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

The whole history of art is really a prolonged commentary on human nature. Here, in a world that has managed to send a human-made object out of our solar system but which yet witnesses thousands of deaths every day from starvation and war, Wagner’s art work surely stands for the mightiness of the human endeavour, whatever our beliefs about why or how we got here. As Wagner was intensely human, there are traces of all his humanity in his work. Perfection is an ideal that can be embodied in art, hardly ever lived out as an ethical ideal.

Orpheus is ascending: And maybe we are learning to look at the face of Wagner with not only our love but with compassion too, the same compassion Wagner expressed so nobly in his music. The world must be an alien place for those who can only criticise what has been brought by civilisation to their back door. How strange it is that Wagner should have achieved something so gigantic in one lifetime. We do no honour to Wagner by turning those achievements into a cult and praise, as in a Nuremberg war rally, the outer garments, the actual detritus of biography and performing tradition left behind after the life has been consigned to history. A real love of Wagner means putting aside all the biographical apparatus and listening to the music he composed and the words his characters sing. What we do with that intensity and exaltation is our own affair, but I should say that the experience is a civilising one.

In some of Lucian Freud’s later paintings the artist has concentrated on painting the figures of Sue Tilley and Leigh Bowery. They are subjects who have amplitude; they impose their bodies on the visual landscape with a voluptuous certainty; they have a physicality that reaches out beyond the canvas; the details of their skin and hair are painted in loving detail. These paintings of Freud are in total contrast to the anorexic smugness that passes itself off as beautiful in contemporary culture. Wagner’s works are somewhat like these paintings. All of life has been put into them. Beyond the rational, yet not irrational, the music of Wagner provokes with its prodding at the fabric of life, the fabric Wagner found so difficult to wear himself. Past debt, fatigue, depression, nervous exhaustion, irritability and duplicity, Wagner dragged into existence his music dramas with their panoramic transformative power. We cannot always be worthy of rising to the level that Wagner demands, and sometimes those demands, as in the Prologue and Act One of Götterdämmerung on a hot August afternoon, are fearsome.

Orpheus had been given a gift by the gods. Wagner often wanted to hand his gift back; even after his world success he fantasised about luxuriating on the Nile and wished the whole Bayreuth enterprise would go to the devil. Christina Rossetti asked in a poem, ‘Does the road wind up-hill all the way?’ and answered, ‘Yes, to the very end.’ Wagner’s life was lived along a road that wound up-hill to the very end. The extraordinary fecundity of Wagner’s imaginative world is still leading audiences, critics and historians uphill.

I said at the outset that Wagner’s predestined end was the classical imperium we reserve for only a handful of mighty creative spirits. He is still removed from that imperium, but the distance is narrowing. Much still needs to be written about and thought over, and that will only be possible once we have cast to one side our present cultural confusion.

In Theodore Zeldin’s book, An Intimate History Of Humanity, Vintage, 1994, the author states that, with all of our historical understanding and insatiable curiosity, the real age of discovery has hardly begun. Let us try to discover the real Wagner, the Wagner still in advance of a century of new departures, artistic revolutions and experimentation. Wagner saw quite clearly that art was not a throw of the dice across a white abyss of symbolic chance, to use the language of Mallarmé, but a profoundly expressive medium that could embody the complexity of existence. It may seem outrageous to claim that we have not yet discovered Wagner. What with the outpouring of critical works written and a performing tradition that is ‘rich and strange’, perhaps it might be objected that we understand Wagner only too well. I would argue that we are now only just preparing ourselves intellectually and emotionally to confront the reach of the Wagnerian enterprise. The old pro and contra arguments are not sophisticated enough to bring into focus the contradictions and ambiguities that the Wagner music drama presents us with.

Critics who write on Wagner spend a great deal of time wringing their hands at the wailing wall of their own supposed moral superiority. I don’t suppose any of them ever got round to nearly starving or being exiled from their own country, though I imagine one or two of them might have had bad first marriages. It is the individual members of the great unwashed general public who are properly grateful for culture, not the critical fraternity, and who often see beyond the tiresome theoretical monologues to the passion and beauty of the art. It is one of the singular failures of most art criticism, though it is of particular significance in Wagner’s case, that it cannot accommodate itself to the following observation made by Arthur Schnitzler in Casanova’s Return To Venice: ‘had he not leamt a thousand times that in the souls of all persons who are truly alive, discrepant elements, nay apparently hostile elements, may coexist in perfect harmony?’

From the very tooth and claw of nature Wagner drew down onto the stage uncanny representations of fire, water and birdsong, moonlight, rainbow and wind. From his own knowledge of human frailty he gave us Marke’s grieving and Brangaene’s incomprehension, Alberich’s lust for power and Wotan’s abnegation of that very same power, Loge’s ironic detachment and Parsifal’s spiritual commitment, Kurwenal’s steadfastness and Ortrud’s treachery. From within a reservoir of sympathetic intellectual interest he fashioned the epic-poetical, political-aesthetic, republican-mediaeval art work of the future. There is revolutionary fervour in the music dramas, just as there is resignation, passionate abandonment to divine fate and existential aloneness. In other words, there is life, not an image of life, but the thing itself in all its ambiguity and complexity. How perplexing it is that an artist captured it all with such intensity and verisimilitude. And how remarkable it is that it should have been possible when circumstance so often conspires to defeat what is worthwhile in this world. The Wagnerian music drama continues to thrive because, for one thing, it is all-inclusive. The young sailor at the beginning of Tristan und Isolde is winged with the same yearning humanity as its protagonists; the apprentices who request silence at the beginning of the song contest in Meistersinger know they are asking for the quiet needed for all to properly participate in a festival of poetry and song. Wagner does not compartmentalise his characters either. Nothing could betray a greater misunderstanding of Wagnerian dramaturgy than a comment such as this in the notes for the CDs of the Met’s 1942 Tannhäuser: ‘Wolfram is so goody-goody. No wonder . . .  nobility has died out . . . he’s too pure to procreate’. Such vulgar reductionism cannot begin to comprehend Wagner’s theatrical world which, whilst seldom achieving equanimity, sees into the heart of the human experience, and in doing so, attempts to reconcile all of its fragmented splendour. Now, one must take account of someone like Marc Weiner who proposes that Wagner’s works are riddled with anti-Semitic intention. There can be no question of the shameful prevarications still practised by those who would like to rewrite history after their own unjust deserts. Art worthy of the name will always withstand critical scrutiny; it has nothing to fear from it. But intellectual justice has to be exercised on behalf of art too. Trying to contain Wagner in an ideological straightjacket simply doesn’t work. The music dramas are too big and too many depth charges are set off in the course of the Wagner experience for there ever to be much plain sailing. Simplifying the biographical facts of the matter doesn’t help our understanding of Wagner either. Just as Cosima’s haughty obsequiousness can make us feel queasy, so can her service to the composer fill us with amazement at its dedicated far-sightedness. If the lamentable intellectual shenanigans Glasenapp got up to have challenged contemporary Wagner scholarship to rebalance the scholarly equation, so too must we come to a clear-sighted estimation of what really was achieved by Wagner and what is now being achieved by the inheritance of Wagnerism.

