Today I would like to explain something scientists know well: how computers work, and then use some of the conceptual insights from that discussion to present an interesting recent model of something relatively unknown: how human brains might work. (This model is due to Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot–a type of computer, hence the title of this essay.) This may well be rather too-ambitious a task, but oh, well, let’s see how it goes…

Part I: How Computers Work

Far too few people understand how computers operate. Many professional computer programmers, even, would be hard-pressed to explain the workings of the actual hardware, and may well never have heard of an NPN junction, while the average computer user certainly rarely bothers to wonder what goes on inside the CPU (Central Processing Unit, like Intel’s Pentium chip, for example) of her machine when she highlights a paragraph in MS Word and clicks on the “justify” button on the tool bar, and the right margin of the text is instantly and seemingly magically alligned. This lack of curiosity about an amazing technological achievement is inexplicable to me, and it is a shame because computers are extremely beautiful in their complex multi-layered structure. How is it that a bunch of electrons moving around on a tiny silicon wafer deep inside your machine manages to right-justify your text, calculate your taxes, demonstrate a mathematical proof, model a weather-system, and a million other things?

What’s equally weird to me is that I haven’t ever seen a short, comprehensive, and comprehensible explanation of how computers work, so I’m going to give you one. This isn’t going to be easy for me or for you, because computers are not trivial things, but I am hoping to provide a fairly detailed description, not just a bunch of confusing analogies. In other words, this is going to take some strenuous mental effort, and I encourage you to click on the links that I will try to provide, for further details and discussion of some of the topics I bring up. (The beginning part may be tedious for some of you who already know something about computers, but please bear with me.) Last preliminary comment: I will try to make this as simple as possible, but for those of you who don’t know extremely basic things like what electrons are, I really don’t know what to tell you, except that you should. (The humanities equivalent of this scientific ignorance might be someone who doesn’t know what, say, a sonnet is.) Oh, go ahead, click on “electrons.” I’ll wait.

——————–

Computers are organized hierarchically with layers of conceptual complexity built one on top of the other. This is similar to how our brains work. What I mean is the following: suppose my wife Margit asks me to go buy some bread. It is a simple enough instruction, and she can be fairly certain that a few minutes later I will return with the bread. Here’s what happens in my brain when I hear her request: I break it down into a series of smaller steps something like

Get bread: START

1. Get money and apartment keys.
2. Go to supermarket.
3. Find bread.
4. Pay for bread.
5. Return with bread.
6. END.

Each of these steps is then broken down into smaller steps. For example, “Go to supermarket” may be broken down as follows:

Go to supermaket: START

1. Exit apartment.
2. Walk downstairs.
3. Turn left outside the building and walk until Broadway is reached.
4. Make right on Broadway and walk one and a half blocks to supermarket.
5. Make right into supermarket entrance.
6. END.

Similarly, “Exit apartment” is broken down into:

Exit apartment: START

1. Get up off couch.
2. Walk forward three steps.
3. Turn right and go down hallway until the front door.
4. If door chain is on, undo it.
5. Undo deadbolt lock on door.
6. Open door.
7. Step outside.
8. END.

Well, you get the idea. Of course, “Get up off couch” translates into things like “Bend forward” and “Push down with legs to straighten body,” etc. “Bend forward” itself translates into a whole sequence of coordinated muscular contractions. Each muscle contraction is actually a series of biochemical events that take place in the nerve and muscle fibres, and you can continue breaking each step down in this manner to the molecular or atomic level. Notice that most of the action occurs below the threshhold of consciousness, with only the top couple of levels normally available to our conscious minds. Also, I have simplified the example in significant ways, most importantly by neglecting the role of memory retrieval and storage. (There are many retrievals involved here, such as remembering where the store is, where my apartment door is, and even how to walk!) Each subset of instructions in this example is what has come to be known as a subroutine. The beauty of this scheme is that once you have worked out the sequence of smaller steps needed to accomplish a repetitive task which is one level higher in the hierarchy, you can just store that sequence in memory, and you don’t ever need to work it out again. In other words, you can combine subroutines from a given layer into a subroutine which accomplishes some more general task in a higher layer. For example, one could combine the “Get bread” subroutine with the “Get newspaper” and “Get eggs” and “Get coffee” and “Drop off dry-cleaning” subroutines into a “Sunday morning chores” subroutine, which I might then do with little thought every Sunday morning.

This is how computers are able to do such extraordinary things. But I would like to explain some of the detail to you, and the best way to explain it is, I think, again by example. When a user highlights a paragraph of text and clicks on the justify button, here is some of what happens: a subroutine perhaps called “Justify right-hand margin” kicks in. (What that means is that control of the CPU is turned over to this subroutine.) This is what a primitive form of the subroutine might look like (in actual fact, many other things are taken into account) in what programmers call pseudo-code (an informal preliminary way of writing instructions–or laying out an algorithm–which are later carefully translated by the programmer into a higher-level computer language such as BASIC, FORTRAN, Pascal, or C):

Justify right-hand margin: START

1. First determine the printed width of the text by subtracting the left margin position from the right.
2. Build a line of text by getting the input (paragraph) text a word at a time. Test to see that the length of the text is less than the printed width.
3. Output the first word with no following space.
4. Determine the length of the remaining text, the available space, and the number of word spaces (the same as the remaining words). Divide to get the target word space. (Be sure to take into account the spaces in the string.)
5. Output the word space, and the next word.
6. Return to STEP 4 if there is more to print.
7. Return to STEP 2 for the next line, until no more lines are left.
8. END.

Of course, FORTRAN or Pascal, or C programmers don’t spend a lot of time actually writing the code (the actual “text” of higher level computer languages is called “code” and the part of programming which takes an algorithm such as the one given above and translates it into the particular syntax of a given language such as C, is called “coding”) for such things, because once they have been written by someone (anyone), they are put into libraries of subroutines and can subsequently be used by anyone needing to (in this case) justify text. Such libraries of useful subroutines are widely available to programmers.

Suppose this subroutine above were written in C. Now what happens to the C code? Who reads that? Well, the way it works is this: there is a program called a compiler, which takes the C code and each of it’s instructions, and breaks them down into a simpler language called assembly language. Assembly language is a limited set of instructions which can be understood by the hardware (the CPU) itself. It consists of instructions like ADD (a, b, c) which, on a given CPU might mean, “add the content of the memory location a to the content of memory location b and store the result in memory location c”. Different CPUs have different instruction sets (and therefore different assembly languages) but the same higher level language can be used on all of them. This is because a compiler for that type of CPU will translate the higher level language into the appropriate assembly language for that CPU. In this way, a program I have written in C to justify text can easily be ported over to a different computer (from a PC to a Mac, say) in the higher level language, without having to worry about how the lower levels accomplish their task. Are you with me? Reread this paragraph if you need to.

Actually, assembly language is itself translated by a program called an assembler into what is called machine language, which is simply a series of zeroes and ones that the hardware can “understand” and operate on. Now we get to the hardware itself. How does the hardware actually perform the instructions given to it? This time, let us start at the bottom of the hierarchy, the silicon itself, and build up from there. Stay with me now!

——————–

P-N Junctions

If certain types of impurities (boron, aluminum or gallium, for example) are added (called doping) to the semiconductor material, in this case silicon, it turns into what is known as P-type silicon. This type of silicon has deficiencies of valence electrons called “holes.” Another type of silicon which can be produced by doping it with different impurities (antimony, arsenic or phosphorous, for example) is known as N-type silicon, and this has an excess of free electrons, greatly increasing the intrinsic conductivity of the semiconductor material. The interesting thing about this is that one can place these two materials in contact with one another, and this “junction” behaves differently than either of the two types of silicon by itself. A P-N junction allows an electric current to flow in one direction, but not in the other. This device is known as a diode.

Transistors

A transistor is a device with three terminals (a triode–like the glass vacuum tubes of old): the base, the collector, and the emitter. In this device, the current flowing at the collector is controlled by the current between the base and the emitter. Transistors can be used as amplifiers, but more importantly in the case of computers, as switches. If you take two P-N junctions and combine them, creating a kind of sandwich, you get either an NPN junction or a PNP junction. These both then function as types of transistors, specifically bipolar junction transistors (BJT). In the case of the NPN junction type transistor, the N on one side acts as the emitter, the P is the base, and the other N is the collector. Refer to the diagram above and click here for more info about how exactly these work in terms of the underlying electronics.

Digital Logic Gates

Once we have transistors, we can do something very neat with them: we can combine them into what are known as logic gates. These are best explained by example. Imagine a device with two inputs and one output which behaves in the following way: if a voltage is applied to both inputs, the voltage is also present at the output, otherwise, the output remains at zero. (So if neither or only one of the inputs has a voltage present, the output is zero.) This is known as an AND gate, because its output is positive if and only if the first input AND the second input are “on.” (This “on” state of high voltage usually is used to represent the number 1, while no voltage, or low voltage is used to represent the number 0.) Similarly, the output of an OR gate is “1” if either the first input OR the second input OR both of the inputs are “1”. (Still with me? Good. All kinds of exciting stuff is coming up.) A NOT gate simply reverses a 1 to a 0 and vice versa. There are other logic gates, but we won’t bother with them because they can all be simulated by combinations of something called a NAND gate. This is just an AND gate followed by a NOT gate. In other words its output is 0 only if both inputs are 1, otherwise its output is always 1. (See the “truth table” at the right. A and B are the inputs and X is the output.)

The really cool thing here is that one can combine two of the transistors discussed in the previous section to form a NAND gate. (See the diagram at right to see how they are connected together.) And as I mentioned before, NAND gates can then be connected together in ways that can simulate any kind of logic gate.

Not only that, there are ways of connecting NAND gates together to implement any binary digital function for which we can supply a truth table, with as many inputs and outputs as needed. This is known as digital logic and we can use it to, for example, add two binary numbers, each consisting of some fixed number of zeroes and ones. As I am sure you know, we can represent numbers in any base (including our usual decimal numbers) as binary numbers, so this is a very powerful way of manipulating numbers. In fact we can do many amazing things with these types of gates, including evaluating any statements of propositional logic. This is really the conceptual heart of computing.

By the way, the standard digital logic symbol of a NAND gate is shown here on the right. (The two inputs are on the left, the output is on the right.)

Now, you should have at least a rough idea of how we can use bits of silicon to do things like add and subtract binary numbers by using voltages to represent zeroes and ones. But what do we do with the result? In other words, where do we store things? This brings us to the other major component of computing: memory.

Flip-Flops

A flip-flop is a device which can be used to store one bit (a zero or a one) of information. Can you guess how flip-flops are made? Yep, you got it: following our procedure here of building things from stuff we discussed in the previous section, of course, this time we combine NAND gates in ingenious ways to construct them.

There are various types of flip-flops. A flip-flop usually has one or two inputs, an output, and an input from a clock signal (this is why computers must have clocks–and it is the speed of these clocks which is measured when you are told that your laptop runs at, say, 1.9 GigaHertz, which means in this case that the clock signal flips and flops between 0 and 1, back and forth, 1.9 billion times per second). I will here describe a simple type of flip-flop called an SR (or Set/Reset) flip-flop. This is how wikipedia describes it:

The “set/reset” flip-flop sets (i.e., changes its output to logic 1, or retains it if it’s already 1) if both the S (“set”) input is 1 and the R (“reset”) input is 0 when the clock is strobed. The flip-flop resets (i.e., changes its output to logic 0, or retains it if it’s already 0) if both the R (“clear”) input is 1 and the S (“set”) input is 0 when the clock is strobed. If both S and R are 0 when the clock is strobed, the output does not change. If, however, both S and R are 1 when the clock is strobed, no particular behavior is guaranteed. This is often written in the form of a truth table. [See the table at right.]

So, for example, if I want to store a 1 as the output of the flip-flop, I would put 1 on the S input and 0 on the R input. When the clock strobes (flips up to 1) the flip-flop will set to the 1 state as the output. I know this sounds confusing, but just reread it until you are convinced it works. Similarly I can reset it to the zero state by putting 1 on the S input and 0 on the R input. So how are these things constructed out of NAND gates?

I hereby present to you, the SR flip-flop in all its immense digital logic beauty:

If you bought a computer recently it may well have come with one billion bytes of internal RAM memory. It takes eight flip-flops to hold one byte of information, and as you can see, it takes eight NAND gates to make this one basic flip-flop which will hold one bit in memory. That’s 128 transistors for a byte of data! Now you know why the original ENIAC computer, which functioned using vacuum tubes instead of transistors, filled a large hall. These days, we can put billions of transistors on a single small silicon chip. (There are ways to make this more efficient, my example is only for rough illustrative purposes.)

There are other flip flops (such as the JK flip-flop) which eliminate the uncertain state of the SR flip-flop when both inputs are 1. There are other improvements and efficiencies which I won’t get into here. (That would be like getting into the choice of materials for head-gaskets while trying to explain how an internal combustion engine works.)

——————–

So, starting with just simple bits of silicon, we have seen how we build layer upon conceptual layer (there are armies of engineers and scientists who specialize in each) until we have a processor which can perform arithmetic and logical functions, as well as a memory which can hold the results (or anything else). This is pretty much it! These are the elements which are used to design a machine language for a particular CPU (like the Pentium 5, say). And I have already described the software layers which sit on top of the hardware. I am sure it is obvious that there is much more (libraries-full) to every part of this (for example, I have said nothing about what an operating system does as part of the software layers), but broadly conceptually speaking, this is about it. If you have followed what I have laid out, you now know how electrons zipping about on little pieces of silicon right-justify your text, calculate your taxes, demonstrate a mathematical proof, model a weather-system, and the million other things computers can do.

I am running out of time and space in this column, so I will continue part II next time on April 17th. Look out for it then, and have a great week!

NOTE: Part II is here. My other Monday Musing columns can be found here.

Rock Brynner, 54, historian, writer, former road manager for The Band and for Bob Dylan and son of the late actor Yul Brynner, knows both sides of the story of the drug thalidomide. In 1998, after suffering for five years from a rare immune disorder, pyoderma gangrenosum, Rock Brynner took thalidomide and went into remission. With Dr. Trent Stephens, he wrote “Dark Remedy” a history of thalidomide. “I didn’t write the book because I had taken thalidomide,” Mr. Brynner said. He looks and sounds very much like his famous father. “I did it as a historian because this was a story that needed telling.”

The story of thalidomide is not only worth telling, it has gotten substantially more exciting even since 2001 when the interview with Rock Brynner (RB) was reported in the New York Times by Claudia Dreifus (CD). The unique anti-inflammatory properties of thalidomide have been harnessed for treating diseases as varied as multiple sclerosis, arthritis, leprosy, a variety of cancers, AIDS, and many other chronic and debilitating illnesses such as p. gangrenosum that Mr. Rock Brynner (RB) suffers from. The story began in 1950’s. Since pathogens were considered to be the underlying cause of most human diseases, scientists were racing to find new antibiotics. At this time, an ex-Nazi officer, Heinrich Mückter became in-charge of the research program for the company Chemie Grünenthal, and working with Wilhelm Kunz, obtained what looked like a promising compound. Unfortunately, this new drug which they named thalidomide had no effect as an antibiotic, anti-histamine or anti-tumor agent in rats and mice, and in fact they could not find a large enough dose to kill the animals. A logical conclusion would have been that the drug has no effect. The investigators however concluded that the drug has no side effects. The question of course was what the drug could be used for. Because the structure resembled that of barbiturates, thalidomide was tried as a sleeping pill and was indeed found to be effective, eventually being sold in 46 European countries as the safest sedative.

Reassured by its safety record in animals, and because of its anti-emetic effects, pregnant women began to take thalidomide freely as a cure for morning sickness. This is when its catastrophic effects began to surface as infants were born with flipper-like limbs; hands and feet attached to the body without arms or legs, later known as thalidomiders.

RB: As a historian, I look at thalidomide in its context. The 1950’s were a time of unquestioning infatuation with science. Science and technology had defeated the fascist threat. In the cold war, science was seen as protecting our lives. The thalidomide scandal exposed us for the first time to the idea that powerful medicines can destroy lives and deform babies. Before that, medical folklore held that nothing injurious could cross the placenta.

As many as 20% adults taking thalidomide began to experience tingling and burning in fingers and toes with signs of nerve damage. Tragically, 40,000 individuals suffered from peripheral neuritis, and 12,000 infants were deformed by thalidomide, 5000 surviving past childhood, before the drug was finally with-drawn. It was later shown that the reason animal studies did not manifest any side effects was because thalidomide is not absorbed in rats and mice. Thanks to the heroic stance taken by Dr. Frances Kelsey at the FDA, thalidomide was never approved for use in the US, a stance for which she eventually won the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1962.

CD: Why did you take thalidomide?

