By Edward B. Rackley

The novelty of the New Year is only now dawning on me. Last year was exceptional; amazing and sad in equal measure, like the dynamics of any satisfying novel or credible cosmology. This year started with an unexpected blast in the face: a week of wilderness survival training in southern Florida.

I had expected to be tossed naked into a Florida swamp and told to ‘survive’ (I admit the idea still excites me), but the course proved long on lecture and short on real-time scenarios. This mix has its merits. Not of the ‘me alone against nature’ school, the Tracker School approach emphasizes the acquisition of primitive/ancestral skills over grin-and-bear-it privation and raw endurance. Its aims are far-reaching and total, merging the physical and spiritual. Provided one is ripe for conversion, the experience can be genuinely transformative. On the pragmatic level, its lessons will enable you to enter Nature’s green veil without a knife, food, water or clothing and still ‘live lavishly’, or so the instructors like to repeat.

There is no obvious reason to embark on a primitive survival course, unless you’re an apocalyptarian, a rabid Luddite or a very gung-ho Navy Seal. But there we were, a room full of seemingly normal people, eager with curiosity and our love of dirt. Both elements proved essential as the week wore on. Highlights of the course included fire by friction, emergency shelter, track identification, camouflage and stalking, trapping, skinning and tanning, edible plants, flint knapping, cordage, and safe water. We learned all of this and more, but the skills themselves mean nothing until you get out in the wilderness and practice–‘dirt time’, they call it.

Uncomfortably numb

Our instructors were often blunt but never repetitive. I heard this sentence only once, and it stuck: ‘By the end of this course, you will know how to make or do anything you see in a museum.’ I looked up from carving a friction fire tool, the bow-drill. Other students also laid down their handiwork. We stared for a moment of mental digestion, then resumed our cutting and scraping. Were these skills so lost as to require preservation in natural history museums? Those dusty diaramas of Stone Age domesticity are all that’s left of the knowledge that kept our species alive for hundreds of thousands of years?

Humanity has been around a while, even our Creationist friends would agree. Whether this makes us ancients or moderns–closer or further from history’s point of departure—we’ll let the philosophers decide. Besides this continuity in time, and a prehensile thumb, we share almost nothing with our distant ancestors. We would definitely not know how to survive in their world, nor they in the world we have built for ourselves. In fact, so much has been learned and lost in the passage from Cro-Magnon to Joe Sixpack that we need museums to house it all. The fact that our minds are now crammed with information needed to navigate our world—none of it serving the simple purpose of survival in the wild, the primary human activity for countless millennia—hit me in the head like a locomotive. If nature is a womb, we are test tube babies: functional and yet entirely oblivious of our true origins.

It took a full week of rumination over this breach of knowledge for the various pieces to come together. The school’s founder, Tom Brown Jr., spelled it out in his own way on the final morning of the course. ‘How can you expect someone confined to a hospital bed, for a full year, pumped with three meals a day, to walk out the door and be able to run, jump or do anything physical?’ Given the extreme state of our separation from nature today, who could possibly know where to start the process of reanimating the personal, immediate relation to nature enjoyed by humans of all previous eras.

Far greater than the sum of the survival skills we’d learned during the course, Tom continued, the quintessence of ‘living lavishly’ in the wild could not be taught. Wild animals fashion no tools and most lack prehensile thumbs, yet they manage to survive, and flourish using only this one skill. Tom refers to it simply, and deceptively, as ‘awareness’.  Sound flaky? Diss not, gentle reader.

When most of us enter the wilderness today, we do so for leisure, rarely survival. Such is our prerogative, our luxury, and our choice: we are after all Lords of the Food Chain. We bring in our own food, water, and gadgets to make our nature experience as much like home as possible. We treat the excursion as if we were scuba divers or astronauts. Inserted into an alien, potentially hostile medium, our comfort and security depend on the conveniences we import. Shelter, food, water, heat: without these we are naked, vulnerable, shit out of luck. As a result, our forays beyond domesticity are typically brief and highly choreographed: we stick to prescribed trails; we don’t touch the animals. The would-be naturalists and conservationists among us like the concept of ‘leave no trace’ because it reflects how we were raised, in pristine domesticity.

The story is well known. From our origins as lowly, abundantly hairy yet edible items on nature’s menu, we have come to dominate the planet’s only inherent hierarchy, the Food Chain. Among the spoils of this conquest, we are granted liberation from the immediate risks and rewards of survival. In its stead, we bask in the Holy Trinity of Comfort, Safety and Security. Doubtless much is gained in this progression; what is lost is less clear. To illustrate my point, indulge me this simple exercise.

Pull out your wallet or purse and look at the cards and bills inside. Like yours, the contents of my wallet allow me many privileges. Among them, I am allowed entry to supermarkets where I wander the aisles, sway to the Muzak, ask the assistant for directions to gluten-free bread and unpitted olives, collect various comfort foods and items of irrevocable necessity (like non-frizzy dog shampoo). Occasionally option paralysis overwhelms me, I abort mission and curse the supermarket experience.

But usually my basic needs are immediately, magically satisfied, with a minimum of conscious effort. There is no stealth, no guile, no creativity involved (although if we drove our shopping carts like bumper cars things might get more interesting). Those parts of my brain get their exercise while I’m perched here on my hindquarters, gazing at this screen and poking intermittently at the keyboard. This sequence of perching, staring and poking ultimately results in the plastic cards and paper money that I find in my wallet. These baubles and trinkets in turn allow me a trip to the supermarket. On off days, when I use my body at all, it is to stand up, walk a few steps, open the fridge and ingest whatever consumables I find there.

All these actions I can perform on autopilot, a blissful state of full-blown mind/body dualism. So long Homo Faber. Meet Zombie Man, connoisseur of post-industrial carrion, the Twilight Consumer.

As long as I fill my wallet at regular intervals, I can perform the minimal necessary actions to secure shelter, fire, water, and food. Nature’s immediacy recedes further and further from my life until it becomes pure idea. For the rest of nature’s creatures, of course, reality is nothing like a vending machine. There is no currency to exchange, no symbolic transactions, no passive remove. Awareness is their sole survival mechanism.

Farewell, Homo Faber

In a 2003 Sports Illustrated article on the Tracker School, Tom reflected on the place of his teachings in today’s society: ‘People are aliens to their own planet. I’m just trying to reintroduce people to their own natural landscape.’ This is certainly true of me, a creature of convenience, but it is not universally true. We co-exist on the planet with traditional peoples whose circumstances are not unlike the Stone Age diaramas in our museums. Their relationship to nature remains immediate, the awareness informing their survival skills is still vital. Clothing, matches and metal tools are now available to many of these peoples, but how these objects are made or where they originate not widely known. Many of the traditional peoples I work with in rural Africa use matches but do not, for instance, know what to make of a mirror or a lighter, nor do they recognize themselves in a photo. They’ll turn it over in their hands like an alien artifact, which it is. 

In Luzubi, a rural Congolese village where I spent two years, I once placed an ice cube in an elderly neighbor’s palm. Nzolene retracted her hand immediately, exclaiming tiya! (fire). The ice fell in the dirt as she turned to search my eyes and read my intent. I realized she thought I had tried to burn her. Suddenly she laughed, clearly delighted to have encountered something utterly alien.

In my two years in Luzubi, I learned a lot from Nzolene. Our friendship began rather mysteriously. The day I arrived in the village, she approached my the door of my mud hut, bowing low and avoiding eye contact. Silently she placed a cola nut at the threshold, turned and left. Locals later told me her husband, also named Edouard, had fallen from a palm tree while tapping wine and died. Nzolene believed I was his reincarnation, and the cola nut was a traditional gift to welcome me home.

When the time came to slaughter my first chicken, Nzolene’s son Masaba was climbing the coconut tree in front of my hut. He climbed down to watch me chase the chicken around the yard in vain, squawking and flapping for its life. When I stopped to catch my breath and reconsider my strategy, he nimbly snatched it up. I had planned on decapitation, but before I could reach for my machete, Masaba had wrung its neck, killing it instantly. I stared as he handed me the limp bird, then stepped back to watch me work.

Standing there holding a lifeless chicken, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I gut it then de-feather it, or the other way round? I put down the machete and, cradling the bird with my left arm, grabbed some feathers with my free hand. I pulled hard—nothing. I tightened my grip and yanked harder, still nothing. A pot of steaming water appeared, brought by other boys who’d gathered to watch. Masaba laughed, taking the bird from me and plunging it into the pot. The feathers came out like pins from a cushion.

When I wasn’t working, Masaba and I would head into the forest and catch things—mostly birds, fish, and insects. Striding along a forest trail, Masaba could swat a grasshopper in the weeds, set it on his fishhook and have a line in the water in a single seamless motion that announced the joys of boyhood. After a heavy rain, we’d pick through underbrush to find a forest clearing where flying termites were taking to the air in droves. Masaba would catch a few in his cupped hands, eat some and affix others to the poles I’d cut and pasted with sticky tree sap. We’d step back into cover and watch small birds and bats swoop down to nip as the insects twitched, stuck to our poles. If the sticky sap did its job, birds and bats would get stuck alongside the live bait. Then we’d make a fire and roast our catch, munching as we sat on the forest floor.

Cro-Magnon Love 

In whatever country I happen to be, children always reveal themselves as a ‘traditional people’ in their own right. Mostly because they are curious and unashamed of their ignorance—like Nzolene’s unabashed delight at the sensation of heat left by an ice cube. We all start out that way, ignorance setting the stage for the wonder to come. I like to quiz my friends’ children when we’re eating together. Anybody know where this mayonnaise comes from? ‘The mayonnaise plant’–my favorite answer. How about my hamburger? ‘Uh, the refrigerator?’ If it’s meat we’re eating, they often don’t know the animal or understand that death was involved. But they want to know, and there is always joy in their curiosity.

Tom often referred to his teachings as having originated from nature itself, gleaned through direct observation and years of solitary ‘dirt time’. By the end of the week, a full circle had been drawn around the human and animal worlds. ‘Living lavishly’—the mark of success in any survival situation—was not the re-conquering of the Food Chain using arrowheads, deadfall traps or high-speed invisibility techniques. These were the glitter and sheen of Tom’s teachings. Successful survival required something far more elemental, a basic disposition of mind and spirit. By foregoing our modern trappings of convenience and comparative advantage (rifles, sleeping bags, MREs, etc.), we meet the animal world on equal footing, where survival is a matter of wits and senses. In short, awareness.

If you’ve read this far, you may be wondering what you can do to ‘increase your awareness’. Many techniques were shared with us, but the following can be practiced almost anytime, anywhere. On a summer night, stand at the edge of a garden, forest or field and listen to the cacophony of insects. Try to isolate one insect song, and approach it. Or listen to trees blowing in the wind, and try to identify one in the chorus. Next time you get up in the middle of the night, don’t turn on the lights. Let your vision adjust to the flat dark world, compensating for reduced vision with your other senses, including memory.

Curiosity is the condition for wonder, and wonder—I like to think—the condition for gratitude. For Tom Brown and his School, awareness is the synthesis of gratitude, childlike curiosity and wonder. Without awareness, the survival skills themselves are empty acts performed in a barren, non-responsive landscape.

Another word for the type of awareness being described here is love. Whether this has any bearing on our broken link with our distant ancestors, who knows. I’ve no idea, for instance, if love Cro-Magnon style was anything more than a monosyllabic, grunty affair. But after a week of survival school I came away certain that the Cro-Magnon definitely had their own version of the boob tube. No doubt about it, fire was Cro-Magnon TV. To watch a fire as it transforms solids into air is mesmerizing, its flames in constant motion and yet without mass. Starting a fire, feeding a fire, and watching it burn: a truly timeless showcase event. Ugh!

He walked into the bar just after sundown. Steven Levine. His friends call him The Adorable Rabbi. Some prefer The Divine Levine. Cold outside. The kind of night you pull your coat up around your head and make like a turtle. The bartender took an immediate dislike to the Divine One. She stared at him like he’d slapped her sister. It was making me nervous. But that’s the sort of night it was. Lonely no matter the number of people around. Edgy.

The Rabbi settled onto his stool and I looked up.

“I finally saw it.”

He got excited, in his way.

“you saw it?”

“I did.”

“what’d you think?”

“it’s good. real good”

Time passed. He was waiting for me to want to know but he already knew I wanted to know and I knew he knew it. More time passed.

“alright Stevie, what’s your theory?”

The Rabbi always has a theory but I can’t fault him for it. So do I. Trouble is, the Rabbi’s a Hegelian. If you know any, you know what I mean. No doubt it’s the side effect from all those dialectics. Metaphysicians the lot of them but they try to queer it. Made the whole system organic, fused it with history. The works. Hegelians.

“spill it, Rabbi.”

“the thing is,” he was warming up, “the thing is that after a few disastrous movies the Coens went back to their bread and butter.”

“keep talking.”

“they went back to The Big Lebowski.”

“you’re crazy.”

“no, listen.”

I ordered him another whisky to settle his upper lip. I hate it when Hegelians take to quivering. They never know how to start a point ‘cause it’s all one big fucking idea. Like Parmenides and his “well rounded truth.” No way to get in. A whole tribe of hedgehogs. Hegelians.

“take a sip, kid, and start from the start.”

“it’s like this, see. The Dude is the person for whom, in the end, nothing matters because everything is OK.”

“always loved The Dude.”

“but in No Country we get The Dude for whom everything matters and nothing is going to be OK.”

I kept quiet for a minute. Damn Rabbi was on to something.

“the Dude is the Coen Brothers’ theory of goodness, which is basically that the good is banal… The Banality of Goodness. and that’s a good thing. goodness is really about absolute flexibility, just flowing around.”

“spin it out, Rabbi.”