Are our ideals capable of being fulfilled by us, here, now, practically. Or are our lives exercises in hypocrisy, and all our humanitarianism a charade to cover over the traces of an adamantine egotism. Is not the example of Wagner a compelling witness for the defence of Western culture, which latterly can be seen to have not been up to scratch. Why is it that the world of Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall and AIDS can appear to fit the Wagnerian music drama so aptly whereas our own art can seem so indifferent, unconcerned and mediocre by comparison. Well, I would argue that Wagner was open to the enormity of our existence and that he lived out the polar and tropical entirety of the mysterium that got put into its elliptical orbit as the third rock from the sun. If there is an underlying racist or sexist agenda in the works themselves, it must be of the kind that is transformed in the very effort of the life lived and the art created. Beauty and truth to be realities must have dipped their purity into the muck of life, the ‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ as Yeats has it in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’. Wagner certainly knew that bone shop in all of its complexities—its disappointments, hatreds and failures. Transcendence and redemption were freely optioned by a volatile sensibility at the epicentre of the Romantic agony.

I am all too aware of the unsatisfactory nature of this commentary on Wagner, just as I am aware that its contents could easily be dismissed as a rhetorical trope by one of our latter-day linguistic exegetes. What matters now is our commitment to art; that we have learned from it, been taught to feel and think in new ways by it. If we look on the Wagnerian endeavour as entertainment we have entirely missed the point; Wagner would have had nothing but contempt for us. It is not a matter of entering the theatre with bowed heads and an air of hysterical solemnity, as with the old guard at Bayreuth, but of an active and intelligent engagement with one of the most fertile and challenging artistic oeuvres that Western civilisation has given us. If that means rejecting the art work of the future or reducing it to the level of our own present straightened circumstances, so be it. It is often the function of great art to wait beyond decades and even centuries of neglect for its torso to emerge before newly-cleansed and awakened eyes.

On the last night of his life Cosima hears Richard talking ‘volubly and loudly’, as always.’ “Once in 5000 years it succeeds!” “I was talking about Undine, the being who longed for a soul.” He goes to the piano, plays the mournful theme “Rheingold, Rheingold”, continues with “False and base all those who dwell up above.” “Extraordinary that I saw this so clearly at the time!”—And as he is lying in bed, he says, “I feel loving towards them, these subservient creatures of the deep, with all their yearning.” ‘ [Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, February 11th, 1883] What a profound leave-taking of life with its clear presentiment of death these final comments are. And how truthful to his whole artistic endeavour is this final adieu. It was extraordinary that Wagner felt and composed as he did; no artist does themself a favour by indulging in false modesty. His final comment is one that expresses love; on the eve of his death Wagner foresees the ocean of life ready to take him, Licht-Alberich/Schwarz-Alberich, down to the depths on the immense wave of feeling he expressed in his music so profoundly. And as he prepares to descend, before a final historical ascent, he sheds his mortality, becoming, like Undine, a spirit of infinite yearning and patience.

In ‘The Critic as Artist’ Oscar Wilde writes in his amusing way, ‘A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal’. Well, perhaps never in the whole history of art was an artist more sincere than Wagner. Maybe it is that sincerity we find so unsettling. We now live in a culture that will pay millions of dollars for a baseball and that espouses the celebrity interview as a via media of significance. In contrast, we have Wagner to show us, in his life and work, what the upper limit for significance can be in this world. The great achievement of democracy gives us a personal freedom to fulfil our humanity to the best of our capacity. Wagner shows both the glories and limitations of this enigmatic human enterprise. His work also stands defiantly as a challenge to all that is unachieved or too-easily achieved in art and culture. Once in five thousand years it succeeds? No, certainly not. But it did succeed gigantically, once. Against all the odds, the poetic ideal became a reality. Wagner ascended the terrain we have yet to traverse, step-by-painful step, and he is waiting for us now.

                                                                        *

The following poem was written in 1997. Ernest Newman, the Wagner scholar and music critic, mistakenly believed that Wagner had composed a string quartet while staying near Lake Starnberg, the lake in which Ludwig II subsequently drowned. My suggestion is that we can complete the ‘quartet’ begun by Ludwig, Nietzsche and Wagner through our involvement in, and commitment to, the creative act.

       Starnberg Quartet
      Ludwig, Nietzsche, Wagner

Here a gold symposium
Was summoned by a swan:
A king unsure of kingship, but who found
In art the solace we would give it now
If we believed in it as he had done;
A thinker near truth’s wound,
Bitter in rejecting what he loved,
A mind at the end of its strength,
Yet leaving Attic tracings
Of philosophic joy;
And a composer, worthy of our need,
Moving beyond failure
To ideals not betrayed.

It ended with drowning and madness,
An argument over sex.
Laughing death now names the fourth
Making the markings of this score—
That is you and I.
Matching what we have
With what they had to give,
Our reach might equal theirs.

We were never so foolish
To think redemption could come
From music heard in the dark
Or use ambiguous logic
To challenge our modern redoubt,
And we know if a god came to earth
Its name would sound like Mandela,
Not Wotan with his strife.

If we reject a part
Of what they were or said
And would never wish to become,
Then too we honour their greatness—
From highest bliss to the social debt,
Manoeuvring to find
All the human allows.

A mountain stands before us
Beneath a radiant Muse
And we would climb it still,
If we could give our best
And serve art as we know we should.
We wait now near their limit
For courage to reshape
The image of our magnitude
In work that’s undismayed.

Written 1997 Published 2001

Justin E. H. Smith

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

I would probably not consider myself in any position to hold forth on God, were talk of this sort not all the rage in Hollywood, and were I not such a slave to trickle-down fashion. But I remain an ordinary mortal, and would do well to proceed cautiously. I should perhaps begin by defining my terms.

It seems to me that God is nothing other than the inflation to infinity of our experience of paternal authority. I was never all that impressed with paternal authority. I preferred maternal solicitude, which inflated to infinity gives us not God but, well, infinite longing for more maternal solicitude. Our access to this begins decreasing around the time we stop breastfeeding, and when it is reduced to a mere residue at puberty we begin to look for alternative sources of it. For the most part, we look in vain, but the absence of what we long for does not cause us to supernaturalize the elusive object of our longing(save for a few neo-pagans who have made the category mistake of suggesting that God may be a woman).

I’ve digressed, you say, but my point is precisely that I have not. God is not a universally necessary a priori concept, and it is not the case that for logical or metaphysical reasons beyond dispute there simply “has to be something,” as the self-described “non-religious but very spiritual” types like to say. It is not the case that everyone everywhere possesses the concept, and it is not the case that we ourselves cannot dispense with it. Rather, supernatural entities are an abstraction from our natural and emotional ties to humans and other animals, and these are largely determined by our culture’s values.