RB: I was fighting for my life, as almost everyone who comes to thalidomide is. Everything else paled beside that. In the film version of Dostoyevsky’s ”Brothers Karamazov,” Dmitri Karamazov wakes a pawnbroker, who says to him, ”It’s late.” To which Dmitri answers, ”For one who comes to a pawnbroker, it is always late.” Well, I was at the pawnbroker’s, and it was late. For five years, I had battled a mysterious, rare disease, pyoderma gangrenosum, where huge wounds on my legs kept growing larger and wouldn’t heal. I had taken, at different times, cortisone, methotrexate, cyclosporine; none worked for long. My immune system was tearing up my skin anywhere I had a wound. Thinking practically, I was planning to end my life because, if we couldn’t stop this, all my skin would be eaten away. Then my dermatologist mentioned anecdotal reports from Europe that thalidomide had been effective with pyoderma. I went to the medical library and read all I could. The rationale made sense: I had this autoimmune condition, in which one immune element, T.N.F.-alpha, was running amok in me for reasons unknown. Thalidomide represses that T.N.F.-alpha response. Fortunately, thalidomide did work for me.

In 1964, Dr. Jacob Sheskin, a Lithuanian Jew, was working with lepers in Jerusalem when he saw an extremely debilitated patient suffering from erythema nodosum leprosum (ENL) type of leprosy, who had been unable to sleep due to severe pain. Dr. Sheskin found an old bottle of thalidomide in his medicine cabinet, and gave two tablets to the patient who then slept better than he had in months. After another two tablets the following night, his lesions began to heal and it is to Dr. Sheskin’s credit that he made the association between the patient’s dramatic improvement and thalidomide. He had to contact Muckter to obtain thalidomide for a larger study. Eventually, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed a total remission of the disease in 99% of thousands of lepers treated in 52 countries. This is how and why, despite the sickening medical catastrophe associated with thalidomide, this drug never disappeared completely and was approved for the treatment of ENL in the USA by the FDA in 1998.

CD. A personal question. You are the son of Yul Brynner. As I was reading your book, I wondered if it was difficult to form an identity that was clearly your own.

RB. Well, I’ve had a separate identity for some time now. At one time or another I’ve written and starred in a one-man show on Broadway, earned an M.A. in philosophy and a Ph.D. in history, was bodyguard to Muhammad Ali, road manager for The Band and Bob Dylan and computer programmer for Bank of America. I’ve also written six books. My latest, about the subjective experience of time, is going out to a handful of publishers next month. These interests were all driven by my voracious curiosity more than a search for identity. Yes, it’s difficult for the children of iconic figures to establish independent identities. But with all the suffering in this world, I wouldn’t shed too many tears for those who had privileged youths. I had wonderful parents, especially through childhood. Later on, they both went a little crazy at times.

Thalidomide has now been tried in more than 130 human diseases, and at least 30 different mechanisms of action have been ascribed to the drug. Yet, the precise manner in which it exerts its anti-neoplastic effect remains unknown. In 1991, Dr. Gilla Kaplan of Rockefeller University in New York showed that TNF levels were very high in the blood and lesions of leprosy patients and that thalidomide reduced these levels by as much as 70%. In addition, Dr. Judah Folkman at Harvard Medical School showed that thalidomide can arrest the formation of new blood vessels by shutting off some necessary growth factors. The teratogenic effects on the fetus, which can occur following the ingestion of a single tablet of thalidomide at the wrong time (a 7-10 day window during the first trimester of pregnancy), turn out to be because thalidomide can stop the formation of new blood vessels or neo-angiogenesis. Finally, the drug also has a variety of effects on the immune system.

I have written previously about how cancer cells alter their microenvironment in such a way that it supports their growth at the expense of that of their normal counterparts. Such alterations may involve angiogenesis, production of TNF and abnormalities of immune regulatory cells, some of which are also the source of TNF. Thalidomide is a drug that is capable of affecting all three of these abnormalities in the malignant microenvironment, as well as having an effect on the cancer cells directly. True to form however, the introduction of thalidomide into cancer therapy did not happen as a result of logical planning, but rather dramatically as the result of one woman’s persistence. The wife of a 35 year old patient suffering from multiple myeloma, a hematologic malignancy with evidence of increased blood vessels in the bone marrow, was frantically searching for ways to save her husband. During her research, she came across Dr. Folkman who advised her to try thalidomide. She convinced her husband’s oncologists in Little Rock to do so. Although the patient himself did not benefit from the drug due to the advanced stage of his disease, several other patients treated subsequently did.

At the same time, our group had been investigating another hematologic malignancy, the pre-leukemic disorders called myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). We had demonstrated that the primary pathology underlying the low blood counts in this disease is an excessive death of bone marrow cells caused by high TNF levels. In addition, there is also evidence of marrow neo-angiogenesis in MDS. We hypothesized that thalidomide could be a useful agent in this disease, and in 1998, treated 83 MDS patients, and showed that a subset responded, the majority of responders going from being heavily transfusion dependent to being transfusion independent.

CD: Do you think there will ever be a time when thalidomide stops being such a charged word?

RB: No. Because of its threat, everyone is working hard to keep the threat of thalidomide well known, especially Randy Warren, a Canadian thalidomide victim. He was the one who insisted that a picture of a deformed baby be on every package, that patients be obliged to watch a tape of a victim speaking and that the name never be changed or disguised with a euphemism. First and foremost, thalidomide deforms babies. Second, remarkably, it can save lives and diminish suffering. But everyone is working to eliminate thalidomide. As long as it exists, there’s a threat.

Thankfully, a safer substitute has now been developed. This drug called Revlimid, which is less toxic and more potent than the parent drug thalidomide, is proving to be highly beneficial to patients with MDS and multiple myeloma. Most importantly, there are no untoward effects on the growing embryo. In a surprising twist, MDS patients who have a specific abnormality affecting chromosome 5 appear to be specially responsive to Revlimid, and the drug has recently received FDA approval for use in this type of MDS. Maybe thalidomide can finally be retired forever. As Randy Warren said, “When that day comes, all those involved in the suffering can gather together for thalidomide’s funeral.”

Recommended reading:

• Stephens T, Brynner R. Dark Remedy: The impact of thalidomide and its revival as a vital medicine. Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA. 2001.
• Raza A et al. Thalidomide produces transfusion independence in long-standing refractory anemias of patients with myelodyplastic syndromes. Blood 98(4):958-965, 2001.
• List AF et al: Hematologic and Cytogenetic (CTG) Response to Lenalidomide (CC-5013) in Patients with Transfusion-Dependent (TD) Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) and Chromosome 5q31.1 Deletion: Results of the Multicenter MDS-003 Study. ASCO May 7, 2005
• Raza A et al: Lenalidomide (CC-5013; RevlimidTM)-Induced Red Blood Cell (RBC) Transfusion-Independence (TI) Responses in Low-/Int-1-Risk Patients with Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS): Results of the Multicenter MDS 002 Study. 8th International Symposium on Myelodysplastic Syndromes May 12-15, 2005 Nagasaki, Japan.

All of my Rx columns can be seen here.

It’s been noticed by more than one person that Walter Benjamin had a melancholy streak. But Benjamin’s melancholy has often been misunderstood. as a form of nostalgia, a lament for things lost to the relentless march of history and time. It’s true, of course, that some melancholics are nostalgic. Nothing prevents the two moods from going together. But Walter Benjamin’s melancholy wasn’t that kind at all. He happened to think, surprisingly enough, that melancholy is at the service of truth.

That’s quite a claim. It sounds both grand and unapproachable. For Benjamin, though, it was almost a matter-of-fact proposition; it was so intuitive to him, it came as second nature. Benjamin thought that melancholy is at the service of truth because he thought that things, especially complicated things like periods of history and social arrangements, are hard to understand until they’ve already started to fall apart. The shorthand formula might be: truth in ruins. The type of person who sifts through ruins is the melancholic by definition. Such a person is interested in the way that meaning is revealed in decay. In a way, the Benjaminian melancholic is darker even than the nostalgist because the nostalgist wants to bring something back, whereas the melancholic is best served by the ongoing, pitiless work of death.

Benjamin was always fond of Dürer’s engraving, Melencolia. In Melencolia, a figure sits amidst discarded and unused tools and objects of daily life. It appears that the world in which those tools made sense, the world in which they had a purpose, use, or meaning, has somehow faded away. The objects lay there without a context and the melancholic figure who gazes at them views them with an air of contemplation. The collapse of the world has become an opportunity for reflection. Truth in ruins.

It’s impossible not to think that Walter Benjamin was so fascinated by melancholy, ruins, and truth because he, himself, had come of age in a period where a world was passing away. For Central Europeans (and to a less extreme extent, the West in general), the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th was the collapse of an entire world. In one of the more moving and epic sentences ever written about that collapse as it culminated in the Great War, Benjamin once penned the following: “A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile, human body.”

***

All of this is by way of a preface to the fact that I just finished reading Joseph Roth’s amazingly brilliant, beautiful, sad novel, The Radetzky March. The Radetzky March follows the fortunes of three generations of the Trotta family as the 19th century winds down into the seemingly inevitable, though nevertheless shocking, assassination at Sarajevo. As the critic James Wood notes in his typically powerful essay “Joseph Roth’s Empire of Signs,”

In at least half of Roth’s thirteen novels comes the inevitable, saber-like sentence, or a version of it, cutting the narrative in two: ‘One Sunday, a hot summer’s day, the Crown Prince was shot in Sarajevo’.

Roth is always writing through that moment, through the shot that cracked out on that hot summer’s day. As Wood points out, Roth became the self-appointed elegist of the empire that had come to an end at Sarajevo. The men of the Trotta family are bound to that empire in a descending line of meaninglessness and helplessness that itself tracks the dissolution and collapse of the world within which they lived. The very song, “The Radetsky March”, becomes a mournful ruin in sound. At the beginning of the novel it can still stand as a symbol for the ordering of life that holds the world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire together. By the end of the novel, it is a relic from a bygone age, and is the last thing that the youngest member of the Trotta family hears as he is gunned down ignominiously in the brutal and senseless fighting that opens the First World War.

What a profoundly and beautifully melancholic work. All the more so because it is melancholy in the service of Benjamin’s truth and not in the service of nostalgia. The Radetzky March is about how meaning operates, about how human beings come to see themselves as functioning within a world that coheres precisely as a world. In the end, Roth is essentially indifferent as to whether that world was a good or a bad one. Like all worlds, it can only cohere for so long. Instead, he focuses on laying bare its nature and its functioning in the moments where it began to break apart. Here, he is like the melancholic figure in Dürer’s engraving. The ‘tools’ of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lay around him as they’ve been discarded by history while Roth sifts through the ruins, contemplating what they were and how they worked.

That is something that Wood gets a little bit wrong, I think, in his otherwise brilliant essay. Wood takes the elegiac moments in Roth’s writing, which invariably come from the mouths of those serving the Empire, as words of longing and approval that are endorsed by Roth. But there is something more subtle and complicated going on. Wood touches on it briefly in his comment about Andreas, an organ grinder in Roth’s Rebellion. Wood writes, “It is the empire that gives him authority to exist, that tells him what to do and promises to look after him. In Roth’s novels, marching orders are more than merely figurative. They are everything.”

To put it in Kantian terms for a moment, that is exactly what Roth is doing, showing the Empire as ‘the everything’, the transcendental horizon within which human beings understand themselves and their relations to everyone else. Like Walter Benjamin, Roth has adopted this broad transcendental framework while jettisoning the strict a priori method that made Kant’s transcendental method a-historical and purportedly universal. Roth has come to see, indeed witnessed with his own eyes, that transcendental horizons of meaning are themselves historical; they fade away, they fall into ruins, and are reconstituted as something new.

It’s kind of interesting in this quasi-Kantian vein to reflect that Roth takes a marching song as his symbol for the coherence of the transcendental horizon of meaning. Kant himself started with space and time, noting rather reasonably that without space and time, you are without a framework for apprehending anything at all. Things have to be ‘in’ something, transcendentally speaking, and space and time are the broadest, most abstract categories of ‘inness’ that one is likely to find. Since Kant was after the broadest and most universally applicable set of rules that govern knowledge of the external world, it seemed a lovely place to start.

But Kant wasn’t much of a melancholic. The Sage of Königsberg thought that he could provide his set of categories for the understanding and that would be that. The content gets filled in later. History is always a posteriori, a matter of particulars. Roth’s transcendental ground, by contrast, is shot through with content and history. It’s a march, a specific song from a specific time and place. But it is no less transcendental for being so. For what is a march but a means for ordering space and time? The Radetzky March is thus more than a symbol for the ordering of the Austro-Hungarian world: it is part and parcel of that very ordering. It’s a transcendental object made palpable and tangible. And it’s one that gives up its transcendental secrets precisely as it fades into ruin. As Benjamin once wrote, “In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are.” That’s the method of the melancholic, the historical transcendentalist. It’s fitting that it was put into practice at its highest level by a novelist chronicling the end of his world.

I recently attended a conference on Central American peace processes in Toledo, organised and sponsored by the Project on Justice in Times of Transition and hosted in Spain by the Centro International Toledo para La Paz. The conference brought together many of the key participants in the peace processes in Central America during the mid-80s to the early-90s. They included ex Presidents Vinicio Cerezo of Guatemala and Jose-Maria Figueres of Costa Rica, former military commander of the guerilla Frente Marti para Liberacion Nacional, Joaquim Villalobos, and former head of the Sandinista Army, General Joaquin Cuadra, former Head of the Guatemalan Army General Julio Balconi, and Sir Marrack Goulding who was Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs at the United Nations at the time, among others. The conference was both a retrospective exploration of the Central American peace processes as well as an effort to glean lessons for efforts at making peace in other places in the world.

The Central American peace processes of this period had a significant impact on how we conduct peace processes in the world today. Many developments that have become commonplace in peace processes around the world were refined, if not first tried, in Central America. They range from the widespread involvement of the United Nations on a regional basis, and the development of human rights monitoring, to the setting up of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and programs for Disarmament Demobilisation and Re-integration of former combatants. However, I want to emphasise another element of the Central American Peace Processes of this period – their contribution to attenuating, if not ending the Cold War.

While the Central American region shaped the context in which each country – whether Nicaragua, El Salvador, or Guatemala – tackled its civil conflict, the cold war shaped the context in which the region dealt with its problems. But Central American leaders searching for peace were not daunted by the global divide we then called the Cold War. They did not feel they had to wait for the Cold War to end to resolve the conflicts in their region, either individually or regionally. The process began under the leadership of President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, who first convinced other leaders in the region that they all needed stability to progress economically, and then convinced the United States to give diplomacy and negotiation a chance. As Arias put it in an interview with El Pais (16 March 2006): “20 years ago Central Americans were killing each other. The superpowers provided the arms and we provided the dead. …After the defeat in Vietnam the US needed to win a war. They wanted to get rid of the Sandinistas from power in Nicaragua by military force. I told the US that is not the solution to differences, rather what is necessary is diplomacy and negotiation.”

So Central Americans managed to make peace in their own countries, if not contribute to the end of the Cold War, by demonstrating how particular conflicts seen as sites of political and ideological contestation on a global scale, could be recast as conflicts with their own dynamics that required a particular set of solutions.

Today we are being asked to choose sides in yet another great global divide – between the West and Islam. We are also told that Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and even Europe, among many other places, are sites of great contestation between these two value systems. One approach is to view these as indeed sites of great contestation between Islam and the West, pick the side you are on, and proceed to fight it out with the other side in each particular place. Central America suggests a different approach. You do not have to deny the presence of such a “global divide” to tackle each problem separately. And tackling each problem separately may help resolve the global divide.

So Iraq then becomes less a place where the best of the West is contesting the worst of Islamic radicalism, but a country undergoing a triple transition – from Saddam Hussein’s Baath party dictatorship to multiparty democracy, from a Sunni dominated state to a multiethnic one, and from US occupation to self-government. And addressing each of these transitions has less to do with where we stand on the Islam-West divide, than with what techniques we can use to address them and lessons we have learned from other places that can help us do so.

Similarly, the Israeli-Palestinian problem becomes a challenge of ending the occupation of a people, and installing a functioning democracy to govern themselves, while developing a viable economy that will sustain their lives. It is not a place where an outpost of the West is facing Islamic hostility. Saudi Arabia can be viewed as the challenge of transitioning from a theocratic kingdom to a more plural state. And Afghanistan becomes the challenge of restoring basic institutions that can function in a country that has been ravaged by war and flattened by bombs for more than 25 years. Syria and Egypt are by contrast straightforward. They require a process for electing a representative government. The issue of Islam in Europe becomes how you include marginalized immigrant communities into the socio-economic and political mainstream of a number of countries who first came as guest workers, but now feel that they are neither guests nor workers.

All of these challenges are familiar to us, not because we have always been successful in addressing them, but because we have dealt with them before in other parts of the globe. By dealing with the parts (democratic transition, immigration, pluralism, building institutions) of the divide between Islam and the West, we need not deny that there may be a whole to it as well. We need only deny that it is clear how much greater the whole is to the sum of the parts. So we do not need to always address the whole in order to tackle each part. This is one important lesson we can learn from the Central American leaders of the 80s, whether government or rebel, who took on another global divide, part by part.

Oscar Arias, the then President of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has just been re-elected President of Costa Rica after 20 years. He is promising a “Costa Rican Consensus” that will contribute to steps to end poverty and lead to military disarmament world wide. Given his contribution to peace in Central America and the end to the Cold War, I would like to add one more thing to his agenda – bringing an end the new global divide between Islam and the West, part by part.