“well, they decided to take the goodness out of The Dude and remove all the limpness. what happens if you make The Dude hard? what happens if you make The Dude a man who actually turns his maxims into imperatives? you remove all the fluid goodness and you get badness, evil. Anton Chigurh.”

They always throw a dig at Kant in there. They can’t help it, it’s in the blood. The Rabbi was no different. Still, he had me up against the ropes. Nobody ever called that stinkin’ Hebrew stupid. I was stalling for time. Never let a Hegelian close the circle.

“sure, I see the angle. but what…” (I was grasping here) “what about the fate stuff? what about the Greek shit?”

I was swinging wilder than a blind kid at a pinata party but I figured I might square his circle a little with the flip. Plus you can always slow a philosopher down with the classics. Only thing that intimidates them. Throw out a few lines of ancient Greek and they’ll let you date a family member. I saw The Rabbi hesitate and I made my move.

“Chigurh is a Fury, man. plain and simple. we’re talking Oresteia territory here. never get messed up in affairs of the Gods. never get tangled up with Fate and never get in the way of the Olympian order… because the Furies do not stop.”

He downed his whisky in one gulp. I had snagged a line and I was yanking it until somebody yelled Uncle.

“you’re good Rabbi, but you’ve got the wrong movie.”

Then it came to me.

“the real remake here is Raising Arizona.”

He turned away, thinking. I could see the vein bulging on his neck from all the blood his brain was begging for. Time to give the screw one more turn and then let Wilhelm Friedrich the Second dangle.

“fate is the subject, my friend. always has been, always will be. moira is big and human beings are little and when the two get together you have got yourself a story. Aeschylus or the Coen Brothers. don’t matter. everybody gets their portion.”

“yeah, I can see that.”

“funny thing about the Coens in the 80s and 90s is they thought they could do the Fates in the register of comedy. human beings transgress. the Furies are sent to do Fate’s bidding. hilarity ensues. Raising Arizona.”

“OK.”

“now the cheeky bastards think they can do tragedy as tragedy. they’ve always liked to swing it far in whichever direction. either everybody’s talking all the time or no one ever says a damn thing. either everybody has something smart to say (Miller’s Crossing) or you can barely get a frickin peep out of nobody (Fargo). you get the picture. they picked up the Cormac McCarthy book and read their own damn script. ‘shit’, they said ‘we couldda wrote that’. Raising Arizona done minimalism and done mean. tragedy.”

Mostly I think he bought it. Started getting that faraway look in his eyes like he’s trying to peer into the night in which all cows are black. But the fact is I was just jumping on his argument and giving it a ride. That’s why we’re good together, me and the Rabbi. Cracked a few open in our day. Aim to crack a few more before the big boat comes. It was a cold night. Lonely. Me and the Adorable Rabbi and some harmless speculatin’ like it ought to be. That’s my story.

..

–yesterday at a local wired coffee house: the place is full,
but no one’s talking —McSorley’s Bar it’s not.

Internet Cafe
Jim Culleny

where virtual folk
with cappuccinos
gather at tables
like islands of stone
in zen gardens,
faces lit by laptops—
and no one’s apt to step
into the cool raked space between,
to be laughingly hugged or nudged
at key points in a repartee
that flies back and forth
on waves of beer-scented
breath

Rather, they sit
keyboarding thoughts into capacitors
that are Bluetoothed into broadband
and bound for distant counterparts
in other states and hemispheres
instead of being uploaded to
that other E-cocooned human
less than three feet away, breathing
to the left of the stacked biscottis,
keyboarding too, but longing for a
real spontaneous embrace

Painting of McSorley’s Bar, artist unknown

..

My January was anything but uneventful, though I rarely left my apartment.  This month will be remembered by the Kleenex, always to my nose, and all the apologies, after each unguarded sneeze.  My body seemed trapped in a sauna and after spending the night lying awake from a hacking cough, I found another wretched soul. Natalie Angier wrote about a New Year’s Eve visitor who “for the next 18 hours would treat the mucosal lining of our stomachs like so much pulp in a pumpkin”. Her family’s violent weight-loss program helped them lose 10 pounds, to maybe meet one of their resolutions.

Their crash-diet came thanks to a virus, a norovirus (named after a bunch of sick kids in Norwalk, Ohio in 1968).  It’s more commonly called the “stomach flu” and targets the digestive system. I also had the flu, the influenza virus, which targets the lungs, not the guts. Along with the rhino and the common cold (corona viruses), January felt like a train wreck for most of us, or more aptly put, a hit-and-run.

The culprits are tiny guys, so small that thousands can sit on the period at the end of this sentence. Viruses very likely appeared about four billion years ago, though they’re are not given ‘living’ status, since they are not much more than DNA or RNA wrapped in a protective shell, without the tools for reproducing themselves or turning their genetic information into useful proteins.  Viruses are fragile, entirely dependent on a host organism for survival.  So they need us. And use us… whether we like it or not.

So, how do they do it?  When a virus infects a host cell, the cell becomes its factory. It hijacks the cell’s machinery, turning the cell away from its usual tasks to now solely replicate the virus’s genetic material and protein coat.  So effectively does the virus take over the cell, with so many viral copies produced, that the cell eventually bursts under the pressure of the viral young, setting them free to infect other cells and continue the cycle. 

Viruses have a kind of docking device, used to infiltrate a particular cell. Rhinoviruses dock onto receptors projecting from the cells of our nasal passages. Coxsackie virus B attaches to a surface protein called CAR, using it to invade cells in the pancreas. Hepatitis viruses are set up to infiltrate receptors on liver cells. Their specificity is from competition for a niche in a virus-packed world. As Phillip A. Sharp of the Center for Cancer Research at M.I.T. put it, “every virus has to have a scheme.”

By the way, we’re also out-numbered. Recent estimates indicate that the total number of viruses exceeds the total number of cells in every other life form – including bacteria – by a factor of ten.

Bounty Hunters

Before we plan on avoiding contact with other people, and showering with chemical disinfectants there are a number of ways to fight viruses. A vaccine can prime the immune system to attack them as soon as they invade the body. If a virus manages to establish itself, a doctor may be able to prescribe a drug to slow down its spread.  If all else fails, a patient may be quarantined in order to head off an epidemic. 

We even have disease detectives to solve the case. They are NOT microbe detectives as I’m told by my good friend Tracy, who was a disease detective.  In the early 1950s the Centers for Disease Control formed a special unit, called the Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS. These detectives are dispatched on two-year active assignment, paid by the CDC, in various local and state health departments, in order to combat the causes of major epidemics.  Tracy tracked tuberculosis outbreaks in many regions, the last place New York City.

Some scientists are now exploring other ways to wipe out disease. Carl Zimmer wrote (NYT, 3/27/07) that they are using decoys to lure them to their death.  Viruses invade a cell by latching onto certain proteins on its surface. But unlike most other cells, red blood cells can’t be infected. Since red blood cells develop in bone marrow they lose their DNA. If a virus ends up inside a red blood cell, there are no genes it can hijack to replicate itself, a dead end. 

Dr. Robert W. Finberg, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and his colleagues, decided to do just that.  They would bait their virus traps (red blood cells) with a surface protein, engineering mice to produce this protein on their red blood cells.  The normal mice all died within a week of the viral infection. The engineered mice tended to live longer.

It showed some promise, but didn’t reveal exactly why they failed to eradicate the virus. Dr Paul E. Turner, an evolutionary biologist, tested what threshold was needed for these traps to force the viruses into extinction. His team mixed normal bacteria with different levels of mutant traps and then infected them with viruses. After letting the viruses replicate, they discovered there was indeed a trap threshold above which the virus population could not survive.

Scientists are using what was learned with bacteria to study HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. While now purely speculative, they hope that someday it might be possible to give HIV patients transfusions of engineered blood cells. Ultimate success would depend on the details of HIV infection. At some points in an HIV infection, a single milliliter of blood can contain as many as 10 million viruses, which would require allot of traps.  It is also possible that viruses will mutate in such a way that they avoid the viral traps. The results are exciting, but still in the early stages.

Less along the lines of a ‘Viral Terminator”, but with possibly equally effective results, Dr. Paul Ewald also believes that the rules of evolutionary biology can change the course of infectious disease. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99feb/germs.htm

In his interview with Judith Hooper of the Atlantic Monthly, he argues that the notion of “commensalism”, which dominated medical thought for decades, is wrong.  This idea was that the pathogen-host relationship inevitably evolved toward peaceful benign coexistence, because it is in the germ’s interest to keep its host alive. But Dr. Ewald counters that the Darwinian struggle of people and germs is not necessarily so benign. It can go either way, toward mildness or toward virulence.

Imagine that you’re a disease organism, such as the common cold.  You’d want to multiply inside your host as fast as you can. However, if you produce too many copies of yourself, you’ll risk killing or immobilizing your host before you can spread. The average airborne respiratory virus would ideally want its host well enough to go to work and sneeze on people (like I did)… This is BAD.

But what if the germ doesn’t need host mobility to spread. If it can use a vector, another organism, such as a mosquito, for it to travel from person to person, it can then afford to become very harmful. That is why insect-borne diseases such as yellow fever and malaria are so horrid. Cholera uses another vector to transmit. It goes by way of fecal matter shed into the water supply… This is UGLY.

His team showed that cholera strains are virulent in Guatemala, where the water is bad, and mild in Chile, where water quality is good.  Moreover, strains of the cholera agent found in Texas produced such small amounts of toxin that rarely anyone who gets infected will come down with cholera. On this, he said, “If you can make an organism very mild, it works like a natural vaccine against the virulent strains. That’s the most preventive of preventive medicine: when you can change the organism so it doesn’t make you sick.”

Dr. Ewald has also taken the laws of evolutionary theory, and applying them to a new theory: that diseases believed to be caused by genetic or environmental factors, such as certain forms of heart disease, cancer, and mental illness, are in many cases actually caused by infections.  The ordinary stomach ulcer is the best recent example of a common ailment for which an infectious agent turns out to be responsible.

The medical establishment had earlier thought that peptic ulcers were caused by: environmental factors, smoking, diet, certain drugs such as aspirin, or stress. Not infection. So for years, ulcer patients ate bland food and swore off stress. But in 1984, Marshal and Warren indicated that maybe an infection explained the ulcers.  It was ignored, until Marshall reportedly “personally ingested a batch of the spiral bacteria and came down with painful gastritis”.  There is now little doubt that Helicobacter pylori causes inflammation of the stomach lining. 20% of those infected produce an ulcer. Many can be cured in less than a month with antibiotics.

Ewald takes Darwin’s laws to mean the evolutionary success of an organism relative to competing organisms. Genetic traits that may be unfavorable to an organism’s survival or reproduction do not persist in the gene pool for very long. Natural selection, by its very definition, weeds them out in short order. By this logic, the genes that spell out that disease or trait will be passed on to fewer and fewer individuals in future generations. Therefore, in considering common illnesses are unlikely to have a genetic cause. He says “When diseases have been present in human populations for many generations and still have a substantial negative impact on people’s fitness, “they are likely to have infectious causes.”  This may offer a new way to think about the causes of our most baffling illnesses, that we have previously considered tied to genetic or environmental factors.

The Good

With news about AIDS, Ebola, the Avian Flu and SARs, it’s hard to imagine anything good could come out of the viral world.  But while viruses are the pirates of the cellular sea, there may be a few Peter Pans also around.  Scientists are starting discover the extent of viral diversity, which may one day radically shift how we think of our uninvited guests.

Hamish Clarke wrote that viruses, which are cheap, quick to produce, and easy to modify, “filled out the toolboxes of many a biologist” for years. Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey used viruses in 1952 to help establish that DNA, rather than protein, forms the basis of heredity.  Their success launched its new career. Their ability to entwine themselves with the host’s genome has made viruses an important factor in the field of gene therapy. The notion of going into a person’s cells and correcting genetic ‘typos’ earlier seemed unlikely. But now researchers are planning to swap the virus’ harmful genes for a corrected version of the patient’s defective genes and use the virus’ unique abilities to insert the gene into patient’s genome. Like a Hollywood movie, the scientists are essentially hijacking the hijackers. 

Patients may feel uncomfortable with the thought of being injected with a virus to cure a disease. But, according to Paul Osten, from Northwestern University in Chicago, the risks are low and decreasing. He wrote that “The viral vectors … are in most cases stripped down to the most basic elements that are required for gene delivery, and thus in no possible way pose any risk with respect to the original disease.”

We always hear about their assault on humans, but viruses don’t just attack animal cells. A large number of viruses actually target bacteria, including the bacteria, called bacteriophages (phages for short), that infect humans. Targeted bacterial killing may be an alternative to antibiotics.  Sounds like another Hollywood thriller, but it’s very real.  In August of 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a bacteriophage food spray designed to reduce the amount of illness-causing bacteria on ready-to-eat meals.

Viruses were known to do allot to control other parasites.  But they are now recognized to be an integral part of every ecosystem and can’t be ignored.  Microbiologist Nick Colman said “We usually only hear about viruses in the context of human disease. But most viruses are actually not harmful, and in fact have played an important part in evolution and in maintaining healthy ecosystems.”  Andrew Holmes, a microbiologist from the University of Sydney, thinks that people should know that viruses “have the potential to cause very rapid biological change through epidemic disease, but that is exceedingly rare”. He pointed out that this same process is an important part of correcting imbalances that occur in nature, such as explosions of algae that choke sea life and disrupt food chains. He notes that, “such viruses are the means by which the ecosystem corrects itself.”

It’s now February, and my nose still runs and my head feels like a football.  Still my role as reluctant host has become little more clear, and my thoughts for these uninvited guests a little more understanding (though I still dont want them around.

by Shiban Ganju

Dedicated to Jenny Mah, a 3QD reader, who blogged the following comment in my earlier post: “Would you consider doing one on other forms of “detox” such as “cleansing” diets and, the latest to hit my city – ionic footbaths!”