We may individually value the women in our lives, but this is something we are expected to keep to ourselves, and when it comes to candidacy for that infinitely high public office of divinity, only a patriarch will do. In many cultures, the supernatural does not extend beyond dead ancestors, conceptualized as ghosts. Members of these cultures will agree that “there has to be something,” but this something is not an omnipotent omniscient creator. It’s just grandpa. Our culture, however, has a habit of infinitizing what it values, of projecting our human attachment to fathers and kings into infinity.

I am no more ready to argue, on metaphysical or logical grounds, against the existence of God than I am ready to argue against the existence of the ghosts of ancestors that some Mongolian peasant holds dear. It is simply not my business. Any serious engagement with the problem of God will be not metaphysical but anthropological. Engaged in this way, the question is not whether God –the concept of which is taken for granted– exists or does not exist, but rather why it is that a society conceptualizes the ultimate grounds of its own existence in one way rather than another.

What we learn when we put the question in this way is quite a bit about the place of fathers and kings and big inflated things in our culture, but very little about the place of, or the logical need for, an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator in the universe. To remain content with learning this much may seem an all-too humble scope of interest, but it is not clear that it constitutes a true change of subject. For talk of God, as Durkheim rightly discerned, is really just talk of society. Society is God, as the great sociologist put it, and to this extent, at least, I can confirm that he exists.

In certain times and places, such as second-century Alexandria or nineteenth-century Denmark, philosophers have taken an interest in the concept of God, and attempted to defend it by stripping away the naive anthropomorphisms that the vulgar habitually attach to it. God, they argue, cannot be a man, let alone a man with a long white beard; God cannot really have a face, let alone a backside, even if the masses were pleased to hear that on Mt. Sinai Moses caught a glimpse of the latter; God cannot really have any human traits at all. Indeed, God cannot even be described in human language.

The problem, though, is that when these rigorous demands are pushed as far as they can go, and one by one all the features projected from human experience are stripped away, we find that not all that much is left, and the apophatic path leads us to something that looks troublingly like atheism. God is an old man on a throne or he is, quite literally, nothing. For this reason, tiresome academic debates such as that between Bertrand Russell the “atheist” and Father Copleston the “theist,” the one denying that there is some entity x such that x equals God, and the other denying the denial –which for some reason undergraduates always want to reenact, though much less eloquently, in my introductory philosophy classes– really don’t get to the heart of the matter. (I suppose I should not be hard on the youngsters. They’re still learning. But grown men should know better.)

To opt for agnosticism is no solution: it is to accept the terms of the debate as laid out by the dithering old dons of a century ago, but to lack the conviction to side with either of them. Agnosticism says that there is something it would be nice to know, but that due to our limited grasp of things we are unable to know it. Agnosticism is failed theism, and I want to say that there is nothing to theism but the projection of what we already value from our mundane experience. It is either this or the empty space left by negative theology, which is hardly worthy of worship either. And it is for this reason that the truly pious disposition can only be atheism: not as the denial of the existence of some entity, à la Russell –as though the problem of God were of a pair with the problem of Bigfoot–, but as a cultivated recognition of the humanness of our projections, and of the cosmic irrelevance of what one’s own culture would like to imagine divine. If I may put this point slightly more paradoxically: it seems to me that the true path to illumination, the one sole hope for arriving at an unio mystica with the ultimate source of our being, is to insist unto death on the exclusive truth of the materialist party line.

Consider in this connection the expression of the religious sentiment in art. Pier Paolo Pasolini, before he was murdered by an underage hustler he had unashamedly picked up in some back alley of Rome, managed to make one of the most beautiful pieces of religious art of the 20th century: his film rendition of The Gospel According to St. Matthew. The best religious art of the last 100 years was created by a homosexual communist.

Perhaps the worst religious art (using that term generously) of the same period was created by an aggressive and empty-souled goon with outsized daddy issues who, when on break from belching hatred, remains unable to shut up about his personal relationship with the divine. Rent his Passion of the Christ together with Pasolini’s masterpiece sometime, and watch them back to back. Then ask yourself whose side you want to be on come Judgment Day.

It’s easy to reduce our political leaders to the sum of their policies, to regard them as no more complex than the glib pronouncements of op/ed contributors. It’s much more difficult to acknowledge the totality of their humanity, to regard them as family men and women, as enthusiasts and hobbyists, individuals of many interests and varying depths. The Bush Administration in particular is susceptible to this reductive tendency. The attacks of September 11th shattered America’s image of itself as invulnerable superpower, and the Bush Administration, in responding to the new challenges of asymmetric warfare with non-state terrorist entities, exposes itself to caricature on a daily basis. But dangerous times require bold new policies, and the men and women that formulate and implement those policies make easy targets for late-night talk-show hosts and comedy-prone pundits. What follows is a small attempt to correct the one-dimensional views so much in fashion these days. Of course, it is only a beginning, and a superficial one at that. Readers will be at fault to imagine that the depths of the four individuals briefly discussed below are so easily plumbed. 

Much has been made of Condoleezza Rice’s musical talents. She is a gifted pianist who, at one time, planned to make a career of music. Today, as Secretary of State, she has less time to devote to her first passion, but still she maintains her skills, regularly meeting with four lawyer friends in her home in downtown Washington, D.C., to practice and perform chamber music. A recent profile in the New York Times Magazine quoted her response to a frequently asked question, namely, does playing music relax her? “It’s not exactly relaxing if you are struggling to play Brahms,” she answered. “But it is transporting.” Commenting on their choice of music, Robert Battey, a former professor of cello at the University of Missouri and current member of the group, said, “We generally like to start off with a nice finger-buster for the secretary.” But for true relaxation, Ms. Rice depends on an altogether different hobby, though one that is no less demanding of precision. For more than a decade, she has exercised her nimble fingers and her nimbler mind with Origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding. Throughout her apartment in the tony Watergate complex, nestled between the family photographs, advanced degrees and other mementoes of a life of academic and inside-the-Beltway achievement, are samples of her meticulous work: a prancing Pegasus, a foil-backed crane, even a remarkably detailed rendering of an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. Recently, Ms. Rice has expanded her repertoire to include Kirigami, a branch of the art that allows cuts to be made in the paper in order to create symmetrical objects, such as snowflakes and pentagrams. As with her music, the secretary is not reluctant to share her paper-folding talents. Upon Margaret Beckett’s appointment to the position of Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Foreign Secretary) for Britain in May, 2006, Ms. Rice presented her with a stunning orchid blossom. She has made similar gifts for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, King Abdullah II of Jordan, and the Bush family, upon the college graduation of daughter Jenna.

