become loosened in their original positions and rattle against each other like the parts of a broken down machine; the driving belts connecting the past with the present slip off their wheels and fall sloppily to the bottom of the mind; all the weights and levers of mind and willpower become jammed and refuse to function; the indicators of the pressure gauges jump as if possessed from zero to maximum and back again. … the next morning he wakes feeling empty as a nut without a kernel and weak after the inhuman strain to which his whole organism has been subjected during the past few months, but dazzled by the thought that everything is already behind him. When a prisoner walks between the bunks without saying a word to anyone, it is easy for the others to guess that he is a convalescent with rapidly healing scars and a newly-assembled personality, taking his first uncertain steps in a new world.

True, Gustav Herling was able to preserve his remarkable humanity through his ordeals and later was able to express those ordeals with his gift for beautiful expression. But that is not why ‘A World Apart’ is an important book. It is so because it explains to us, in rather torturous detail, exactly the process by which human beings were reduced to nothing and then rebuilt into something even less. End of story. My copy of Primo Levi’s ‘Survival in Auschwitz’ proclaims that it is “a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit.” Primo Levi was a remarkable and brave man and his writings are a gift, if from hell. But the last several sentences of ‘Survival in Auschwitz’ read:

Because we also are broken, conquered: even if we know how to adapt ourselves, even if we have finally learnt how to find our food and to resist the fatigue and cold, even if we return home. We lifted the menaschka on to the bunk and divided it, we satisfied the daily ragings of hunger, and now we are oppressed by shame.

Primo Levi’s book is not about the ‘indestructibility of the human spirit’ but about its destructibility. Levi’s book is about how we can adapt to that destructibility, even in our shame, even in our recognition that we can be made into slaves in a heartbeat. Finally, my copy of Imre Kertész’s ‘Fatelessness’ carries, in a quote from The Washington Times, the claim that the book is “an ornate and honest testimony to the human spirit.” That’s simply insane actually and probably the result of a time-squeezed reviewer never having bothered to read the book. The reviewer simply saw that it was a novel by an Auschwitz survivor and assumed it could be described as a ‘testimony to the human spirit’. And that’s the problem in a nutshell. Nothing about the civilization behind wire is a testimony to the human spirit, except, perhaps, in being a testimony to the fact that the human spirit can be crushed into dust more quickly and efficiently and devastatingly than we ever wanted to believe. Among the many virtues of Imre Kertész’s novel is the extent to which he allows himself, through what amount of mental effort we can only imagine, to portray the civilization behind wire as something that has become natural to those who inhabit it, as just another way that human beings live. Here is his description of an evening at Auschwitz:

Here and there, more suspect plumes of smoke mingled with more benign vapors, while a familiar-sounding clatter drifted up faintly my way from somewhere, like bells in dreams, and as I gazed down across the scene I caught sight of a procession of bearers, poles on shoulders, groaning under the weight of steaming cauldrons, and from far off I recognized, there should be no doubting it, a whiff of turnip soup in the acrid air. A pity, because it must have been that spectacle, that aroma, which cut through my numbness to trigger an emotion, the growing waves of which were able to squeeze, even from my dried-out eyes, a few warmer drops amid the dankness that was soaking my face. Despite all deliberation, sense, insight, and sober reason, I could not fail to recognize within myself the furtive and yet—ashamed as it might be, so to say, of its irrationality—increasingly insistent voice of some muffled craving of sorts: I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.

The implication of that sentence “I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp” and the tortuous way that the sentence is finally squeezed out of the barely comprehensible experience that elicited it, is the very essence of the literature of the civilization behind wire. I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to think that sentence through, to ponder how it could have been uttered and what it means that it was. But, there we are. The civilization behind wire did exist and it has left to us a legacy. I very much wish this weren’t the case. But it is.

Edward B. Rackley

In the 1960s, post-colonial Africa was the most hopeful place on the planet. Post-partum exuberance in Europe’s former colonies was infectious and abundant. Yet fate has not been kind to sub-Saharan Africa. From Namibia to Guinea to Somalia, the path of most sub-Saharan nations has traced an arc of intimate complicity with the predatory appetites of their former colonial masters. Nowhere has this neo-colonial continuation of anti-development and enrichment by and for the few been more evident than in France’s former colonies.

The nature of governance in these ex-colonies attests to the abiding power of the self-serving instinct and immediate gain, over and against the long-term goal of national progress. Such is the confounding irony of Africa’s entire post-colonial era in nations previously occupied by France, Britain, Portugal and Belgium alike: why is the colonial, predatory model of governance so faithfully re-enacted by ruling African elites? It’s as if all that negative conditioning only succeeded in instilling a predatory instinct in the new ruling class. Why are Mandela-style visions for collective prosperity not more common, given the shared experience of subjugation and occupation across the continent?

Two to Tango

Colonialism’s direct rule in Africa was subjugation globalized. African independence in the early 1960s opened the door to fresh national possibilities. New African leaders claimed to reject the culture and values of the former occupier but happily overtook their infrastructure, education systems and administrative apparatus. “Authenticity” campaigns were launched in many countries; western attire and Christian names were banned in an effort to restore the indigenous to its rightful pride of place. Private companies held by former colonials were nationalized and dispersed among the new political elites, the results of which were just as disastrous as Mugabe’s land re-distribution schemes in Zimbabwe. Yet genuinely radical or “clean slate” beginnings, in affairs of the state as in art, are illusory.

During the cold war, western foreign policy in post-colonial Africa sought political stability, access to raw materials, and a common front against the Soviet threat. Military hardware and training for elite presidential guards was a common form of international assistance, a quid pro quo in exchange for access to resources and for remaining faithful to western capitalism. African leaders were not pressed on human rights, “good governance” or controlling corruption as they are today. The massacres of Idi Amin were insignificant compared to the Soviet threat.

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, western strategies towards Africa shifted as the need for quid pro quo camaraderie faded. The US gradually disengaged. Multiple internecine wars arose to topple African dictators, newly vulnerable without superpower protection. The UN struggled to contain the violence in Somalia, Liberia, Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Angola, and more recently Ivory Coast and Sudan. Peace deals were brokered, mostly on the cheap, resulting in a new crop of leaders.

As Africa imploded in the 1990, France in particular found itself on the receiving end of a massive outpouring of illegal immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. This influx continues at a massive pace, regularly making headlines in the international media. For Sarkozy and other EU leaders, the “African disaster” and the ongoing human exodus towards Europe constitutes a social, economic and political crisis and hot potato, engaging and enraging all sides of the domestic political spectrum.

La Françafrique

After independence, the new leaders of France’s ex-colonies chose to “respect continuity” by maintaining close political and economic ties with the former occupier. A common franc zones was initiated among the former colonies and the resulting currency, the CFA, was tied to the French franc to ensure stability. A parallel to the British Commonwealth was sought; its first articulation was issued the Ivoirian leader Houphouet-Boigny. La Françafrique would designate the unofficial confederation, bound by language, common history and appreciation of the ties that bind power and wealth. As the machinations of this network involving French oil companies, arms dealers and notoriously corrupt regimes came under increasing public scrutiny in the 1990s, Françafrique was subsequently adopted by F-X Verschave as the title of his book, La Françafrique. Le plus long scandale de la République (1999). Françafrique also means “France à fric,” fric being slang for cash. [More on this network, including interactive maps and histories by country, at Stop-Francafrique.com]

Since ceding control of its African colonies in 1960, France continued to support and protect the new client states, fending off insurgents or usurping leaders no longer of use. Between 1960 and 1994 alone, it carried out 16 non-UN mandated military interventions in former colonies. As of 2002, France maintains defense pacts with eight countries (Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, CAR, Djibouti, Cameroon, Comoros, Senegal, Togo), provides technical and material support to the national armies in 30 others, and has 14500 troops stationed in five countries. In return, France receives privileged, sometimes exclusive access to raw materials.

The political returns on this relationship for African leaders can be grand. President Omar Bongo of Gabon first rose to power in 1967 with French help; Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo ruled for 38 years until his death in 2005, when his son assumed the presidency, thanks to a nod from Paris. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, self-proclaimed “emperor” of the Central African “empire” and later tried for cannibalism, was ingloriously deposed by the French secret service while visiting Kadhafi in 1979. Belgium conducted affairs with Mobutu of the former Zaire in this way, as did the US with its African clients for the duration of the cold war. The closest American parallel to Françafrique is the way the US treats its Latin American “backyard” in the pursuit of profit and opportunistic alliance (recall the infamous “School of the Americas” still in operation at Fort Bennington GA).

France’s most infamous support to a rotten ally, the Habyarimana regime in Rwanda, led to recurrent accusations of complicity in the genocide as perpetrated by officials and military authorities from the ethnic Hutu majority then in power. France then intervened with Operation Turquoise, after 100 days of slaughter, ostensibly to prevent a “second genocide” by the invading Tutsi army against Hutus on the run towards neighboring Zaire. While some lives were saved, the French buffer zone allowed genocidaires to escape safely, proving the critics’ point that France is loyal to its puppet regimes no matter how venal or murderous.

Since the recent Sarkozy presidential victory, Africa observers are a-twitter over probable shifts in French policy on African immigrants, and whether the Françafrique network will finally be laid to rest. Consternation and surprise followed Sarkozy’s appointment of Bernard Kouchner as Foreign Minister, the socialist and well-known humanitarian. Kouchner is also the architect of the so-called droit d’ingerence (“the right to intervene on humanitarian grounds in the internal conflicts of sovereign states, which was recognized by international law in 1988. It has since served as the basis for inter-state military interventions on humanitarian grounds (Kosovo, Côte d’Ivoire, etc).