An oft heard remark about Iraq today (at least where I hang out) is something along the lines of “Well, it may be bad over there, but at least they (the Iraqi people) are better off than they were under Saddam.” Such a response strikes me as simultaneously reasonable (it may be true) and false, insofar as it may be little more than the ‘last line of defense’ justification of many folks for what is increasingly seen as a losing proposition. Bush’s recent declaration that finishing the war will be effectively ‘someone else’s problem,’ seems only to strengthen the latter interpretation. But let’s take the claim of “at least they are better off than they were under Saddam” seriously for a moment. For if it is true, then one might hope that the future is not so bleak after all.

There seem to be (at least) two issues tied up in the statement that “they are better off than they were under Saddam.” First, that the ‘quality of life’ of the Iraqi people is, on average, better, with standard indicators such as per capita GDP, and the number of people receiving basic services such as electricity etc. moving in the right direction since the invasion. Second, that regardless of the quality of life, one’s actual life is better preserved today, despite the violence that seems ever present, than under the old regime. While seemingly appealing, the problem with both claims, I suggest, is that they tend to rest, at least implicitly, on calculations of ‘averages’. Unfortunately, focusing on such indicators and sampling for averages to make meaningful comparisons may hide more than it illuminates.

Take the first claim, that quality of life indicators are (on average) moving in the right direction. If one examines the available statistics then the picture presented seems to back up this claim. Regarding GDP growth, the US Department of State notes that a year before the invasion “Iraq’s per person income had dropped from $3,836 in 1980 (higher than Spain at the time) to $715 [in 2002] (lower than Angola),” which is pretty poor by any standard. In contrast, in 2005 the State Department reports that “Iraq’s GDP is projected at $29.3 billion…up from $18.4 billion in 2002.” Moreover, “the IMF projects Iraq’s economy to grow by 10.4% in 2006.” Regarding electrical power as another indicator of progress, the same Department of State report notes that “more than 2,000 megawatts (MW) of generation capacity have been added or rehabilitated. One hundred fifty planned and ongoing projects worth $800 million will add more than 600 MW of additional generation capacity and improve the distribution of power to more than 2.1 million people.”

These are indeed successes, but does it mean that Iraqi’s are better off, on average, since the invasion? If it is at least plausible that the sanctions placed on Iraq by the UN from 1991-1999 lowered GDP by as much as 75 percent, or some equally large amount, then the recovery to the current level of per capita GDP of $3,400 seems somewhat less impressive. Moreover, confusion abounds as to what the real figures for Iraqi GDP actually are. For example, the CIA estimates the per capita GDP of Iraq in 2001 at $2,500.00 and in 2003 at $1,600.00, which makes the 2002 figure of $715.00 used by the State Department seem rather deflated. Regardless, similar to the ‘miracle of Reaganomics’, if you throw yourself out of a building and break both your legs (in 1980-82), the ability to crawl away on your elbows (in 1984) could be considered a success -– on average.

Regarding electricity supply, the recent growth in Iraqi generation capacity has to be seen against, not just recurrent insurgent attacks, but against the decrepit state of Iraqi infrastructure at the time of the invasion (due in part to sanctions), and the orgy of looting that eviscerated what was left of that infrastructure in the first six weeks after the invasion. Seen in this light, what restored power there is may be far less than is needed, with some estimates arguing for 6 gigawatts of new capacity to meet current demand in the context of a projected current shortfall of 1.1 Gigawatts despite the new capacity noted above. On average then, electricity supply may be higher today than it has been since the mid 1990s – on average – but that’s not saying much.

Third, what is making Iraq better off are not its oil revenues, which are up but wholly insufficient to rebuild, or the export of dates (the export success of the past few years apparently), but massive foreign (US) aid. Given the falling popularity of the war in the US and the long run costs of the war being projected as being as high as two trillion dollars it is unlikely that this ‘development by aid’ can be supported in the long term. Given all this, even if the optimistic statistics and projections are correct, which they are unlikely to be (given the bogusness of most forecasting), then it is hard to unambiguously make the case that the Iraqi’s are materially better off, on average, than they were under Saddam. Specifically, since the current recovery is contingent upon unlimited foreign largess that can disappear rather quickly, thus skewing the average quite drastically, it is not clear that the average a year or two from now will be anything like the average today.

What then for the other claim, that physical security is better now than under Saddam? Here the picture is equally complex. If we are to compare the threat to individual life today to that during the old regime, we must remember when Saddam et al., committed the majority of these murders rather than average over the life of the regime. Doing so would be to average out, for example, deaths in the Soviet Union over 70 years, and thus equally blame Stalin and Gorbachev. The problem is that ‘average’ deaths ‘now’ versus ‘then’ are a problematic indicator for comparison, (even if, unlike the USSR, Saddam was in power for the whole period).

Consider that the major ‘killing periods’ of Saddam’s regime were the ‘Anfal’ campaigns against the Kurds in the late 1980s where it is estimated 180,000 were killed, and the 1991 revolt where some 60,000 were killed. Add in the 500,000 Iraqis slaughtered during the Iran-Iraq war, plus the estimated 50,000 or so people murdered at other points, and you end up with about 790,000 people killed. [Photo shows Kurdish victims of the poison gas attack at Halabja.]

Compare this to the numbers given in The Lancet study of 2004 (or the UN study of 2005) where it was estimated that 100,000 had died as a result of the invasion (slate), or the (more documented and less estimated) study of Iraq Body Count of between 33,000 and 38,000 deaths since the invasion, and it seems quite simple to conclude that one’s safety today is greater than it was under the old regime. Indeed, one estimate places the old regime death rate at “between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power.” (In contrast, see the Bode Miller problem I discussed last month). As such, things may, on average, be better today than the were in the 1980s or 1990s, but we should not expect anyone unfortunate enough to be living Iraq today to calculate their position relative to the average and be thankful for it.

Specifically, the data in Iraq, especially regarding political murders, is especially lumpy. Rather than their being an average number of murders per day by Saddam that people could expect, there were brief periods of intense violence punctuated by long periods of relative inactivity. In contrast, what we seem to have in Iraq since the occupation is constant and increasing levels of violence, even if the average rate is lower. Which situation then is harder to deal with? Reflecting on my wife’s family’s experience made me think about this question.

My wife was born and raised in East Germany, Stasi and all. Indeed, her uncle spent a few years in prison for going against the regime. However, the rest of her family did not. The reason was simple. Dictatorship or not, the East German regime had certain rules and norms that were obvious to all its citizens. If you obeyed these, you had a Stasi file like everyone else, but probabilistically, if you did not break the rules or violate the norms, you were left alone. There was little about the lived environment that was radically uncertain. Saddam’s regime may have been far more vicious than the former East German communists, but given the lumpiness of the data on who was killed and when, it may have been a reasonable assumption that if you were neither in the army in the 1980s, not a Kurd or a Southerner in revolt in the early 1990s, you had a reasonable chance of being left alone.

But what about the situation today? In a previous post I argued that social scientists’ predictions are under-determined by the facts and over-determined by our theories (old post). Something similar may affect normal people as well as social scientists. The world is an immensely complex place and we tend to assume it to be a far more stable place than it is. We do so because the stability that we take for granted is itself a social product, the result of intersubjective norms, institutions, rules etc. that we reproduce in our daily routines.

Iraq today may be far less bloody and far more wealthy – on average – than it was under Saddam, but it is also far more random. Given such a constant (as opposed to lumpy) level of random violence, old certainties no longer apply, old institutions no longer operate, and old norms are routinely violated. People (Iraqi or American) do not deal well with such environments and try to reduce this uncertainty by acting to protect themselves against it. In doing so they promulgate new norms (usually based on old scripts) such as re-imagining group membership on, for example, ethnic or religious lines, as seems to be happening in Iraq. Doing so may of course increase other agents’ uncertainty and thus ratchet up the violence, for every new ‘in-group’ there has to be a corresponding ‘out-group’, but it is a coping mechanism nonetheless.

Overall then, conditions in Iraq may be ostensibly better today than they were in the past, on average, but they may feel worse, and that’s what counts. Even though the body count is lower, even though there is more electricity, and even if there is more wealth in the country, such factors, and focusing on such factors, may be less important to understanding where Iraq is heading than we think. The Iraqi people “may be better off now then they were under Saddam”, but if it doesn’t feel any better to the people on the ground, we should not expect less bodies and more wealth –- on average –- to really make a difference.

An eighteen-year old girl drinks heavily at a bar. She leaves with three boys about her age. No one ever sees her again. Her body is never found. Such is the ordinary stuff of crime across the world: a victim and her suspects caught in a prosaic mixture of sex and violence.

Add to that a few elements I’ve left out of my description, however, and we have the stuff of media sensation and obsessive interest: A blond American girl goes to Aruba to celebrate her high school graduation. The night before she is to fly back, she drinks heavily at a local bar. She gets in a car with three locals. She is not at the airport the next morning. Her body is never found.

The facts of the crime remain the same. The temper of the response alters dramatically.

Almost a year later, Natalee Holloway still commands our attention. Small developments in the case are breaking news. The characters are all well known: the grieving and irate mother; the coddled major suspect; the various local authorities. Several have given long interviews on national television; all have lawyers, perhaps one or two have secured agents. As with the runaway bride and Hurricane Katrina, the story itself has become a story, an occasion for the media to examine the way in which it packages and serves up the news. Why do we care about one girl’s disappearance when so much of graver consequence happens all the time? Why Natalee Holloway? 

One answer to this question has been the much-discussed “missing white girl syndrome.” A blond and attractive teenager disappears and all sorts of conscious and unconscious associations are made. Natalee Holloway swiftly turns from a particular individual, with thoughts and desires and experiences of her own, to an iconic vision of American girlhood: blond, young, pretty, and almost certainly dead. Like many things, our icons are easier to see in their twilight. Natalee is somehow blonder in repose. And so the story isn’t really about one person’s disappearance. It is about everything that is conventionally American thrown into horrible distress, apple pie tossed to the wolves.

Lurking below the interest in iconic American girlhood is something darker and less easy to talk about, at least on prime time cable. Natalee may or may not have been raped. She may or may not have had consensual sex with one, two, or three boys. One of them licked Jello shots off her stomach earlier in the evening. This much is known. She left a tourist bar named “Carlos ‘n Charlie’s” at around 1:30 am on May 30th, 2005. Her last recorded act was to get into a car with the three suspects. After that, we are left to our bleakest imaginations. In other words, the Natalee story lingers in part because of its strong undercurrent of sex and mayhem.

Natalee’s blondness and our penchant for erotic mayhem are not so separate. They are two sides of the media frenzy that has become the Natalee Holloway story. We turn girls into icons and then like to think of them in the most degraded of circumstances. Even a casual observer of trends in recent pornography knows this all too well. Prurience and voyeurism are intrinsic to this case and central to its apparently unending allure. Our white girl has not simply gone missing. She is now at the dimmer reaches of what we can speak about and what we can imagine. The combination is toxic and intoxicating. 

To these associations, I would add one more element that is essential to the Natalee phenomenon. The crime remains without a body, some of the most basic facts available only through conjecture and inference. This way it is both a perfect and flawed crime story. The same public that watches Greta Van Susteren incessantly dissect the case on On the Record tunes in regularly to CSI, where virtuoso experts discover incriminating evidence on or about the corpses of victims. But Natalee’s body is still out of reach of criminology and forensic science. Nothing is resolved or certain. Natalie did or did not have sex, was or was not raped, died by accident or met foul play. According to the latest version of events, she may have expired from an overdose of alcohol and drugs. Without a body, there is no way to know for sure.

Natalee still holds her secrets. Irresolution and uncertainty allow for the infinite variety of crime-narratives to play themselves out—among talking heads, in our imaginations. Yet irresolution and uncertainty also frustrate an audience that expects closure. We have grown used to bodies that talk to the police and doctors and scientists. The Natalee Holloway story places her body at the center of events—she was or was not inebriated, did or did not have sex, met or did not meet with violence—yet renders it disturbingly mute.

We may never hear Natalie speak. What we know is this. An eighteen-year old girl drank heavily at a bar. She left with three boys about her age. No one saw her again. Her body has yet to be found. 

Scott Esposito, author of the excellent literary web log Conversational Reading, has spread the word that the next volume of William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series of novels might take on the subject of Chief Joseph:

Vollmann fans will be giddy to hear…that he’s shortly to begin work on the next dream in the Seven Dreams series. He said it will center around the life of Chief Joseph and that he’ll be playing with the chronology, perhaps telling the story backwards. He remarked that this may mean that the story will have a happy ending, something Vollmann stories typically don’t have.

Giddy, indeed. I hope nobody will object to a few notes giving some historical background, which I happen to be interested in at the moment because of a projected essay on a parallel subject I have been developing with a friend. To be clear: I know nothing about the upcoming novel whatsoever, other than that, if the report is accurate, I look forward to reading it. Since the larger meta-narrative of the Seven Dreams series involves the history of the clashes between Native Americans and their white colonizers since the settlement of the New World, it does seem logical that Joseph could become a central figure. His tragic heroism in attempting to save his Nez Perce people from ethnic cleansing in the 1870s is a story American schoolchildren may remember. Evicted from their homeland in the Wallowa valley of what is now Oregon, they attempted to flee to Canada to avoid being forced on to a reservation. Pursued by a much larger force of U.S. Army regulars under the command of the one-armed general Oliver O. Howard, Joseph managed to elude capture for around 1,000 miles through extremely shrewd tactics and maneuvers.

The definitive history of the subject is The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, written by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., back in 1965 (Mariner Books reissued the complete and unabridged book in 1997 as a paperback). One of the more remarkable episodes in Josephy’s book involves a photograph taken by William H. Jackson before the 1877 war of a “half-blood with blue eyes and light hair,” who the Nez Perce claimed was the son of William Clark (of Lewis & Clark, the idea being that Clark fathered a son on his travels through the area). Later, when Joseph and the other “non-treaty” remnants who had refused the destruction of their homeland were finally captured in Montana some forty miles away from the Canadian border, by troops under Nelson Miles, they found a old man who was probably the same light-haired person in Jackson’s picture. The story of the photograph, which now resides in my hometown at the Iconographic Collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society, neatly encapsulates the drift down into the abyss of unnecessary and largely unprovoked violence that took place when white settlers replaced more friendly explorers in the Nez Perce homeland. The great tragedy of the Nez Perce was that they, among all the tribes of the West, were the most consistently friendly and accommodating allies of the whites.

Another remarkable dimension of the story is the role of the villain of the piece, General Howard, the man tasked with hunting Joseph down. (Because the Nez Perce had women and children with them, Howard today would be called, properly, a war criminal.) Howard might prove to be an ideal vehicle for Vollmann’s continual exploration of the bad conscience of white mythology. An abolitionist Civil War general who had atrocious luck in battle – losing his arm at in the accidental battle of Fair Oaks, routed by Jackson’s surprise attack at Chancellorsville, and given the worst troops in the worst field position on the first day of Gettysburg – Howard was reliable enough to rise to be one of Sherman’s key subordinates during the March to the Sea. He was one of few Northern military men to write about the suffering inflicted on the civilians of Atlanta, particularly the women (this in an article in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War). After the war, he helped found Howard University for African-Americans, before being posted to the West. Howard, in fact, seemed to have a paradoxical streak in his character whereby he tried to negotiate for the Nez Perce to stay in their homeland at first, but had nothing but contempt for what he saw as the satanic dimensions of Native American religion. What is so terrible about him is that he seemed to have every appearance of being an upright man, even a sympathetic man in some ways during the war.

In his memoir Nez Perce Joseph, Howard tried to justify his actions in a way that followed the commonly-held and relentless logic of dispossession:

There are few Indians in America superior to the Nez Perces. Among them the contrast between heathen and Christian teaching is most marked. Even a little unselfish work, both by Catholic and Protestant teachers, has produced wonderful fruit, illustrated by those who remained on the reservation during the war, and kept the peace; while the unhappy effects of superstition and ignorance appear among the renegades and “non-treaties.” The results to these have been murder, loss of country, and almost extermination. (Brig. Gen. O. O. Howard, “Preface,” Nez Perce Joseph.)

The connection between this fascinating (and awfully frank) statement and the general drift of how Native Americans were loved to death by the Catholic missionaries in Vollmann’s novel Fathers and Crows (the Second of the Seven Dreams) should be pretty clear. How Vollmann handles the story will be doubtless unexpected, unpredictable, and brilliant, as usual. If I had to hazard a single speculative remark (never wise, so advance apologies), I would probably guess that the story won’t be that Howard found ways to fail to capture Joseph. It would diminish Joseph’s military accomplishments to put that idea forward, for one thing. In fact, Howard did fail – mainly because with heavy equipment and logistical problems he couldn’t really keep up in the terrain – and in the end Sherman dispatched Miles’ troops to catch Joseph before he slipped across the border into Canada. Joseph hoped, possibly mistakenly, that Canada would have offered him and his people asylum. After being captured, Joseph made the speech for which he is known to history: “I will fight no more forever…”

The generally-rentable and pretty solid PBS series The West (Episode Six), directed by Stephen Ives and produced by Ken Burns, and written by the perennial Burns collaborator and scholar Geoffrey C. Ward, contains a lot of interesting documentary material on the story.