—————————————–

I travel for my work; I fly forward across continents and backward across centuries. In twenty-four hours, I journey away from the worried–well, who scurry to ‘detox’ their bodies, to the scared sick, who fall prey to needless death; from twenty-first century neurosis to nineteenth century ignorance.

Currently, my work lands me in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in north India with 186 million people, which would make it the sixth largest country in the world, were it an independent nation. From Lucknow airport we drive – in a rented Toyota Qualis – deep into the state, where 783 persons stuff every square kilometer, all of who seem to crowd into the bazaars on the two-lane highway. The driver assiduously – and miraculously – avoids every sauntering pedestrian without a scratch, but he can’t avoid potholes, which outnumber people. Our Toyota drops and hops, rattling my vertebrae and shaking my innards.

After trundling for four hours we reach our destination – a small village of 150 houses. My jolted body slides out of the car and hobbles into a dusty patch in the center of the village, where I see a circle of women in bight colored saris, who greet me with restrained smiles and curiosity. I learn they have walked miles, from twenty surrounding villages, to become social health activists. My travel aches vanish. I sit among them on the tarp-covered ground.

My job: to strengthen health delivery systems. My aim: to eradicate ignorance. My method: to persuade and educate. And my success: not guaranteed.

Failure to persuade is not new to me; I remember having failed before, when I ‘imparted education’ in my faraway home country, where ‘body detox’ is big business. And where it sells in different packages.

Detox customers throng to ‘colonics’ where they learn that the colon holds body waste in its crevices for a lifetime and a medicated colon wash is curative. The caregiver inserts a tube into the rectum and flushes the client’s colon with a gallon or two of the washing fluid. They may also offer a strong purgative called the ‘oral colonic.’ I have tried – with limited success – to convince ‘colonic addicts’ that a normal colon does not hold any grouse and does not need catharsis. They listen, they ignore me and they go back for the colon scrub.

Then there are the ionic footbath parlors for stressed urbanites. Here, I am quoting a sales pitch I found on the net about ‘Ion footbath detoxification’:

“This is the most relaxing way to get rid of the toxins present in the body. You just have to sit on the chair, with your feet dipped into the water container. A flow of warm water will flow under your feet and the positive and negative ions in the water will attach themselves to the toxins present in the body. Toxins that are insoluble will also dissolve in this water.”

Look at the clever craft of words – toxins, positive and negative ions – to add credence. It helps to sell, if the pitch throws in a couple of mysterious words without context to create a scientific aura. Flowing water under the sole may be soothing but that probably is the only truth in the statement. Even a perfunctory knowledge about the working of the body is enough to arouse suspicion against this ludicrous claim preying on the gullible.

Ions are components of a salt in solution. Common salt, also called sodium chloride, floats as sodium and chloride ions in water. These ions – the commonest ions in the body – can cross through porous barriers by passive osmosis or active transport. Thick sole of a foot is not permeable and the ions in the container cannot penetrate into the feet, which hoard no special toxins to extrude.

Feet also become touch pads for ‘reflexologists’ who carry an unsubstantiated belief that feet possess a mirror ‘reflex’ representation of the whole body. These practitioners promise relief for migraine, hormonal imbalance, digestive, sinus, respiratory and many other ailments by rubbing areas – representing the sick organ – on the feet. Unfortunately for the sufferers of these ailments this relief is merely an expensive promise.

Similar to such practitioners are ‘energy field’ or ‘biofield’ healers, who claim to heal by transmitting energy from the healer to the patient in some mysterious way. They claim to ‘restore balance’ and release ‘congested energy.’ Spurious claims abound in this field and we have to be as much skeptical as we have to be receptive to healthy holistic tips.

Then there are cleansing diets, which may be harmless to the body but not to your wallet. These diets offer no extra benefit. If we just eat the calories and the nutrients we need, we cannot go wrong. Food has an either-or effect; we become what we eat: fat-slim, happy-sad, intoxicated-sober, energetic-mellow, sick-healthy – the choice is ours to make. Each nutrient – carbohydrate, fat, protein, vitamin, mineral or water – has a specific utility for normal functioning of the body and in special circumstances, we may have to increase or decrease the quantity of one or the other nutrient. Cleansing diets provide extra amounts of one or the other nutrient and claim an exaggerated benefit.

Some alternative medicine practitioners recommend a liver and gall bladder cleanser. The recipe contains Epson salt (magnesium sulfate), olive oil and ornithine. They offer no rationale about what it cleanses in the liver and how it works.

For people with a temperament of ‘faith’ in much abused clichés of ‘organic’, ‘natural’ and ‘holistic’, probably I sound foolish. It is nothing new to me. I am aware of my limitation to persuade people of seemingly simple things. My inability haunts me now, as I face these eager women in this remote Indian village, which still lives in the nineteenth century.

My mission is to devise ways to reduce maternal mortality, which is one of the highest in this part of the world. Over 500 women die out of 100,000 live deliveries. Compare that with the USA, where maternal mortality rate is under 9 per 100,000 live births. The solutions are so simple that we in the west are incredulous. If we treat anemia with extra iron, prevent excessive hemorrhage during birth, give one prophylactic antibiotic before delivery and encourage institutional delivery, we can decrease the mortality by almost 75 percent. It has been done before.

The women, sitting in a circle, introduce themselves; they tell me their name and the village they come from. I enquire about the deaths in their villages.

Shakila, a girlish woman, wearing black, recounts – in a flat voice – the story of her neighbor, who died in childbirth last month.

“How old was the mother?”

“Twenty one.”

Her emotions do not match the tragedy; death is not an occasional visitor – it is their next-door neighbor.

But it doesn’t have to be this way; ‘this death was preventable!’ My challenge is to penetrate this simple message into their brains – the most obstinate organ of the body.

Changing behavior is an uphill task – anywhere in the world. I have ranted against scams in health care; pleaded against colon cleansers, protested against refeloxolgy and energy healing without success. If I have failed in persuading educated twenty first century people against ionic footbaths, how will I convince these illiterate women about the benefits of iron in pregnancy?

I realize, it is all about ‘detoxing’ the mind and not the body.

by Michael Blim

George Wallace reflecting on his first and unsuccessful run for governor of Alabama in 1958 defeat, made a remarkable vow. “Well, boys,” he said, “no other son of a bitch will ever out-nigger me again.” Needless to say, no one did, as you might recall.

Perhaps until now. Bill Clinton, self-proclaimed and rather foolishly acclaimed by some who shall go nameless as the first “Black” president has played the race card with a finesse that even Wallace might have admired. He has niggered Barack Obama. After he and Mrs. Clinton began to see that African-Americans were turning to Obama – doubtless armed to with polling data (I am guessing here) that might have indicated an African-American swing toward Obama in other states, this most ruthless and cunning couple, the Macbeths of our time, played the race card.

And Bill Clinton knows it. There is nothing, and I hope that progressive Southerners will forgive me this, like the expertise of a Southern politician in out-niggering, to use Wallace’s infelicitous phrase. Clinton employed it with a devilish finesse. Why, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice in 1984 and 1988. And he ran a good campaign. Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here, he’s run a good campaign everywhere.” (Financial Times, January 28, page 4) The Financial Times, a straight-ahead, moderately conservative but rigorously reported newspaper concluded: “Mr. Clinton’s bleary-eyed implication was clear: Mr. Obama is a black candidate whom blacks disproportionately support.”

The specter of “block voting,” another code word in the South for the historic attempts of African-American to change Southern society comes to mind. Clinton has transformed Wallace’s technique: he uses race to “triangulate,” another unseemly strategy he brought to the White House and now spews forth as the hatchet man for Senator Clinton. He’s not baking cookies. He is artfully playing against African-Americans in order to pick up whites and Latinos for the Clinton campaign down the road. This is triangulation in its meanest form. Before it meant isolating progressive Democrats and working with Republicans to steal the middle ground of American politics out from under both of them. Recall “welfare reform,” the Defense of Marriage Act – oh, I don’t want to get started – both signed just in time for his re-election?

No noose-swinger is he. No, the Wallaces and Sparkmans and Russells – and yes the early Lyndon Johnson — they were pikers in comparison. They merely consolidated the white vote. Clinton seeks to take out not only the black vote (if Senator Clinton can’t get enough of it), but to pick up both whites and Latinos – a kind of multi-culti racism without a ready precedent as I see it, at least now.

Niggering Obama makes a perverse sense that a Southern politician really understands. In the North, white politicians are no dummies. They consolidate white votes too by playing the race card. Their play must be both obvious, but careful in the final analysis. In big cities, few white politicians can countenance completely alienating African-Americans. They must share at least some power with them when they govern. In Chicago, my hometown, the elder Mayor Richard Daley was elected and re-elected with an overwhelming African-American vote, as Mike Royko, the inventor of Slats Grobnik, noted with a bittersweet irony. Yes, Chicago Congressman William Dawson ran a plantation on the South Side, ever since he had turned Democrat during the New Deal.

Chicago since the sixties was often described by social scientists as the most segregated, and by implication most racist, northern city in the nation. But something is lost in this description. African-Americans gained real power in Chicago, and they did it because white resistance began to whither under the relentless pressure of African-American politicians.The first black mayor, Harold Washington, came up working in the Daley machine, as did three generations of African-American politicians before him. After Obama took a whupping in his run for Congress – buried by a well-oiled African-American wing of the famous intergenerational Daley Machine, he still found some room for his rise, as so many other African-American politicians in Chicago have done before him.

Niggering in the North is done not by nailing African-Americans wholesale. – not these days anyway I would argue. But white politicians work up white racists by stigmatizing the Jacksons (not Jackson Jr. by the way who now has the congressional spot that Obama failed to win and is liberal force within the new Daley machine) and the Al Sharptons. These are the blacks to watch out for. They are the pushy ones – the “uppity” ones. In this way, white politician consolidate their white votes and still find a way to work with powerful black politicians after Election Day.

But the resentment of white politicians was visceral. How they hated Adam Clayton Powell. There was one uppity black man. How they hated Harold Washington, another uppity. These politicians knew the moves, and could beat the openly racist white politicians through their extraordinary insight, whether in running campaigns, or in Powell’s case helping pass the most progressive social legislation to come out of the Congress since the New Deal.

The Clintons, one expects the former President in particular, must really hate what is happening. An African-American politician, of all people, could become the real first black president. Another Clinton myth dismantled. The poor man sees himself becoming the Eisenhower of his generation.

But whereas, the General was an old-fashioned racist, Bill Clinton is of the new breed. He won’t be out-niggered, but in a new sense. He and the Senator can’t run an overtly racist campaign. After all, some of their best friends….. Oh, by the way, does my memory deceive me, or were the most spectacular of Clinton’s political executions during his regime the throwing overboard of Lani Guinier, Jocelyn Elders, and Andrew Young – all black “friends of Bill?’ Help me readers on this one. I could never keep up with Bill and Hillary’s betrayals.

But they can try to make Obama black. Watch out, they are saying to whites and Latinos, those old black block voters are going to get their way. And God knows, you both will find yourselves on the outside looking in. Think of what would happen if they escape the plantation? Given what’s been done to them, their revenge could be frightful.

And, of course, we Clintons will lose our grip on the best job, the most perks, the most lucrative book deals and speaking engagements, and the best elbow-rubbing in the world as we know it. Why they even paid off Bill’s legal expenses incurred in the little mess with that woman that the old yard dog didn’t have sex with.

Let a black man grab this? Not on your life. If we have to nigger him, well, the polls say we’ll make out. Another one over the side – that’s just a day’s work for us. We’ve been doing it so long, what’s another one to us?

George Wallace has found his heir, only in a politician smarter and more modern. But Bill be out-niggered? Not on your life. Or Obama’s for that matter.

by Ram Manikkalingam

Prime Minister John Howard’s days were numbered the day Dr. Senan Nagararatnam, a radiologist in Sydney, took two weeks leave from work and went to Bennelong – Howard’s electorate – to campaign against him. I have known Senan since we were in first grade at Royal Junior School in Colombo. You couldn’t win an argument with Senan – however good your logic, your rhetoric or even your volume. If rhetoric was not on his side – he used logic. If logic was not on his side he used rhetoric. And if neither was on his side – he used volume. Whichever way you went at it – you always lost. And the argument always ended with Senan proclaiming loudly in front of the whole class – “Machan you do not know what the hell you’re talking about – so shut the …. up”. Someone should have warned John Howard.

I was in Australia recently and Senan drove down from Sydney to spend an evening with me. Like many Tamil families – his left Sri Lanka in the mid 80s when the fighting intensified and it started becoming uncomfortable to live in Sri Lanka particularly as a Tamil. However, unlike many members of the diaspora, Senan developed a real interest in the politics of the country where he chose to settle. He said his interests first began because he would read the papers daily – both to improve his English and to stave off boredom when he first moved to Sydney – and then because he started following politics more closely. Senan, is one of those peculiar people – who loves a good fight – but doesn’t like to hurt anyone. The result is that he enjoys watching people slug it out (verbally) – and occasionally joins in himself. And I suspect that this is why he deepened his interest in Australian politics – the stakes there after all are much lower than the volume. In any case, Senan has developed a good centre-left politics of support for basic freedoms, economic re-distribution and the underdog (whoever that might be). So Howard, to begin with, was definitely not his cup of tea. [Photo on left shows current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.]

All immigrants in Australia do not share this view. Many have traditionally voted for Howard’s liberal party – endorsing policies based on the simple premise that if you work hard and lead a frugal life you will succeed, if the state gets out of the way. Howard, himself, comes from a background where such an experience proved to be true. The son of lower middle class owners of a small business, he saw how working hard and saving money enabled his parents to improve their lives. And he finally became prime minister of Australia. The flip side of Howard’s thinking of course is that those who do not succeed have only themselves to blame. Oddly, many immigrants who move to Australia share this thinking. I say oddly, not because it is surprising that they have social views about, say homosexuality and abortion that are relatively conservative, but that though they have moved to another country in order to do better for themselves, they still cannot see how their doing better is so closely tied to the political system in which they live.