It’s a bird, it’s a plane…

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that French paratroopers landed near Birao in the Central African Republic on March 4 to recapture an airstrip held by a rebel faction (reprint here). An email from colleagues at Médecins Sans Frontières working out of Birao confirmed the report of the French intervention, ostensibly to stem a swell of rebel activity in the northeast quadrant of the country where violence has driven refugees into southern Chad and Sudan, further destabilizing the region.

The intervention was not the first for France in this country, where bolstering the country’s sagging leadership in Bangui, the country’s capital, has been a regular occurrence through several regimes since independence. While the WSJ article used the incident to highlight France’s long history of covert military interventions in its former colonies to support despotic regimes by extinguishing local insurgencies, its primary thrust was to question Sarkozy’s recent claims that the pattern of military meddling in African politics would cease.

Some pundits argue that an end of Françafrique will come “naturally,” as French foreign policy is modernized and subsumed by the EU. This would be an unfortunate disappearance act, for it would sacrifice France’s unique experience and knowledge of African realities. France under Sarkozi and Kouchner is far better positioned to create and drive policy renewal as an individual state than would behemoth multilateral that is the European Union. Yes a common front among EU states is needed, but this should not preclude or eclipse a reformed French policy on Africa. Hopefully Sarkozy and Kouchner will not duck the challenge of reforming Françafrique by passing the hot potato to Brussels, where reaching multilateral consensus can take years, the result an incoherent soup of compromise and concession between member states.

The big question is what will become of the client states themselves, the “backyard” of Françafrique and its cronyist web of privilege and profit. Omar Bongo of Gabon has already emphasized his friendship with Sarkozy, explaining that were he new president to reject him, (Bongo) would respond, “Ce n’est pas sérieux Nicolas, […] the fundamentals of Françafrique will remain, and can only be improved upon.” But whether armed invasions to bolster dubious regimes continue where no viable alternative exists and murderous chaos is literally at the door?

There is a potential humanitarian argument to be made for propping up drooling dictators if their demise is sure to unleash untold carnage as it did in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Congo-Kinshasa. The stage is set in Chad today, where French troops are supporting a delusional autocrat, President Idriss Déby, as violence escalates and spills over from Darfur. Without a foreign armed presence as a deterrent, things would certainly be much worse.

Kouchner’s visage humain

Besides the fresh perspectives Kouchner will bring to the table and, one hopes, the rapid retirement of the Françafrique cronies and kickback systems, Sarkozi needs a “human face” to deal with the immigration issue. Credited with single-handedly inventing the humanitarian movement, Kouchner is the face of humanitarianism in France. Serving with the Red Cross in the Biafran civil war in the late 1960s, he later broke publicly with the institution over its unwillingness to expose the government’s role in sustaining the famine to attract international attention. Out of this experience he founded Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in 1971, which in 1999 won the Nobel Peace Prize for its pioneering and controversial approach to emergency relief work. In 1980, after a similar breach with MSF, he founded Médecins du Monde.  

How will Kouchner respond to France’s “immigration problem”? Sarkozy, in a deft play on classic French solidarité, claims the immigration crisis points to the common destiny binding France and its former colonies—yet “another occasion to satisfy mutual interest through joint problem solving.” Will the Kouchner solution see a tempering of his humanitarian instincts in a bow to national interest and pragmatism? In 1979, Kouchner responded to a different migrant crisis, the Vietnamese “boat people,” by filling a giant lifeboat with aid workers and journalists to rescue a fleeing, desperate population. The adventure also served to highlight the alleged totalitarianism of the Vietnam regime. A potent symbolic and life-saving idea at the time, such grandiose gestures are less feasible now given the scale of the current African exodus. (Its inverse, an equally grandiose gesture of quarantine and rejection—the erection of enormous concrete walls—is the current favorite of conservatives in Israel and America).

Efforts to solve the impasse will doubtless be multi-faceted and contain complimentary strategic elements. Opening the floodgates has never been an option; “fortress Europe” and forced deportations have been the modus operandi since early 2000. Since his election last month, Sarkozy has already spoken of a 1:1 ratio of legal entry per available employment opportunity. But what will the African side of the solution look like? More stable regimes and job creation is the probable thrust of the policy, as Champs Elysée has already subsumed its development ministry, harnessing its development budget to the more dominant national interest machine. (The same is happening in Washington as USAID gets relegated to the State and Defense Departments toolbox).

Syphilitics on crutches

Françafrique may be buried or modernized under another name, but that won’t solve the mother of Africa’s problems, its governance crisis. Realistically, then, what are the immediate alternatives to propping up syphilitic regimes? Option 1: Let the people decide. The persistence of Mugabe’s grip on power shows how unready that population is to mobilize for change—no one wants to get killed. Popular reticence to risk life and limb is not indifference or ignorance; it is a calculated survival strategy common in many dysfunctional African states. As a result, there is no structured or coherent vox populi in the dozens of African countries living under Mugabe clones.

Option 2: Let the venal autocrats fall to any armed would-be liberator, and deal with the outcome. This is not a solution, it is a recipe for recurrent humanitarian disaster. If memory serves, Rwanda is the only internecine conflict in Africa since the cold war where a rebel group took power and actually delivered a superior product over the preceding regime. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Congo-Kinshasa were all ruled by corrupt cronies and were toppled viciously, but none were replaced by functional cabal, autocrat or enlightened despot who could restore order and rebuild the state.*

Option 3: Arrete le propping and forcibly remove them from power, à la Saddam. Where there is no local political system to step in and fill the void left by a charismatic autocrat (which rarely exists because smart autocrats destroy systems so everyone depends on them), this option will result in Iraqi-style failure or will require the installation of another dictator, fuelling an eternal new boss/old boss spin cycle.

A spoonful of democracy

Sarkozy has also said he will give development aid only to democratic regimes, and stop using the French army to control the political landscape in its former colonies. This is easy talk. The elephant in the room is that no magic solution exists to bring about more humane, transparent governance in Africa. Everything short of a continent-wide Marshall Plan has been tried: the tireless efforts by human rights groups to build civil society—what have these come to after thirty years of training and documenting systematic and atrocious abuses? When is the democratic genie going to pop out of the much-rubbed and fetishized lamp, assiduously cultivated and endlessly bankrolled by western democratization groups? Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s 2005 election in Liberia is one cause for hope. Other alleged democracies and favorites of the west, Kenya and Uganda come to mind, are extremely fragile whose presidents serve at the pleasure of the national army.

[Indulge me the following aside: Western governments fund the ballots, the pencils, the voting urns and booths, the observers, the armed guards, the voter registration process, ad infinitum, for most all elections in developing countries. When a party we don’t like wins, say, Hamas in Palestine, we insist that the elections were rigged and to start over. Unbowed, our mirage of miraculous democratization remains intact: just add candidates, willing voters and stir. Presto! Democratic process is born, fully formed and self-aware, straight from the test tube. Should you be undecided about whether the exportation of western-style democracy is what the developing world needs, sign on with the Carter Center and go observe upcoming elections in Asscrackistan, Zimzongoland, or wherever. I assure you a good time—and that no further proof of the scandalous charade that is the democratization business will be needed.]

The priority for the Sarkozy-Kouchner couple will be to conclude a viable foreign policy on the African disaster, both internally within specific nations, and the increasing outpouring of migration towards Europe. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Kouchner bury his head in the hallways of Brussels EU offices, spending less time expounding on French policy and positions on the plethora of problems facing sub-Saharan Africa. It is in the end far easier to construct and drive a bilateral foreign policy, and make it “more humanitarian,” “less hawkish” or even to pull the plug on the dirtier dealings of Françafrique than it will be to engage a multilateral mechanism like the EU to build and implement a common front on African policy that combines development and humanitarian assistance in sufficient measure, commercial investment and economic/employment development, and military training and assistance to fledgling but representative democracies, as in Liberia or Congo-Kinshasa.

In rural Africa today, subsistence livelihoods are the norm, even for those lucky enough to have received formal education. Where there is peace, the lumpen majority can hardly be called a proletariat given a near total absence of employment opportunities. Many of the rural poor I’ve met in Congo-Kinshasa, an ex-colony of Belgium, pine openly for re-colonization. But if a Marshall Plan for sub-Saharan Africa is out of the question, can Sarkozy and Kouchner at least get some of these people a job?

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* In Angola and Congo-Brazzaville, western powers ultimately came around to support the side with the oil—Congo-B president Sassou Nguesso is a card-carrying member of Françafrique, so no surprise there. But in Angola, Dos Santos’ MPLA party was adamantly pro-Soviet, with Cuban troops protecting extraction facilities run by American companies. Go figure.

My brother-in- law (BIL) has been breathing all his life but is unaware of the amount of air he has sucked in – over 200 million liters! He has inhaled 500 ml per breath – a little less during childhood – 15 times every minute to keep his body working for 51 years.

“Now, that is lot of air.” he exclaims.

BIL, an affable, portly man of liberal bend feels guilty of this enormous selfish appropriation. The guilt probably is also an overflow from his job – he manages a hedge fund.

When I ask him, “ What do you do?”

He mumbles, “I work for a hedge fund.”