Justin E. H. Smith

[For an extensive archive of Justin E. H. Smith’s writing, visit www.jehsmith.com]

In recent years, one of the sights that never fails to drive home to me the fact that I am back in Eastern Europe is that of hordes of travellers rushing to the grand machines in airport departure areas that, for a price, will wrap one’s luggage in multiple layers of clear, environmentally unfriendly plastic.  This is meant to serve as protection, though it must be hell to remove. 

With this image still vivid from a recent voyage, I was amused to read of Milosevic’s posthumous return to Belgrade that “[t]he coffin, wrapped in clear plastic and packing tape, was removed from the jet after the rest of the passengers’ baggage on a small yellow vehicle with a conveyor belt” (New York Times, “Milosevic’s Body Returned to Homeland for Burial,” March 15, 2006).  Finding this gem just before the funeral, I thought to myself: Replace the staid black suit and tie with a shiny track outfit for the ceremonial display, and pipe in some noxious turbofolk to pump up, with the help of a cheap techno beat, the narcissism of minor differences, and there will be no doubt but that in death the ex-Yugoslav dictator has been honored, if not with a state funeral, at least with all the decorations of the post-communist culture of tacky thuggery that Milosevic and his family so shiningly embody.

In 1998, I asked Warren Zimmerman, the recently discharged U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, whether the seemingly endless series of violent episodes involving Serbia and its neighbors could be attributed to “deep-seated, historical enmities.”  He rightly said no, and that indeed much of the Clinton administration’s fence-sitting was regrettably motivated by just such an idea.  Slobodan Milosevic often invoked the battle of Kosovo Pole against the Turks in 1389 to justify ongoing slaughter.  Clinton, in turn, emboldened by Robert D. Kaplan’s influential 1993 book, Balkan Ghosts, was happy to invoke similarly distant and semi-mythical events to justify the U.S. position that there’s no point in trying to stop those bloodthirsty Yugoslavs from having it out.

In the late 1990s, I got it into my head to go to Belgrade to interview Milosevic.  It never happened, and this past month I have definitively put my hope of following through to rest.  Back then, I was listening in preparation to instructional casettes of what used to be called “Serbo-Croatian.”  They highlighted the names of foods, and for some reason lay particular emphasis on the fruits.  I learned for example that in Serbia a mango is called a “mango.”  Great. 

I quickly realized that this would not help me to formulate probing questions about who stood to benefit from the privatization of previously state-controlled industries, about the chain of command between Belgrade and Bosnian Serb commandos, etc.  I doubled up my efforts and began to sit in on intensive language courses at Columbia. In the end, the Yugoslav embassy in D.C. held onto my passport far too long.  By the time I got it back, having in the end been declined a visa, I was fairly proficient in Serbo-Croatian –I could now buy a mango while haltingly discussing geopolitics– and the NATO bombing campaign had, at long last, begun. 

This campaign divided those of us who hate war, but also hate the suffering wrought by nasty, opportunistic men propelled into power, whose “sovereignty” is then for some reason thought worthy of respect. To the present day the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia seems to occupy a position halfway between the case of Rwanda, where staying out was a clear abrogation of international responsibility to protect the helpless; and that of Iraq, where humanitarian intervention between a tyrant and his subjects was neither a significant part of the justification for invasion nor, evidently, among the concerns of the invasion’s planners.

The Serbian media have for the most part been at least as reserved in their expression of affection for the deceased former leader as has the New York Times.  Vreme, Serbia’s own journal of record, assesses Milosevic’s reign as one of incalculable tragedy. Curiously, it seems that Milosevic has received a warmer send-off from the Russian establishment press, but even there his legacy is presented in that dialogical form that often passes for objectivity: “Some say he was the butcher of the Balkans, but some say he was a Serbian national hero.”  We may speculate that this “balance” has something to do with Putin’s increasingly tight control of the media, and his concern for his own legacy as an increasingly iron-fisted ruler.  Russia has given amnesty to Milosevic’s wife and their cretinous son Marko, the one-time patron of Belgrade’s Madona discotheque, whose principle concern in life seems to be collecting sports cars and firearms, and who once announced to Yugoslavia’s Vatican ambassador that he would like to have plastic surgery on his ears, since, as he explained, “I can’t drive an expensive car, dress well, and be floppy-eared like cattle at the same time” (for a hilarious transcript of bugged conversations among the Milosevic clan, see: http://harpers.org/AllInTheFamily.html).

Those who believe that Milosevic could do no wrong appear to include young Marko, wife Mira, a few scattered seniors in Serbia and Russia whose pensions have been cut off, and Ramsey Clark.  All considered, the average age is quite high.  Notwithstanding the depiction widely circulated in the Russian press, of the former ruler as St. Slobodan in the style of an Orthodox icon, and notwithstanding the 50,000 nostalgic gawkers who turned out for the public funeral, it is not likely that the affectionate memory of him will survive for more than the few years most of his supporters have left.

Reading the placards held up by the elderly demonstrators outside the US embassy in Moscow a few weeks ago, one detected an odd persecution complex, as though Western nations have arbitrarily picked out the South and Eastern Slavic peoples for harrassment.  This complex is particularly sharp among some Serbs, who sincerely believe that they are the last line of defense for Christian Europe against the invading Muslim hordes.  As I seem to recall one Serbian warlord saying in the mid-1990s, if it weren’t for the vigilant work of death squads like his, camels would be drinking from the banks of the Seine in no time.

The problem of course is that the Ottoman Empire no longer exists, and in  any case the Kosovo Albanians and the Bosnian Muslims are not foreign invaders.  They are, to use the old, optimistic and all-inclusive language preferred by Marshall Tito, indigenous Yugoslavs, and from the point of view of, say, a Norwegian, they are at least as European as Arkan the warrior and Ceca his turbofolk-singing muse.  Though there is an enduring “Muslim question” in Europe, the landscape has changed somewhat since the original battle of Kosovo Pole, and Milosevic was indulging in nothing but an anachronistic medieval fantasy to make Yugoslav Muslims out as Turkish infidels.

But are the complaints of anti-Serbian bias justified?  To be sure, there is a prevailing sense in the Western media that Serbians are to be collectively punished for the crimes of the warlords and thugs Milosevic oversaw.  Thus in a blurb on the New York Times homepage we read that “The ex-Yugoslav leader’s supporters planned a Belgrade funeral that raised fears of Serbs using the ceremony to try to regain power.”  Serbians regaining  power in Serbia?  The very gall.  In the full article, “Serbs” is lengthened to “nationalist Serbs,” but the slip is telling.  Serbia continues to be vilified as a whole, and probably will be until more serious atonement is made by the Serbian political establishment, and until the deniers of the ethnic-cleansing campaigns are pushed even further to the fringe, where they may congregate harmlessly and irrelevantly, like the friends of David Irving.  It is a good thing that Milosevic was not honored with a state funeral, and if he and his family had been refused the right to return to Serbia now, the ceremonies would likely have only taken place in Russia and stoked the rancid rhetoric there about some pan-Slavic mystical  “brotherhood” which nonetheless excludes the Croats and Slovenes since they abandoned Orthodoxy, or the Cyrillic alphabet, or something.

The irony is that the appeals to ancient blood ties that provide nationalist movements with their fuel are but a flipside of the Clinton-style invocation of intractable ancient blood feuds in the aim of rationalizing staying the isolationist course.  Among national groups, there simply are no natural enemies or natural friends.  Serbs and Kosovo Albanians are not like cats and dogs.  The myth that they are, or that they became so in some  transformative event on a 14th-century battlefield, and are forever condemned to live out the fates that were there secured, has tremendous propaganda value in rallying the troops for current purposes, and this is something that Milosevic well understood.

And this brings us to Iraq, where, in the transition from “terrorist insurrection” to “civil war,” the Americans are increasingly feeling not besieged, but exclued from the action.  Whatever the arguments for withdrawal, and there are many excellent ones, let us not lapse into the Orientalist and vaguely racist fantasy that, whereas we in the enlightened world work out our differences through rational communication, in those parts there’s nothing to be done but to let the Shiites and Sunnis fight it out amongst themselves.  Such reasoning always mistakes the local and short-term for the eternal and fixed.  It’s not in their blood.  It’s in their predicament.

By Dr. Shiban Ganju

Shiban is the chairman of a biotechnology company in India and a practicing gastroenterologist in the USA. He travels between these two spaces frequently but lives in them simultaneously. He has been a passionate theater worker, reluctant army officer, ambitious entrepreneur, successful CEO and an active NGO volunteer. Still, he is does not know what he wants to be when he grows up; but he wants his epitaph to be “He tried.”

A diminutive microbe, Helicobacter Pylori (HP) emerged from obscurity over twenty years ago and squirmed itself into fame and stardom! Since its stomach damaging felony was discovered, it has been accused of causing injury to other precious organs like heart and colon. The scientist sleuths are collecting evidence to indict it; the verdict is not yet in but it is likely that HP will be found guilty on some counts and exonerated of others.

This miniscule, (3 micrometers long), corkscrew like microbe eluded the scientists with diversionary tactics worthy of a hardened felon. HP created the trail of hyper acidity as the cause of ulcer disease and scientists spent decades to unravel the mystery of acid production.

The dogma in ulcer disease stated: stress increases Hydrochloric acid production which in turn erodes the duodenal or gastric (stomach) lining causing an ulcer crater.

Investigators found excessive acid and pepsin production in the stomach of patients with ulcer disease. Other associated culprits — cigarettes, anti inflammatory drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen — shared the blame.

Natural consequence was a multi million dollar business of acid neutralizing and suppressing drugs. Shelf loads of antacids and histamine-2 receptor blockers like Cimetidine (Tagamet) became the standard therapy. Later, the proton pump inhibitors like Omeprazole (Prilosec) and its variants entered the fray to abolish gastric acid.

When medical therapy failed, surgeons wielded their knives, especially for those patients with complications of bleeding, obstructed stomach outlets and indolent ulcers. Surgery involved cutting part of the ulcerated stomach or duodenum and reconnecting the stomach to the jejunum. Prominent surgeon Billroth attained immortality by naming one such procedure after him, only to announce a newer and improved version later that he named Billroth II.

Other surgeons innovated the cutting of the vagus nerve to abolish the stimulus to acid production. But it led to decreased motility of the stomach and stagnation of food, so other surgeons offered a solution by enlarging the gastric outlet opening into the duodenum (pyloroplasty).

So the dogma went on. Books, papers, seminars were devoted to discuss the virtues of one procedure and vices of the other. Newer acid suppressants proliferated and a few generations of gastric surgeons thrived. Meanwhile, some patients improved while others suffered more.

The beginning of the end of this mindset came with the discovery in 1983 by Barry Marshal and Robin Warren from Perth, Australia that the cause of gastritis and duodenal ulcer is this cork screw shaped bacterium Helicobacter Pylori. (Campylobacter pyloridis initially) Though this bacterium was found in the stomach lining by many investigators from 1875, it was Marshall and Warren who cultured these bacteria and found them in over 90 percent of duodenal ulcers. Marshall further nailed the etiology by satisfying Koch’s postulates. Koch, a renowned scientist, had suggested earlier that in order to validate an infectious etiology of a disease the following criteria had to be met:

1. The organism is always associated with disease.
2. The organism will cause disease in a healthy subject.
3. Eradication of the organism will cure the disease.
4. Re-challenge with the organism will cause the disease again.

Barry Marshall swallowed a Petri dish culture of H. Pylori and suffered severe gastritis; he recovered when the bacteria were eradicated and he did not re-challenge.

He satisfied three of the four postulates. After initial skepticism, as befits a dogma, other workers from all over the world replicated these findings. Suddenly ulcers of the stomach and duodenum were cured by simple antibiotic therapy for two weeks. Drs. Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize in 1995.

HP turns to be more interesting than a mere ulcer causing nuisance. It has four to six flagella at one end with which it penetrates the mucous layer and approach the gastric wall. The bacterium produces many enzymes including urease which breaks down urea into ammonia and bicarbonate which neutralize the surrounding acid creating a neutral pH cocoon around the bacterium. With glue like surface adhesins, HP clings to the gastric cells. Its secreted enzymes provoke the gastric G cells and D cells which enhance the Hydrochloric acid and pepsin production. An inflammatory response ensues and the lining succumbs to the onslaught of abrasive acid and inflammation. The surface breaks down and forms an ulcer. (Remember how research had shown increased acid production in ulcer patients: the cause was the bug and not stress!)

Investigators have shown that HP is present six times more often with gastric cancer and mucous associated lymphoid tumors (MALT) than in normal stomachs. Eradication of the infection with antibiotics clears the lymphoid tumors. (Here is a stunning example of antibiotics curing cancer!)

HP lives preferentially in the lower part of the stomach and passes in the faeces.The interpersonal transmission, therefore, is presumed to be fecal-oral. Over 50 percent of adults in the developed world carry this bug; the prevalence is higher in the developing countries. The prevalence increases with age.

The microbe is transmitted with in the family and travels with the family; this attribute has been used to study recent migration of human populations. The following example illustrates the point: the Ladakh region occupies northern tip of India and borders Tibet on the east and Kashmir on the west. The population of this region descends from Tibetan and Indo-Iranian stock. While genetically the two populations do not differ, the genomics of H pylori in their stomachs betray their migrations from their respective ancestral lands of Tibet and northwest India.

HP has reminded us again: 1. Microbes rule. 2. “Scientific” dogma can stupefy the mind 3.The dogma may even harm the very patients that are supposed to benefit from such knowledge.

What is the future of this bacterium? All bad things must come to an end! A mathematical model from Stanford suggests that H pylori will be extinct in one hundred years, at least in the USA. Its fifteen minutes of fame will be over.

Helicobacter Pylori, the diminutive flagellate, dispeller of dogma, generator of insight into cancer, tracer of human dislocations gives me “ulcers”, when, as a physician, I encounter patients with surgically mutilated stomachs from a bygone era. I shudder to think that the current “state of the art” in medical practice will be found similarly inadequate in future.

I pray we do no harm in the meantime.

Yes, you’ve read correctly. This won’t be appearing on the front page of the Times, or even amid the increasingly unfortunate and obviously marketing-driven Newsweek covers, though it would likely turn more heads than that recent headline about sex and the single baby-boomer. You’d probably only expect to see it in the “Shouts and Murmurs” column of the New Yorker, where you might safely dismiss it as mere jest. Then again, I’m sure many of my dear readers have had similar, or indeed contrary, thoughts of their own. Yet this reflection was noted by one of the world’s most esteemed scientists, back in July of 1838. While I don’t think that Charles Darwin intended this statement as an evolutionary judgment, it is certainly the point that most stuck with me after looking at a rich collection of his musings.

Upon visiting the American Museum of Natural History’s current exhibition on Darwin last week, I found one piece—nay, hypothesis—by far the most interesting. The show is filled with skeletons; pinned-down, and long-dead, beetles; some unenviable live specimens of species he worked with, displayed at deathlike rest in glass menageries; the requisite, and dare I say relatively passive, interactive computer screen displays; resplendent orchids; manuscripts; and facsimilies of his doodled diagrams. I came across his idea that a wife is “better than a dog anyhow” while reading through his methodical listing of pros and cons regarding the esteemed institution of marriage. This curious sentiment was set quite literally between the lines, with a carat indicating he’d added it afterwards between two other items. The list, neatly folded down the middle and not-so-neatly scrawled in pencil on paper, read as follows, with the heading centered on the page, “Marry” on the left, and “Not Marry” on the right [click on manuscript photo to enlarge]:

This is the Question

Marry

Children (if it Please God)
Constant companion (and friend in old age) who will feel interested in one
Object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow
Home, & someone to take care of house
Charms of music and female chit-chat
These things good for one’s health—but terrible loss of time
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all—No, no, won’t do
Imagine living all one’s day solitary in smoky dirty London House
Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps
Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Great Marlboro Street, London

Not Marry

Freedom to go where one liked
Choice of Society and little of it
Conversation of clever men at clubs
Not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle
Expense and anxiety of children
Perhaps quarrelling
Loss of Time
Cannot read in the evenings
Fatness and idleness
Anxiety and responsibility
Less money for books etc.
If many children forced to gain one’s bread (But then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much)
Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool

Marry, Marry, Marry Q.E.D.

Darwin was twenty-nine when he wrote this, and had been living, presumably in grand bachelor style, in London for almost two years. His five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle was done, and both his age and status brought marriage to mind. Clearly he was torn with the same problem many of my friends (though I must say only the females actually talk about it) are now facing—namely, settle down with one partner and start a family, or pursue career without such compromise. Of course others are facing the dilemma of perhaps passing up on those pros in favor of the cons, after a few (or not so few) years of putting up with such “terrible loss of time.” I’ll not focus on salient, perhaps salacious, details like the fact that Darwin married his first cousin (what would reproductive rules governing gene diversification have to say about that?), and will instead discuss the reverberations his list has in our current society.