Instead they attribute their success – in getting to a new place and doing well – to precisely the fact that it is individual effort, not social support that matters. Moreover, they look at a country like Australia with relatively generous social welfare provisions (healthcare, housing and unemployment benefits) and treat with a mixture of dismissal and disdain those who are originally from Australia, whether white or Aboriginal, and fail to succeed. They are dismissive of White Australians for not doing much better than they do under such favourable circumstances, and disdainful of Aboriginal Australians for being at the bottom of the heap.

So the immigrant community in Australia has a diversity of views, and do not always share the centre-left perspective that Senan has. Still they do come together on one issue. Since they are immigrants, they are uncomfortable with the politics of nativism in Australia – that also invariably has a racially exclusivist tone to it. Despite the presence of a large non-White native Australian population, it is hard in Australia to separate nativism from opposition to non-Whites. And successful immigrant communities in Australia, like the Chinese and South Asians are also affected by this. They are uncomfortable with direct or indirect appeals to race – which invariably come from the conservative end of the political spectrum. And John Howard was noted for this on many occasions.

In August 1988, Howard created controversy with the following comment about Asian immigration into Australia:

“I do believe that if it is – in the eyes of some in the community – that it’s too great, it would be in our immediate-term interest and supporting of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater.”

Advocating what he called a one Australia policy Howard opposed land rights for aboriginal Australians and the shifting focus of Australia away from Europe and towards Asia.

Subsequently, Howard took his time to disassociate himself from Pauline Hanson, who founded the “One Nation” party and campaigned on a platform of anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism. Her policies, which included a combination of protectionism, nationalism and social conservatism, resonated in the late 90s with a significant fraction of the population. From a high of 8% of the national vote in the federal elections of 1998, however, her party’s popularity dwindled to a measly 0.3% in the election of December 2007. But not before she had a significant impact on national politics, particularly the shift in the platforms of the Liberal party towards the anti-immigrant right.

Finally there was the infamous MV Tampa affair. Here the Australian government, led by Howard, accused seafaring asylum seekers of throwing their children overboard in order to get permission to enter Australia. They refused to permit the MV Tampa, a Norwegian freighter that had gone to the rescue of the refugees at sea, to land on Christmas Island, an Australian territory and sent Australian special forces on board to enforce this order. The incident eventually led to a serious diplomatic dispute, with Norway accusing Australia of violating its maritime and humanitarian obligations under international law. It eventually emerged that the Howard government had knowingly lied about the refugees throwing children overboard in an effort to demonise them, and get public opinion on their side. Australia suffered a serious blow to its reputation of tolerance and openness, but John Howard’s coalition gained popularity and won the elections held shortly thereafter.

Why did John Howard, who appeared unassailable only a few months ago, not only lose the elections in December 2007, nationally, but also lose his own seat in parliament. So I asked Senan, who loves to travel during his vacation, why he instead took two weeks off to work against Howard, in his own electorate.

Senan mentioned two factors – Mohamed Haneef and “Work Choices”. Mohamed Haneef was an Indian physician working in Australia, who was falsely accused of association with terrorism. He is distantly related to one of the perpetrators of the attacks on Glasgow airport and had left his SIM card with a balance in it, with him after leaving the UK. And because Dr. Haneef was found to be leaving the country shortly after the incident on a one-way ticket to India, he was charged with associating with terrorists. All the “suspicious” activities had very innocent explanations. He could not afford a ticket and asked his father-in-law to buy him a one way ticket. And he wasn’t fleeing after the attack in Glasgow, but was finally able to find other doctors to cover for him at the hospital that week. Eventually charges against him were dropped, but his visa was revoked, and he was sent back to India. To the credit of the Australian judicial system and Dr. Haneef’s courageous lawyer, Stephen Keim, he not only won his case, but his visa was re-instated. The minister who revoked his visa was also rebuked by the court, for loosely interpreting the term association to imply family or professional relationships.

What is remarkable about the Mohamed Haneef case was that not just the judiciary, but also a large section of Australians were unhappy. Australians, whatever their background, have a strong sense of fair play. And they sensed very quickly that this was a case of a young man being victimised by powerful politicians to scare others into toeing the line. The hospital where Dr. Haneef worked, and the Prime Minister of the State of Queensland, where the hospital is located, all said that Dr. Haneef was welcome back anytime.

Then, there was “Work Choices” the Howard government’s legislation to radically overhaul the industrial relations framework of Australia. The result was a pro-business legislation that weakened collective bargaining agreements, permitted individual contracts between employers and employees, and facilitated the dismissal of employees under circumstances that had hitherto been considered unfair. The Autralian trade union movement and the labour party opposed this legislation. Still, it passed muster in parliament and became the law. There were widespread protests against “Work Choices” and a great deal of unease among voters across the entire political spectrum, except maybe the super rich. Even the middle class was affected as their employers pressured them into individual contracts that lacked the protection of collective bargaining arrangements backed by a trade union.

And, finally, there was John Howard, himself. Having served out eleven years as Prime Minister, the second longest since Sir Robert Menzies, even his ardent supporters were getting a bit tired of seeing him around all the time, and his long time critics were getting ready to get rid of him.

I teased Senan, that he put on his walking shoes and went to Bennelong to join all the other “Chardonnay Socialists” in ousting John Howard. And they succeeded, helped by a charismatic, courageous and attractive labour candidate Maxine McKew, who was a well known anchorwoman for Australian TV.

And it did not hurt that the then leader of the opposition and current Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd , a fluent Mandarin speaker, campaigned in Bennelong. In the past decade Bennelong had changed from a predominantly White middle class neighbourhood to an ethnically mixed immigrant neighbourhood with a significant East Asian immigrant population.

So in-between sipping a lot of chardonnay, Senan walked many miles around Bennelong, educating voters about whom to vote for and how to do so, in Australia’s relatively complicated single transferable voting system. Senan was both a cause and a symptom of why John Howard lost. Until this past election, he had mainly discussed and argued about politics, but had never become directly involved. This time he actually worked to unseat John Howard. And he won.

Once Upon a Spacetime
— to P. on our 40th anniv.

.

.

.

.

.

.

A couple of hours before twilight
a gibbous moon rose in the east
over the serpentine spine of the mountain
a bright hole in a bluegrey scrim,
just there without reason,
as uncomplicated and expected
as a shard of granite on the slope of a talus,
as common as the little moons that rise
above the cuticles of each finger
of your familiar hands, as singular,
as sure as the hidden sun it mirrors,
and I wondered at what the ancients thought
as it appeared and disappeared
regular as breath, opulent as a third eye,
as crisp as the feel of a January breeze
slapping my cheek as I cross the bridge
from here to there. I’m as stupefied
as they must have been,
even though I’ve been told this bright hole
is no more than dust and rock
tethered by a wrinkle in space
which holds it in a groove of time
like a stylus spiraling in black vinyl
sending mute tunes
hushed as the sure breath
that billowed from our mouths
as we threw row cover
over the kale

Jim Culleny
1/15/17

Review of Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up by John Allen Paulos

You may know the (almost certainly apocryphal) story of an 18th century encounter between the brilliant Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and the French freethinking encyclopaedist and philosopher Denis Diderot:

Diderot had been invited to the court by Catherine the Great, but then annoyed her by trying to convert everyone to atheism. Catherine asked Euler for help, and he informed Diderot, who was ignorant of mathematics, that he would present in court an algebraic proof of the existence of God, if Diderot wanted to hear it. Diderot was interested, and, according to De Morgan, Euler advanced toward Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: “Sir, ( a + bn )/n = x , hence God exists; reply!” Diderot had no reply, and the court broke into laughter. Diderot immediately returned to France.

Not being ignorant of mathematics, had John Allen Paulos been in the place of Diderot, he would have had no trouble replying. He could just have presented Euler with a copy of his charming and brief book Irreligion. In Irreligion, Paulos provides (in the form of musings about them) refutations of twelve arguments for the existence of God which “range from what might be called the golden oldies of religious thought to those with a more contemporary beat,” and he does so with verve, a robust prose, and a very welcome sense of humor. Along the way, we learn all sorts of interesting mathematical tidbits in short side-discussions of related issues. And there are delicious little anecdotes sprinkled throughout. I can’t resist immediately providing an example of the latter:

[I am reminded] of a story related by Bertrand Russell about when he was entering jail as a conscientious objector during World War I. The admitting clerk asked him his religion, and when Russell responded that he was an agnostic, the clerk shook his head and said he’d never heard of that religion but that all of them worship the same God. [p. 79]

* * *

Let’s get to the meat. To give a sense of Paulos’s modus operandi, I’ll present one of his refutations briefly here. This one, he calls The Argument from Prophecy (and the Bible Codes). For each of the arguments that he discusses, Paulos first distills them into a formal structure. Here’s what that looks like for this argument:

1. A holy book makes prophesies.
2. The same book or adherents of it report that these prophesies have come true.
3. The book is indubitable and asserts that God exists.
4. Therefore God exists.

First, Paulos notes that in any narrative, the more details that are supplied, the more true it starts to seem. For example, if asked which of the following narratives is more likely to be true,

1. Congressman Smith took a bribe last year.
2. Congressman Smith took a bribe last year, took another one this year, used some of the money to rent a secret apartment for his young intern, and spent the rest on luxurious “fact-finding” trips with her.

many people will pick the second one even though mathematically speaking, any statement alone always has a higher probability of being true than its conjunction with any other statement(s):

Embedding God in a holy book’s detailed narrative and building an entire culture around this narrative seem by themselves to confer a kind of existence on Him. Holidays, traditions, ideals, cultural identities, as valuable as they occasionally might be, all seem to add to the unwarranted presuppositions underlying them. Their familiarity also serves to inure us to the vindictive, petty, and repellent aspects of the God character. [p. 62]

Second, Paulos notes that people, even if they are deluded, often reinforce each others beliefs. A kind of “all-of-us-can’t-be-wrong” thinking, and then he points to an interesting mathematical result:

note that testimony that someone is telling the truth is self-undermining if the likelihood of truth-telling is less than 1/2. If people are confused, lying, or otherwise deluded more often than not, than their expressions of support for each other are literally less than worthless.[p.64]

He goes on to give an example with two people who each get the truth right only 1/4 of the time. What is the probability if one of them makes an assertion and the other supports it as true, that it is actually true? Paulos shows with some simple mathematics that the probablity now drops to 1/10:

The Moral: Confirmation of a person’s unreliable statement by another unreliable person makes the statement even less reliable. [p. 65]

The rest of the chapter is devoted to a probabilistic analysis showing that there is nothing unusual about the Bible Codes. Such codes could be extracted from any sufficiently large text, and they have been. For example, War and Peace has been shown to contain codes for “Jordan,” “Chicago,” and “Bulls” very close together, prompting Paulos to sarcastically declare Tolstoy a basketball clairvoyant!

* * *

The book is organized into three sections, each of which deals with four arguments. The first presents traditional ones, such as the ontological argument, and the argument from design. The second deals with subjective arguments such as the one I presented above. And the third section is on psycho-mathematical arguments such as Pascal’s wager. Each section also contains short asides with commonsensical comments on various dubious assertions and practices in religion. For example, discussing Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, Paulos writes:

Assume for the moment that compelling historical documents have just come to light establishing the movie’s and the Bible’s contentions that a group of Jews was instrumental in bringing about the death of Jesus; that Pilate, the Roman governor, was benign and ineffectual; and so on. Even if all this were the case, does it not seem hateful, not to mention un-Christian, to blame contemporary Jews? …even if we give full credit to Plato’s twenty-four-hundred-year-old account of Socrates’ death, what zealous coterie of classicists or philosophers would hold today’s Greeks responsible? [p.92-93]

Nowhere is Paulos preachy or condescending. His tone remains always detached and his humor dry. Paulos is not interested in engaging in polemics or spewing invective. This is a sincere, calm, humane and timely examination of a phenomenon nowadays much in the news, one we can benefit by reading regardless of our beliefs.

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!

You may have noticed that I have been posting more poetry recently at 3QD. This is not because I have suddenly become more literate, but because my friend Jim Culleny has been sending me poems almost every day. In addition to having exquisite taste in poetry, Jim is himself a distinguished and fine poet. In fact, we became friends a few years ago when someone sent me something by him, which I posted at 3QD then and reproduce here:

I was just looking through a hole in Van Gogh’s head. The hole I was peering through is a painting some call Terrasse de Cafe. It could be called Fire and Ice. Wonderful would be another apt name for it.

This piece of Vincent is a night sky hung with stellar lanterns as near as lightposts, as if the cosmos was just another canopy slightly beyond the one shielding the cafe. Just a stone’s throw beyond. Within spitting distance. Half a hair’s breadth away.

Stars big as moons hang in this room in Vincent’s skull. Stars ready as wet Cortlands to be plucked from trees in orchards of exploding hydrogen.

Under the cafe canopy nano-figures repose upon cobbles of burning coals.
Sipping wine maybe; savoring oysters; sucking energy from supernovas.
Near and Far opposed as lovers in Vincent’s embracing mind.
There and Here tangled beyond belief.

I am happy and proud to say that Jim has agreed to become 3QD’s Poetry Editor. He will be posting poems daily, and will also contribute original poems on Mondays. You can see his first post just below this one and can read more about Jim on our About Us page. Please join me in welcoming him to 3QD.