“But what do you actually do to be so rich?”

He just smiles.

I try to assuage his hedge-fund-guilt by telling him that he did not hoard all that air, but exhaled an equal volume. But as a blue blood liberal – who thrives on a staple of guilt – this disconcerts him even more: he exhaled 200 million liters of pollution.

He cajoles me, “If you explain what happened to all that air, I will tell you about the hedge fund.”

So, here I go: Neurons in the brain stem (brain–spinal cord junction) regulate the autonomous respiratory rhythm; some neurons control the rate, while others control the depth of breathing. These neurons are sensitive to carbon dioxide (CO2) level in the blood; when the CO2 level crosses a threshold, sensors (chemoceptors) in the neck vessels and brain alert the respiratory neurons to initiate a breath. While cerebral cortex can direct the autonomous respiratory center to hold a breath for some time, it cannot override the chemical stimulus of CO2, which is why you cannot voluntarily hold your breath indefinitely.

With each breath, the diaphragm muscle, that partitions the chest from the abdomen, descends and the rib cage expands, which creates a negative pressure inside the chest cavity. The air from higher atmospheric pressure gushes in, fills the respiratory passages and reaches the small gas exchange sacs (alveoli). When the lung pressure equals the atmospheric pressure, the breath ends. The lung tissue also has stretch sensors, which send signals to the respiratory center to terminate lung expansion, which prevents over inflation and rupture.

About 500 ml of air rush into the chest, of which, 300 ml fill up the non breathing spaces like trachea and bronchial tubes. About 200 ml travel to alveoli – the active breathing sacs at the end of the breathing passages. About 60% of the inhaled air at rest, does not participate in gas exchange and occupies the dead space. During exercise and deep breathing more lung alveoli open up to accommodate increased inhaled volume of air.

During exhalation the diaphragm ascends, rib cage contracts, increasing the pressure inside the chest, which pushes out the air.

The walls of alveoli lay in apposition to the walls of the thin capillary blood vessels, which together form a respiratory membrane for exchange of gases. The gases diffuse from higher to lower pressure gradient. Thus, oxygen crosses from alveolar air into the blood and carbon dioxide moves in reverse.

Hemoglobin, the oxygen-loving-red-protein in blood, clutches oxygen in its quaternary embrace and swishes to the farthest tissues, where it unloads its valuable cargo to allow the oxygen-depleted cells breathe and thrive. Low tissue oxygen tension, acidic ph and some enzymes stimulate oxygen release from hemoglobin. Oxygen again follows the simple rule of diffusing from higher tension to lower and crosses the cell membrane into the interior, where it ignites the energy combustion by working as the terminal electron acceptor in the electron transport chain (ETC) near the mitochondrial membrane. ETC uses oxygen to generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the storehouse of cellular energy. All food components – fats, carbohydrates, and proteins – participate in the manufacture of ATP, which works as a ‘battery’ that powers the cell. The uncoiling of the high-energy phosphate bonds of the ATP provides the energy for metabolism and muscular activity.

“BIL are you listening?” I shout as I see him yawning.

“Yes, I am, go on. And what about the toxins and pollutants we produce?”

I continue: we produce CO2 during metabolism, which diffuses from the cells into the blood, mixes with plasma and travels back to the alveoli and forms major portion of the exhaled air.

We also form damaging ‘free oxygen radicals’ during metabolism. An atom is in a stable state when all the electrons in the outer orbit have a complimentary electron spinning in opposite direction. A ‘free radical’ has at least one unpaired electron in the outer orbit, which makes it highly reactive. To achieve stability, the atom ‘ steals’ an electron from a neighboring molecule converting it into to a free radical. To restore its own stability, this newly formed radical, in turn, captures an electron from another surrounding molecule thus setting up a chain reaction. Oxygen radicals – with two unpaired electrons in the outer shell – are readily formed in the cell during metabolism. These roving radicals snatch electrons from fatty acids of the cell membrane (lipid per-oxidation) causing decay and senescence. Approximately 2 to 5% of the total oxygen intake has the ability to form the highly damaging radicals by electron escape. During exercise, oxygen consumption can increase up to 20 times; electron escape from the ETC multiplies, generating considerably more damaging radicals.

“BIL, are you there?”

“Yes, I am. Energy giver oxygen is also a toxic radical. With each gasp of life comes a whiff of death.”

BIL could be right but for the antioxidants – the molecules with ability to mop up roving radicals. Body produces its own protective antioxidants and it extracts some from food, such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, oil and meats. . These antioxidants readily donate their electrons to unstable radicals and electron depleted antioxidants are not harmful themselves. The fat-soluble antioxidants, Vitamin E, beta-carotene and coenzyme Q line the cell membrane and the water-soluble antioxidants like vitamin C, glutathione peroxidase and catalase scavenge the interior of the cell. Under normal circumstances these suffice, but during increased oxygen use, like exercise, excessive radical production may overwhelm body defense causing lipid per-oxidation and cellular damage.

I summarize for BIL, ”The respiratory cycle involves, autonomous breathing, carrying oxygen to the needy tissue which extract it to use it for metabolism and produce unwanted by products like CO2 and free radicals. CO2 exits through the lungs and antioxidants neutralize the radicals.”

BIL demands, “Now tell me more about that dead space you talked earlier.”

I repeat, “ Even though we inhale about 500 ml with each breath, only 200ml actively participate in gas exchange. The rest just fills up the space in the air passages.”

BIL looks into the sky and pontificates, “That is the nature of human action: most of the human endeavor lands in dead space, seemingly futile. But that is the good news. The better news is that very little of human action is of any consequence, which unfortunately generates all the bad news.”

Now, BIL gets earnest and adds “Every living person consumes air every few seconds. That must make air the largest consumption good in the world and that is a huge market opportunity – bigger than food, water, oil, religion or war. But where is the business?”

I remind him that respiratory therapy for ‘the breathing – challenged’ is a big business, but BIL reminds me that the normal non- ailing healthy lungs form a much bigger market. I tell him that the Yoga peddlers have exploited the ‘business of normal breath’ and quote some data that I read recently, “The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks.”

Unimpressed, he remarks, “The opportunity has not been exploited enough.”

I loose my patience, “Then go to moon and mine oxygen! Oxygen is the most abundant element in lunar soil, constitutes nearly half of it by weight. Your mined oxygen from the moon can play big in space ventures.”

“How do we arbitrage this?” he enquires.

I stare at him with dumb expression; I don’t even understand his question.

“Arbitrage is like diffusion of oxygen across gradients; it equilibrates the gradient of the financial markets.”

Now, confusion contorts my dumb expression. He notices my silence and says,” You wanted to know what I do for my living; I will tell you. For my detractors I am a selfish free radical who steals from others; for my supporters I am an anti-oxidant bringing stability to the inherently inefficient systems; but I think, I am like the cushion of air in the dead respiratory space, mostly futile, but ready to pounce when action erupts.”

by Ram Manikkalingam

My senior editor Morgan Meis and I were watching Sri Lanka play Australia in the Cricket World Cup, in an Australian pub in New York city last month. Morgan accused me of being a nationalist, because I did not agree with Amnesty International’s (AI) campaign for international human rights monitors in Sri Lanka. He did not use nationalist here as a compliment. What he meant by a nationalist, was someone who said my country, right or wrong, i.e., my country whether or not it kills innocents and displaces hundreds of thousands, or develops the economy, and educates and feeds the poor.

As the armed conflict intensifies in Sri Lanka, several thousand were killed and about a thousand have disappeared in the past year. These disappearances and killings have primarily taken place at the hands of the Sri Lankan security forces, or their proxy militias. The Tamil Tigers, who have been fighting harshly, have also made a significant contribution. In addition, in the capital Colombo, dozens of minority Tamil businessmen have been kidnapped for ransom. These kidnappings involve a combination of lawless lawmen, ex Tamil militants and criminals. More recently, the Tamil Tigers launched their air force, bombing the main air force base and gas storage tanks. The economy is in a tailspin with a severe drop in tourism, risk of hyperinflation, low levels of investment and increasing cost of living. There is no doubt the situation in Sri Lanka has deteriorated, with the military clashes escalating and ordinary civilians suffering. Even the most sanguine observers, and nationalist minded, will find it hard to deny this.

This has led reputable national and international human rights organizations like Civil Rights Movement and the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, to call for the armed parties to respect the laws of war, and for the deployment of international human rights monitors to establish a presence in Sri Lanka and protect civilians. The idea (or hope) is that the presence of impartial outside witnesses will make the armed parties to the conflict, whether connected to the state or opposed to it, think twice before they kill and torture innocents or expel them from their homes. This has been the case in a number of other conflicts from El Salvador to Nepal. They hope that this experience can also prove to be true for Sri Lanka, easing suffering and reducing violence.

Picking up on this theme, Amnesty International, launched an international campaign around the World Cup Cricket to get the international public to call on the government and the rebels to accept international human rights monitors. The campaign was titled “Sri Lanka play by the rules”. Cricket, in Sri Lanka, as in much of South Asia, is not simply a passion. It is a way of life. Some might even say it is the only secular religion we have – sort of like French nationalism or Turkish secularism. In any case, AI gambled that with passions running high during the cricket world cup, it would be possible to highlight the deteriorating situation in Sri Lanka, and pressure or persuade the government and rebels into accepting the presence of human rights monitors. It did not quite work out this way and Amnesty’s campaign was a flop.