Darwin was set with a “generous living allowance” and flourishing scientific career when he married Emma Wedgwood after a three-month engagement. She was more religiously devout than he, not having put her faith to the rigorous tests inspired by scientific skepticism that he had. Many differences separated the two, yet those were overcome by the presence of the two children and that now most rare of traits, utter devotion and commitment. Clearly he got over most of the cons listed above soon after tying the knot with her. What most interests me, though, is the sentiment that inspired this list and some of Darwin’s letters, and how I see it recurring among my friends and acquaintances 168 years later.

In a letter to his fiancée written during their engagement in 1839, Darwin explicitly states his hopes and expectations: “I think you will humanize me, & soon teach me there is greater happiness than building theories, & accumulating facts in silence & solitude.” A dear friend of mine, who is an accomplished writer and journalist, has finally decided, after a marriage and two children, followed by an affair or two or three, that, were he to have a choice, working with facts in silence and solitude would rank higher than any sort of companionship. All of his experiences with women up until now had perhaps at one point humanized him, but they have either canceled each other out or just proven to be a bit too much for someone who just wants a “choice of Society and little of it.”

Perhaps this character is similar in its nature to the sort that would prompt another prominent journalist to publish a book entitled Are Men Necessary? While I’ve not yet gotten round to reading Maureen Dowd’s latest book, the many reviews and arguments against or in favor of men’s necessity or superfluity have been impossible to miss. A forty-six-year-old friend of mine has chosen to raise her now six-year-old daughter on her own. After becoming pregnant in the course of a brief affair, she decided that both she and her daughter could get along just fine without a man. I will be curious to see how this develops, especially when the girl hits her teens. Thus far I’ve noted some very interesting forces at work. While I took her on a walk to give my friend a little rest, before letting go of my hand and running up to the swing set as we came to the local playground, she turned to me and asked, “Alta, why don’t you have a little girl?” While offering up my rather vacuous reasons, it occurred to me that, in her eyes, it’s normal that every woman would have a little girl, and therefore strange that I wouldn’t. Just like she has a doll, and her mother has her, I should have a little girl. Her father is present, lives in a neighboring town, and sees her several times a week, but he’s by no means a key figure in her life. This is just one of several emerging models of family that is visible all over the animal world, but seen as new, and by many as a threat, to the contemporary human societal structure.

Darwin shared a lot of his work with his wife; his father had advised him not to recount his religious doubts, noting that some women “suffered miserably” at the idea that their husbands weren’t destined for heaven after death. While they don’t directly relate to the situation between Darwin and his wife, the increasingly “religious” politics of faith, devotion, commitment, and exclusion of unions that aren’t strictly male-female—and hence focused on the propagation of the species (though proponents of such politics seem to forget that this will occur with or without such lofty pretence, especially if abortion is no longer an option)—has become a major issue in the past few years. I don’t really feel like writing about all that, as it makes me rather ill. While evident in this list and in discussions I overhear on a daily basis, the idea that one must choose between companionship or career, and the view that they are mutually exclusive, or at least call for serious compromise, although recorded on Darwin’s list, proved insignificant in the end.

The generation of women who began their careers in the sixties and seventies, and whose stay-at-home mothers almost universally spoke of career only when speaking of their husband’s work, forged new titles for themselves. It was common to hear one woman say of another that she was in college just to get her so-called MRS degree—something that did, and for many people still does, carry more weight than an MFA, MBA, MD, or PhD. That generation quickly came to learn that the academic and professional titles previously inaccessible to them would prove both more difficult and more worthwhile in the long run. The generation of women beginning their careers now, while it might have an inkling of what was and what is to come, cannot relate to this at all, at least not yet.

Partnership of whatever sort seems to bring balance, desired battle, and a reason for being to people that might otherwise be without. The idea of a “better half,” however, has always perturbed me. Perhaps this is only because of its judgmental nature. I recently read an article in which the author related a dialogue, and one of the voices was recorded as her “better half,” which I misinterpreted as the better part of her character. Only when I remembered the definition of “better half” as “spouse” did the article begin making sense (in a non-schizophrenic way). My grandmother would never have had such a misunderstanding.

While I think each item on Darwin’s scientifically rigorous list deserves greater attention—especially the priceless idea of a “nice soft wife on a sofa”—I will close with a nod to recent articles on one of my preferred poets. I recently reread Auden’s “In Sickness and in Health,” many years older and a few experiences richer than when I first read it, when I understood very little. This poem, written for a couple Auden knew, also came to mind as I contemplated Darwin’s list. Many lines acerbically reference marriage as an institution (cf. “Nature by nature in unnature ends”). I especially like the penultimate stanza: “That this round O of faithfulness we swear / May never wither to an empty naught / Nor petrify into a square, / Mere habits of affection freeze our thought / In their inert society, lest we / Mock virtue with its pious parody / And take our love for granted, Love, permit / Temptations always to endanger it.”

There’s nothing about nunchucks that makes C. Alice Newman smile. They’re “violent, flashy, and outmoded,” she told me last week over pie. When her stepson, Ben, buzzed her doorbell, Alice saw him on the security camera, saw his plastic nunchucks, and pressed the intercom. “I told him to get rid of them before he came up,” she reported, “and get rid of anything else violent while he’s at it. He knows better.”

Alice is a member of a book group composed solely of stepmothers; they meet twice a month to discuss literature that treats their particular role. “We’re basically always the bad guys,” says Shea Stetson-Brown, the group’s founder. “And it’s a relief to look at these stereotypes, and say, hey – that’s not how I see myself.” Last month’s title was “Warm and Wonderful Stepmothers of Famous People.” At our meeting, Alice had the novel “More Than You Know” tucked in her purse. Though the margins were full of her left-leaning slant, Alice confessed that most sessions are spent dissecting more personal narratives. For instance: nunchucks.

Ben receives a weekly allowance of $10 from his mother, Claudia. This money is deposited in a savings account in Ben’s name (he’s saving for a Nintendo DS). Last month though, to Alice’s dismay, he got his hands on some discretionary cash. Claudia’s dog Soupy got sick and puked under the kitchen table, and Claudia heard the retching, saw the mess, clutched her pregnant belly and started to cry. Ben ran in and offered to help, and she felt guilty about her ten-year-old doing such a thing alone until he proposed a $5 bonus. (And, Alice adds, “He says he couldn’t smell anyway on account of a cold, which I do not believe.”)

The nunchucks were $1.99 and Ben bought them at Jack’s World on the way to Alice’s apartment. The rush of his solo trip to the counter and pulling the bill from his pocket must have momentarily overwhelmed his judgment, because it’s true, Ben should have known better. He’d been in trouble with Alice before.

“He took my bra and he tried to hang my cat,” Alice said.

It soon became clear that the only evidence Alice had of Ben’s attempt was flimsy at best. She had left Ben alone in the apartment while she went to the UPS store to ship a Christmas gift to her sister. The store was closed, and she turned back. Ben must not have heard Alice return, because she entered her bedroom and saw Ben standing in front of her open closet. The top drawer of the dresser was open, Ben was holding a bra and the cat by the scruff of her neck, and he was looking up at the clothing rail. “I know what I saw,” Alice said when I challenged her conclusion. It was hard for me to think of what Ben might have been doing, but I thought messing around was a finer bet than hanging the cat. Alice remains convinced – and her group supports her. I spoke with Nedra Tomasino, who sees the situation as “fucking classic.”

Nedra’s tormentor is named Rougie, and she is fifteen and a winker. “Everything nice, everything sincere from her, is like, followed by this,” she groaned, and executed an overexaggerated wink, accompanied by a slight shoulder shimmy. “I think I’m doing something nice for her, and then there it is.” Nedra winked again. It all stems from a chat they had shortly after Nedra married Rougie’s dad. Apparently Nedra told Rougie that she’d never try to take the place of Rougie’s late mother, but she hoped that they could be friends, and she felt lucky to be a part of Rougie’s life. Then Nedra had winked. And now she can’t escape it.

Another group member who supports Alice’s interpretation, Joanna Clemmens, has encountered real violence from her stepchildren, Genny and Andrew. Genny is six and clings to Joanna during the day but at night screams and slaps at her, crying for her mom, who’s across the country in Washington State. Andrew, 17, just breaks things. He’ll idly pick up a decades-old china egg and let it slip through his hands. He’ll knock over flowers, and spill a gallon of Hi-C on the kitchen floor, and apologize for it all. “But he never breaks [my husband] Carl’s stuff,” Joanna explained.

With the blessing of her book group, Alice responded to the cat episode by eliminating Ben’s unsupervised time and axing his kitchen privileges. (“No knives.”) So Ben really should have expected Alice’s nunchuck decree. He didn’t. Over at his mom’s, those nunchucks meant he’d been a good boy. Here with Alice, they were proof of his delinquency. What did he think about as he sat out there on the stoop with those $1.99 nunchucks, waiting until it got dark and his dad got home? Alice says he opened his backpack and did his homework, but he kept the nunchucks tucked in the back waistband of his pants, so they would be visible on the security camera. After he finished the homework, he beat the stair railing with the nunchucks for an hour.

I asked Alice why she didn’t go downstairs and grab the plastic weapon and haul Ben inside. “I thought about it,” she replied, and dragged her fork through a few final wisps of whipped cream on her plate. “But he was sleeping at Claudia’s that night. I can only go half-way with this kid.”

We should establish two things right off the bat.

First, R. Kelly has been arrested and accused enough times for us all to accept the basic idea that he has deep, ingrained pedophilic tendencies.

Second, there is no hard evidence, grainy internet film notwithstanding, that R. Kelly ever urinated on anyone.

But this isn’t an indictment or a defense of R. Kelly. I don’t pretend to know anything about him as a man, or as a singer either. My sister has a soft spot for R&B, but it always struck me as the honey dripper bullshit that Chuck D once proclaimed it to be. I took it that if you appreciated the crisp diction and streety rawness of hip hop you were honor bound, as it were, to thumb your nose at R&B and the endless sloppy crooning of it all.

That was before I saw Trapped in the Closet, which broke me down and rearranged me as a man. There is no way to describe Trapped in the Closet properly. It’s a long R&B song. It’s some kind of opera/soap opera/TV drama. It bears some vague genetic resemblance to the Hip Hoperas of the brilliant Prince Paul from a few years back. It’s sort of like a music video.

But as much as it is all these other things, it is simultaneously, incredibly unique.

The story starts with a character, played by R. Kelly, who wakes up in a woman’s bedroom after a one-night stand and immediately has to hide in the closet as the husband arrives home unexpectedly. From there, the R. Kelly persona morphs into two or maybe three semi-distinct characters: the character in the story, the singer of the song, and the meta-narrator who is sometimes also to be found hanging out in other closets all around town. The story then immediately splits into several more complicated sub-plots, all of which end up being interconnected in various streams of adultery, deceit, sex, and, violence. So, the material is good (I would mention something here about the guy who comes out of the kitchen cabinet but you really need to experience that moment for yourself).

The song is simple and loosely structured with no chorus, allowing R. Kelly to use his patented ‘rhyme-a-word-with-the-exact-same-word-repeatedly’ technique. Though there are various characters played by different actors, they all lip-sync to the voice of R. Kelly, who sings each part himself with gusto. The tension points in the story, of which there are quite a few, are punctuated by R. Kelly’s lyrical flourishes in what amounts to a remarkably effective drama heightener. The thing is extremely frickin’ watchable. Indeed, it is a rare occasion when I pop Trapped in the Closet into the DVD player, as I have done repeatedly in the last weeks, and witness anyone drifting out of the room before it’s over. It grabs you in some strange concoction of melodrama and lyrical flow. It has a hypnotic quality, without robbing the viewer of self-awareness. In fact, that is one of the oddest things about Trapped in the Closet. You can’t believe you’re watching it, and you can’t stop. You have no idea exactly what it is, even, that you’re watching or how such a thing could possibly have been created . . . and you want more.

Somewhere around the fourth viewing I decided, reluctantly, that R. Kelly is some kind of genius and that he’s spewed out something so utterly singular that a person simply has to give in to it. And it struck me, further, that I couldn’t admit this simple and irrefutable fact without also acknowledging that this accomplishment has something to do with R&B. As much as Prince Paul’s Hip Hoperas are infinitely smarter, more clever, and more sophisticated, they are also, maybe, too much all of those things. R. Kelly comes along with his complete, almost utterly naïve lack of just those qualities and creates something that is a genre unto itself. Whatever the failings of R&B as a musical style, there is something direct and immediate about the way it portrays human emotions that is difficult not to relate to. R&B is not afraid to lay it out on the line. However you’re feeling, that’s okay, man. Just sing about it. Nothing complicated here, you’re hurtin’ or wantin’ or missin’ or something like that. Just, you know, tell us about it. The thing I used to hate about R&B is also a kind of strength, if you look at it a little differently. And it struck me even further that the straightforward narrative simplicity of R&B lyrics are just another way to portray the complexities of human experience. It is the emotions that are complex. The language and syntax that expresses, however inadequately, those emotions, doesn’t have to be.

Indeed, it was while watching Trapped in the Closet for the eighth or ninth time that I recalled a conversation with a friend of mine, Alan Fishbone, who runs the Intensive Latin Program at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York and has often had occasion to think about how language works. He once remarked to me that there is nothing but syntax, only syntax exists. He was in an extreme mood, and the comment has the ring of exaggeration to which Fishbone occasionally succumbs (I recall that it was also around this time that Fishbone started talking about stockpiling weapons and canned goods out in the woods somewhere. His beard had grown particularly scruffy and his eyes were sunken even deeper into an already cavernous skull. I started to worry that he might have joined some Humanist Militia, Juvenal-and-AK-47s-type outfit. But the phase passed). The comment, however, stuck with me. He meant, basically, that semantics gets you nowhere. Meaning comes out of the arrangement of words, not out of the individual meanings of individual words. There’s a perfectly respectable school for this type of ‘meaning holism’ among philosophers of language, but it somehow seemed more impressive coming from someone who’d gotten there solely in long, dark nights’ labors with impenetrable sentences in Tacitus that suddenly revealed themselves as if in a magical flash. Syntax is like that, he said, like some weird kind of magic with language.

Pushing this a little bit further (indulge me for a moment), if it’s true that it all comes down to syntax, then you could also say that human thought can be divided into two basic categories, paratactic and hypotactic. They are the two most elemental ways of putting thought together. In paratactic arrangement, you just keep adding something more. The greatest ally to parataxis is the conjunction. Such and such happened and then such and such happened after that, and next was a little episode of this and that, and then it all came to a head with this particular series of events, and then after that a whole new thing started. That’s pretty much how parataxis works. Epic poetry tends to unfold in parataxis and no one did it more paratactically than Homer. It just keeps coming, line after line, thought after thought, event after event. There’s barely a subordinate clause to be found in the Iliad or the Odyssey. Parataxis works, in a sense, in real time. It unfolds as experience unfolds, in a narrative line. It’s thick with the relentless forward push of lived temporality.

Hypotactic arrangement, by contrast, nestles thoughts within thoughts, steps to the side, qualifies, alters, and modifies. It has the structure of reflection and argument rather than that of lived experience. It is thus no accident that when one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Parmenides, wanted to appropriate the dactylic hexameter of epic verse for his complicated ontological argument about the necessary logical structure of all that is, he dropped the parataxis. Parmenides’ poem, despite its first-glance resemblance to epic poetry, is a mess of complicated hypotaxis.

The thing is, you can’t really choose one over the other; parataxis or hypotaxis. It doesn’t make any sense. That would be like saying that Homer is better than Parmenides or vice versa. They’re both great, they’re both doing amazing things. But when you start analyzing it you realize that they’re doing completely different things. Parmenides is messing around with the very structure of language, going inside of it in order to pull out inferences about the logical structure of Being. Crazy, maybe, but somebody had to see where that would go. Homer is riding on a sea of language, completely comfortable in it, surrounded by it, happily willfully drowning inside it. Homer doesn’t even say things like “I ask the Muse to help me sing such and such” like some of the later epic poets do. He just says “Muse, sing,” as if the difference between Homer, the Muse, and language itself is swallowed up in the great gush of the telling. By the end of the first few lines of the Iliad you are so much inside the narrative that there is no time to sort anything out. You just have to keep moving forward, adding more and more layers of experience. I always thought that Matthew Arnold got it right when he advised those attempting to translate Homer that, “he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas.”

Now, I’m not saying that R. Kelly is Homer. Trapped in the Closet will not be studied and revered by armies of scholars three thousand years from now (though you never know). But I am trying to say something about the power of parataxis. In that, at least, Homer and R. Kelly share something. There’s an amazing feature to the Trapped in the Closet DVD where R. Kelly gives his commentary to the episodes as he’s watching them. This should be the hypotactic moment where Kelly busts open the immediacy of the narrative and analyzes it, breaks it down, fills it with parenthesis and reflection, etc. But he can’t do it. He doesn’t think that way. So, basically, he simply ends up telling you the exact same story he is singing on the screen. He’s paratactic all the way, baby. It’s his only register. He has nothing to say about the story whatsoever except to reiterate it. That is goddamn amazing to me. It’s like he’s a traveling Rhetor from the sixth century BC to whom the very idea of ‘commentary’ as we generally think of it is completely foreign. When I watched that DVD commentary I was truly sold. People like R. Kelly don’t get produced all that often. I’m a changed man.