Richard Bruce Cheney, 46th Vice President of the United States, is often characterized as a vicious political in-fighter and soulless pragmatist. He is a leader of the neocon movement currently in power in Washington, and has been at the center of America’s conservative elite since the mid-seventies, when he became the youngest chief of staff in U.S. history, serving in President Gerald Ford’s administration, along with his political fellow traveler Donald Rumsfeld (see below). He is thought to be the driving force behind an effort to expand executive power to an unprecedented degree, exemplified by the Bush administration’s regular use of signing statements to selectively ignore constitutional and legislative restraints, its fight for warrantless wiretapping, and its skirting of international standards of humanitarian treatment of war prisoners. An intensely private man, little is known about his family life with wife Lynne, and still less about his recreational preferences (except the hunting of oxygen-deprived quail). But to the residents and shopkeepers of Mackinac Island, Michigan, there’s no mystery to this Vice President. Mr. Cheney is just another “fudgie,” one of the thousands of fudge enthusiasts who descend on the tiny island each summer to sample its famous candy. According to classmates at the University of Wyoming, Mr. Cheney regularly spurned frat parties and college mixers in favor of concocting new fudge recipes in his dormitory’s kitchen, and endeared himself to his fellow students for his generosity with the product of his efforts. He has made several pilgrimages to Baltimore, Maryland, and Poughkeepsie, New York, both of which lay claim to the title Birthplace of Fudge, and he boasts senior membership in the North American Fudge Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preparation and enjoyment of what has been called “America’s favorite sinful snack.” But Mr. Cheney’s affinity for sweets extends beyond the world of fudge, to include peanut brittle, taffy and even some varieties of hard candy. He is widely believed to reward political allies and business associates with small “sampler” gift boxes of homemade sweets, anonymously delivered, each one bearing the mischievous inscription “Love, DLC.”

Curiously, Origami is not the only secret Bush administration talent with roots in the early Edo period (1603-1867) of Japan. John R. Bolton, current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, is a practitioner of the Japanese tea ceremony, and a devoted student of sadō or chadō, literally “the way of tea.” Mr. Bolton, known for his gruff demeanor and blunt criticism, makes for a highly unlikely ambassador, and is infamous for remarking that the U.N. would be no different if ten of the Secretariat building’s 38 stories were lopped off. In addition, he is known for his leadership position among the neoconservatives who encouraged the invasion of Iraq, and for his part in the manipulation of intelligence relating to Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium for the creation of a nuclear weapon. With these facts in mind, it’s all the more remarkable that he should devote himself to the delicate complexities of the tea ceremony, which requires substantial knowledge of calligraphy, ceramics, flower arrangement and incense. A friend of Mr. Bolton, speaking on condition of anonymity, was quick to point out that his personality is widely misunderstood. “He values simplicity and refinement above all,” this friend said, “and he’s got a very eastern notion of beauty. Very formal, very restrained.” Mr. Bolton and the members of his tea circle gather at least once a month to engage in the ceremony, usually at his residence in New York. The Ambassador wears kimono and hakama, which is the most traditional of prescribed wardrobes, and prepares the tea room with tatami, a calligraphic scroll, and a simple arrangement of seasonal flowers. Whenever possible, a facilitator or teacher is invited to participate, and provides instruction on various aspects of the ceremony, including the hanging scroll, tatami placement, and the elaborate service motions required of the skilled practitioner.

There is a bit more obvious justice to Donald Rumsfeld’s secret talent. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is widely known for his oracular speaking style, unique vocal cadence and undeniable charisma. Indeed, in the early days of the Iraq War, he managed to charm many in the press corps and the public with his witty pronouncements on the status of the conflict, notwithstanding the grim subject matter. So it is perhaps not a surprise to learn that Mr. Rumsfeld is a widely respected Laurel (a title of achievement in the Arts & Sciences) in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), Middle Kingdom (comprising Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and parts of several other states). The SCA is familiar to many for its presence on American college campuses, and is best described as a Medieval and Renaissance-themed arts revival organization. Members of the SCA gather for festivals and demonstrations in full costume, and participate in combat tournaments, arts exhibits, classes, workshops, dancing and feasts. Mr. Rumsfeld, whose SCA persona is Wilhelm von Steublen, is renowned in the Bardic Arts, specifically poetry and storytelling. He excels in creating ribald, historically appropriate ballads, set to Gregorian Chant tunes and performed during regional and national festivals. He is also noted for his “fyrewalking” at nighttime events, in which a performer moves from campsite to campsite offering entertainment, in exchange for food, drink and other, bawdier refreshments. The secretary is unusual within the SCA for joining as a full-fledged, dues paying member at the late age of 44, in 1976, during his first tenure as Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford. But it wasn’t long before he was fully invested in the organization: Honored with the title of Laurel in 1980, he quickly became the Middle Kindom’s principal authority on the Bardic Arts (including poetry, storytelling and early music), and has received numerous awards and honorary titles since then. In 1992, he was selected to sit on the SCA’s Board of Directors, and continues to serve in that position to this day.

On the seventh day She said, “Let there be light.” But nothing stirred: not a blade of grass, not a leaf. Then on the eighth day She said, “Let there be Caffeine.” And the whole world came into being; life found a purpose: the trees trembled, the fish floated, the birds buzzed, the women went shopping and the men went to war.

Well, all men except Mr. Cafenos, a toothpaste salesman who believed he was born to achieve more than sell lies about the whitening magic of his toothpaste. Always searching for a break from the white lies, he had an intuition: if packaged properly, caffeine could trumpet the wake up call for the sleepwalkers of the world. He brewed the business plan in his mind. “It is all in the packaging” he uttered the cliché and claimed it as his original thought. He set out to unravel the science and art of his product and he found the following information.

Caffeine – a white bitter powder when dried – is chemically a xanthine alkaloid. Two other xanthines (theophylline and theobromine:’theos’) live as a close family with caffeine in coffee, tea, cacao beans, mate, cola nuts and guarana.

The quantity of these three related compounds varies in different plants. Caffeine concentration is up to 4% in tea leaves and coffee but tea has more of the other two ‘theos’, which explains its occasional stronger kick. The ‘theos’ relax the smooth muscles of the breathing tubes (bronchi) while caffeine stimulates the heart and jolts the brain.

Cola nuts have lower caffeine content while cocoa contains eight times more theophylline than caffeine. Guarana soda is popular in Brazil and it wakes up the brain minus the coffee jitters. It is likely that guarana and mate deliver their unusual punches with some other compound besides caffeine.

A 7 oz cup of coffee has the following caffeine (mg):

Drip 115-175
Brewed 80-135
Instant 65-100
Tea 30-70
Espresso 100mg/2oz

Coffee is safe in moderation and it takes 50-200 cups to kill a man. Theobromine is not as assertive as its two other cousins except for chocolate devouring dogs – in excess it is a ruthless poison and a pound can kill the dog.

For the chemical sleuths the alias of caffeine is: 3,7-dihydro- 1,3,7-trimethyl- 1H-purine- 2,6-dione.

With all these discoveries Mr. Cafenos began his caffeine enterprise. The unwanted effects of caffeine that he had learned, he kept to himself – like a well groomed salesman.

He built a bohemian coffee shop and his Sumatra Mandheling-Lintong drip coffee, extracted by clean soft water at precisely 95 degrees Celsius, was an instant hit. His obsessive quality controls demanded freshly roasted ground beans from the finest crops of the world. And he insisted on cleaning the equipment after each brew, for clean equipment is as important as the bean quality to yield the right flavor. Oil and resins stick to the pot and spoil the taste.