I recently spent ten days in L.A., and despite being quite busy, I ended up with a pretty good picture of the food scene in that city-state.  My very first night was somewhat revelatory.  I was lagging, beat and needing to be up by five, and we took refuge around ten in Los Feliz’s Cafe Stella.  Somehow more French-seeming than similar bistro facsimiles in New York City, despite being in a strip mall, Stella calmed our nerves immediately.  I had an excellent steak tartare.  My only complaint was a slight lack of tang to the beef, it was more a clean-tasting piece of sashimi than a gamy lump of bloody beef tenderized under a horse’s saddle.  (Michael Lomanaco’s tartare at Porterhouse is similar, but has more tangy iron in it.) 

The Proustian element of my meal, however, was effected by a glass of Fleurie, which, as you may know, is one of the more elegant vintages of Beaujolais (other good ones being Brouilly, Julienas, Chiroubles and Morgon).  About ten years ago, I drove through Fleurie on my way south and bought a couple of cases of wine from various vineyards.  This glass at Cafe Stella brought back that trip involuntarily, instantly, and uncannily.  The restaurant itself is effortlessly atmospheric and surprisingly expensive, and I recommend it.

On a free afternoon, I snuck off to pay a visit to Pizzeria Mozza, which is at the crest of the current wave of obsessive, Neapolitan-style U.S. pizzamakers that includes the national champ, Phoenix’s Pizzeria Bianco.  Pizzeria Mozza is the brainchild of Nancy Silverton, one of L.A.’s two female superchefs, and a baker of world class, in collaboration with Dionysian ubermensch Mario Batali.  (Big Mario’s own pizza spot, Otto, does not rank in the top class).  I’d heard a lot about Mozza and was eager to compare it to the East Village’s Una Pizza Napoletana, which I believe is New York’s best pizza–better by a shade than the old-school legends, Grimaldi’s and Totonno’s.

And so I pulled my rented Dodge Avenger up to Mozza’s non-descript corner, was greeted by a very friendly maitre’d (they’re way friendlier in Lala; another true truism), and took a seat in front of the wood-burning oven.  Some superb breadsticks quickly appeared, and my water glass was refilled just as I became conscious of its emptiness.  My pie was… stunningly good.  Tomato; long, sliced red chilies; white anchovies.  The chilies were audaciously hot, perhaps reflecting how Mexican food has reoriented Los Angeleno’s taste buds.  I’m going to sound like a dope for saying this, but the plump anchovies were as bracing as the seaside.  Really, they were the perfect complement to a perfectly designed set of flavors that remained distinct yet conversed with each other.  The only reason I will say that Mozza finishes a close second to Una Pizza Napoletana in my book is the crust: Silverton’s is excellent, mottled by amber bubbles, but a touch, just a touch, sweeter and less astringent than Anthony Mangieri’s.  Mozza’s pies are brilliantly executed and more creative.  But Una Pizza’s still barely my champ.  Now I gotta get to Phoenix(!).

We also spent some time at the Mandrake, a bar on Culver City’s art strip that I highly recommend (especially on Wednesday nights).  Their sandwiches and plates are similar in quality and simple elegance to our own Clandestino, but the Mandrake’s vibe is more challenging.  It’s sort a Lynchian lodge that bears some psychogeographic memory of its previous incarnation as a rawhide gay men’s spot.  Drinkswise, it offers an edited, unpretentious yet high-quality selection.  Mandrake is to L.A. what the Club Charles is to Baltimore, and I don’t have many higher compliments for bars.

Later that day, on the way down Mulholland Drive and Laurel Canyon, a pit stop at In-N-Out Burger was decided upon.  Personally, I am starting to prefer Southern California’s thin-pattied, topping-heavy burgers to the New York variety, with its giant puck of beef.  The SoCal version is healthier and fresher than, say, the leviathan burger of Dumont.  Plus, the In-N-Out burger is incredibly cheap, yet you see whole potatoes being peeled, cut and fried in the restaurant, which is more than you can say for thousands of pricier pubs and sports bars that feature frozen fries.  Order “Animal-style” is my advice, though for the rest of the secret menu, check here.

(Speaking of fries, Alia and I had some classic, thick-cut steak fries in Burbank at Frank’s Coffee Shop, a diner that feels, like many things in the ungentrified precincts of Southern California, lost in time in the best possible way.  Hard to say more.  Just go there.)

(I also had some Thai food at Rambutan in Silverlake.  It’s perfectly decent, but the reports that Los Angeleno Thai food kicks New York’s insipid ass may not be entirely true–Queens’ Sripraphai is much better.)

Our last supper was at A.O.C., a project of the other L.A. superchef, Suzanne Goin of Lucques.  (I love the fact that L.A.’s two most celebrated chefs are women.  Does that make me knee-jerkily politically correct?)  The idea at A.O.C. is of sort of haute winebar, with endless courses of small plates.  Memorable ones: rabbit in mustard sauce, chanterelles with ricotta gnocchi, skirt steak with roquefort butter, clams with garlic and sherry, and salt-cod fritters with little orange segments.  The food was excellent and so were the wines, but it was all too rich, everything being fortified with major quantities of butter and cream.  The dependence on Old World technique–flavor enhancement through fat–felt slightly disappointing to me.  I want Los Angeles to be more fearless, less honor-bound, not to pay too many tributes and homages, but to express itself more uniquely.

The meal I enjoyed most, I must say, was a late night dinner at an outdoor white plastic table in front of the little blue shack that is El 7 Mares of East Hollywood.  It was quite late, and we were exhausted and hungry.  We had some blazingly refreshing fish  and shrimp ceviches, some tacos al pastor, and some truly superb fish tacos.  A squeeze of lime, two tortillas, some chunks of fish, white cabbage, and a salsa combined in that miracle of fresh complexity that great Mexican food always delivers.  As our second assistant director said, perspicaciously, “This is the real thing that La Esquina is the fake version of.”

A last word about Mexican food: it couldn’t be clearer that we Americans have assigned the wrong social meaning to it.  Maybe because of the place of Mexican laborers in the U.S. economy, Mexican cooking got associated with low eating, even with gastrointestinal problems.  This is the reverse of what should be: we suffer much more from overeating than undereating, in this historical moment of ours.  Yet we currently fetishize the saturated fat-dependent peasant cuisines of Europe, out of a vague sense that the European peasantry is somehow more authentic and closer to the earth. 

By contrast, most of Mexican cooking, its ceviches and guacamoles and posoles and salsas, depends on raw vegetables for flavor, in the form of cilantro, chilies, avocados, tomatoes, garlic, scallions and radishes.  There’s the habit of drinking fruit juices and infusions: hibiscus, blood orange, etc.  Then there’s all the papaya, the healthiest, most enzymatically active fruit going.  Not that Mexican cuisine shuns meat–in fact, it celebrates its variety more ecstatically than most cuisines, from beef tongue to pork belly to goat’s head.  Mexican cooking is what L.A.’s food truly is and should be: a powerfully flavored melange of the raw and cooked, that upends our outdated senses of high and low.

Café Stella
3932 W. Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 090029
(323) 666-0265

Pizzeria Mozza
641 N. Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 297-0101

Mandrake
2692 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 837-3297

In-N-Out Burger
7009 Sunset Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90028

Frank’s Coffee Shop and Restaurant
916 W. Olive Ave.
Burbank, CA 91506

A.O.C.
8022 W. 3rd St.
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(323) 653-6359

El 7 Mares
3131 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90026

The rest of my 3qd Dispatches.

Michael Blim

Tears work in American politics, as events in New Hampshire last week show. But they didn’t always work, as a 1972 presidential contender Edmund Muskie learned in New Hampshire 36 years ago. They cost him his presidential bid, even as they propped up Senator Clinton’s.

What has happened in America politics and public life that tears have become so acceptable, even gratifying? Rather than considered mawkish, a sign of instability, a feint or worse, crying now signifies something good about the character of someone who does.

Americans generally need have no fear of suffering from blocked tear ducts. Turn the camera on, and we turn the tears on. Happy people cry, and sad people cry. Soldiers cry, police and fire fighters cry, criminals and victims cry, and game contestants cry. Celebrities cry. Politicians cry. We cry with them.

Sports figures positively blubber. Jemele Hill, an ESPN writer, reacts to sports tears without pity and with a little spice in her May 15, 2007 commentary “Crying Etiquette of the Sports World.” Here are some of her rules:

1. Don’t cry at a news conference where you’re announcing to the world you’ve cheated on you wife (I would add or used steroids).
2. Don’t cry when you’ve been traded.
3. Don’t cry at practice.
4. Don’t cry before the game is over.
5. Don’t cry on camera if hurt; wait until you hit the trainer’s room.

Tears of joy, tears of defeat, tears of pain, and just plain tears. Some tears say, “I am one of you.” Others say, “I feel your pain, or joy, or loss” …or whatever. Some ask for pity; some are pitiable.

Whence all this crying in America, especially in politics? In Italy where I have spent a lot of time, politicians don’t cry, and would be considered addled or a bit ridiculous if they did. Contrary to the weepy Italian stereotypes of movies, women in black throwing themselves on biers and Neapolitans male or female caught in sweaty, tearful embraces, and so on, Italians don’t expect politicians to cry. They chalked it up to senility when one of their favorite Presidents, the octogenarian Sandro Pertini, wept every time he touched the Italian flag. As Machiavellian as Italian politicians are, crying is not part of their playbook. It is a sign of weakness, of fecklessness, and given that there is so much “feck” in Italian politics, better not to show it, as Mark Twain said, and remove all doubt.

In our neck of the woods where politicians are fecking up big time — let’s let two wars and the lust for another stand in as a placeholder here – crying sometimes helps them get over rather than get sown under.

Why? Perhaps like many “68ers,” for me, it all begins with Nixon, the Republican cloth coat, and the blessed dog Checkers. Nixon while Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952 was caught using money from a slush fund his supporters had created to defray expenses not covered by his Senatorial allowance. To prevent Ike from tossing him off the ticket, Nixon gave the first of his many bathos-soaked self-disclosures for which he is justly famous. One scholar considered the so-called “Checkers” speech one of the top 100 speeches in modern American rhetoric.

Well…most speeches in American politics today come down to comments such as “I did not have sex with that woman.” Let’s just say the barrier has been lowered a bit, so that even Nixon’s vicious rambles outclass the mumbles of the current bunch.

To recall, Nixon had not only received the slush money, but some kindly Texas dog owner had sent so opportunely a cocker spaniel along for his kids:

“One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something – a gift – after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”

Nixon’s mouth quivered, his eyes wetted, – and yes, as usual, he perspired. Afterwards, he broke down in sobs. But Americans had begun to get a taste for exhibitionism and self-pity. Even Ike, the great general, “welled up” when he saw Nixon’s speech in Cleveland that night. “Dick, you are my boy,” Ike announced with Nixon at his side the next day in Wheeling, West Virginia, and Nixon broke down again in the weep seen round the world.

It was not always thus. Who would want to ruin a rhetorical high point with a weep? Would William Jennings Bryan, taking a Democratic convention by storm in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech have stopped for a good cry? Teddy Roosevelt and the boys after San Juan Hill? Woodrow Wilson after the Fourteen Points? It’s said that Cal Coolidge could barely stay awake, let alone cry.

Even dogs didn’t make politicians cry before Nixon. For Franklin Roosevelt, it was all in a day’s work of skewering Republicans in 1944 when they came after “his little dog Fala:”

“These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him – at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars – his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself – such as the old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.”

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house – from laughing.

Thanks to Dick Nixon (alas, poor Dick, we knew thee well), his bathos is now our own. He showed us how to ignore politics and enjoy the spectacle of personal abasement – something the former President Clinton practiced rather ham-handedly, and only just in time to save himself from an impeachment conviction.

Now, Senator Clinton. Does it run in the family, the bitten lip, the wetting eyes, or was it simply a Monday morning desperation Hail Mary? Well, tears for fears — and it worked.

Permit me to recall that famous line of the Army lawyer James Welch responding to a red-baiting attack on a soldier by Senator Joseph McCarthy in April, 1954:

“You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency … at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

In 1938, there was a world’s fair in Glasgow—called the Empire Exhibition—that attracted over 13 million attendants. Modernists from Basel Spence to Jack Coia built dozens of pavilions, most of which have since been demolished. Last month, the Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studio (DDS) launched a digital recreation of the festival, bringing to life many of the buildings from archival film footage, photographs, the memories of surviving participants, and architectural drawings. You can look at a map of the site and click on specific buildings for more detailed perspectives.

I’ve been preoccupied about the implications of such an endeavor since going to Scotland for a walkthrough of the project by the head of the DDS and the researchers involved a few months ago, and it seems to have found a curious counterpart in another recent fixation. Quite by accident, I was revisiting a rather insipid New York blog that I used to read years ago when the author made some mention of a guy called Ben Chappel, a New York-based illustrator and web-whiz who died two years ago.

The post had a link to his website (which still exists), and I clicked on it. The site and his work resonated, for whatever reason, and I Googled him. I’m by no means one of those people who search everyone they know or any stranger’s name they come across, so this in itself was unusual.

Cut to three hours later: I’ve read countless posthumous descriptions of his life and accomplishments. I’ve read email exchanges, instant messenger conversations, and a typed dialogue between him and a friend from an evening spent together during which, rather than talk, they communicated only on a shared computer. I found countless pictures from every angle, of every face, of many locations. I discovered a phenomenon whereby when someone dies, friends and strangers leave them messages on social networking pages (for him, myspace)—wishing them well, missing them, loving them. He seemed a swell guy and a great person with whom to have a romantic entanglement.

I started to realize how limiting traditional obituaries are, how unidimensional and incomplete. The internet, magical place it is, allows for something far more holistic. In its democratic arrangement, it lets anyone join in the grief process and, more importantly, the process of contributing to the story of the deceased.

I hardly need to point out the parallel between this and the aims of the DDS in recreating Glasgow’s Empire Exhibition. The only analogy I can posit is to look back to analytical cubism, where painters like Braque, Picasso, and later Duchamp attempted to create time and space through a style of painting that simultaneously revealed various facets and dimensions of a subject.