I also contributed to this failure, not in word, nor in deed, but in sentiment. Like most Sri Lankans, I was deeply discomfited by the campaign, if not opposed to it. I was torn, because I did support more active human rights monitoring, including international presence, if required, but did not like the use of the World Cup Cricket tournament as a venue to campaign for this. I wanted to support the Sri Lankan cricket team and enjoy cricket without Amnesty, and by extension Sri Lanka’s civil war, intruding on it. So Morgan accused me of being a Sri Lankan nationalist – defending my country right or wrong – and choosing my cricketing pleasure over the welfare of my people.

So why would someone like me, who sympathises with the purported objectives of Amnesty – an end to human rights violations in Sri Lanka – and even the means – international human rights monitoring – oppose its campaign during the world cup? Let me first set aside the two responses that I have heard that do not necessarily apply to me. One is the response made by an organization like the Free Media Movement that also criticized Amnesty. They had this to say: “Amnesty International’s actions at the Cricket World Cup, for the best of intent, may well result in the worst of outcomes for human rights activists in Sri Lanka. By raising the wrath of the government and fuelling the already powerful rhetoric of extreme nationalist forces in the country who are deeply and violently opposed to civil society advocacy and support of human rights, we regretfully note that Amnesty International’s ill-thought of campaign may end up severely discrediting the human rights movement in Sri Lanka.” Now while I do not disagree with this view of the Free Media Movement’s, I am a bit more nationalistic, at least according to Morgan, because I am saying something more. Not just that the campaign is bad, because it is not successful and is turning off many Sri Lankans, but that I myself am one of those Sri Lankans who is being turned off, by Amnesty’s campaign.

Others say it is bad to mix politics with sport, and therefore Amnesty’ campaign should be condemned for doing so. This is a facile response. After all politics and sport are often linked. And politicians like to take advantage of sports victories by their countrymen to increase their popularity. Prime Minister John Howard, who cannot really claim any credit for Australia’s victory at the World Cup, hosted the winning team to dinner, and sought to bask in the reflected glory. Moreover, I supported the sports boycott of apartheid South Africa, which had a racist regime and all White teams. And there is no doubt that the sports boycott contributed to the demise of apartheid there.

Sri Lanka, or at least its cricket team, is different. It is a multiethnic team with members from all communities – Muslim, Tamil and Sinhala. While there is clear discrimination against Tamils by the state, along linguistic and ethnic grounds, this is not the case in the selection of the cricket team. And there is a widespread consensus that it is successful, in part because there is a considerable degree of meritocracy in its selection. This is not to deny that because of the war there are fewer and fewer players from the war affected North and East being able to make the grade, in part because it is harder for schools and clubs to participate in national competition. But this is quite a bit different from saying that players are excluded simply because they belong to a particular ethnic or social group, as was the case in apartheid South Africa. So what then is my specific reason for opposing Amnesty’s campaign?

While there are many things that make me sad to be Sri Lankan – poverty, corruption, violations of human rights, authoritarianism, ethnic extremism, not to mention death and destruction – there are some things that make me happy to be Sri Lankan. Anyone visiting Sri Lanka will notice, in the early mornings and late afternoons, children going to and from school, in their crisp clean whites, whether they live in affluent urban settings or poor rural ones. It is hard to tell the wealthier children from the poorer ones, as they bicycle, bus, or walk to school in the hundreds of thousands. It is sight that always makes me feel good. Not because the schools have the best facilities, or every child is going to “make it”. But because I feel that whatever we may have done wrong, we have a society, where most children (if not the poorest of the poor) will learn to read and write, and have a real opportunity for a better life. And I feel proud to be part of a left tradition that helped set the foundation for a universal and free public education system that is able to provide for most Sri Lankan children.

And then there is cricket. We have a team, from a small poor South Asian country, that has been able to stand up to, and invariably defeat, the very best in the world. And this because we have chosen our cricketers, not on the basis of their class, ethnicity or regional background, but because of how well they can play the game. I am (only) a little embarrassed to admit this, but one of my heroes among, John Rawls, Antonio Gramsci, Salman Rushdie and Muhammad Ali, is Arjuna Ranatunga – the Captain of the Sri Lankan team that won the World Cup in 1996:

And like all Sri Lankans, I enjoy watching my country play cricket, and I particularly enjoy watching them win. And this in Sri Lanka is pretty much universal. On days when Sri Lanka is playing cricket, traffic comes to a complete stop, nobody works, and everyone is watching the game, except a few very superior souls. Cricket provides a uniquely common moment of enjoyment for all of us. Even strong Tamil supporters of the Tamil Tigers, cheer the Sri Lankan team in international competition, donning Sri Lanka cricket T-shirts, even as they give money to the Tigers to prosecute the war against the Sri Lankan state.

No doubt there is in cricket a moment of national escapism not entirely unlike a good bollywood movie. When we cheer the team, we forget the number of issues that divide us, plague us, drag us down, and make us depressed and sad, because of the state our country is in. But this moment of escapism is just that. It need not be seen as denial, because from the Free Media Movement, which opposes the campaign but enjoys cricket, to the Tamil Tiger supporter who supports the Tamil Tigers, but cheers the Sri Lankan cricket team, or the Sinhala nationalist who wants the Tigers defeated and supports the Sri Lankan team, the reality of the war and moment for choosing sides, is around the corner, as soon as the game ends. At this moment, Amnesty or anyone else, might have our attention, when they chip in to get us to address the mess we find ourselves in. But by interfering with our cricket before that, they risk marginalization by intruding on a moment of collective escapism, and pleasure, and dare I say pride, that all of us Sri Lankans share irrespective of whatever may divide us.

Elatia Harris

Last weekend in Reykjavik, the renowned French street theatre company, Royal de Luxe, enacted the latest episode in The Saga of the Giants, a outdoor drama for colossal, crane-operated marionettes that has since 1993 unfolded in continental Europe, the UK, Africa and South America. (For a detailed look at the company and a mind-boggling video, refer to my earlier 3QD article.) 

Each time Royal de Luxe plays a new location – and this was their Scandinavian debut – Jean-Luc Courcoult, the company director, writes a story especially for the people of that place, a simple story that will reach deeply into their trove of archetypes yet be understood by children under 10.  It must be performable by the Giants, too, who are between 20 and 40 feet high, made of carved wood and operated not only by cranes but by numerous actor-technicians manning pulleys and ropes, swarming all over the marionettes.  Learning this, one might assume there was a lid on the expressive potential of the Giants. There is, but not in the way that springs to mind.  And which is more important?  What a giant marionette does, or how it makes you feel watching it?  “For years, I wondered how one could tell a story to an entire town,” Courcoult has said.  “On a plane to Rio, the idea of using out-size marionettes came to me… People have believed in giants since the year dot.  Every culture on earth has stories about them.  I find the giant more powerful than God or religion – because it is more make-believe yet more human.”

The Geyser of Reykjavik

For Icelanders, Courcoult wrote “The Geyser of Reykjavik.” There being no natural geyser within city limits, one was created by jack-hammering a square at a foot-traffic nexus downtown, and, every half-hour or so, pumping water in a 3-storey surge into the air – routine mischief for Royal de Luxe.  The new geyser was accompanied by a hideous low growling sound, and ruined vehicles were seen all over town, pinned to the asphalt by a 15-foot fork, impaled on a tree, smashed from above by a concrete roadwork barrier.  Unusually for the company, which seeks always the advantage of surprise, bits of the story were allowed to circulate well before the show – rumors of an angry giant, with a giant daughter who would come to pacify him.  As Courcoult intended, the story dovetailed with the lore of Iceland’s deep past — the Eddas and the Sagas, so full of fateful encounters among giants, and between giants and gods.  The Royal de Luxe Giant was understood to be acting out his wrath in dreams or in some other brawling disinhibited state, the geyser wrung from the asphalt being only the first sign of him.

The full story would recall the Norse creation myths laid aside by Vikings on Iceland less than 1000 years ago, their conversion to the new faith coming reluctantly, and later than that of their mainland peers. As the original Giant in The Saga of the Giants was known to have fallen from the sky onto the city of Le Havre, the Giant of Reykjavik was said to sleep uneasily in the earth beneath the town, the angry Icelandic earth only a few tens of millions of years old and still churning, glaciers lurching and sliding over its hottest spots, volcanoes rising from its boulder-strewn lava fields.  Iceland straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, part of the world-circling undersea mountain system that separates the North American from the Eurasian Continental Plate. These Plates shift precisely under Iceland, anchored to the Ridge like a clasp on a chain.  And beneath all this, interacting with it, there is the Icelandic plume, a self-buoyant hot upwelling of intensely primordial material from the Earth’s mantle into its crust.  Countless eruptions and quakes have formed and re-formed Iceland, girdling it with tiny newer islands, the last permanent one, Surtsey – named for Surtr, the furious Norse fire giant – rising from the sea in 1963.

Into this calamitous land – hellish, lunar, achingly beautiful — whose snowy terrain will buckle, split and flow until some unimaginably serene era imponderably far from now, the Royal de Luxe Giants have come to stir up the mythic past.  Fire giants and frost giants were in Viking days the personifications of extremes to be endured.  Nature was itself a battlefield, with the giants — the rock-hurling, venom-spewing giants, stupid and rageful — impossible for humans to defeat without the gods, their joined battle the cause of otherwise inexplicable natural phenomena.  The Reykjavik show, free to all comers and attracting thousands, was a battle of the giants for our own time, fought with noise and will and stealth in the narrow streets, by the freshwater lake and at the windy blue harbor of the world’s northernmost capital.