“If you’re addicted to alcohol, if a faith program is able to get you off alcohol, we ought to say, hallelujah and thanks…”

George W. Bush
Boston Globe
March 10, 2006

Well, hallelujah back at ya: the Boston Catholic Archdiocese, seeking to deny gay couples adoption privileges in violation of Massachusetts anti-discrimination laws, decided to get out of the adoption business altogether. They are foregoing their $1 million in state funding for adoption services, and have fired their 15 adoption service workers.

The cause is religious freedom – yes, religious freedom. Because the Vatican in 2003 called gay adoptions “gravely immoral,” Massachusetts’ four Roman Catholic bishops decided on February 28, 2006, to seek regulatory relief from state anti-discrimination laws so that Catholic Charities can begin discriminating against potential gay adoptive parents. Though the agency had successfully placed 13 children with gay couples over the past 20 years with no reported ill effects, Boston Archbishop Sean O’Malley announced that the Archdiocese would insist that Catholic Charities desist in order that the exercise of Church’s religious freedom be preserved.

The Archbishop did not give up without a fight. He ascended Beacon Hill in his ever-present Franciscan drag to convert the First Mormon, Governor Mitt Romney, to his cause, surely a delicious irony for anyone who has been accosted by black badge-bearing Utah boys in city streets and subways. An easy mark was the First Mormon, a presidential candidate and co-religious freedomist, but sadly for our proselytizers, the law is against them. Romney has promised to propose a bill guaranteeing the Archdiocese the right to discriminate against gay and lesbian couple adopters, and to do it with state funds.

The Archbishop’s band of four does not appear to be speaking for others connected with Catholic Charities. Its 42-member lay board voted unanimously to continue adoption to gay and lesbian couples. Eight of its members resigned in protest when the Archdiocese announced it would press on nonetheless for the right to discriminate. A Charities’ law firm declined to handle an exception-seeking lawsuit.

Nothing prevents Catholic Charities of Boston from discriminating and doing adoptions in the future. They just can’t have state money that subsidizes their efforts, or, it seems monies from other foundations and charities such as the United Way that practice non-discrimination against gays and lesbians. The deep reliance of Catholic Charities, like other charities, on government monies discloses just how faith-based our do-it-yourself welfare system already is. Consider that about 60% of Catholic Charities of Boston’s funding comes from government sources, roughly the same proportion true of the national Catholic Charities USA.

The Boston Catholic Archdiocese could do what do what other religious organizations have done, freeing their charity arms from church control, thus leaving the churches to believe and the agencies to serve, subsidized by state funds. Given that the curates created this crisis all by themselves by making their right to discriminate a test of their religious freedom, this path seems unlikely. Or, another family agency that obeys the law could hire the 15 fired Catholic Charities workers, and a cooperative and agile state bureaucrat could funnel the subsidy money to them. A little God-given common sense, one might say, could solve this problem in a jiffy.

Don’t count on it. The curates are on a mission. The American Catholic Church has long been committed to getting the states, federal and the 50, to fund the exercise of their religious freedom, as historic campaigns for state funding for Catholic schools, school bus and textbook subsidies for Catholic kids, and tuition tax deductions and vouchers, among other ventures, testifies. They now seek a radical extension. They seek to enforce Catholic norms and beliefs upon non-believers while acting as the direct agent of the state.

A strange, seemingly odd notion of religious freedom, you might say. Yet it is consistent with a kind of Orwellian double-speak that binds and blinds public discourse in so many aspects of American life today. The great French historian of capitalism Fernand Braudel wrote that capitalists, contrary to their professed love of competition in a free marketplace, actually despise competition and all of its attributes. What real capitalists prefer is monopoly status so they can set usurious prices, corrupt the state in their favor, and annihilate any potential competitors by whatever forces they possess (that’s where the state comes in). Remember: Halliburton is not a fish, unfortunately, even in Boston.

Boston’s Catholic clerics answer to a Church in Rome that is religious master of all it surveys on its home grounds. No grasping mullah, imam or rabbi could ask for more. Roman Catholicism in Italy is recognized as the paramount national religion, its priests paid for by the state, as is their ministry in public school classrooms. Its churches are recognized as part of the national patrimony and repaired at state expense when frequent earthquakes befall the peninsula. Religious instruction is mandatory in state schools: the odd Jew, Muslim, or Protestant may ask to be excused from priestly intellectual benedictions, but many I have known over the course of working in Italy for 25 years, just suck it up, as they say in the army, so as not to reinforce their pariah status. In sum, this is the Church that wants the European Community to pronounce itself a Christian nation.

In one sense, then, seeking some domain over state power and authority is part of the Catholic Church playbook. But in the United States, where Catholics are a religious minority, it means joining up with like-minded Protestants who, not to put too fine a point on it, compose the religious right. In fact, from many perspectives, including my own, the John-Paul II revised American Catholic Church now forms part of the religious right. Armed no less than their Protestant brothers with the truth of Jesus Christ, they seek to put real teeth into expression “one nation under God.” If national norms conflict with theirs, they must be changed. Their religious freedom, and its “free exercise thereof” is diminished if its access to state support is diminished. Like Braudel’s good capitalist, they seek guarantees and a good fix. Their institutions need feeding, and state funds in support of their mission – well, things couldn’t get any better, except perhaps than a state religion itself, which isn’t in the cards in America. The Catholic clerics, after several thousand years, are experienced card players.

This little case is our canary in the civic coal mine. It alerts us to the deeply dangerous zone into which America has entered. And it nicely coincides with a new propaganda campaign this week by the Bush regime to gin up support for expanding so-called “faith-based initiatives.” The administration whether by stealthy recounting or by actual distribution claims that $2 billion of a total of $20 billion in health and welfare expenditures currently goes to religious organizations in our do-it-yourself welfare state. The Big Brother in Christ makes it clear that he supports legislation that goes beyond the current authorization of faith-based program grants, and that will enable religious organizations to evade equal opportunity laws that currently prevent them from using religious preference as a hiring criterion. When government gives support to religious people providing social services, Bush says on the White House faith-based initiative website, “charities and faith-based programs should not be forced to change their character or compromise their mission.”

Somewhere deep in the antediluvian folds of my mind, the phrase “soldiers of Christ” resides, and some conjuring of Ignatius Loyola lurks. The White House would allow a Catholic Charities, say, to choose only Catholics for its social workers, and presumably Catholics of whom the clerics would approve for its state-supported work. This is a clever business: first, get the structure and the money right, and then the hearts and minds will follow. The grace of monopoly power could surely work wonders.

A final note. When one puts the machinations of the Christian right, composed now of the Catholic Church and many Protestant sects, in perspective, it forces consideration of the question of why American imperialism, so open to a kind of religious governance at home, is ostensibly so chary of religious governance abroad. The happenstance of building an imperialist majority at home, as in more Christians, more Catholics, more majority? Or perhaps it is the peculiar US hypocrisy of imperialism as foreign policy. Hypothesizing that constant oil flow and nationalist religious fervor don’t mix, the US becomes agnostic and universalistic abroad, while ignoring its Christian identity at home. Imperialism does seem to induce a somnolence at home about the degree to which we become what we pretend to abhor.

Or is it the case that we have met the mullahs, and they are us? If so, let’s stop killing the rest of the world in such great numbers and hold a great domestic inquisition instead. At least, we would be killing each other rather than annihilating substitutes.

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.

                                    UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE June 28, 2007

In the middle of a hot Australian summer, a new Cross City Tunnel forcing motorists to use its subterranean tendrils, road closures making drivers either succumb to its expensive ease or find new ways about, tempers at breaking point, one suddenly caught a glance of the Sydney Opera House, out of the corner of the eye. There, centring the whole city of Sydney, this amazing building still had the power to overwhelm with its leaping shells, its suggestion of ascent to an empyrean. Fruit rinds, sails, wings—each person chooses their own imagery. How far removed from the sweat and fury on the roads below. What Platonic perfection, in contrast to the swearing and rising blood pressure of infuriated drivers. How different a response, at least from me, to grotesque outrages on the spirit such as Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

But then, not wholly, for the history of the Sydney Opera House also reveals failure and tragedy. The physical splendour of those gleaming shells which has contained so much artistic splendour hides great bitterness and grief.  [Photograph by Darren Helsby.]

Most Australians think of Joern Utzon, the architect of the Opera House, as the great Dane, the architect who gave us this building which seems to draw all the horizontals and verticals of the city about its rinds. Yet this man was forced to leave mid-construction after cost blowouts and design problems ran up against philistine government policy. A great deal of dirty pool was played and Utzon’s reputation was besmirched. Another team of architects took over the completion of the interior of the building leaving its artistic integrity compromised and in need of an expensive makeover. Where the money is to come from is the problem. This icon requires plentiful supplies of it, and always will. Recently, the State government has re-established links with the architect and there are now long-term plans for renewal, some of which have already been implemented.

I have been attending performances there since its opening. Even as a student I went on the occasional tour when it seemed as if one had strayed onto some gigantic Mayan temple. There are some evocative photos of the Opera House in this early pupating phase by David Moore. The first performance took place when Paul Robeson sang ‘Joe Hill’ in 1960 at the invitation of the Building Workers Industrial Union, prophetic intimation of the necessity for blood sacrifice on the temple steps.

Utzon left Australia, eventually taking up residency in Majorca, after being given the thumbs down not only by the New South Wales state government, but also by his colleagues back home. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were about, waiting to dispatch Hamlet at the first opportunity. The Queen eventually did get round to opening the building in spectacular style in 1973, but the excited crowds, the flotilla of vessels on the harbour, the planes overhead, hid the shadow side of this architectural leap to the sublime. However, one could go back further in history to come up with an even greater tragedy than Utzon’s.

In the foyer of the Concert Hall there is a bust of Sir Eugène Goossens, the man who first proposed an opera house for Sydney, a home for the performing arts. He fought for it, charmed politicians who eventually came up with the competition that brought forth Utzon. Goossens’ energy, persistence and foresight brought the Sydney Opera House from idea to reality. He had come to Australia to lead the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and head the NSW Conservatorium of Music after brilliant work with Stravinsky and other moderns in Europe and America. All was going swimmingly until Goossens was intercepted on arrival at Mascot airport, back from one of his overseas trips, and found to be carrying with him rather mild forms of pornography that would hardly raise an eyebrow today. Revelations about a relationship with a local celebrity, Rosaleen Norton, the ‘white witch’ of Kings Cross followed on from an orgy of splenetic baying by the press, and Goossens lost his job as Chief Conductor. Exiled in England, he died six years later. As I said, human, all-too-human, the Nietzschean imperative part and parcel of the building down by Circular Quay.

What one has seen and heard there in the decades since its opening: muck-against-glory Strindberg in the Drama Theatre, Bette Davis with her trademark ‘what a dump’ mannerisms, a superb concert-version Ring cycle under the direction of Edo de Waart. And there were plenty of surprises too: the USSR State Symphony Orchestra with Yevgeni Svetlanov tearing through Rachmaninov’s First Symphony, Leonie Rysanek transforming herself into a teenager as Sieglinde, the young French-Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin setting the Concert Hall ablaze with Bruckner when we expected an also-ran after Maazel cancelled. And the great missed opportunities. Ella Fitzgerald! She’ll be back—she never was. What a susurration of the soul has threaded its way beneath and around those shells with theatre, ballet and opera; political demonstrations, recitals and readings; conferences, music, music, music; eating and drinking, dancing, tourists; the solace of the great performance to renovate a spirit at the end of its tether; the weeks of the Olympics, a special feeling, the air like champagne, a general feeling of goodwill.

And yet. There are things still worse than exile, more joyful than sporting celebrations. Go beyond the towering, powder blue sky with its Brancusi curves, back beyond the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, past the old Tram Shed on Bennelong Point where the Sydney Opera House now stands, beyond colonial hard times when floggings, leg irons and rum ruled the roost, to a dusty evening, just as afternoon’s rose fades before the ghosts of spirit ancestors. Aboriginal people—the Cadigal, the Cammeraygal—are fishing around the harbour’s edge. Thousands of years of cultural adaptation are about to undergo severest trauma. Over the horizon sails are approaching—Dutch, French, and British. Dispossession is on the way.

And then again to the present. A performance has finished. The wind drops and evening’s purple dissolves into the swirling waters of the harbour. Crowds have dispersed and you are left to your own devices. John Olsen’s mural tribute to Kenneth Slessor’s poem ‘Five Bells’ stretches out into the darkness beyond. Suddenly, the whole panoply of human endeavour raises its mighty yearning edifice before you with its intolerable cruelties, its inexplicable greatness, imagination’s parallel universe moulding itself through the sculpture whose stairs you descend towards home. Mahler and Shakespeare are echoing in the shells, lithe limbs reaching apotheosis in the Rose Adagio, with cheering, waves of applause, first visits and last glimpses. Before you, above you, around you, is the winged victory of human aspiration made visible in concrete, steel and tile. The Sydney Opera House stands, not phantasmagoric, something inspiration, technology and sheer hard work brought forth at the cusp of city and ocean, yacht sails and ferry lights disappeared in evening.

A glimpse of the Sydney Opera House from a mess of traffic. The spirit is refreshed and your blood pressure eases, architectural lines tracing from paper the nervelines of our best intentions, metamorphosing into reality, not dissolving into thin air. Silence is best then. The heart, vexed but not yet cynical muscle, is too full to say anything more.

                                                                        *
                                  Sydney

A kookaburra’s blubbering laugh
Skids above the gumtrees’ lean,
Shards of light rekindling
Harbour’s blue acetylene.

And blossoms large as bruises fall
In supplication where a swirl
Of wings divide this limping air,
Cresting over beachs’ foil,

Roundabouts of coastal wrap,
Sandstone blocks and bitumen,
Miles of terracotta roofs
Sloped to sheer oblivion.

Flesh abrades in shower and bed
Geographies for loving,
Hillside muscles slumped
On salted sheets’ revisions.

Cockatoo headline of Opera House sails
Flashes its crest near the Quay
As night’s shenanigans up at the Cross
Dwindle to weak cups of tea.

Pulseline of buildings mortgages trains
Where Heralds flap into position,
Row upon row of white collars creased,
Timetables laughed at by larrikins.

Westwards to afternoon, reaching at bush,
Grids sweat time from the crowd,
Circling emerald’s eucalypt swash
Strking sunset down.

Then, past backyards, over the mountains,
Images float to the brain,
Tethered by dreaming in suburbs
Beside the Pacific’s black sheen.

Heralds: The Sydney Morning Herald  Written 1993
Lines 17 and 18 from this poem were used in a booklet (poetry and photographs) given to official guests at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, along with work by Henry Lawson, Douglas Stewart, David Campbell, Judith Wright, Judith Beveridge and others.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Since our incarnation as a destitute and sometimes diligent academic, we haven’t possessed a TV, much less cable. We lead a wonderfully Spartan life here in Cambridge, reading, writing, braving the Massachusetts winter. Like hermits, ascetics, Eskimos, or those lost natives of the Amazon with dangling members, it seems we have also lost the talent for chit-chat, small talk. Consequently, the opening episode of “The Sopranos” Season Six presented us with a project. We had to call up old friends, mend tenuous if not severed relationships, invest in wine, crackers, a pricy lump of cheese. It was an awkward encounter, a bona fide production.

Had Tony been in a similar predicament, he would have done things differently: the balding, bearish, flinty-eyed Soprano antihero would have showed up unannounced, yelled at his host (arguably Arty), consumed the six-pack he brought for himself, sprawled on the couch, hand jammed in trousers, cradling his testicles. Strangely, we understand the impulse. In fact, we have a visceral appreciation of Tony’s likes and dislikes, his aspirations and motivations, his rages, his lusts. Even Tony’s theme song, the moody, bluesy A3 number, resonates in quiet cantons of our head most mornings during Soprano season:

“When you woke up this morning everything you had was gone/
By half past ten your head was going ding-dong/
Ringing like a bell from your head down to my toes/
Like a voice telling you there was something you should know/
Last night you were flying but today you’re so low/
Ain’t it times like these that make you wonder/
If you’ll ever know the meaning of things as they appear to the others…”

Typically, we’d consider having our head checked. After all, identifying with a sociopath is always a troubling development. And Tony is not a mere sociopath; he’s serial adulterer, a misogynist, a man who considered murdering his own mother. He has no real friends and has people he calls friends murdered. He is a very, very bad man.

We have, of course, empathized with such men before, from Richard III to Patrick Bateman, American Psycho. In American popular culture, the antihero has a rich heritage. The protagonists that populate the canon of film noir, for instance, are real pieces of work. Mike Hammer, the antihero of “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955), is, as his name suggests, not a charming rogue but a brute. A commentator characterizes him as a “cheap and sleazy, contemptible, fascist private investigator/vigilante.” Hammer’s doppelgangers populate other genres of cinema, from the cool, squinty, monosyllabic and violent Blondie in the late Western, “The Good, Bad and Ugly” (1967) to the raging, foul-mouthed Cuban gangster, Tony Montana in DePalma’s gangster film, “Scarface” (1983).