Here, the process is curiously Baudriallardian—the result a digital simulation of reality that, despite its verisimilitude, remains set apart from its original subject. But the two things, this young man and this fair, are to a certain degree recast by digital means and through a process that involves third-party participation. Just as with the DDS’s interface, whereby users have the agency to explore the fair grounds and take detailed tours of the various buildings, so too can a web surfer navigate the waters of a life lost and create a multidimensional portrait of that person based on selective research. It’s a terrifying process in certain ways, as though history is almost too elastic and becomes itself a subjective exploration rather than something with a singular definition. Gone are the days of a tombstone with a single epitaph, now not only do we have a person’s life and accomplishments at our fingertips, but also the dynamics of their relationships and intimate correspondences.

In the case of the Glasgow exhibition, there is a shift from the telling of history through gritty black and white photographs to an interactive and experiential portrait mediated, of course, by its very nature as a virtual environment.

And that’s where things get a bit slippery for me. With the rise of phenomena like Second Life, suddenly the creation of digital personae and places begins to blur my understanding of reality and historical occurrences that are retold through the internet. This Ben (who I am exploiting so despicably here, but only because I am truly fascinated by, and may go so far as to say may actually like), just as this Empire Exhibition, are ultimately going to survive in the annals of the internet, sharing a place with Lara Croft as easily as those pets for whom adoring (and perverted, in my opinion) owners make myspace and friendster pages. Their digitization is, rather than bringing them to life, making them ultimately less real, if not more complex, than people and places sitting in an encyclopedia.

Ultimately I grieve for Ben as much as I stand in awe of the remnants of Glasgow’s fair. I am able to understand them as things once tangible, but it’s taken a lot of imagination and a refutation of the source of information by which I’ve come to know them. It’s an active process, but one that brings them to life beyond the confines of the same digital world through which I came to know them. It’s all a bit twisted, I guess.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’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 subject of Prometheus has appealed to poets from the Greeks onwards. Though Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound’ is probably the best known poem on the subject, many poets have been drawn to the figure of the trapped and suffering Titan—Byron, Goethe, Ted Hughes (Prometheus on his Crag) and Robert Lowell (translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound).   

Australia’s vast continental landscapes and devastating seasonal bushfires provide both the scenic and metaphysical songlines from which the adjective Promethean could draw a particular music and imagery. 

Here is the opening of my poem ‘Prometheus’. Three voices are dramatised. Prometheus’ speaking voice is caught between a blank verse narrative and lyrics that explore the fire imagery inherent in the subject matter.

                Prometheus

Leaving the past,
Its histories and mutterings,
Now our pitch
Rears from feral backblocks.
So, here in limbo,
At adequate height,
Fate abandons you, leaving
Hollow triumphs
And the dreck of a century,
Freeways ringing oceans
While see-saw skin
Sexes the packed minutes.

Look at the harbour unreeling—
Its cloud wedding cake on a cracked mirror sheen,
Oxygen feeding furnaces,
Strengthening iron,
Industrial shift work stretching
Towers from tired limbs.
We stare at the brilliant sky
Hoping for something large,
A handle to grip
Each failure
Summoning bad grace.
Then at one zone of light,
Near opalescent sea,
On a bare rock, in a hard place,
Prometheus is faxed,
Myth amid technology,
Linkages of lyric,
Monologues and fragments,
Vague beginnings, endings,
Not old certainties.

A superhero skimming heights
Made marvellous by NASA,
Limbs carved to silhouette,
Olympian gesturing?—
Prometheus has dropped
Poses meant for dominance,
Though trapped,
Still glorying in a mood
Named euphoric,
Data banks in stacks.
But there is too much pain
To be contained by formulae
Or measured with an ECG,
Too much inexplicable,
Not defined by chemistry,
Unpaginated nerves
Rippling near texts.

   If I speak, it’s clear
   that I must speak
   with the voice of nations
   and bestiaries—
   I’ve seen the end result
   of evolution’s tramp
   and known cruelty,
   that rational excess
   when species felt the needle plunge.
   Politicians shouted slogans
   too long with no end
   except their re-election,
   true democrats
   left high and dry,
   justice dumped,
   speculators salting
   loot on harbour shelves.

      Lightning highlights clouds,
      Thunder rattles stairs,
      In the bedroom shadows crowd
      Round a loving pair.

      A bolt descends theatrically,
      Attracted to their heat,
      Severs bodies open
      Under ruined sheets.

      Then rain pours through the tiles,
      On this crumpled couple—
      Morning sky is spread
      With cloud-limbs reassembled.

Here is our astrology—
Using words to sew up faults,
Coming to strength
When the shining ends
Of dreaming have sprung up.
There lies within us nature coiled
Which we can bring with splendour
Or quickly finish off;
Waiting at our end
Are a million crackling stars.

      Fire on hills, wheels of light exploding,
      Sheet flame folding valleys and bright birds
      Caught in flying ashes, brought to the bronze moulding
      Of these channels surging through the grass.
      Snake writhing on a log, cattle scorched and sculpted,
      Flickering as a furrow where the steel is poured,
      Hunter trapping fauna in a glowing comer,
      Branch and tree trunk splitting in the branding heat.

      Then the flapping wall of flame perishes with windfall,
      Leaving grey abstractions after purgatorio,
      Stink of soot and stripped design, black predominating.
      Through the haze a form escapes into midnight tremor;
      Madman with a box of matches, grinning at the night,
      Weird with all that reddening he runs to start new fires.

   My charity must search
   beyond failed intent.
   Of course, if you’re content
   with defeat and are smug
   with your own self-hate,
   you’ll never know
   more than curiosity
   for suffering, or sympathy
   for disgrace.
   After disillusion
   I take the world in tow,
   sparking hope again.
   To some I’m naive,
   a philosophe
   who’s lost the drift of things.
   Still, I’ve this to give:
   passion, not knowledge,
   feeling, not incision.

      Bars that turn blue
      In the cooling tank room
      Menace the chocolate box snow.

      Are you excited
      Or just plain frightened
      By this victorious show?

      Yellow cake loads
      Will flatten the roads
      In a manner that’s rather gung ho.

      One flash and you’re ash,
      Done your whole dash,
      Buried alike friend and foe.

      Just transfer the lot
      To the stars you clot
      And the problem will soon disappear.

      A war up in space
      Will not cinder the race—
      It’s goodbye to your out-of-date fears!

Alternative dazzle
As jumbos knife the sky,
Land distanced by the roar
Of engines burning fuel,
Your wanderlust soon gutted,
Lying on a foreign bed, thinking
Of that prize: thunder on the skin;
In that noise the turbulence
That shadowed every pastoral,
Rippling motel rooms,
Ribbing beachtime games.
You wonder then
If beauty lasts;
Its harness sometimes drags
To seaweed in a trench
Or flags stuck on a peak,
Laundering politely,
Only gathering in
When loving is the cause—
Orchids hanging in glass shed stacks,
A stretch of muscle pushing at your own,
An um whose figures freeze up rushing time.

Cont. . . .

Written 1985–1987 Published Such Sweet Thunder 1994 49-64

Elatia Harris

Around last Newton’s Day, I began considering what to write about in this space once 2008 got underway. It was only natural to think of upcoming holidays that might also be headed for revaluation in the clear light of reason; if Newton had supplanted the Christ Child, then surely Marie Curie ought to elbow Mom, but I didn’t want to wait until May.  Riffling through a sexual Psy-Ops manual featuring leaflets distributed to combat soldiers during the wars of the 20th century — the image above is one such, a tasteful Japanese effort from WWII — I could not help recalling we had on the horizon a veritable festival of unreason: Valentine’s Day. 

Now what could that mean to us? Sure, pooh-pooh Valentine’s Day if you like, as nothing more than a tree-killing bonanza for greeting card manufacturers – but its roots go very deep. In 1969, St. Valentine, possibly a martyr of the 3rd Century, C.E., was let go by the Catholic Church as being just that little bit too nebulous for enforced feast day-keeping. But by then, the engraining in Western culture of this apocryphal saint as the patron of affianced couples was done, having been begun, many scholars argue, by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Parliament of Foules.

Twenty years after Chaucer, on Valentine’s Day, 1400, a High Court of Love was convened by noblewomen in Paris.  Nan Seuffert, writing about — among other things — women who kill, tells us in “Domestic Violence, Discourses of Romantic Love, and Complex Personhood in the Law,” an article for the Melbourne University Law Review, that this court was to have jurisdiction “over the rules of love, to hear disputes between lovers, and to hear appeals from other Courts of Love.” Organized in a non-hierarchical manner, the judges were chosen by women after reciting poetry, and judgments were made collectively. The Court of Love addressed “contracts of love, remedies for amorous betrayal, deceit and slander of lovers, responsibilities of separated lovers and punishment of violence against women. Further…the courts often considered disputes between women lovers and between male lovers. What we might today call transgendered identifications may also have been common.”

My, my, I was thinking: what a lot of fascinating stuff — eloquent relics of love gone sour enough to beg for the chat of well placed women — must have been produced in that High Court of Love, those 700 years ago in Paris.  But no such relic has come down to us, for these courts were more like salons or discussion groups than legal entities whose official evidence would survive to go on display as records of actual medieval jurisprudence.

The Museum of Broken Relationships

What about the present, then?  If one of us strode into a non-hierarchical High Court of Love, relics of our acute romantic distress in a special box tucked under an arm, what would those relics be? I found that two Croatian artists – former romantic partners – were on the very same wavelength, with their Museum of Broken Relationships, initiated in Zagreb in 2006.  As Kate Connolly, writing in The Guardian on October 29, 2007, observes, “Cutting the arms off his designer suits, putting her prized wine collection out on the street for passers-by, or burning the collection of love letters are just some of the ways in which jilted lovers are known to have exacted revenge at the end of relationships. But now there is another outlet for their pain – The Museum of Broken Relationships.” The MBR spent the fall and early winter of 2007 in Berlin, and has traveled to Skopje for a Macedonian spring. Plans for future travel include Stockholm, New York, L.A. and Buenos Aires.

There was no lack of media about the MBR, last fall especially, but it passed us by on 3QD, I’m afraid — are we too rational?  Some of us — still incomplete rationalists — are trying awfully hard to swear off the woo, and we may in that push be repressing altogether too enthusiastically even our vicariously Dionysian natures.

See that wedding dress in the photo above – and that hatchet? These are relics with fancy explanations, displayed in Tacheles, a 1930’s department store that’s since become an artists’ squat, where the MBR had its Berlin run.  At present, only a big roomful of the growing collection of artifacts can be installed at any one time, although the initiators of the project, Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic, hope that the MBR may one day find a permanent – and vast – home. Artifacts keep arriving, each with its story: the bike on which a wretched boy simply pedaled away from his unendurable love one hot summer day; the pricey coffeemaker that reminded its donor of too many attempts at a cozy connubial breakfast that somehow never took place; a pair of pink fur handcuffs, with keys; an evening gown which, its donor writes, “one New Year’s Eve was neglected to be put on.”

Boy/Girl, Boy/Boy and Girl/Girl Ruptures – and Their Traces

Since the MBR focuses on physical artifacts of failed romantic relationships, couples out for winter entertainment in Berlin found it a popular destination – fingers crossed inside their mittens, I presume.  Everyone reading this – and the very one writing it – has had some form of romantic disappointment of which there exists a relic — if only a memory artifact — of such symbolic power that it matters not at all that it no longer takes up three-dimensional space, if it ever did.  Perhaps the couple in the painting above left, A Difference of Opinion, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, will be stepping decorously wide of birdbaths forever after their kitschy tiff.   If I were one of the two unconscious women in Courbet’s Le Sommeil, top right, I might wake up mad, battling an urge to hurl that flower vase against a wall.  The scene here depicted has always appeared to me as one of those “it just happened” episodes, not a thing the principals made a habit of. The vase shards would do for a relic, as would the intact vase, if I ran off into the day with it.  Or just recalled it as a container of memories, without needing to own or destroy it. A musical instrument or a dried laurel wreath could be a manageable relic if things went South between the Greeks – one of whom is already pushing the other away — in the 6th century B.C.E. tomb painting, bottom right.  In either the virtual or the veridical Museum of Broken Relationships, literally anything in the surround of coupling can be the highly charged artifact of a failed romance.

But why be so literal-minded? A romance that fails need not be with a human. No, I’m not making an off-color observation, just stating a fact: some of our most torrid and keenly regretted romances are with ideas.

Cerebrally on Fire, to Crash More Cruelly Still

Taking care not to get too distracted by his Dominican garb, consider Fr. Dominique Lacordaire, painted in 1840 by Theodore Chasseriau.  The painting hangs in the Louvre, where it leaps out at you even among depictions of rabid 19th century fanaticism of many kinds. It is perhaps the most ardent face ever painted, as befits the personal history of Fr. Lacordaire, which I won’t go into here. When I first came upon it, I was not actually a grown-up, and it looked like every boy I’d ever seen in a University library who was so turned on by his reading that he could no longer stand it, and had to leave off to walk the aisles and stare lasciviously into carels full of girls.  This was a face that made me understand the willingness of Signor Settembrini and Fr. Naphta to duel to the death over an idea, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, in The Magic Mountain. It is still the face I see when I think of momentous first encounters with philosophy – the kind that truly carry you away, so that no one can bear you for upwards of a week.

Ideas of this sort have in common with romantic love the potential to let anyone beguiled by them down, most cruelly down. How horrible it was, when Nietzsche turned out not to be enough.  Being let down by Fritz is a torment even Fritz would have ranked high – Fritz, who was himself let down by Wagner. There is a twin quality of both religious and sexual dismay to it. And don’t try to tell me different, even if Nietzsche was not the one who did it to you. Because, if you’re reading this, you know what I mean — although you might choose to put it some other way.