With the stirring success of his first venture he expanded and soon his shops were proliferating faster than the dandelions in your backyard.

He brewed exotic beans of the world. His varietals/staights included Brazil Bourbons, Celebes Kalossi, Colombia Excelso, Colombia Supremo, Costa Rica Tarrazu, Ethiopian Harrar-Moka, Guatemala Antigua, Indian Mysore, Jamaican Blue Mtn/Wallensford Estate, Java Estate Kuyumas, Kenya AA, Kona Extra Prime, Mexico Pluma Altura, Mocha Mattari (Yemen), New Guinea, Panama Organic and Tanzania Peaberry.

His blends and dark roasts were Colombia Supremo Dark, Espresso Roast, French Roast, Vienna Roast and Mocha-Java.

Mr. Cafenos appeared on every billboard, magazine, prime time TV, football game, radio, newspaper and the Internet.

His caffeine laced the products on every grocery shelf; he got the drug into you either through his brew or his grocery adulteration.

Mr. Cafenos’s caffeine empire ruled. But every thing must change and so did his luck.

A lonely chemist from his R&D department – who like every other ‘lonely’ had excess spare time – invented a technique to remove the buzz from the coffee. But no one cared, which added depression to his loneliness. So the lonely, unwanted, depressed chemist published his invention in a scientific journal, describing the bad effects of coffee on health, hence, the importance of decaffeinating. He, in his scientific honesty and business naiveté, mentioned the bad effects that Mr. Cafenos had assiduously suppressed.

He wrote,” Caffeine causes thinning of the bones (osteoporosis), decreases the motility of the sperms, increases irritability and may harm the pregnant mother. Caffeine is habit forming and sudden cessation causes withdrawal symptoms.”

His candor cost him his job like many other scientists before him. And an unemployed scientist is a disabled parasite; he needs the crutch of a laboratory to feed his stomach.

The lonely, unwanted, depressed and now jobless chemist had only one asset: he knew the process of decaffeinating. The asset was valuable for a detractor of Mr. Cafenos, who offered business partnership to the chemist and thus was born the ‘decaf coffee’.

They borrowed all the leaves from Mr. Cafenos’s business plan and countered his every concoction with a decaf version. Decaf, they declared, was pure, non toxic and virtuous and they were surprised by the number of gullible neurotics who paid for their decaf. And as their luck would have it, the neurotics multiplied as fast as their products.

We all know, capitalists accommodate competition only if it can’t be killed. Mr. Cafenos tried both and failed; his profits plummeted. To make matters worse, his wife discovered a new emotion unknown to her so far: her love for him matched his balance sheet. She decided – like a faithful wife – to announce her declining love for him. But she did not get a chance.

He had disappeared without a trail or trace.

Decafs got into action and declared him dead due to caffeine poisoning; it suited them. The wife accepted widowhood with alacrity; it suited her. The prime time TV cashed high ratings on his death; it suited them.

The happy widow promptly proceeded to annex the caffeine empire and then a strange thing happened.

After twenty-three days, Mr. Cafenos reappeared in a purple robe and a brown cap – oh, never mind the color mismatch.

The marketing genius, Mr. Cafenos, called a prime time press conference and declared in front of the ogling cameras that he had meditated on the roof of his ninety-five storeys high rise building for twenty-three days and he had a revelation.

He had known from history of religion that there are higher chances of communion with God, if you climb on a higher ground or something; in his case he chose a city sky scrapper. Yes, the God had spoken to him and She had said “Let there be caffeine.”

He demonized all the decafs as blasphemous, heretic pagans who will be roasted like coffee beans in the life after.

But that did not solve his immediate problem here on earth: cash flow at the coffee shop. So taking the help of his new found religion, he announced “The Caffeine Manifesto.”/p>

He made it simple and articulate, but you should be kind enough to overlook the intellectual dishonesty. (Why shouldn’t you; you have done it before.)

The new religion said:

• Caffeine is God’s gift.
• Caffeine energizes and thus increases economic productivity.
• Productivity is the source of all profit.

He proceeded to sermonize from the pulpit of the press conference, the corollaries derived from the new axioms: “The Decafs are parasites on the economic system; they thrive on the profits created by the sweat and toll of the “caffeinated” worker; Down with the pop gulping, wine sipping, beer guzzling, cognac sniffing decafs; All the caffeinated workers of word unite!”

When a reporter asked, “Why the purple robe and the brown cap?” He replied, “It is all in the packaging!”

This all infuriated the decafs and thus started the protest phase of the caffeine war.

They mounted pressure with all persuasive techniques created by mankind: media saturating advertisements after midnight, rallies on bridges and beaches; civil disobedience in all wrestling arenas; bikini competition in all grocery stores; car washes in snow storms.

The reincarnated Mr. Cafenos retaliated by renaming his coffee shops as ‘Temples of Caffeine’. His newly converted clergy delivered vitriolic sermons at the temples on Thursdays. His followers wore purple wristbands and coffee-bean-shaped brown caps.

And both camps checked their profit and loss statements every quarter. And it seemed the decafs camp was having more fun in life and also winning at the cash register.

When Mrs. Cafenos discovered no turnaround and mounting losses, she reactivated her plan A. She eloped with a decaf, filed for divorce and demanded half the assets of Mr. Cafenos before the balance sheet got redder.

This infuriated desperate Mr. Cafenos and in his next Thursday sermon he announced his next plan. He demanded a new nation carved out of the old one and called it “CaffeiNation” The productive, hard working caffeinated workers will be free from the tyranny of the decafs. He promised a nation based on the new religion and caffeine.

Right after the sermon a faithful follower, inebriated on the new religion and propelled by extra-strong-no-cream-double-colombia-excellso in his blood marched briskly to Mrs.Cafenos’s lover’s house and burned it down. Next morning the fire fighters found two charred bodies but none was of Mrs. Cafenos or her lover.

The decafs called it the death of innocent civilians and appealed to the Human Rights activists, who at that time were in a conference in Bahamas discussing “water as a female right.” They replied by email, “We do not involve with gang violence unless one of the gangs is the Government. We will investigate the situation when we return. Please ensure press coverage.”

Both sides declared this a vindication of their stand and the Decafs proceeded to retaliate by burning down a Temple Of Caffeine.

Thus started the second phase of the caffeine war – the violent phase.

History reminds us repeatedly that love does not beget love in spite of all the gurus, but violence attracts violence unfailingly and urgently, which the masses seem to enjoy more compared to this love-thing. So the bystanders in the caffeine war promptly chose and joined their preferred violent gang. The decision was easy as it was made by the limbic system of the brain and not by the cortex. And biology tells us, when limbic system plays, rational cortex is a dumb spectator.

Thus started the next phase of caffeine war – the limbic system war that is the most brutal, bloody, destructive, unrelenting and unstoppable. The rescue from this vortex is possible only by an external force, as suggested by one of Newton’s laws.