Another Mission for Little Girl Giant

Happily for Royal de Luxe, the giants of the Eddas and the Sagas were not always disastrous, nor the gods entirely well behaving.  There were more complex interactions between gods and giants — seduction, for instance — than battle.  Giants could be very wise, like Mimir, from whom Odin purchased for the price of an eye the ability to foresee the future, including Ragnarok, the end of the world.  Or they could be the last word in desirability, like Gerdr, a beautiful giantess wooed by Freyr, the Norse fertility god who sent her eleven golden apples and a golden arm ring before she would consent to be his wife.  For the Reykjavik show, Royal de Luxe took a cue from the ambiguities inhering in the very oldest legends, pitting Little Girl Giant – the 20-foot time-traveling child who had already eluded an elephant-borne sultan in London and chased down a hidden rhinoceros in Chile – against a fresh antagonist, her father.

Learning of her father’s destructive rampage at the Arctic’s edge, Little Girl Giant, suitcase in hand, came by water to Iceland, there to subdue him. The first anyone saw of her, she was resting from the journey in her pale pink nightdress, reclining in a deck chair atop a hexagonal 19th century bandstand by the lake.  Little Girl Giant routinely enjoys a levee that would make Louis XIV appear a figure of radiant simplicity. She commands, for one thing the Sun King lacked, her own camion de musique, a 20-foot float with rock musicians, Les Balayeurs du Desert, who follow her everywhere, playing selections from her personal album of characteristic tracks, Jules Verne Impact.  On Day One of the drama as the band geared up, she was tenderly helped into white ankle socks and the astonishing red iron-hinged shoes that are her hallmark: as with a stranger in a myth, it is by these shoes that she is known to take possession of a territory, and if she does not always wear them – she sleeps and dances barefoot – they are nonetheless always beside her.  Her one dress is that of a 10-year old school girl of the 1950s – innocence itself, and therefore alluring in the well-chronicled way that is, even so, startling.  It is leaf green, cap-sleeved, trimmed in white piping, and mothers and daughters have been seen — in Chile not in Reykjavik — to wear costumes as nearly matching it as they can contrive for a Royal de Luxe appearance in which she figures.  On this first morning of the show, she is a giantess with an entourage, gathering her powers for a day of reconnaissance in a new city, looking sleepily around her — at the lake, at the town, at her people.  It’s a Friday, so many but not all of her people are young children out of school just for her, brightly hatted to make them easy to keep in sight.

Negotiating the steep downward incline from the lake to the city center is more than Little Girl Giant can do on her own steam, though when walking on flat land she has a charming, natural, arm-swinging gait, and the actors counter-weighting her feet by means of ropes make no secret of how hard it is to produce this appearance of insouciance on her part.  Indeed, the appalling effort of keeping her on the march is a big part of the show. Poussez, poussez, the throaty, carnivalesque voice of the actor-boss barks out at his team, who are utterly choreographed, sweating inside their velvet livery, and making awful faces.  The noise they must endure is awful too, the iron hinges of the famous red shoes ringing on the cobblestones that line the city streets.  It’s a portentous sound barely disguised by the band’s amped music, and every decibel is a calculated result. The huge racketing feet, the beauty and gentleness of the face against the pointed rooftops, recall tales from the Brothers Grimm – and from much further back – speaking to the unfathomable divide between our lower and higher natures. Giants in themselves speak to this divide, the myth of the battle of the giants involving human effort and divine inspiration to overcome innate regressive tendencies. Beneath the cobblestones, conduits of boiling water from Iceland’s geothermal sources keep the surface of the streets too warm to freeze.  It is understood now by everyone thronging these streets that the angry father sought by the noisy daughter is in the earth just below, his gnashing distantly audible through the new geyser’s roar.  Can he hear her down there?  Can he know why she has come?

To stalk a furious father without having a pee is just too much. Crouching near the Lutheran Domkirkja in the center of town, toy-like in its relative size, Little Girl Giant makes water – lots of it – pleasing herself intensely and looking embarrassed not at all. The children in their knitted hats are wild with joy at this.  It’s time for the fabled lollipop, long and pink, causing Little Girl Giant to show her carnal aspect and her intricate and frightening tongue – something for the murmuring children to remember always, the aha! of it still years down the line.  Her eyes are slitted as she licks, her concentration perfect, she dips and all but swoons.  Uniquely at this time she seems alone, disconnected from her people, 20 feet above the city’s major shopping street with townsmen leaning out dormers at her yet somehow in a private space.  Finally, a red-liveried actor takes the thing away from her, and sated but brightening, she once again regards her surround, large-pupiled gaze resting for longer than usual on whatever is in its orbit.  If you are standing on a corner, which causes her to pivot and linger, this is the best moment to make eye contact with her, for she may give the thrilling appearance of personally taking you in. With eyes the size of searchlights, she can always sweep you, but the air of faint distraction caused at most other times by a multiplicity of foci does not just now obtain; you have beheld her in a private moment, and she will judge you like a cat.

Knowing When to Stop

Poussez!  Poussez! The boss’s raspy plosives tell the crew it’s time to lift Little Girl Giant onto the bed of a truck for a ride up the highest hill in town, surmounted by a true architectural one-off, the Hallsgrimkirkja — Reykjavik’s most imposing structure.  Begun in the 1940s, the cast concrete Hallsgrimkirkja owes a bit to the geysers, a bit to the Machine Age, and a bit more to the witch’s towers of Oz.  Seeing Little Girl Giant in its unlikely adjacence, it’s hard not to conceive of her as the Hyperborean Dorothy, trekking red-shod in dreams where she cannot waking go.  It is high noon, the most threatening hour to illusion, for the absence of shadow drains off gravitas to reveal the awful corroded fragility of the mind’s play.  Here, where the church – the campy, mathy and strangely moving church – is almost scaled to Little Girl Giant, the public space large enough to encompass her, the absurdity of the Giants kicks in.  Perhaps she agrees, for at this summit of the town, beneath a bronze statue of Leif Eriksson not a quarter of her size, she naps.  The music winds down, the crowds disperse.

Royal de Luxe Giants have always tended to nap, and they do it with abandon – head thrown back, hands grazing the ground, feet propped up.  Never unattended while napping, they nonetheless look unguarded. Having lost consciousness before you, they’ve disarmed you, and always at the perfect time, when you can probably not much longer suspend disbelief.  Sleeping or waking, the ceaseless motors in their chests cause their diaphragms to rise and fall – they do not miss a breath, ever.  And, lightly, they snore.  For the early evening show, in the light that will not subside for many hours yet, Little Girl Giant and her camion de musique will set up at the harbor, where, barefoot, she will be lifted by a crane to dance high in the air, the red-liveried actors struggling horribly with ropes to make her gyrate, point, kick and raise her arms, all of which she does energetically to loud percussive music on this pale-skied night before she finds and subdues her father. 

There was a levee, and there is also a couchee.  A 25-foot dormitory-style brass bed is rolled out onto a pier in the lee of low buildings, a windbreak for the night. The nightdress replaces the day dress, folded carefully into a basket.  Little Girl Giant shelters between a featherbed and a duvet. There, a new topographical element in the cityscape, she will spend the night, and her people will go home aware of her recumbent presence beside the slowly darkening waters of the harbor, and of her father dreaming destructively beneath the land.  But not just yet.  Les Chaussures! Les Chaussures! The boss calls out to the crew – the shoes, the shoes!  A rug is laid down at the side of the bed, and the red shoes, the symbol of the traveler, are placed squarely on it.  Without shoes, in the old legends, the journey is broken, and the traveler waits for Heaven to provide the means to continue.

A June to Remember

The Reverend Jon Steingrimsson — an eyewitness — recorded these memories of the Laki eruption in the south of Iceland in June, 1783. “This said week, and the two prior to it, more poison fell from the sky than words can describe: ash, volcanic hairs, rain full of sulfur and salt peter, all of it mixed with sand. The snouts, nostrils, and feet of livestock grazing or walking on the grass turned bright yellow and raw.  All water went tepid and light blue in color… All the earth’s plants burned, withered and turned gray, one after another, as the fire increased and neared the settlements.”

The old giants stirred that June at Laki in 1783, with ten eruptive episodes identified, the onset of each heralded by an earthquake swarm that increased in intensity until a new fissure opened. Fire fountains reached heights of 1400 meters, and lava poured from fissures at the rate of about 8,600 cubic meters per second, coming close to the discharge rate of the Amazon River. Shortly after the eruption began, lava reached the Skafta river gorge and flowed towards the lowlands, traveling 35 kilometers in only four days. And the effusion of lava continued to February of 1784.  Almost worse than this, and much further reaching, the convective eruption column of Laki carried gases to altitudes of 15 kilometers – gases that formed aerosols causing cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, possibly by as much as 1 degree C, a cooling that is the largest such volcanic-induced event in historic time.  As for the ash fall extending all the way to mainland Europe, in Iceland alone it led to wide-scale livestock loss, crop failure, and the death by famine of one quarter of the human population.