It struck me that this kind of disappointment could be entirely characteristic of many 3QD readers. Not just those we know who are professors or grad students in math or philosophy, but readers and writers who are capable of being inspired to the limits of their being, and thrilled utterly, by the purely intellectual. Whoever has undergone this knows there are many possible aftermaths to it, some of them with artifacts worthy of inclusion in the Museum of Broken Relationships.

In Sorrow an Iron Door

As Tosca sings, I have lived for art, I have lived for love… What about those who have lived not just for but largely through art?  Whether as creators, or as non-artists compellingly subject to the experience of art who have, like artists, put art at the center of their lives?  I once knew the owner of a riding stable in Mid-coastal California who followed Dr. Boehm around the world, to wherever he was conducting Beethoven – Fidelio especially. Without attempting to meet him or to draw attention to herself in any way, she was in his audience as often as she could manage to be, and that was very often.  She had found the ideal interpreter, she felt, of the music that most ravished her – nothing could be allowed to come between her and the experience of it. Whether it ever let her down and broke her heart I never knew.  If it did, Rilke had words for the phenomenon, for the devastating failure of art at just the time one most needs to be borne up by it.  Words that sound even better in German: Das Kunst ist im Gluck eine Zier, im Ungluck ein eiserne Tur. (In happiness art is a jewel, in sorrow an iron door.)

When this happens, if you are an artist, you may have barely survived a horrendous rupture with your own source of inspiration. When, on the other hand, things are going well between you and your muse, it is as if all forces had joined for an inevitable work of art to occur, and you had channeled those forces so that the work bears your imprint yet came from someplace far beyond yourself. Poussin paints it in The Inspiration of the Poet, below. Eyes gazing upward, the poet is thronged with divine aid he does not see, an unearthly golden light shining from low on the left.  Apollo and the muse, their intent faces in shadow, look steadily not at the poet but at his notebook, to which the god also points.  In the moment of creation – not later, when the work may have found an audience, but in the moment of creation itself, when it really matters – putti are present with laurel crowns for the poet.  If, as an artist, you have had so much as one hour when you simply showed up for work and, lo… nobody could beat you, then you recognize what’s going on here.

But it’s not always like that, is it? Since I would very much like not to contribute to all the heartfelt prose there is about the failure of artistic inspiration, I won’t.  A related matter, however, is the plain parallel between the presence of the muse and the enchantment of sexual love, between the departure of the muse and the cold eye cast upon sexual love. And this is where the Museum of Broken Relationships might be justified in soliciting a few artifacts from poets, painters, architects and musicians, for the frequent overlap of muse and romantic partner suggests worlds within worlds of fairly glittering dismay.

Giorgio de Chirico has left us his own version of The Poet and His Muse, c. 1925.  And in it, so much is amiss. The poet slouches head down in an armchair, his materials nowhere in sight, an icon of giving up.  The muse at first glance appears to comfort rather than inspire, but her torso is filled with knobby, pointy objects, including a right triangle – there will be no crying at her breast. And her right arm, the one that would direct the poet’s efforts, is altogether missing. The featureless faces of both poet and muse encrypt forever the secrets of their disastrous union. They are but two messengers, come together to share their awful news – and there cannot be an artist who fails to recognize the impasse.

The Ukrainian academic painter Anna Bilinksa-Bohdanowicz must have understood the problem intimately, as she reveals in her Self-Portrait with Apron and Brushes, painted in 1887. Her tools at hand, leaning forward into the mirror, she seems to be showing us that inspiration isn’t strictly necessary, only uncompromising will and the readiness to work. Like many very well known Western European women artists of the same era who left self-portraits, Bilinksa-Bohdanowicz has painted herself tiny-waisted, in stays, entirely girded for the business of the day. She appears exhausted, though, anticipating only the kind of work that need not bring extraordinary rewards. Within several years of completing this self-portrait, she was dead at 36.

All Threads Lead to Rilke

The artists, writers, thinkers and lovers on the cusp of Modernism speak urgently to us now, all in their graves for three quarters of a century.  Like ourselves, they tended to think love and sex should coincide, although many of them lost decades trying to effect that coincidence. Our subject being the Valentine’s Day one month from now, and how we might — as a community — mark it, I believe it is more delicate to write of heroic longing, and the exigencies it brings, than of the other thing.  That special pre-Modern longing has no finer exemplar than Lou Andreas-Salome, a virgin – and enraged about it, too – until she was more than 30.  Today, reading Lou is rather difficult; for a horribly intelligent Russian girl who kept all the best company in Europe, she furnishes us with too little that is readable. One achingly lonely day in her late 20’s, however, she surpassed herself – just not in writing.  So great that day was her longing for Rilke, with whom she was in love, and corresponded, that she actually ate his letters.

Reading Rilke’s letters makes one quite see why.  Knowing, certainly, how astonishing they were, he was often traveling, making camp at a correspondence-necessitating remove from the people who most interested him. The great poet, the first to write of going barefoot, the first to look at the exposed interior walls of a bombed building as if they had a story to tell, was married for exactly one year to a German sculptor, and died at 51, from an infection contracted when, already ill with leukemia, he pricked his finger on the thorn of a rose.

The Love of Animals – Not Afterthought but Aftermath

Animal lovers might send in pet snapshots to the Museum of Broken Relationships, not because animals can make you deeply, deeply unhappy by doing anything but getting sick or lost, or by dying, but because some animal lovers have abandoned romantic hopes of other humans, so that the sheer relief and sweetness of having an animal companion instead of a boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse is, itself, an artifact of at least one failed human/human relationship, and the pet snapshot is the document of the artifact. On Valentine’s Day, I may come clean about this or I may not – but her name is Lucy, and she is a 12-lb. poodle.

My friend, neighbor and fellow animal lover Prof. David Mitten, who teaches classical archeology at Harvard, converted to Islam in Turkey in the 1960’s.  He tells me about a tradition I’ve not heard of elsewhere – that Muslims he knew in Turkey believed the love of animals prepared young children for the love of God. That is, through animals, a child learns of love entailing both duties to perform and perfect trust, which is how God means to be loved.

Who can quarrel with that wordless love which is yet a passionate and soulful attachment, which mingles tender care and emotional abandon?  The real nature of a beloved animal, including its sense of itself, is – like God – unknowable, so we project, imagine and endow it with power.  We are allowed to love our animals beyond reason because it’s “trivial, but not ungratifying,” as Nancy Mitford shrewdly remarked.

Frida Kahlo, in Me and My Parrots, 1941, paints herself amid birds that defend and counsel her, perching on her shoulders like Minerva’s owl, crowding her lap like toddlers.  Can they break her heart?   Probably not, but we know that Diego Rivera did – many, many times. La vida es un gran relajo, she used to say – life is a carnival.

Take the 3QD Valentine’s Day Challenge

Some readers, whose e-mail addresses I have been able to obtain, have already heard from me about the 3QD Valentine’s Day Challenge.  Put simply, it is thus: if you were asked to donate an artifact to the Museum of Broken Relationships, what would that artifact be? 

In today’s post, I wanted to amplify on the rather narrow meaning of romantic love hewed to by the founders of the MBR and its donors.  A poem, a puppy, a film, a painting, a building, a song, and perhaps above all an idea have the potential to incite us to soul-pounding love, to carry us literally away, and examining what is left after feelings of that kind have fallen away will, I believe, reveal the community of writers and readers here in all its creativity and diversity.  Some readers have written back that their emotional life is not a train wreck, and they cannot therefore imagine what to contribute; I hope today’s post may point them towards another reading of the challenge.

On Monday, February 11, when I post the material I shall have gathered, we shall see what there is to see. I’ve already got hold of some great stuff, but 3QD has many more readers than commenters, and I want to cast my net wide.

Please write to me – elatiaharris AT gmail DOT com. If you send visuals, lower their resolution and otherwise scale them to facilitate uploading, no wider than 600 pixels. If you prefer to anonymize yourself via a yahoo account, I promise I won’t analyze your prose style for identity clues, although my mother showed me how to do that, many years ago.  I hope to receive your contribution by February 8, the better to orchestrate it into a real conversation with all the others instead of merely listing contributions in the order they arrive.

Happy bittersweet musing, and — thanks for sending in those thoughts!

Note: Herein I discuss the film in such a way as to ruin it for those who haven’t seen it.

There Will Be Blood is a movie that begins by making good on some of the remarkable formal promise that Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrated in certain key sequences in his last movie, Punch Drunk Love.  (He’s developed quite a way with titles, too.)  In the earlier movie, Anderson was discovering an ability to produce riveting sequences without dialogue or camera movement, simply by sound, composition and cutting.  It was a refreshing improvement on the allusion-heavy style he deployed in his first films, which quoted Altman and Scorcese to no end.  (An example of this would be the fully Scorcese-esque tracking shots in Boogie Nights.)

There Will Be Blood suggests even further independence of technique, that PTA is emerging as a formally unique artist (sometime, I have to investigate my overreliance on the concept of formality in movies).  It begins with a truly striking landscape shot, over which we hear an orchestral swooping, out of a horror movie.  This unmotivated shot leaves much to infer, leaves the viewer in what I’d term a rich state of ignorance.  What follows is also powerfully restrained, as we see Daniel Day-Lewis’ character, Daniel Plainview, discovering oil while mining for silver in circumstances of extreme privation and physical risk.  He lights a fuse, dynamites a wall, blows his tools up while trying to winch them out of the mine, climbs back down, and at a beautifully unexpected moment the rung of a ladder slips away from the wall and down he plunges.  Back to the ominous landscape.  Cue orchestra.  Shiver.

Such moments are staged so freshly that you have the sense, in a way similar to Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (though perhaps not as fully achieved), of a film finding a magical way to make the experience of other times, other forms of consciousness, palpable.  It’s something the best period films do, and even if it’s always all a fake, there is something about the way movies can record being-in-the-world that makes them a special vehicle for this.  The first two-thirds of There Will Be Blood are peppered with revelatory material, non-judgmental observations of Plainview’s Nietzschean will to dominate.  Plainview rejecting a town whose members are too excitable; Plainview bargaining with a sheep-like farmer; Plainview saving his son from a spectacular oil fire that manages to suggest both Kuwait and the Old Testament.  Yet the movie never makes its moral judgment too plain–it never fully betrays its origins in the Upton Sinclair muckraker, Oil!.

Until the last third of film, that is, when Plainview’s paranoid, psychotic nature becomes drastically clear.  He humiliates a preacher, kills a man who had pretended to be his half brother, and after becoming a Howard Hughe-grade recluse, piles up furniture in his living room and shoots at it, viciously abuses his own son, and in the movie’s final scene, he manipulates, bullies, kills the younger preacher, with whom he has contended for the entire movie.  Not only kills, but kills by beating him to death in Plainview’s own private bowling ally, with a bowling pin.  Suddenly, Day-Lewis has become Joe Pesci–and P.T. Anderson again the Scorcese disciple.  It’s acting out as acting.  (The cut from the establishing shot of Plainview’s neo-Gothic mansion to this bowling alley says so much more than the craziness that follows.)  Plainview’s descent into homicidal behavior, though, seems much less menacing than the more ambiguous behavior that came before, when it appeared his love was as dangerous as his hatred.

How does one take this overstated ending?  If you’re me, terribly.  Anderson gives away much of what he has achieved with it.  He re-roots the movie, so unique before, in the American genre tradition of the psychotic picaresque, aligning Day-Lewis with the great Method scenery chewer of modern American film, Al Pacino.  Anderson’s love of movies and desire to point his movie at something, like a sharp stick impaling religion and capitalism together, seem to overtake his purer filmic qualities.  The movie loses its internal cohesion.  It’s probably still a great film, but less great.

Or maybe not.  The day after I saw There Will Be Blood, I spoke about it with a great friend of 3qd occasionalist Descha Daemgen, let’s call him Tittymouse, who loved the ending.  In revealing Plainview’s character to be basically evil, in making itself into an allegory about the unholy alliance of oil and God, said Tittymouse, the film was making visible its desire to critique, and blasting out of a specious naturalism into a more obvious pastiche of genres. This seemed a more honest filmmaking style to Tittymouse, in that it brought our attention to the artificiality, the constructedness, of the movie, rather than “fooling” us by maintaining its tone.  I see Tittymouse’s point, though I feel there is something  important in our disagreement.

For Tittymouse, and those like him, there is no knowledge that can be higher than the knowledge that accepts and signals its own insufficiency.  So postmodern effects like pastiche and artificiality, the showing of seams, are to be admired.  For me, and those like me, I think, the immanence of a piece is more interesting than its signaling of its theoretical sophistication.  In Tittymouse’s worldview, the work is important not for itself but for its expression of certain favored themes in post-Heideggerian Continental philosophy, basically about the impossibility of knowledge of the object.  Because of this, elements like the ending of the movie, that rupture the self-consistency of the film, are admirable.  The auteur of the film is irrelevant, in this post-death-of-the-author mode of understanding.  But to me, a movie shouldn’t be a representative of a school of thought.  It should be a movie.

(I’m being a bit unfair to Tittymouse, ventriloquizing him this way, making him say what I want him to say and then arguing with it.  But he’s partially a literary character, so it’s okay.)

There’s something more interesting to me about seeing a work as immanent, independent of philosophical thought.  You can see it from a productive zone of ignorance, if that’s not too vague.  What I mean by that is that ignorance is what allows you to develop a personal, fully (emotionally) engaged response to a work, while obsessive knowledge, or an obsessive relationship to relating things to other things, makes for a good critical stance but does a kind of violence. 