Mr. Cafenos understood this all and as he witnessed relentless charring of his temples, he appealed to The United Notion and demanded its intervention to secede and form an independent “CaffeiNation.”

One member of The United Notion said, “Independence is not the same as freedom.”

The second said,” Violence over caffeine is stupid.”

The third said,” We should not even discuss this ridiculous appeal.”

The other Notional members agreed not to discuss it except the wise president of The United Notion. He said,” We will discuss this serious issue in the assembly without delay. Those who consider this matter stupid and ridiculous apparently haven’t tuned into the CNN world news lately.”

Eqbal Ahmad was a shining example of what a true internationalist should be. Eqbal was at home in the history of all the world’s great civilizations. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of states past and present, and he knew that states had a rightful role to play. But he also knew that states existed to serve people, not the other way around, and he had little to do with governments, except as a thorn in their side. To friends, colleagues, and students, however, he gave unstintingly of himself and his time, his example and his memory will inspire many to carry on his work.
                                        —Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations

By complete coincidence, a few weeks ago, just after I had been thinking about writing a few words about Eqbal Ahmad, and had called his daughter Dohra (a friend) to speak about him, I received an email from Columbia University Press offering me a review copy of The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (edited by Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani; Foreword by Noam Chomsky). The book arrived two days ago by mail. Even though Eqbal died in 1999 at a relatively youngish age (he was 66), his political analyses are so sharp and prescient, and perhaps even more important and relevant today, that I decided immediately to introduce him to those 3QD readers who may not know of him, and also to recommend getting the book.

Like his close friend Edward Said (whose book Culture and Imperialism is dedicated to Eqbal, and who followed him to a too-early grave at about the same age a few years later), Eqbal was one of that rare breed of academics: those who bring their intellectual insights into the public sphere and directly engage a much wider world than the professoriate. While Eqbal’s activities and achievements were immensely wide-ranging (teaching, academic writing, political activism, journalism), possibly the most impressive thing about him was his uncannily precise feel for politics, and his ability to dispel the clutter of argument around political issues with a plainspoken insight of lucidity and obvious truth. As Noam Chomsky points out in his foreword:

… Ahmad was able to identify currents of modern history that few perceived. To mention only one distressingly timely illustration, he recognized at once that Washington and its allies were creating a terrorist monster when they exploited Afghan resistance to Soviet invasion by organizing and training Islamic fundamentalist extremists for their own cynical purposes. He warned that these initiatives were reviving a form of violent jihadism that had disappeared from the Muslim world centuries earlier and were also helping to implant similar forces in Pakistan under the brutal Zia-ul-Haq dictatorship, with a devastating impact on Pakistani society, Afghanistan, and beyond.

Indeed Eqbal pointed out that, as he welcomed them to the white house in 1985, President Ronald Reagan actually called the Afghan Mujahideen (the future Taliban) “the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers.” At the time, they were battling the Evil Empire, so no degree of hyperbole in their praise could be considered excessive. These “moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers” are now, of course, terrorists. Speaking of which, in one essay, Eqbal brilliantly unpacks the term “terrorism.” As Carolee Bengelsdorf and Margaret Cerrulo explain in their introduction:

“Terrorism” in [Eqbal’s] analysis is a floating signifier attached at will to our enemies to evoke moral revulsion. The vagueness and inconsistency of its definition, he insists, is key to its political usefulness. Official discussion will eschew, indeed disallow, any search for causes or motives, to the point where former secretary of state George Schultz, asked about the causes of Palestinian terrorism, insisted “there is no connection with any cause. Period.”

Or consider Eqbal’s foresight in these few sentences (written in 1993) on the Oslo Accord:

Trouble awaits for the accord. Hamas will continue to question its legitimacy and may be joined by other nationalist elements. Attacks on Israeli occupation forces and other acts of resistance shall occur, giving Israel ample arguments against Palestinian statehood. It may stall even on extending limited autonomy to the West Bank. After all, its cooperation is premised on the PLO’s ability to maintain order, especially in Gaza. No one should be surprised if Yasser Arafat ends up as the Pasha of Gaza…

Eqbal was also able to correctly forecast (in 1988) that the birth of Jihad International would coincide with a disastrous rise in tensions between the Sunni and the Shia, with proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran taking place on various battlegrounds, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, and as we can now clearly see, Iraq.

                                ————————- *** ————————–

Born in the village of Ikri in the Bihar province of India in either 1933 or 1934 (record-keeping of births was not a priority in the subcontinent until recently so that even I have no birth certificate), Eqbal witnessed the murder of his father one night when only a few years old, who died while trying to protect Eqbal from the blows of his assassins. It was a land dispute.

His grandfather was a wealthy man who had established the Khudabaksh Library in Patna where to this day it remains one of the finest collections of medieval Persian manuscripts. When he was about 14, Eqbal migrated to Pakistan upon its creation with his older brothers. (In 1996, the BBC produced a documentary about this difficult trek in a refugee caravan from India to Pakistan as part of a 5-part series entitled “Stories My Country Told Me.” The others profiled were Edward Said, E.J. Hobsbawm, Desmond Tutu and Maxine Hong Kingston.)

After graduating in economics from the Foreman Christian College in Lahore, Eqbal served briefly as an officer in the Pakistan Army before leaving for Occidental College in California as a Rotary Fellow in 1957, and soon transferred to study political science and middle eastern history at Princeton, where he eventually obtained his doctorate in 1967. While he was conducting thesis research on trade unions, Eqbal lived in North Africa from 1960 to 1964, and became a student and active supporter of the Algerian Revolution. It is not clear if he ever met Franz Fanon, but Fanon certainly knew of Eqbal and they shared a mutual respect. [Photo shows Eqbal at Princeton.]

I recently saw the brilliant Gillo Pontecorvo film The Battle of Algiers (rent it!) and was surprised to learn that Eqbal was a consultant on the film. He helped research the script and was present during the filming. Selected Writings contains an edited transcript of a fascinating lecture Eqbal gave to undergraduates at Hampshire College about the making of the movie. Even though it is a short thing (7 pages), it is a paradigmatic illustration of how packed with strategic insight even the most informal of Eqbal’s writing could be, and I’d like to dwell on it here for a bit. One of the key lessons that Eqbal took away from Algeria was that before revolutionary movements are ready to fight a state entity, they must take away its moral legitimacy by outperforming it at its main task: administration. Here’s Eqbal:

… to be successful, the revolutionary movement must outadminister the enemy before it starts to outfight it. The Battle of Algiers gives you that insight from both sides, Algerian and French. The film closely follows the actual battle, but the emphasis is not on violence; it is on organization…

…Ali is shown leading an angry mob, calling for blood in response to the [French] bombing. In a critical early moment in the film, he goes to see the resistance commander, Colonel Mohammed Jafar, and has an argument with Jafar saying, “We must strike back.” Jafar answers, “No, Ali, not yet; we are not ready. We must first organize the Casbah before we engage in violence. We must clean up the numbers racket, the gambling racket, the prostitution; we must institute discipline; we must offer services to people…”