Today, Laki is a ten-fissured vent complex, each fissure covered by a continuous row of scoria cones, spatter cones, and tuff cones ranging in height from 40 to 70 meters. You can visit it on a “volcano tour,” minding where you step as always in Iceland when trekking over sites where seismic activity is both a vivid memory and a future certainty.  The world-historical and unusually well-documented Laki eruption occurred at a time that folklore had edged out myth – all that giants were supposed to be doing in Scandinavia by the 1700s was hurling rocks at churches. 

In our own time, Iceland — one of the most active volcanic regions on Earth — erupts and quakes, and non-Icelanders do not particularly hear about it.  Eleven volcanoes erupted between 1900 and 1998 alone, eruptions involving the effusion of basaltic lava.  Perpetually snowy, massive Hekla erupted in 2000, and Grimsvotn, near Laki, erupted as recently as 2004.  In fact, much of Iceland lies in the path of what geologists call a propagating rift.  Jules Verne, beloved inspiration of the Royal de Luxe 2005 show, The Sultan’s Elephant, chose the three-cratered volcano of Snaefell as the starting point for his Journey to the Center of the Earth.  In Verne’s own boyhood in Nantes, the Laki eruption and its impact on continental Europe would have been sufficiently within living memory that to enter the crater of an active Icelandic volcano was a most intrepid thing for a character in a novel to do.  For Royal de Luxe to bring a fire giant to Iceland speaks not only to its deep past but to its present way of life, which includes forms of preparedness – a special tax on everyone going to a common fund, for instance — for seismic events that produce chaos, swallowing up the homes of citizens.  Yet the ultimate form of preparedness, prediction, is a quest one must still battle with giants to succeed in.

The Day of the Giant

Small wonder that on the morning of the day she would encounter her father, Little Girl Giant took time not for the usual levee but for lustration – a shower by the harbor lasting half an hour.  High on a hill above the lake, where the historical museum and the Universities are, her father was preparing for her, too.  In The Saga of the Giants, the big Giant is sometimes in a fix, parts of his 38-foot body hidden within fiery structures.  Once in Le Havre, for example, he was found in a burning house, head emerging from the roof, hands from dormers, looking no more perplexed than usual but even more trapped.  The Giant of Reykjavik was first seen around 10 a.m. on May 12, staring angrily into a pan of fire, the growling sounds familiar from the new geyser in town issuing from his lips, which also spat ashy water at bystanders. His lower body was confined inside an overturned bus of great size.

The big Giant never has the freedom of motion of that Little Girl Giant enjoys, and he had less even than was customary in Reykjavik, where there was literally no street wide enough for him to walk on within his scaffolding, a towering 6-storey affair that forbids the Giant to be ambulatory in all but a few cities in the world. Another difference between the original giant and the giant of Reykjavik is the head.  The face of the original Giant is a sorrowing, vigilant, blue-eyed countenance – rather Christ-like, and that’s no accident.  To see him walk within his scaffolding, regarding with incredulousness the humans far below, actors leaping on ropes from the scaffolding to lift his sandaled feet, is to be on his side. The Giant of Reykjavik, by contrast, was yellow of face and bald of head, his lips set in a sneer.  On either cheek were sinuous carvings like those on the Vaksala Runestone, and he wore a permanent and terrible frown. This was a creature to whom there was no appealing; the sight of him and the sound made babies cry. You’re not meant to hope this Giant will be spared, and you don’t hope it. You would like, instead, to see something bad happen to him.

Little Girl Giant has been charged with luring this furious, pagan father of hers off the land – his element  – and down to the water, her own.  For their first meeting, on the bridge across the lake, they size each other up – it’s a meeting from a fairy tale between an ogre father and an innocent offspring who have never before set eyes on one another.  Behind one of her inner tube-sized ears is a bouquet of fresh flowers – she is garlanded for this event like a sacrificial maiden, but otherwise wears her usual Lolita dress and her killer iron-hinged shoes.

This day will see several more encounters of the Giants, as the child lures the father through the town, always closer to the water, where the decisive encounter will take place.  Never once does the big Giant nap, and all day one notes still more differences between him and other players in The Saga of the Giants. But the failure to nap is what most sets him apart – the failure to make himself vulnerable.  Occasionally he down-focuses, as if auguring from his pan of fire – which never goes out. You feel that although he is malevolent, trapped and being hauled to his doom, he may yet be capable of one more awful feat, that perhaps he is not trapped in the vast bus but coiled in it. The question of what might ultimately happen is not really open, however — the rising generation will indeed subdue the old.  While this makes for less drama, it is a sign of a deeper affinity between the Giant of Reykjavik and the chthonic fire giants of Muspelheim – one could, with inspiration, outwit them, but not control them.  And there will always be another battle, as the myths attest.

In the bright evening, a high wind coming off the water, so that even in May thousands of Icelanders are in their down coats and fur hats, the scene at the harbor is played out.  Having lured her ogre father to the water’s very edge, Little Girl Giant, her camion de musique in tow, walks to the far end of the long pier where the battleship gray vessel of the Icelandic Coast Guard is tied up. The Giant cannot follow her there — she seems somehow under the protection of the long boat painted with Iceland’s flag.  She turns around and, facing him, lifts an arm.  That’s the sign for a horrifying-looking implement at the end of a heavy-duty crane to get the Giant’s head in its grip and tear it off – not before he looks menacingly at the crowd one last time. 

Ashy water gushes from his empty neck – almost another geyser, and it gushes for a long, long time.  The crane flings his grimacing head high in the air.  When it falls to the surface of the water, there are flames and gas and steam – the hellfire in broad daylight of which Royal de Luxe is justly proud, and which they always deliver.  Children howl and cheer, their parents buttoning them tighter into their down coats, for it’s not yet the end of the show, and it’s cold.

A tug rounds the corner of the pier, backing into the slip next to the Coast Guard’s boat.  In it are Little Girl Giant’s deck chair and her suitcase – stiff-sided creamy calfskin, it looks like, tagged and stickered from all the ports she’s traveled to.  Her work done, she heads for the tug resolutely, waving Queen Elizabeth-style as the crane lifts her from the pier into her chair.

The red-liveried actors jump into the tug after her, the better to settle her there, but also to be taken off themselves – they leave when she leaves, for they are not to be separated from her unless she sleeps, or, as happened last year in London, hurtles off into space-time.  Bright-eyed with victory, Little Girl Giant surveys her people but lingers not. The tug pulls out of the slip, fast gaining the end of the pier. 

Thinking that Royal de Luxe must now be done, you lift your eyes to a mountain across the blue bay — a table-top mountain, remnant of one of the subglacial eruptions commonly occurring in Iceland that can generate meltwater at twenty times the flow rate of the Amazon River. The discharge rate of water is actually a very fine topic for Icelandic conversations — you are in an island nation where thundering falls are named for horses’ manes, where half the structures are heated by geothermal power, where falling water is power, even in legend, and people can’t fail to be interested in it.  But Royal de Luxe is also interested in the possibilities of water, and Royal de Luxe is not done.  Two hoses on Little Girl Giant’s tug release streams at a certain angle to its jets, making the air in its wake trembling wet.  The sun is high, and a rainbow appears.  The Icelanders, cold in the wind, passionately fond of their history and folklore, wave off Little Girl Giant and the actors who operate her as the tug makes for wider water.  The music finally stops, the rainbow persists, and you are released. 

Bifrost, some of the Icelanders might be musing as they gather up their children to go home — Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge, the only way there is for the giants to enter Asgard, the realm of the gods.

See also: ROYAL DE LUXE: THE SAGA OF THE GIANTS  (3QD, March 26, 2007)

Numerous Internet resources provide photo-documentation of Royal de Luxe events, most notably the Royal de Luxe Group on Flickr, administrated by Kris Blomme (a.k.a. KrieBel), who has compiled an excellent list of external links. http://www.flickr.com/groups/royaldeluxecentral/

For kind permission to use their work in today’s post, I want to thank, in the order their photos appear here, many photographers in Iceland: drengur1, Laufey Waage, Petur Fridgeirsson, Sigurros Engilbertsdottir, Jon Ragnarsson, Adalsteinn Eythorsson, Helgi Halldorsson/Freddi, Karl Gudmundsson, Villi Thorsteinsson, Haraldur Gudjonsson, Helga Eiriks, Elisabet Elma, and Asa Thordur. And one non-Icelandic photographer, Trey Ratliff, a fellow Texan.            

If the legacy of Patricia Highsmith could be said to live on through the work of any contemporary artist, it would surely be the British filmmaker Danny Boyle. Boyle, who has worked in a range of genres—from 2002’s zombie flick 28 Days Later to Millions, a wondrous children’s fable directed two years later—is a director with a vision. Much like Highsmith, he rarely treads lightly. His touch is definitive and recognizable to anyone acquainted with his work. However, his isn’t the first name you associate with the modern-day auteur. He, like Highsmith, is more an artist-craftsman than a flashy star—rarely do their personalities overwhelm their work—a director whose work appeals to those uninterested in film’s form but whose fan’s immediately recognize his narrative and visual style.

Through this interplay Boyle’s films bridge the gap between mainstream and independent movies. When they came out, his Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996) catered for a very different audience than The Beach (2000), as Boyle temporary abandoned the gritty Brit genre in favor of a glossy Leonardo DiCaprio blockbuster which, ultimately, earned him the most critical derision. Unlike many of his peers, Boyle traverses genre and thus creates two parallel audiences for his movies: the genre audience likely to only see one of his movies and uninterested in him as a filmmaker, and the audience comprising his fans. Typically, the former group tends to be more disappointed with his films than the latter, who have come to expect of the director certain key successes: a solid soundtrack, engaging story, and generally beautiful photography.