Maybe another way to get at this is with an anecdote.  I once went to Dia: Beacon, to look at look at those most consecrated of artists, with a friend, Jimmy, who was then the director of a major gallery.  I had expected him to pontificate interestingly on the brilliance of all those titans of contemporary art, the Smithsons and Serras and Lewitts.  Instead, he said, “This stuff is alright, but it’s not that interesting to me, it’s not what’s happening now.”  He was pretty much nonplussed by the stuff–as the director of a downtown gallery specializing in much more contemporary art, he was electrified by his own peers and not the generation before.  Jimmy’s response surprised, intrigued, and has stayed with me.  Rather than a curatorial, reverential relation to artworks, he had more selfish, disrespectful and, in a way, ignorant relation to them ( I say this in a good way, actually).  That was hugely enabling.  He wasn’t worried about the place of a particular in the history of art, as embodiments of conceptual revolutions, or rather, he was, but only to the degree that he was.  The zone of ignorance is productive.

And that, in a way, marks the difference between two worldviews, that are cleaved quite deeply.  You want a work to be immanent in the moment you encounter it, or you want it to somehow symbolize and perform historical transformations.  You either see it as a thing or a representation.  You’re either with us or you’re with the Tittymouses.  And I think your response to the last scene of There Will Be Blood will tell you which.

Justin E. H. Smith

For those travellers departing to Nova Zembla: Please confirm for us whether the snow there gives off its own light, or only reflects that of the moon with unusual intensity.

Hi-ho, to all those expert in the arcana of Finno-Ugric inflection: Won’t you kindly let us know how the vocative case is faring in Samoyed?

To the hardy citizens of Brasov (Kronstadt): We have heard reports of a bear that descended from the mountains right into the medieval city center, and savagely mauled an American woman hoping to take its picture.  Can you please tell us whether, firstly, the victim was targeted in view of her nationality, and, secondly, whether the Carpathian bear population has exploded in consequence of Nicolae Ceausescu’s bear-fertility policies, or some other reason?

We have received news of giant ‘flash-fossilized’ bones from the region of Fairbanks, Alaska.  From what terrible lizards did these bones come?  What great cataclysm made them hard like stone?  Might they be suitable for display in a scientific museum or a church-auxiliary building in Indiana, say, or Orange County?

It is said that Slavs are struck deathly ill when a window is left open at one side of a room, a door at the other.  The cause is said to be a ‘skvozdnyak’, or ‘draft’.  Is this skvozdnyak a spiritual creature of some sort, or a demon?  What makes these people so feeble?  Why can they not appreciate a nice healthy breeze like the rest of us?

For those travellers to Sentinel Island in the fabled Nicobar Chain: Do not try to make nice using cocoa-nuts.  The natives will have your head, and baste it in the ‘milk’.

We have been informed that the Anatolians consider Mustafa Kemal Atatürk a national hero for having ‘heroically’ lopped the dot off of the letter ‘i’ in bending our Latin alphabet to fit his backward tongue.  We would like to know whether the Turks have any idea what the dot was doing there to begin with, and whether they intend any further violent deformation of our vowels, consonants, or punctuation marks.  If this much can be said without risking decapitation oneself, it might be pointed out that they too have not a few extra little marks above and below their letters, that two can play at this game, &c.

For those travelling to Muscovy: Is it true what we have heard, that the Great Ruler is also a Judo master, ready to take on any head-of-state who would challenge him?  Is it true that the sight of him shirtless sends fear into the hearts of neighboring dictators, and that periodic pec flexings on state-controlled television have been enough to re-consolidate this once mighty empire?

It is said that among the Papuans old women are not permitted to participate in the cooking of food for young warriors, as their dessicated, death-heavy bodies transmit impotence and hunting failure through the aliments they have prepared.  Post-menopausal women are required to maintain a distance of at least three arms’ lengths between prepared food and their vaginas.  Won’t some brave explorer ask these savages if they have not heard of “granny’s home cookin’”?  If the natives are keen, we would consider sending a few of our favorite dishes.

For those Cincinnati-bound: How comes it that a great Roman statesman lends his name to what has been called the ‘Sodom of the Ohio River’?  And why, of all possible meal combos, do the Cincinnatians put chili atop their spaghetti?

—

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

A couple of days ago I had posted a video of the famous Pakistani singer Habib Wali Mohammed singing a poem written by the last, and ill-fated, Mughal emperor of India, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Earlier today my wife was listening to it and asked me what the words mean. I told her I would translate the poem for her, but when I sat down to do it, the very first line was impossible, as the Urdu phrase “jee lagna” or “dil lagna” not only doesn’t have an idiomatic equivalent in English, it is difficult even to explain what it means. It is something like becoming comfortable and happy in a place, but that doesn’t quite capture it.

[The picture above shows Bahadur Shah Zafar in exile in Rangoon, where he died. According to Wikipedia, it is the only know photograph of a Mughal emperor.]

Anyhow, I went ahead and did a translation which I present below. I welcome suggestions for improvement from those who understand Urdu (particularly from my sister Azra who is about to publish a book of translations of Urdu poetry into English).

My heart does not settle in this landscape of ruin
Who can feel settled in this evanescent world?

Tell these longings to go live someplace else
This scarred heart no longer has space.

Asking for long life, I was given only days
Half I spent wanting, the other half waiting.

The nightingale complains against groundsman nor trapper
Being caged in springtime was a matter of fate.

How hapless is Zafar, that even for burial,
He could not get a sliver of land near his lover.

And here is the original poem in my very informal transliteration into the Roman alphabet:

Lagta naheen hai jee mera ujray diar mein
Kiss kee banee hai aalam-e-napaedar mein

Keh do in hasraton say kaheen aur ja basein
Itnee jagha kahaan hai dil-e-daghdar main

Umr-e-daraaz maang kay laey thay chaar din
Do arzoo mein kut gaey do intizaar mein

Bulbul ko baghban say na sayyaad say gila
Qismat mein qaid thee likhee fasl-e-bahaar mein

Kitna hai badnaseeb Zafar dafn kay leeay
Do gaz zameen bhi mil na sakee koo-e-yaar mein

William Dalrymple recently wrote a book called The Last Mughal about Bahadur Shah Zafar, and my friend and 3QD colleague Ram Manikkalingam wrote about that book in his essay “The Emerald City and the Red Fort.”

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!

Like the proverbial emperor and his nonexistent clothes, the ‘Process’ has no ‘Peace’

A serious pandemic of delusion is gripping the world.  Ground Zero for the spread of this scourge was in Annapolis, Maryland in late November.  Within hours, millions of otherwise intelligent people started exhibiting the symptoms of this horrible affliction: uncontrollable optimism, abrupt failure of reasoning, oblivious disregard of reality, and a deeply religious faith in a fictional ‘Peace Process’ that will be the New Messiah that will deliver the world from all evil.

It would be fun to watch this mass hysteria unfold as it infects more and more people, but unfortunately, there are real human costs to the continuation of this delusion.   It is time for sane people everywhere to rise to confront this delusion and break the news to the millions of devout Peace-Processians springing up around the world: like the proverbial Emperor and his nonexistent clothes, this ‘Process’ has no ‘Peace’.   This fictional god you have been worshipping exists only in your brains; just because you insist on seeing it in spite of all evidence does not in any way change the cold hard reality that it is simply not there.

There is utterly no evidence to suggest that any prospects for ‘Peace’ exist from this charade of a ‘Process’.   Israel is finishing the construction of its apartheid wall, the world’s only religiously-segregated road network, and thousands of watch-towers from which it observes everything going on in the life of all Palestinians. Complete towns are locked up behind gates that open arbitrarily according to the whims of callous soldiers. Israeli illegal colonies are growing more than ever—mere days after the conclusion of the Annapolis conference, Israel announced it would expand a crucial colony outside Jerusalem.   More than 400,000 illegal Israeli settlers still litter the West Bank, having benefited from 40 years of expansionist colonialism and generous subsidies from every single Israeli government elected by the Israeli populace. The Gaza Strip remains legally an occupied land, though effectively it is the world’s biggest prison.   Normal service will by all means continue.

It is quite clear to anyone who would care listen to Israeli leaders themselves that Israel has absolutely no intention of giving away anything meaningful in the West Bank—certainly nothing on which anyone could establish a viable state.   It is also painfully clear to anyone who cares to reason that the American government has no intention whatsoever of pressuring the Israelis into any form of concession.   Seeing as these issues are the main issues standing between us and a peaceful solution, one can be sure that there will be no way for a peaceful solution to be achieved.

So why do so many people continue to believe in this mythical ‘Peace Process’?  Like other fictitious beliefs, there are the few who benefit, and then there are the masses who are deluded.   There are also, of course, the many that are harmed.

The biggest beneficiary from this delusion is the Israeli government.  That is why its leaders have gone around the world trumpeting the importance of achieving peace. Olmert claimed that failure to achieve peace would doom Israel; Haim Ramon, his deputy, even beseeched American Jewish groups to work for a peaceful solution for the sake of Israel.   There is a desperate attempt to make sure that Israel appears desperate for peace.  But of course, actions speak louder than words. If Israel really meant any of this, they wouldn’t have approved an illegal colony on stolen Palestinian land in East Jerusalem hours after Annapolis.   It is this hypocrisy that has come to accurately define the past few years, and will be the hallmark of the future: Israeli actions that solidify and perpetuate the occupation, along with Israeli statements desperate for peace.   All that Israel has to do is to play pretend and everything will be fine.  It just needs to pay some lip-service to the possibility of potentially starting some sort of a ‘Process’ that might, with a few miracles, result in something or the other, someday, somewhere, and the entire world will applaud in awe.   Any Peace-processian fundamentalist who still has faith needs to ask themselves the honest question of how they can maintain this delusion in the face of this hypocrisy and this disparity between actions and rhetoric.

As for those who are harmed, they are the millions of Palestinians living under apartheid, repression and murder in Gaza and the West Bank, with their hopes of ever seeing normalcy in their lives evaporating; and the millions of refugees whose legitimate right to return to their homes the world is happy to forget.

The worst thing about this sorry state of affairs is its indomitable sustainability.  Israel will continue expanding settlements, oppressing Palestinians, and murdering an unborn nation with complete impunity.   The Palestinians, left to their fate by the world, will continue to suffer completely unable to do anything to alter Israel’s position.  And the world will cheer on, and assure the Palestinians that all they need is just a little more ‘Process’.   So long as the ‘Process’ goes on; no one pressures Israel to do anything, and Israel won’t do anything. So long as Israel does nothing; the tragedy of the Palestinians continues. So long as the tragedy of the Palestinians continues, the mirage of ‘peace’ will become more unattainable.

What the Peace-Processians don’t realize is that not only is the status quo here to stay, their cult-like enthusiasm for it is the main reason why it is here to stay.   If the hordes of ‘Peace Processians’ want ‘Peace’ and not ‘Process’, they should be condemning Israel’s colonies and occupation, not applauding its empty statements.   So long as the masses continue to convince themselves the emperor is dressed in splendid clothes, he will continue to parade his hideous crotch all over the world, from Jerusalem to Annapolis and beyond.

The title of this post is a translation of a Latin inscription on Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb. This is the fourth year that we at 3QD celebrate the auspicious 25th day of December as Newton’s Day, an idea that we coincidentally came to independently on the same day as Richard Dawkins proposed it. (Newton was born 365 years ago today.) Each year I have given some small snippet about Newton’s life (previous years’ posts here, here, and here in chronological order) and this year I’ll present a simple experiment that changed our understanding of the nature of light. Even though Newton had done the experiment in 1666, he did not publish it as part of his first major bit of scientific writing until 1672. In fact, just as in a more fair world (with a more fair academy in Oslo!) Einstein should have won four Nobels for the work he published as a 26 year-old in 1905 (the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the derivation of the law of the equivalence of mass and energy, E=mc2, from the equations of special relativity), Newton’s achievements of the summer of 1666 (which caused Murray Gell-Mann to joke about that annus mirabilis that Sir Isaac could have written quite a “What I did on my summer vacation” essay!) were no less astounding: the law of gravitation, the laws of motion, the work on optics, and the invention of the calculus!

In addition, Newton refined Galileo’s notion of scientific method to the point where it is basically indistinguishable from a modern statement of it by a scientist today. He writes in the Opticks:

As in mathematics, so in natural philosophy, the investigation of difficult things by the method of analysis, ought ever to precede the method of composition. This analysis consists in making experiments and observations, and in drawing general conclusions from them by induction and admitting of no objections against the conclusions, but such as are taken from experiments, or other certain truths. For hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental philosophy. And although the arguing from experiments and observations by induction be no demonstration of general conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the nature of things admits of, and may be looked upon as so much the stronger, by how much the induction is more general. And if` no exception occur from phenomena, the conclusion may be pronounced generally. But if` at any time afterwards any exception shall occur from experiments, it may then begin to be pronounced with such exceptions as occur. By this way of analysis we may proceed from compounds to ingredients, and from motions to the forces producing them; and in general, from effects to their causes, and from particular causes to more general ones, till the argument ends in the most general. This is the method of analysis: And the synthesis consists in assuming the causes discovered, and established as principles, and by them explaining the phenomena proceeding from them, and proving the explanations.

Now just look at the elegant simplicity of this beautiful experiment that Newton performed with just two prisms and a convex lens. This is from a University of California, Riverside, physics webpage:

Newton’s first work as Lucasian Professor was on optics. Every scientist since Aristotle had believed light to be a simple entity, but Newton, through his experience when building telescopes, believed otherwise: it is often found that the observed images have colored rings around them (in fact, he devised the reflecting telescope to minimize this effect). His crucial experiment showing that white light is composite consisted in taking beam of white light and passing it through a prism; the result is a wide beam displaying a spectrum of colors. If this wide beam is made to pass through a second prism, the output is again a narrow beam of white light. If, however, only one color is allowed to pass (using a screen), the beam after the second prism has this one color again. Newton concluded that white light is really a mixture of many different types of colored rays, and that these colored rays are not composed of more basic entities.

So, once again, Happy Newton’s Day to all!