… A second critical moment in the film is the marriage scene, presided over by an FLN [resistance] militant. It signifies that French rule is over inside the Casbah, that the revolution has outadministered the French. Colonial law stipulated that marriages must be registered with the French government… [but] The French have been cut out of the process…

This, no doubt, has already reminded you of the recent successes of a certain organization today which has taken these lessons to heart and has made itself the sole provider of public services in southern Lebanon. Yes, of course: Hizbullah. Also, interestingly enough, the Pentagon screened The Battle of Algiers for the heads of its Special (counterinsurgency) Forces in August 2003. Another of Eqbal’s points in this lecture is that a revolutionary movement must allow the larger population to appear neutral in the conflict until close to the end, and that the call for a general strike by the resistance leadership was an early mistake in the Algerian Revolution:

… In order to protect people, revolutionaries must maintain the fiction of popular neutrality. The incumbent power (whether colonial or local) has the compulsion to say, “The people are behind us; the revolutionaries, the guerrillas, are merely terrorizing them. We are protecting the people,” as indeed the French said. That rhetoric reduces their ability to attack the whole population. Therefore good revolutionary tactics always create an environment in which the people are overtly neutral, while covertly larger and larger numbers of them support the revolution by various means. In Algeria, therefore, you didn’t do anything to expose the entire people to attack by the other side. No decent revolutionary movement would call a general strike in a situation of warfare until almost the end, when it was winning, and it just need the last push.

This was not the case in Algeria… When the FLN declares the general strike, [French commander] Colonel Mathieu is very happy and says, “Now we can lick them. They have made their first bad move.” Why? Because they are announcing themselves to be on the side of the revolution. He can plan his operation: arrest everyone who is on strike and torture the bloody lot. Interrogate them. Some of them will turn out to be activists, some of them will turn out to be neutrals. But now he has a large pool from which he can get information… Seventy-seven thousand people in a period of just about twelve days were tortured, badly, in the city of Algiers… Six of the French who carried out the operation were eventually censured for torture.

The third point that Eqbal makes is that because of this mistake, the FLN was decimated in Algiers and its leadership had to move to weaker positions in Tunis. This insecurity caused them to raise a conventional army there (the Armee de Liberation Nationale, or ALN), complete with tanks, and even a small air force. When independence finally came in 1962, the ALN under Colonel Houari Boumedienne, which was not a revolutionary force, turned on the FLN leaders. By 1960 everyone knew the Algerian people were going to win; there was no need for the conventional army. Eqbal’s disappointment is palpable here:

Without that conventional army, the revolution would have been at least partially successful. It has not been even partially successful. It only succeeded in getting rid of France; it failed at building a democratic, revolutionary society.

In the mid-to-late 60s, Eqbal taught at various American Universities and became “one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of American policies in Vietnam and Cambodia.” In November of 1970, after reports to congress by J. Edgar Hoover, Eqbal was indicted along with the antiwar priest Daniel Berrigan and six other catholics on charges of conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger in an attempt to end the war in Vietnam. The group came to be known as the Harrisburg 8. [Photo shows a press conference for the Kissinger trial. Eqbal is seated at extreme left.] One measure of Eqbal’s unwavering integrity and unerring moral compass is that in April of 1971, during his trial on these trumped up conspiracy charges, he took note of the worsening situation in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and the Pakistani army’s shameful atrocities there. At a time when hardly any other Pakistani raised a voice in protest, and under all that personal stress, Eqbal took the time to write a “Letter to a Pakistani Diplomat” which is included in Selected Writings. After laying out a seven-point argument for why the Pakistani government’s actions would only end in disastrous secession (which, of course, they did within the year), he writes:

I know that I shall be condemned for my position. For someone who is facing a serious trial in America, it is not easy to confront one’s own government. Yet it is not possible for me to oppose American crimes in Southeast Asia or Indian occupation of Kashmir while accepting the crimes that my government is committing against the people of East Pakistan. Although I mourn the death of Biharis by Bengali vigilantes and condemn the irresponsibilities of the Awami League, I am not willing to equate their actions with that of the government and the criminal acts of an organized, professional army.

After their deliberations, the jury declared a mistrial in the Harrisburg 8 case in April of 1972. For the next decade, Eqbal continued writing while a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., also serving as the first director of its European affiliate, the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. He also held various visiting professorships during this time, and further consolidated his reputation as an intellectual’s intellectual. (“I’ve spent much of my adult life, it seems, reading and learning from Eqbal Ahmad.” —Seymour M. Hersh) From 1982 Eqbal was a professor of political science at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts until his retirement in 1997. But from 1992 onwards, he had started dividing his time between Amherst and Islamabad. Eqbal Ahmad died on May 11, 1999.

                               ————————- *** ————————–

Starting in the early 90s, Eqbal’s dream was to start a new secular university of the highest academic caliber in Pakistan, which he wanted to name Khaldunia after the famous fourteenth century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun. I only met Eqbal Ahmad once: after the screening of the BBC documentary about his migration to Pakistan (which I have mentioned above) at Columbia University. Akeel Bilgrami introduced me to him and we all went to dinner together. (I’m quite sure Robin Varghese was also present.) There, I asked him how the Khaldunia project was going, and he replied that he would tell me but first I must commit to teaching there for two years. Of course, I immediately and happily did, but alas, Khaldunia never came to be. The corrupt Pakistani bureaucracy put hurdles in Eqbal’s path at every step and finally even rescinded the land grant they had given him years earlier. Still, Eqbal kept trying, and during these years also became a columnist for Karachi’s largest English daily, Dawn. He wrote his last column on April 25th, 1999, and died two weeks later. Eqbal really was one the most widely beloved and respected men I can think of. Edward Said spoke at his memorial service, ending thus:

Bantering, ironic, sporty, unpedantic, gracious, immaculate in dress and expression, faultlessly kind, an unpretentious connoisseur of food and wine, Eqbal’s themes in the end were always liberation and injustice, or how to achieve the first without reproducing more of the second. He saw himself perceptively as a man of the eighteenth century, modern because of enlightenment and breadth of outlook, not because of technological or quasi-scientific “progress”. Somehow he managed unostentatiously to preserve his native Muslim tradition without succumbing either to the frozen exclusivism or to the jealousy that has often gone with it. Humanity and genuine secularism in this blood-drenched old century of ours had no finer champion. His innumerable friends grieve inconsolably.

You may read the rest of Said’s speech here, and other tributes can be seen here. Over the years, Robin, who knew Eqbal Ahmad intimately and worked with him for a while, has frequently entertained and edified me with anecdotes of Eqbal. Rather than try to recall these and give a second-hand account, I urge Robin to set down some of his personal reminiscences of Eqbal himself here at 3QD in the near future. But for now I give the last word to Arundhati Roy who speaks for many in saying: “Ahmad is a brilliant man with brilliant insights. My only complaint about him is that he is not here now, when we need him the most.”

[All photos of Eqbal Ahmad are taken from this website and were provided by Emily Roysdon of Hampshire College.]