Boyle, it seems, falls just short of winning over the adulation of genre audiences. Like Highsmith, he suffers from a certain kind of carelessness with regard to narrative, requiring audience members to abandon logic (even that curious kind of movie-logic that allows us suspend belief and accept the undead and star wars alike). Perhaps this comes from fact that Boyle’s films try and establish practical explanations for unworldly situations: Sunshine sets out a long explanation regarding the looming death of the sun and the mechanics for our salvation. 28 Days Later doesn’t proffer a world in which zombies exist, but rather tries to explain their origin; begging more questions than it answers.

Boyle thus tries to weave a certain kind of drama out of extraordinary situations that relate to believable experiences and pedestrian concerns. Like Highsmith before him, Boyle is concerned with revealing threat in the quotidian. Both Boyle and Highsmith set out stories in recognizable worlds floating on an undercurrent of seething tension. Small gestures and brief moments disrupt the tension, causing dramatic action that is both shocking and, strangely, unsurprising. They share in Alfred Hitchcock’s fascination with ordinary accidentally implicated into worlds of horror and intrigue. Highsmith, whose work has been adapted for film countless times and has produced both Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Boyle, who has collaborated extensively with novelist Alex Garland on Sunshine, 28 Days Later, and The Beach, are both figures whose work is both literary and filmic, rooted across media.

Each, however, is bound to their medium of choice through their formal sensibilities. Highsmith’s style is unmistakably literary and Boyle rather unabashedly exploits (cheap) film techniques. Somehow, he employs an MTV-pop-cum-Baz Luhrmann aesthetic with a surprising degree of grace—a signature style that unites his movies. The scenes in which the brilliant Christopher Eccleston loses his marbles in Shallow Grave; DiCaprio’s descent into his hyper-aware hunter state in The Beach; Cillian Murphy’s salvation of the human colony in 28 Days Later; and the dramatic final scene as Cillian Murphy once again comes to humanity’s salvation in Sunshine all share in a set of what have become Boyle’s signature trademark for narrative climax. These scenes feature blurry focusing, wildly mobile camerawork, rapid editing, and confused perspectives to achieve what can only be described as a frenetic environment. Boyle has maintained these techniques across a diverse group of cinematographers, from Alwin Kuchler (who shot Lynne Ramsay’s stunning Morvern Callar and Ratcatcher) to the superlative Anthony Dod Mantle (the preferred photographer of Dogme founders Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg), and while the films at large are totally different visually, Boyle’s style prevails over these moments.

The transformation of his protagonists reveals Boyle’s fascination with the Nietzschean übermensch. His themes of  nihilism and the abandonment of traditional moral systems all parallel the philosopher’s own interests, and are a extension of the same narratives crafted by Highsmith decades earlier. Like Tom Ripley or the hundreds of protagonists of Highsmith’s short stories, Boyle’s characters transcend their humanity during narrative climax to confront not only adversity, but the traditional worlds in which the narrative itself is grounded. Nietzsche’s influences over Boyle shouldn’t be passed off as merely an afterthought and the comparison isn’t meant to be heavy-handed, but it would be remiss not to at least acknowledge the commonality.

I also don’t mean to gush over Boyle by aligning him with figures as illustrious as Nietzsche or Patricia Highsmith. I mean only to explain why he warrants attention as a director and not the sum of his products. Highsmith, for example, has a remarkable ability to keep her verbal cool when describing horrific scenes. Her descent into violence isn’t marked stylistically or structurally, as is Boyle’s. Hers instead is a world whose very consistency renders its violence all the more terrifying. She doesn’t seek to disaggregate the horror from the tension nor the bloody from the quotidian. They are the same, and they are simultaneous. Boyle, on the other hand, creates a dichotomous world of climax and latency. His threat underlies both, yet he literalizes the expression “to break into chaos.” This is a choice, of course, yet in my mind one that detracts from the potential power of his carefully constructed situations. Ultimately, Boyle and Highsmith create worlds both pedestrian and accessible, that is until they reach the tipping point and our empathetic ties carry us through their terrifying descent. 

First, a few words on the neighborhood.  Inside the door, above a landscape of crushed-ice, a long wooden board has been affixed to the wall, the purpose of which quickly becomes clear.  Fish, having been selected from the tank in front, sail wriggling through the air, hit the board, bounce, skitter along it, hit the far inside wall, and fall to the ice below to be grabbed, alive, and filleted by the staff in back.  Below the plank that ensures the fishmongers’ accuracy, the heads of large salmon, recently detached, continue to yawn and gawp reflexively.   In front sit wooden baskets of soft-shell crabs, porgies, shrimp of all sizes, razor clams with their phallic, protruding siphons, and numerous flatfish, all whole and waiting for inspection by customers who wouldn’t think of buying a fish without checking its gills for redness and pressing its scaly sides for taut resilience.  Squeezed between the wall and the crab and lobster tanks sits a large black bucket, nearly the size of a garbage can, from which the topmost of many layers of frogs stare up.

Such is a typical fish stall on Mott Street, in downtown Manhattan.  But many other food shops south of Houston Street and east of Lafayette Street, of all cuisines and nationalities, share the stall’s intensity, if not always the sheer directness of the relationship between people and the animals they eat that obtains there.  In the window of Despana, a newish food boutique on Broome that specializes in Spanish delicacies such as paprikas, olives, cheeses, and oils, hangs a salt-cured pig’s hind leg, hoof and all, unmistakably a severed mammalian limb, waiting to be sliced into transparencies of Serrano ham.  Inside Dom’s, a nearby Italian grocer, chickens complete with head and feet (the better to be added to to your stockpot) lie in cases beneath gamy homemade sausages that age hanging from the ceiling.  The Essex Market’s Dominican butchers sell goat meat and oxtails, while pig stomachs and tripe are available nearby.  Not only the Sullivan Street bakery but the Balthazar bakery, Ceci-Cela, the Falai bakery and several others turn out impeccable breads.

Bangkok Grocery, the city’s best purveyor of galangal, shrimp pastes, lime leaves, fish sauces, and other Thai ingredients, is a few blocks below Canal on the San Francisco-esque, tilted Mosco Street.  Back up on Mott sits DiPalo’s, the legendary supplier of the best Parmigiano-Reggiano and other Italian artisanal products in this country.  Catty corner from it one can buy the city’s best Banh Mi, or Vietnamese sandwich, at Banh Mi Saigon Bakery.  (This opinion professionally corroborated by the always scintillating J. Slab at The Porkchop Express.)  Vegetable sellers and more fishmongers from China’s Fujian Province line Grand Street all the way to Hester, where a right turn brings you to Il Labatorio del Gelato, New York’s most lauded ice cream makers, and a little beyond that a wide-ranging chocolate shop where you can find most of the finest single-bean productions of Michel Cluizel, Valrhona, and other chocolate titans.  Next door is Alejandro Alcocer’s excellent food shop, Orange, and restaurant, Brown.  Over another block on Grand is Doughnut Plant, where Mark Singer makes his grandfather’s recipes using organic ingredients.  And back up to Houston sits Katz’s, the pastrami champion of New York City.

Back west a few blocks on Houston is the new Bowery Whole Foods.  Is it just me who finds still finds appending the word “Bowery” to such amenities as pricey supermarkets oxymoronic?  Or has the word Bowery already shed its downmarket connotations, or rather, already accrued the upmarket status into which downmarket connotations are now magically transformed?  Whichever confusing permutation it is, the branch itself comically interrupts perhaps the densest, most diverse, and best collection of individual food shops in the United States.  Whole Foods, the American food economy’s answer to Crate and Barrel, is no doubt a useful intervention in most suburban contexts in which there are thirty enormous chain pharmacies for every good butcher or fish shop.  If you live on the exurban outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, presumably Whole Foods appreciably increases the diversity of available food. 

But on Bowery and Houston, Whole Foods represents a much poorer form of food diversity than what is already there.  And, food shops are not just food shops: they are a solidified form of the social relationships that obtain between people in an particular place.  The unofficial little vegetable market that pops up on weekends on Forsyth Street under the Manhattan Bridge represents a food culture of inspecting produce and comparing adjacent vendors for the best price: the entire cacophony of traditional market culture.  It is the product and instantiation of the middle and working-class residents of Chinatown.  But don’t think I am making an argument about authenticity here.  Whole Foods is in no way a less natural emanation of a different class stratum: the professional and managerial upper-middle people who flow into downtown in increasing numbers.  These people, and their needs for organic baby food, large amounts of wildly expensive prepared lunchtime panini and salads, exist in symbiosis with Whole Foods.  As downtown New York tilts towards this population, and its fauxhemian pretensions, there is a natural influx of corporate franchises with bland, do-gooder brand identities that serve the casual American elite from Seattle to Cambridge.

But the Bowery Whole Foods tells us something remarkable about its shoppers: how ignorant they are of where they are and how alienated they are from food.  Perusing it, the thing that impresses you most is the pervasive labeling, the enormous amounts of information appended to everything.  Everywhere are little identificatory notes, signs overhead, brochures on what to do with their sausages (eat them?), glossy photos of the smiling man who supposedly dredged up your mussels or baited the hook upon which your (always already headless and filleted) wild salmon met its end.  This is food shopping for people who have come to trust only that which is mediated by text, addenda, explanations, certifications.  It is a website come to life, or a piece of life for those who prefer websites: each piece of signage functions as the hyperlink that clicks through to a capsule review. 