Interestingly, David Liao makes the case that Scarface has even influenced gangsta rap:

“Perhaps no movie has had as conspicuous an impact on hip-hop, and more specifically the genre’s gangsta variation, as ‘Scarface’…Since its release, [it] has lent its dialogue, music, fashion and  imagery to countless rap artists and their songs, such as Notorious B.I.G’s ‘10 Crack Commandments’ and Mobb  Deep’s ‘It’s Mine.’ One rapper has even gone so far as to adopt ‘Scarface’ as a stage name, and build an entire career around references to the movie.  Indeed, two decades later, it seems as if the very essence of De Palma’s film has been assimilated by the hip-hop community, or at least a highly prolific segment of it. Evidence of this can be seen in the 2003 album ‘Def Jam Recordings Present Music Inspired by Scarface,’ a compilation of songs by artists including Jay-Z, N.W.A, Ice Cube and even Grandmaster Flash.”

There may be some resonance of the classic American antihero in the rage of old-school gangsta rap but its ethos is informed by a different variety of disestablishmentarianism. Institutional racism dates back not more than a couple of generations and continues to exert itself. NWA’s beef with the police has little to do with Hammer and Blondie, Tony Soprano or Tony Montana. Their anthemns concern certain ground realities; in particular, the reality of being a young black man on the streets of Compton, LA:

“*uck tha police comin’ straight from the underground/
Young *igga got it bad cuz I’m brown/
And not the other color so police think/
They have the authority to kill a minority…

*uckin with me cuz I’m a teenager/
With a little bit of gold and a pager/
Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product/
Thinkin’ every *igga is sellin’ narcotics…”

Of course, this raw sentiment has since been appropriated and cheapened by hip-hop, repackaged and marketed for an audience of young white men who wear baggy jeans and tilted caps and furiously mouth manifestos while listening to their I-Pods. Faraway, in the banlieus of urban France, young North African men find meaning in hip-hop, in what Staley Crouch calls the “thug-and-slut minstrelsy,” and roving child soldiers in Sierra Leone also listen to it while hacking off limbs.

But perhaps we shouldn’t treat this generation with too much sarcasm. After all, back in the day, we listened to NWA as well (and can spout lyrics on demand). Why, boys and girls, are we all drawn to the antihero, black, or white?

Montana sagaciously mulled this question before us and arrived at the following conclusion:

“Whattaya lookin’ at? You’re all a bunch of *ucking *ssholes. You know why? ‘Cause you don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be. You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your *ucking fingers, and say ‘that’s the bad guy.” So, what dat make you? Good? You’re not good; you just know how to hide. Howda lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth–even when I lie. So say goodnight to the bad guy. Come on; the last time you gonna see a bad guy like this, let me tell ya. Come on, make way for the bad guy. There’s a bad guy comin’ through; you better get outta his way!”

In this rather brilliant discursive philosophic pose, Montana seems to be suggesting the symbiotic duality of good and evil, an echo of the Zoroastrian creation myth, the Sufi malamti tradition, the business of Yin and Yang. Also inherent in his response is an allusion to Freudian tension, the Ego grating against the Id. (We here must note that we agree when Nabokov when he says, “Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.”) Parsing Montana’s pithy treatise is a project for a bigger, better man. We return, then, to our initial impulse, Tony Soprano, and pose a different, perhaps more interesting question altogether: why does “The Sopranos” command such popularity in America today?

That Tony is a sociopathic leader may have some resonance among a segment of the voting populace but this variety of exegesis seems somewhat facile to us (and as a young Muslim male in America today, not at all advisable.) No, we suspect that apart from being an intelligent, dramatic show (when every other critically feted production these days seems to be peculiarly undramatic, whether we’re talking “Capote,” “Good Night and Good Luck” or “A History of Violence”), “The Sopranos” evokes nostalgia for a simpler time, for simpler violence.

After 9/11, America, indeed the world, changed. The scourge of international terrorism suddenly threatened civilization. A “War On Terror” was waged. Now, there are different ground realties. Iraqis are daggers drawn, their country teetering on civil war. The Afghans have a smart new leader but continue shooting themselves in the foot as they have throughout their bloody history. And somewhere in the southern Afghanistan, in and around Helmand, lurks Osama bin Laden, and his one-eyed pal, Mullah Omar (who corroborates the proverbial theory that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”). They are figures we cannot identity with. Tony Soprano may be a very bad guy but he’s goodfella. He whacks some people; he scratches his balls; he’s the sort of antihero we get. It’s kind of like the sage once said, “All I have in this world is my balls, and my word, and I don’t break ‘em for no one. Jou understand?” We do.

Arif Abid of Karachi, Pakistan, has kindly given 3 Quarks Daily permission to publish his fascinating short study of Nawab Tafazzul Hussain Khan. If anyone knows of further primary sources of information on Nawab Taffazzul Hussain Khan, Mr. Abid would appreciate an email at [ arifabid at cyber.net.pk ]

A POISONED CHALICE

By Arif Abid

“……he taught mathematics in the morning to students in Calcutta, then visited English friends until noon. In the afternoon he taught Imami law, and after supper expounded Hanafi law. In the evenings he read philosophy alone”.

      –Abd al-Latif Musawi Shushtari

Alas! The zest of Learning’s cup is gone;
Whose taste ne’er cloy’d, tho’ deep the draughts;
Whose flavour yet upon the palate hangs
Nectareous, nor Reason’s thirst assuag’d
But yes; – rent is the garment of the morn;
And all dishevell’d floats the hair of night;
All bath’d in tears of dew the stars look down
With mournful eyes, in lamentation deep:
For he, their sage belov’d, is dead; who first
To Islam’s followers explain’d their laws.
Their distances, their orbits, and their times,
As great Copernicus once half divin’d,
And greater Newton proved: but, useless now,
Their work we turn with idle hand, and scan
With vacant eye, our own first master gone.

      –Verse from an elegy written by Mirza Abu Talib in praise of Tafazzul Hussain Khan

These extracts refer to Khan-e-Allama Nawab Tafazzul Hussain Khan (1727-1800), a man who embraced and promoted modernity and the scientific outlook in the formative phase of British imperialism in the sub-continent. In his lifetime he was acknowledged as the harbinger of a new age and given the high accolade of Khan-e-Allama. However, his legacy was still born. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the contemporary sub-continental psyche was formed essentially during that period when we made our first substantial contact with a new civilization which brought with it an altogether different world view, a world view with which we still have an uneasy and disjointed relationship. Two hundred years after his death we still find ourselves adrift in this world because of the absence of a scientific outlook and our own vision of modernity. It is critical that we study that period and find out what factors brought this about and what it has made of us. Was it that, as a colonized people, we imbibed the draught of modernity from a poisoned chalice?

We are still living in an age of imperialism. In these straitened circumstances, with our backs to the wall, there is still a reluctance to learn from history. This is an opportune moment to look back at that earlier age of imperialism and the life of a man who tried to build bridges between traditionalism and modernity. Tafazzul Hussain Khan was of Kashmiri descent where his grandfather was a highly ranked Mughal official. Born in Sialkot, his father moved to Delhi when he was around fourteen. In Delhi “he studied rational sciences by the Nizami method”. When his family moved to Lucknow, he “had an opportunity to study at Farangi Mahal itself, working with Mulla Hasan. He asked Mulla Hasan so many difficult questions that the Farangi-Mahalli finally hurled his book to the ground in exasperation and expelled him from the classroom. Tafazzul then studied on his own, mastering difficult philosophical works by Avicenna in Arabic”.

He later came to the attention of Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab Vizier of Oudh, who appointed him as tutor to his second son, Sadaat Ali Khan. During this period and when the capital moved from Faizabad to Lucknow, Tafazzul made friends with some of the British settled there.

This was the beginning of a new phase in his life. While he continued with his work in mathematics and philosophy he ‘……began the study of the English language…..in two years he was not only able to understand any English mathematical work but to peruse with pleasure the volumes of our best historians and moralists.’

In 1788 he was appointed as Ambassador to the British capital at Calcutta.

It is time we hear directly from the man holding centre stage, and what would be more appropriate than doing so in one of the languages recently learnt by him – English. Here is an extract from a letter to his friend David Anderson in Edinburgh.

‘I have’, he says, ‘been unfortunately compelled to supply the place vacated by the death of Raja Govind Ram. It was not without reluctance that I accepted the offer…… Had Lord Cornwallis not encouraged me to hold my connections with public affairs, it would have proved very difficult to me to manage the office in which I was put by the imprudent importunity of my superiors.’

The final phrase –’imprudent importunity of my superiors’- elegant yet strong, kept coming back to my mind and I try to imagine the person who wrote it: independent, passionate and at odds with his ‘superiors’. This conflict would grow and have disastrous consequences.

In the event, Tafazzul’s move to Calcutta proved to be a fortuitous one; he was to spend the next ten years of his life there. Sir William Jones had already founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal where linguists and mathematicians had gathered to study the literature and sciences of the sub-continent. Tafazzul made friends in this circle and it was probably now, if not earlier, he began the study of Latin, the language of classical learning in Europe. He would later add Greek to his repertoire.

Tafazzul’s interests were in both modern and ancient literature, but his first love would always remain mathematics and astronomy. Reuben Burrows, the mathematician, writes: ‘ Tofuzzel Hussein continues translating the Principia of Newton (from Latin to Arabic) and I think we shall soon begin to print it here in Arabic….He has likewise translated Emerson’s Mechanics, and a treatise on algebra (that I wrote for him) in Arabic. He is now employed in translating Appollonius de Sectione Rationis. The fate of this work is singular; it was translated from Greek into Arabic, and the Greek original was lost; it was afterwards translated from Arabic into Latin, from an old manuscript in the Bodleian library; the Arabic of it is now totally lost in Asia. I translated the Latin version into English and from the English Tofuzzel Hussein is now rendering it into Arabic again.’

William Jones would write to a friend “….Tafazzul Hussain Khan is doing wonders in English and Mathematicks (sic).”

Apart from his work in the rational sciences he ‘contributed a number of discourses on works related to the Hadis, the tradition of the Holy Prophet and jurisprudence and on Islamic philosophy and sciences; these studies were so numerous and varied that something of their kind had rarely been attempted by other scholars.’

Learning also involved a process of un-learning and the new scientific verities were publicly discussed and debated. One recorded instance concerns Copernicus’s theory that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the earth being the centre of the universe. Tafazzul publicly stated that Copernicus was right, leading to the orthodoxy raising a hue and cry when their traditional beliefs were disputed. Tafazzul’s response was that the Prophet had said that you must seek knowledge even if you have to go to China. Such was his standing that the matter rested there.

Tafazzul’s influence was far reaching and a contemporary, Abd al-Latif Shushtari, who was the Ambassador of Hyderabad to the British in Calcutta, describes him thus: ‘Tafazzul was respected by the scholars of Europe and people from every part of the country paid respect to his excellence. In fact, his merits, scholarship and learning entitled him to a higher status. It required a lifetime to write about his merits. The entire India and its people were proud of Tafazzul and paid high respects to him and venerated him for his scholarly attributes. It has been since ages that a scholar of Tafazul’s stupendous intellect was born’.

Lord Cornwallis later revealed further dimensions to his thinking on his ‘connections with public affairs’ and in a subsequent letter to David Anderson, written in Persian, Tafazzul says: ‘……. he thought of sending me as Resident, on the part of his government, to the Nizam Aly Khan, but as I had been long absent from home, and found it difficult to even remain at Calcutta, I saw that it would be out of my power to undertake so distant a journey’.

Tafazzul’s life had started taking on some of the elements of Greek tragedy, products of a culture whose ancient civilization he admired and whose language he was learning to enable him to drink deeply from it. His abilities were now coveted by both the English and the ruling family of Awadh and his strengths were to become his Achilles heel. The former, a progressively more ambitious and powerful force in India, both economically and politically, though it had still not gained the strangle-hold that it would in the coming decades. As for the latter, it was a medieval monarchy with limited vision and ambition, which had already partially surrendered its sovereignty to the British after the defeat at Buxar. In this world of volatile and contradictory forces ( a chimera to put it in a nutshell), whose definitive direction had still not fully manifested itself, Tafazzul was having to fend his way. Tafazzul’s own vision, inherent in his life’s work, to facilitate the natural progression of the sub-continent from medievalism to modernity, was not of interest to either side. Each had their specific need of him which they expected fulfilled.

—————————–

Awadh had been a province of the Mughal Empire, but had become independent as the empire entered terminal decline, though they still paid symbolic homage to the emperor. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century it was the richest province in the sub continent and Lucknow was to become the largest metropolis with a population of around a million. In 1764, Shuja ud Daula made the critical mistake of taking on the British and lost a decisive battle at Buxar. After signing a treaty with them that made substantial concessions he regained his kingdom.

Shuja ud Daula was succeeded by his eldest son Asaf ud Daula. One of his first acts was to move the capital from Faizabad to Lucknow to escape the interference in his dissolute ways of his mother, the Bahu Begum. It was an apt beginning for Lucknow as it was to become a world of fantasy and excess, where poetry and sensuality were the ruling spirits. For all its achievements, and there were indeed many, its guiding principle was to escape from the harsher realities of life. However, in all fairness, it has to be mentioned that the British reduced them to the status of puppets and revenue collectors which suited their purposes.

The real world intruded but rarely; and in Asaf ud Daula’s case it was usually when he had to pay the annual subsidy to the British and he found the treasury empty. Profligate, vain, pusillanimous, he allowed the British to impose more and more demands on him and now, apart from conducting the defense of his realm and controlling its foreign relations, he allowed them to have the final okay on the selection of his prime minister. Sir John Shore had taken over from Lord Cornwallis as Governor General and he found the serving prime minister, Jhau Lal, inimical to the British. Moreover, not only were there no funds to pay the subsidy, there were loans outstanding and corruption was rampant. This was 1797 and Tafazzul Hussain Khan was still in Calcutta.

‘….the former must be the object of my choice as he was of the Vizier’s and the Board who so well know his worth, his abilities, his extensive knowledge, and the energy of his character and his high reputation’.

‘….my efforts to persuade Tafazzul Hussain Khan to accept the office, and I feel the sincerest satisfaction as my success was only because I have the highest respect for his talents and integrities’.

‘….he undertakes the office with a reluctance that nothing but my influence and solicitations could have subdued’.

These entries on Tafazzul are in Sir John Shore’s papers regarding his appointment . Shore, in his self-congratulatory mood, is completely blind to his specious reasoning. Whatever Tafazzul’s qualities, none of them point towards his ability to exercise power. In fact, he was a soft spoken, mild mannered man who ‘never changed his courteous and egalitarian behaviour towards the poor and the weak’. Furthermore, what stands out is that not once does Shore show any sensitivity to Tafazzul’s feelings on the matter. Even the editor of the Asiatic Annual Register, who lived in London and had never met Tafazzul, concedes in his obituary: ‘….an appointment not at all suitable to his inclinations, as literary fame, rather than political preferment, was the object of his ambitions’. I have found no record of Tafazzul’s own thoughts on this appointment. He could, of course, no longer use the excuse of having to go far away from home as Lucknow was home, or of already being in the employ of Asaf ud Daulah. Ironically enough, the one oblique reference to it I found is from Shore in his tribute to the man in his obituary. He says: ‘ ….he proved his disinterestedness, by declining to receive the usual emoluments of a most lucrative office, and by confining himself to the receipt of a salary, barely adequate to his expenses. An uncommon instance of moderation and self denial’. Shore’s perceptions seem misdirected; I would have thought that Tafazzul was aware of the situation that he was getting into and wanted to show the Awadhis that self interest was not a motivating factor plus he wanted to maintain a degree of independence. Shore is, apart from everything else, an enigmatic and unreliable witness. He says Tafazzul was ‘between forty and fifty’ when he started to study the English language; he was actually fifty five. Then there is Shore’s Freudian slip in the same tribute: ‘…his honour unimpeached’. What had happened, but was left unsaid, since his earlier statements that he had to assert this point?

Thus we had the strange, even ludicrous, spectacle of the leading mathematician of the country reluctantly making his way to Lucknow to, amongst other things, introduce economies, sort out the account books and produce a surplus so that the subsidy could be paid.

This is not supposed to be a history of Awadh so I will paraphrase. Tafazzul took over the reins of office around April 1797. Asaf ud Daula fell ill in July 1797. Refused to take medicine. Died 21 September 1797. Succeeded by Wazir Ali Khan, his eldest son and supposedly his designated heir. He is 16 years 5 months and 3 days old at the time of his accession.

The ruler and his chief executive could not have been more different from each other. Tafazzul, 70 years old and a Khan e Allama, a scholar used to patiently labouring at every new undertaking, rigorously meticulous, searching for truth in theoretical disciplines and at all times seeking to enlarge and enrich his culture. Wazir Ali, not yet past his teens and suddenly vested with power and responsibility, brash, callow and smarting from all his observations over the years of seeing his father acting subserviently to the British. What exacerbated this situation was that Tafazzul was, after all, the choice of the British and perceived as prejudiced in their favour.