I once served some sliced raw albacore tuna doused in soy to a friend.  I had bought the fish not far from Whole Foods from Alex, the fisherman who had caught it and brought it the next day to the Greenmarket.  I’m lucky to live in a city where this is a humdrum and everyday transaction.  My friend, a film producer, remarked, “This is great!  But how did it get sterile?” 

“Sterile?” I asked.

“Yeah.  How does it get safe to eat?”

Food?  Sterile?  This is the alienation on which Whole Foods depends.  In the age of hysterical warning about the dangers of food, it comes as a surprise to find that fish can be pulled out of the water and eaten, raw.  No anti-bacterial soap or release form required. 

There is something else alienating about Whole Foods: it posits a universe in which we are all only consumers.  The holism its name gestures towards is not the holism of a community in which buyers and sellers know each other.  Instead, it’s purely about the foods themselves: one’s interest in food is projected as only another form of self-interest.  Industrial organic food production has many of the same faults as the conventional food industry; it doesn’t matter.  That organic food is roughly a third the price at socialist institutions like the Fourth Street Food Coop, or the superb Park Slope Food Coop, is also unimportant.  These neoliberal shoppers prefer the impersonal embrace of a corporate parent, disguised as some vague moral goodness.  Yet a principle like seasonality is sacrificed to the lure of exotic, irradiated produce available year-round.  Such are the characteristics of the so-called “foodies.”  Even the term suggests a cute and infantile hobby.  And it does seem infantile to shop at Whole Foods while all around you sits the very food cultures about which Whole Foods’ publicity materials fantasize.

Near Orchard Street, four blocks from Bowery and Houston Street, sits Russ and Daughters, a small shop crammed with smoked salmon, cured salmon, salmon roe, herring, chubs, sturgeon eggs, bagels, fruits and candies, mustards, cream cheeses, etc.  It is a legacy of a time when the Lower East Side was the world’s single densest agglomeration of people, and Jewish and Eastern European foodstuffs were for sale from pushcarts up and down Orchard Street.  The store started on such a pushcart, but this is no neighborhood of Jewish immigrants anymore.  Instead, Russ and Daughters has survived by becoming the best source for smoked fish and caviar in New York City, no mean achievement.  In a way, it and shops like it have produced the very market they now serve: the teeming Lower East Side’s taste for bagels and lox ended up colonizing the nation. 

In a world in which we’ve been socialized to distrust the claims of brands, we paradoxically require ever greater documentations of authenticity, ever wordier mediations between ourselves and things.  We don’t trust ourselves to be able to divine with our own eyes what an edible object is, whether it’s genetically modified, whether it contains omega-3, whether it’s safe for our children.  But the Lower East Side of New York has lasted against this tendency, thanks to the richness of its cultural inheritance.  It’s also due, frankly, to intrepidness of the people who have lived here, their lack of a need for handholding, and their willingness to seek out the new and the strange.  There is something beautiful about the fact that the greatest smoked salmon purveyor in the country operates on the very corner from which the taste for the foodstuff emanated.  It is a rare and appropriate historical congruence, and to me it represents what is fascinating and powerful about the food culture of this quadrant of New York City.  Whole Foods is not.

The rest of Dispatches.

First-class stamps cost two cents more today, but don’t worry, the USPS “forever stamp” is also making its debut. Few of us still use stamps, but as a fan of snail mail I’m grateful for this concession, even if it’s been created for no other reason than to appease disgruntled postal workers who’re tired of explaining the price hikes to increasingly aggressive customers. The fact that I can buy one for forty-one cents today and use it, say, forty-one years from now (if the US pseudo-empire and its postal service still exist) sounds like a great deal to me, ne’er you mind that the image is of the cracked Liberty Bell and the line “USA FIRST-CLASS FOREVER” creates a somewhat pathetic kind of poem. That little rectangle of paper, ink, and adhesive will effectively appreciate over time, and I won’t even have to monitor the investment. This brings me to some other goods hitting the market this week that will soon cost a few gazillion cents more.

Tomorrow, 15 May is the Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale, followed by Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale the day after. Both of these hot evening sales are accompanied by morning and afternoon sessions, which include works of implicitly less desirable/more attainable status. I’d not given the whole art auction universe much thought for a few years—ever since an insistent idealism about art hinted that my job assisting a private art dealer was perhaps better filled by an aesthetically disinterested economics grad—but having an outside glimpse of it again this past weekend was most enjoyable. Overlooking the apparently confused titles of these regal events (Jackson Pollock is a contemporary artist?) and focusing on some of the work, I left thrilled that these two premier auction houses deign to even open their doors to riffraff like me.

In the company of a painter I adore who’d suggested the trip, we first went to Christie’s, at Rockefeller Center. Strolling through two of the three preview floors, I was reminded how much Ruscha’s letters make me smile, and how Martin’s still verticals and horizontals can be too quiet for all but the most studied space. I’d expected to feel intimidated, but was glad to see that I wasn’t so out of place, remembering an observation Miranda July once made after discussing one of her short stories, something along the lines of “poor people who win the lottery don’t become different people, they just become poor people with tons of money.” So there we were, amid well-heeled and sandal-wearing families alike, lovers, art lovers, art investors, indifferent investors, and all sorts of folk keen to have a look at some incredible works before they’re sent to the auction block and disappear. Some will be whisked away into private homes forever, some will vanish into the buyer’s closet for a few months until they appreciate enough to be sent right back to the block, and a very few just might happily end up in a museum or collection where the public will still have access to them. After leaving that gallery I had worked at and moving on with life, the whole experience came vividly back to me last year as I unsuspectingly strolled through the National Gallery of Art and came across a piece the dealer I’d worked with had been offering when I left. It was like bumping into an acquaintance who’s moved away and you never expected to see again, and I was glad she’d (unintentionally) placed it where people could enjoy it.

Here I must take a moment to digress; for me, the real discovery at Christie’s was Matthias Weischer, one of the Leipzig School painters I’d heard a lot about but whose work I’d never seen in person. I considered getting the auction catalogue for this one piece, filled with echoes of De Chirico and other strange spaces I’d been thinking about lately, but wanted to travel lightly and knew there’d be other occasions to see him. Checking the Christie’s website I found some lofty, laughable text about it:
“In Familie O-Mittag…. all spatial bearings lost, viewers are left with the fascinating task of making sense of the layers of Weischer’s painting and grappling with the meaning of the inexplicable dark and foreboding coiled mass at the center of the work–a process which intelligently mirrors the manner in which many struggle to wade through the multiple strata of their everyday lives and wrestle with the often enigmatic recurring doubts of human existence.” I know nothing about dark and foreboding masses, but I love green boa-constrictor constructions, hovering floors, and dissolving bricks. And yeah, if it can mirror my struggle to wade through the strata of my everyday existence better than a little Lacanian analysis, maybe it is worth more than the $250–$350,000 estimate they’ve put forth… if only a fraction of that went to the work’s creator.

Leaving Christie’s and walking northeast to Sotheby’s singular palace (now quite contested real estate), a very different atmosphere greeted us. Joining what appeared to be a gregarious father-son duo asking if there were anything to see on the ninth floor during the elevator ride to the relatively new, rather sterile tenth floor, the space felt more like the new MoMA, as opposed to Christie’s more intimate spaces, until I turned a corner to see jewel-cases of diamonds tucked along a wall beside some of the paintings. As a big Marilyn fan I’ve nothing against diamonds, but their placement here seemed curious, even disruptive, next to the supposed works of art. The shopping mall atmosphere grew stronger as we descended to the lower floors, tucked into shadow behind the tall front atrium and connected by somehow incongruously loud escalators, where the paintings up for the morning and afternoon sales were cramped in around pre-Columbian artifacts, another branch of the diamond division, and some “Important Turner Watercolours from the Guy and Myriam Ullens Collection,” (as if Sotheby’s would sell anything that weren’t important).

The second preview, feeling more like an odd museum, had a more varied and vociferous public, and there was more mobile phone speculation to be overheard. Seeing an early Stella maze was a good welcome, and its blacks, greys, and whites good preparation for Richter’s charming Spanish nudies in the next room. As I looked at a Warhol flower piece set into one of Stella’s rainbow works thanks to the magical refraction of a prismlike Robert Irwin column, a young boy ran up, ducked between me and the column, and took my same stance to look through. He then called his parents, who’d just dismissed Not Pollock on the side wall, to do the same. The following room had Tom Friedman’s teeny self-portrait carved from Aspirin, and more Aspirin encapsulated in the transparent acrylic of a Tomaselli piece. Seeing on our way out that another, less fortunate Richter was relegated to a spot next to the escalator, then noting that it was a lithograph of a photograph of a painting of his, numbered 5 in an edition of 8, the relatively low $40–60,000 estimate on it made more sense. It was a fun afternoon.

The following evening I ran into my upstairs neighbors, two truly fine artists who’d ridden the ascending art market wave of the ’80s and weathered the consequential crash, and traded some not-so-fun reflections on precisely what is going on, where these works are coming from, going to, and why. These will be an exciting couple of days, and I’m glad to have had an inspiring peek at some beauties just briefly passing through.

Pevious Lunar Refractions here.

[Images courtesy of my camera, the USPS website, and Christie’s and Sotheby’s online catalogues.]