It was a loaded situation, which soured and deteriorated, becoming more complicated with time as other players entered the fray and Wazir Ali made desperate efforts to become independent of British influence. Relations between the two reached breaking point. Tafazzul sent a message to Wazir Ali through a friend to be patient, but it was ignored. A sensitive man, Tafazzul fell ill from exhaustion. Lucknow was rife with rumours that Wazir Ali wanted to kill Tafazzul and when he visited him at his home with 800 armed men the obvious conclusions were drawn. This did not happen, but Tafazzul found himself in dire straits caught in the cross fire between the imperial imperative of a grasping power and the bumbling efforts of a frustrated Nawabi trying to regain its sovereignty.

The mirror, which Shore had never looked at anyway, had cracked. All the contradictions inherent in the situation came to the fore. Tafazzul wrote to Shore: ‘As far as I can judge there is no possibility of remedying and arranging matters without coercion. Wazir Ali bears no resemblance to Asaf ud Daula. He is totally devoid of fear and apprehension and has been led through ignorance and by the instigation of the incendiaries about him…’

This was followed shortly thereafter by this letter to Shore’s Persian translator: ‘In the situation I now find myself….it is absolutely proper and necessary for me at all events to get out of this place. The mode of doing this as soon as possible, is now what employs my thoughts. The Governor General and your coming gives me hope of Safety’.

The matter was not going to be as simple as that, especially since Shore was shortly returning to England and he had his own reputation to think of. Tafazzul met Shore on the way to Lucknow and discussions were held. It was decided that Wazir Ali had to be replaced by Tafazzul’s former pupil, Sadaat Ali Khan. Tafazzul’s role in this episode earned him the opprobrium of Awadhis.

Sadaat Ali Khan ascended the musnad in 1798 and, I believe, also assumed the office of prime minister. Tafazzul briefly stayed on in Lucknow and then went again to Calcutta as Ambassador. He surrounded himself with books and led a quiet and reclusive life. The much admired ‘energy of his character’ deserted him and he had a paralytic stroke and died shortly afterwards in early 1800, in all probability a heart broken man.

Sir John Shore went back to England in 1798 and was elevated to the peerage. He was henceforth known as Lord Teignmouth.

My father, whom I called Bhayya, grew up in the early part of the last century in the city of Lucknow in northern India. This intersection of period and place was perhaps the acme of Urdu-speaking culture, known ever since all over the subcontinent not only for its sublime literary achievements and the refinement of its manners, but also for its high ideals of decency and civility. One of the many ways in which these were manifested in the tehzeeb or culture of Lucknow was in its uncommon aspiration to male gentleness. This can perhaps best be described as something akin to the opposite of machismo. Even the shadow of aggressiveness was to be suppressed by men, with those unable to do so being considered barbarians or, at the very least, riff-raff.  [Photo shows the Husainabad Imambara in Lucknow.]

Bhayya was a near-perfect product of this enviable culture, and hence I never even heard him raise his voice. Ever. Instead, one glimpsed his manliness in random, small ways. For example, I remember once when I was a child we were driving somewhere in our family car when a huge bumblebee flew in through a slightly open window and proceeded to make our driver almost crash the car, so busy was he ducking and furiously swatting at it. As the bumblebee droned loudly, crashing back and forth between various surfaces, with the rest of us (mostly adults) in the car spastically and violently trying to avoid it, my father sat perfectly still. Then with a single quick and confident motion of his hand, he had grabbed the bee and crushed it to death in his fist. He threw it out the window and didn’t say anything, but the bee had been faster than he, and later at home I noticed his swollen hand.

Bhayya also had the simplicity and frugal habits of someone who has grown up without very much. Hence he would use the same basic bar of laundry soap to bathe, wash his hair and face, and whip into a lather with a small brush for shaving. (I have heard that before I was born, in his eccentric attempts at economy, he even once tried to make large quantities of soap at home with the help of his brother and some vats of fairly toxic chemicals, but luckily my mother put her foot down and that was the end of that.) And shaving gives us another rare instance of his appearing somewhat macho: he always shaved with a razor blade (of the kind in the photo on the right) held simply between his forefingers and thumb. Whether he chose not to use a proper holder for the blade as another step in his economizing campaign, or because of some other personal preference or secret to a good shave, I will never know since I never had the courage to ask him while he was alive. It was quite frightening to watch though, because one felt that if he were startled he might accidentally slit his own jugular, but then, as we know from the bumblebee incident, he wasn’t easily startled. (And no, he did not die in a shaving accident.) All I know is that because of him, every time I shave with my fancy Gillette razor, I feel like a bit of a sissy. But we’ll come back to shaving later.

A peacock’s tail presented an obvious problem for Charles Darwin, in that it doesn’t enhance its owner’s ability to survive. Indeed, it is such an expensive investment of precious resources (to grow it), not to mention an unnecessary burden to carry around, making it much harder to flee from predators, for example, that it is actually a significant handicap. And the peacock is by no means alone in possessing such costly ornament. There are countless other species which exhibit similar traits, such as the humongous antlers of male reindeer. Darwin immediately realized that something other than plain old natural selection is involved here, and he called it sexual selection and devoted most of his book The Descent of Man to it. Here’s the basic idea: in species which reproduce sexually, while natural selection works to increase an individual’s ability to survive to an old(er) age, sexual selection works to increase an individual’s chances of mating with a greater number of partners. For sexually reproducing species, just surviving is not enough. One could presumably increase one’s chances of living longer by not fighting over mates and incurring the many costs of pursuing them to mate with them, for instance, but one would not leave many descendants that way, and such individuals would soon be wiped out of the population. Since bringing up young is very costly, especially for the females of many species, since they often bear all if not most of this cost, it is in their interest to make sure that their descendants have the best genes possibles. In other words, they must try to mate with the best males available. (Males of species who do not invest heavily in child-rearing do not have to be as picky about females because they can just try to mate with as many females as possible.) And here is where sexual selection enters the picture. Males who are able to attract more females will leave more descendants, and they attract females by advertising the quality of their own genes. There are many ways to do this, and the peacock’s tail is one of them.

Such ornaments must be costly to function effectively as advertisements of fitness and health, because if they were not, it would be easy to fake them. For example, males of a certain species might start growing fake muscles which only look like real muscles (but are cheaper to grow) to appear strong. If this were the case, females would quickly start using some other criterion (like seeing if the male can actually lift a heavy weight) to make their choices. A costly investment in ornament is more difficult for less-fit males (such as diseased ones, for example) to make, and it is this that makes the ornament an honest display of fitness. (Now you know why men feel the need to buy Porches!) So, while the tail of a peacock may start as an advertisement of health and overall fitness (“look at me, I am so good at finding food and avoiding predators that I can afford to grow and maintain this expensive tail, and am still strong enough to get away from that fox which wants to eat me!”), there is something more that can happen as was shown by Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher: runaway sexual selection.

What Fisher showed mathematically was that once such a process of sexual selection (where a male develops a trait that causes at least some females to prefer him) gets started, this male trait and the female tendency to prefer it become genetically correlated in descendants, and will spread quickly through the population in what he described as a “runaway process.” And as they spread, both traits (the male ornament and the female tendency to prefer males who have it) tend to themselves become exaggerated. With peahens unable to resist the sight of an awesome male tail, peacocks try to outdo each other by growing bigger and bigger and fancier tails. Of course, a point is reached where the natural selection costs of the tail actually start outweighing the sexual selection benefits of being able to impress potential mates, and a kind of equilibrium is reached. But not before this process of evolution giving rise to such whimsically resplendent ornaments as the peacock’s tail we see today.

An interesting theory of the origins of the relative hairlessness of humans relies on such a process of sexual selection. In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself dismissed more utilitarian explanations for the human loss of hair in favor of a sexual selection process, believing that in our ancestral men there arose an arbitrary preference for less hairy women, and that was enough (in what we would now call a Fisherian runaway process) to eventually result in our almost total loss of body hair, especially in women. Others, like Alfred Russell Wallace, believed that less body hair, at least initially, arose for actual utilitarian reasons, such as getting rid of lice, and being able to see whether one’s potential mate has lice or other parasites and the condition and color of their skin–an important indicator of health, with a sexual selection process then following. Recent work suggests that Wallace was probably right, and that the invention of fire and clothing to keep warm without body hair made it possible for humans to lose it. (By the way, pubic and underarm hair may have been retained as a way of efficiently dispersing sexual pheromones, whose importance is much underappreciated in our society.)

So what does this have to do with shaving? Well, nothing much yet, though as you can see, our relative hairlessness may have much in common with a peacock’s tail, at least in terms of how they came about. Now, you probably know that in the realm of culture, memes often spread in ways that are analogous to the way that genes spread through populations. This is how fashions, for example, get started. An arbitrary preference for pants that are flared a bit at the bottom gets going somehow, and before you know it a huge runaway fashion-selection process is in full sway, and you see huge bell-bottomed pants everywhere. I believe our present overall cultural tendency to prefer being clean-shaven probably also worked something like this. At some point a century or more ago, when shaving technology was not very advanced, it may have been an indication of success (or “fitness”) for a man to be clean-shaven, just as clean and expensive clothes would be: it meant that he had the resources and the leisure to go to a barber regularly. Or maybe there just spontaneously arose a preference for shaved men among women (they look more youthful, after all), and then the practice (or meme) spread through the culture in a runaway selection process, no different in principle from the cyclical vogue for thin ties, or wide collars, or short(er) hair for men than for women.

And finally, I come full-circle back to shaving technology with a last example of a completely runaway process which came to my attention by way of this year’s Super Bowl show on TV. One of the truly great advances in shaving razors came in 1971 when two blades were put close next to each other on a razor. This resulted in a much smoother, more comfortable shave, and the age of the Gillette Trac II began. But as you may know, the preference for more blades was not to stop there. If two blades were better than one, then three had to be better than two: in 1998 we were given the Gillette Mach 3 with three blades. (This is the razor that I use, though I am not sure if it is really any better than two-bladed ones.) Not to be outdone, a few years ago Schick introduced its Quattro with four blades! Being a sucker for marketing, I immediately bought it, but found that the blade is so wide that it is hard to shave the small areas on one’s upper lip, under the nose, etc. But in an almost unbelievable move, and with a $100 million marketing campaign for its launch, Gillette is fighting back by unveiling its Fusion razor on TV during the Super Bowl. The Fusion is a true peacock’s tail with six blades! I wonder what my father would have thought of that.

[An extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing can be found at www.jehsmith.com]

I’ve always loved borders.  I still have a photo album from a 1978 tip across the United States, and remarkably the great bulk of them –matted, square prints from those old, flat cameras– are of my sister and me in Montessori school T-shirts and short shorts, sporting identical bowl cuts, grinning contentedly in front of signs such as ‘You Are Now Leaving Wyoming’, and ‘Welcome to South Dakota’.  I believed we were making history that summer, in the back of our grandparents’ AMC Hornet station wagon that always smelled like burnt butter.  Who before us had crossed so many borders?  We heard ‘50 Ways to Leave your Lover’ on the AM radio, endured a plague of locusts in Nebraska, saw scattered dinosaur-themed monuments, and, when the outer edge of my right knee would by gravity and heat-induced lethargy drift into contact with the outer edge of her left, she would say ‘gross’ and insert a napkin between them.  The skin too is a border and sometimes must be secured.

Years later, I discovered that I enjoyed travelling to places principally in view of the places my destinations were next to.  In Leningrad, I fantasized about Finland; in Istanbul, I couldn’t stop thinking about what life is like in Bulgaria; in Egypt, I wanted nothing more than to cross into Libya; and in Argentina, it was Paraguay that captured my imagination.  I hate my whereabouts on principle just as I loathe the specious present and yearn for some authentic future. 

Sometimes my curiosity overpowers me and I depart to see what is on the other side.  In Leningrad I pretended I was sick so that the Soviets would give me an exit-entry visa to go to Helsinki for medical care.  I departed on the train with the Kalevala and a russko-finskii razgovornik filled with Finnish phrases written in the Cyrillic alphabet.  From the former, I still remember the opening lines of a spell intended to keep away bears: ‘O bear.  O honey-paws.  O handsome chubby lad of the forest’.  From the latter I can still remember the numbers one through five, which, transliterating back into the Latin alphabet, look something like this: yksi, kaksi, kolme, nelja, viisi.  I spent all the money I had on a hotel room and a vending-machine sandwich, and returned to the Soviet Union the next day, rather less gloriously than Lenin before me.  To the Finland Station, yes, but without even a plan for myself, let alone for world revolution.  This is what always happens when I succumb to my longing for neighboring territories.  I realize I am there for no good reason, and I return.    

In 1978, from some point in Minnesota, we crossed into Canada.  My six-year-old mind struggled to grasp the difference between national and state boundaries.  I knew that on the map the boundary between Minnesota and Canada consisted in dashes followed by two dots instead of one, and this I found significant.  They made us stop at the border, not just to ask us about any produce we might be carrying, but about our very identity.  We ate lunch, I believe, at a border truck stop, and turned right around, and our grandparents announced to us that we were now ‘world travellers’. 

In 1987 or so my mother sent me to sailing camp along the British Columbian coast, but what we didn’t know when I set off from Sacramento was that I would be stuck on a boat run by proselytizing Christians.  The summer prior I had been stuck at a Christian horse camp, but at least when you’re on a Christian horse you can jump off and run to the nearest payphone to demand to be picked up.  When you’re on a Christian boat, you have no choice but to wait it out, which is hard when you are 15 and have recently discovered Trotsky and Kafka, and want nothing so much as to get back to Victoria and find that punk-rock chick who invited you to some show just because you looked cool.  But no, you’re stuck on ‘night watch’ 100 ‘knots’ up the coast of Vancouver Island.  What the hell were we watching for, pirates?  I remember pulling up a bucket of seawater and stirring it to see the bioluminescent sea creatures glow.  ‘Explain that, Christians’, I remember thinking.  No doubt they would have thought themselves capable. 

Back in port, I found the punk-rock chick and she got me into a show.  A group of us spent the night on the floor of some kid’s parents’ home, assured that the parents were away on the mainland.  There was plenty of Southern Comfort and marijuana.  We listened to Crass.  A skinhead girl wearing tennis shoes recounted her recent trip to Montreal, and how when she was sleeping on the sidewalk there some other skinheads stole her Docs.  Montreal’s bad ass, everyone agreed. 

It would be 15 years before I would come back to Canada, and the next time it would be to Montreal, and, apparently, for good.  Earlier in this space I disputed Montreal’s claim to bad-ass status by any interesting measure.  I do see plenty of squeegee punks with tattooed faces lurking about in traffic, accosting drivers, hoping to strike that perfect balance between threatening and pitiable.  I hear they’re on a circuit between here and BC.  Some are old and particularly worn out, and sometimes I imagine I recognize the skin chick sans Docs, now in her thirties, like me, but now of an altogether different species. 

In those 15 years I never once thought about crossing into Canada.  Living in New York, I never developed a trace of the transborder fugue syndrome that brought me to Finland and Bulgaria from Russia and Turkey.  Into my psychical geography I factored New Jersey and Long Island, and a sliver of Connecticut, and most of that mass of land we call ‘Upstate’.  But Canada was as non-existent.  All my fugues in those days were trans-Atlantic.

I do not wish to complain about Canada for a second time, as I had initially planned to do.  I was in a foul mood when I wrote my first essay on the place, and I apologize to all those I offended.  I will say nothing about Stephen Harper, that hair-helmeted, Mattel-doll version of Newt Gingrich, nor about the complacent idiocy that clings, generation after generation, to a borrowed and vestigial queen.  Recently, I’ve been re-reading Montaigne, and this affects my mood dramatically.  You will get off easy if I don’t drift off into a discourse on my favorite sauces.  Come to think of it, that québécois gravy with cheese curd known as poutine is just fine, and so, even, is sirop d’érable.   

It is noteworthy, though, what an important part of Canada’s own psychogeography is its southern border.  The Canadians live pressed up against it like it were a source of heat.  From my 14th-floor window, facing the South, I imagine I can see the Adirondacks of Upstate.  But increasingly it is not, for me, in facing South that I have the sharpest feeling of what it is like to be in Canada.  This I have facing North, or even, with eyes closed, feeling North by I don’t know which sense.  Just as I get settled in a place where the border is all-important, accounting for 85% of the commerce of goods and at least as much of what Leibniz far too optimistically called the ‘commerce of light’, I find that borders have ceased to matter so much for me. 

This country, along with Russia, is one of the only two in the world to habitually leave out a good percentage of its land mass in the maps it makes of itself.  This is a shame, for it is that great mass, like the dark matter of the universe, that gives the place its weight.  Without that great mass that is left off the maps, that never figures into the squeegee punks’ circuit, that is largely neglected in CBC weather reports, I don’t think I could bear the place.  Russia’s vast expanse to the East is cumbersome, and always seems too much for Muscovy to bear.  Canada’s North in contrast is a source of power (literally) and majesty.  Baffin, Kugluktuk, and Vuntut are toponyms charged with life and wonder.  Handsome chubby creatures roam wide up there, I like to imagine.  The very thought of them frees a would-be fuguer, if only for a moment, from this string of makeshift border camps that most are content to call Canada.