My other Monday Musings can be seen here.

I went the Museum of Modern Art the other day with the intention of seeing the new Dada exhibition. I never made it in, however, because I found myself preoccupied with the Douglas Gordon videos on display in the room next door. Now let me say at the outset that video art has never been my thing. I’ve usually found that artists working in video try too hard to de-familiarize a medium cognitively associated with the pleasures of television. Video makes my brain expect TV and thus more than anything else to expect narrative. The response by video-artists is often to freeze out all notions of story telling—or what we might naively call action—and put in their place one or another kind of tableau. Video art would appear to become art, in other words, when it sheds its association with what we ordinarily find within the box.

So I was happily surprised to find so much in the Gordon exhibit, and to find in particular that Gordon’s videos worked precisely by making me rethink (at least for a moment) the ways in which we view television or film. This is not to say that Gordon’s works are a version of television or film, or what some might deride as mere entertainment; it is rather to say that Gordon remains much closer to the forms to which the medium of video inevitably alludes. His point is not to detach video from entertainment but rather to try to comment upon the way in which visual entertainment works.

Perhaps the most well known of his works is 24 Hour Psycho, in which he slows down Hitchock’s film to the speed at which it would take a day to watch the whole thing, and projects it front and back on a single, large panel. Do the math and that turns out to be roughly two frames per second, just enough for the human eye to perceive each as it gives way to the next. The result is that the motion of the motion picture is not so much slowed down as thrown into a kind of controlled herky-jerky. The illusion of reproducing human perception is taken apart, as what we see is not fluid movement—what we at least think we see in real life—but rather a series of connected stills and the gap between them, as if we’ve learned for the first time that light really does come in particles after all. The effect is uncanny: one can almost feel the brain attempt to stitch together the stills into the motion we expect from films and the events we remember to be the story of Psycho. But this requires, first, that we, as it were, melt the one still into the next (and the next), and, second, that we situate them in relation to a whole that we will never see. When I got there Janet Leigh was putting her stolen bundle into her bag and preparing to go on the lam. An hour or so later, she had been pulled over by a policeman. Anthony Perkins, the shower, etc. were still nowhere to be seen. Now of course we remember Perkins and the shower when we see the film denatured into a daylong version of itself. Our memory assists in the effort of putting the one still in a fluid relation to the next, which is I suspect something that happens at a preconscious level when we watch film at its ordinary speed.

A similar sort of thing happens with Gordon’s genuinely disorienting piece Left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right, which splits Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool into two panels with alternating frames projected on each side, one the reverse of the other. One frame flashes on the right, followed by black leader, and the next frame, flipped in reverse, flashes on the left, followed by black leader, and so on. The visual result is a double and mirrored image and a pulsing strobe that fills the entire room. The effort to compress the two into one—to flip the movie right side out—and make something like a cohesive fit is daunting. More so, however, is the aural effect. 24 Hour Psycho is blessedly silent (one shudders to think what speech and score slowed down to that duration would sound like). But Left is right keeps the soundtrack attached to its flipped over and alternating frames. What emerges is not quite human speech, but something that has all the cadence and rhythms of it appearing to come out of the mouths of the images broken up and split on the screen. The piece thus reveals an interesting difference between the way we process visual and aural stimulus. At some level of preconscious activity, we convert sequential stills into the perception of motion. We can even do this when the motion is revealed to be one still after the next or, with greater effort in Left is right, when the images strobe and mirror each other. We cannot do the same with speech, which, as the philosophers would say, is compositionally structured. Break speech down by inserting syncopated pauses and mumblings and it will sound like speech but communicate nothing at all.

Space keeps me from saying much about Between Darkness and Light, a riff on William Blake that projects The Exorcist and The Song of Bernadette (a 1943 movie about a woman claiming to see the Virgin Mary) on top of each other. One quick thing to notice is the sheer dominance black and white has when placed on top of color. We see through the blush of the one to the more saturated tones of the other. And of course the ironic juxtapositions of two films reversed in spiritual content yet similar in iconography and form.

Discussed:

Timothy Leary: A Biography, by Robert Greenfield. 2006
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson. 1971
A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. 1977
A Scanner Darkly, (Movie) by Richard Linklater. 2006
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, by Lawrence Sutin. 1986

Time has been quite cruel to Timothy Leary’s best known prescription: that the mass indulgence of hallucinogens would result in a liberating transformation of American society. The “mystic vision” behind this bad notion actually belonged to the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, but Leary was seen as the “perfect person for the job” of advancing the alchemist’s agenda — initially through the dosing of famous artists, poets, intellectuals and musicians. Whatever value may lie in consciousness alteration among society’s vanguard, the more wide-spread the experiment became, the more terrible its public costs, the more Leary seemed to deny that it had all gone horribly wrong. The crimes of the Manson family should have been a sickening wake-up call, and if there is a flicker of vitality still left in the original proposition that some intrinsic and transcendent wisdom lies in the imbibing of psychedelics, the news that right-wing harpy Ann Coulter (a shrew so shrill even conservatives have tired of her) remains a wistful Deadhead might prove sobering.

Robert Greenfield’s 600+ page biography of Leary reveals a charismatic and talented Irish huckster who anti-heroically refused to sober up. Though he initially approached psychedelics with scientific skepticism and hopes for psychiatric use, the mystic vision imparted by Ginsberg took deep hold and propelled him from F. Scott Fitzgerald wanna-be to Acid King to pseudo-Revolutionary fugitive, before winding up as a Hollywood Squares style B-list celebrity with a penchant for fringe science. One of the oddest kinks in this declension, a turning point in Greenfield’s biography, is when Leary, behind bars and looking at rotting the rest of his life in prison, named names in the drug movement he had built. To show the depths of his penitence he penned articles for the conservative flagship The National Review, in which he lambasted the druggie music and wayward morals of his friend John Lennon (and Bob Dylan) while also attempting to lure his devoted ex-wife into arrest. Bummer.

Why did Leary flip and fink? Perhaps there was some residual effect from the stupendous amounts of all the acid, brain damage that lent a certain plasticity to his character, or maybe it was an addiction to a more common and insidious drug: fame. Leary behind bars was forgotten as the world moved on, a fate too grating to endure for an egomaniac, especially if all that was to be sacrificed were past principles and allies. Ratting out his friends, associates and lawyers would both place him back in the public eye and speed his release, and it seemed to have worked okay. Credit the man with dancing fast enough to avoid his “karma”.

A noteworthy side effect of this episode is the way Leary’s fall from grace came to symbolize the death of the sixties for so many. When a grand vision with utopian promise grabs a sizable chunk of culture then sputters out into betrayal and self-parody, it remains with the burned romantics, writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Philip K. Dick, to best chronicle the aftermath. Both men were masters of writing a certain style of drug addled jive, prose that crackled with wild energy and potential violence while teetering between complete paranoia and high comedy. Thompson, in his best known book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas captures both the triumph of the counter-culture in full bloom and its quick collapse:

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning . . .

And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

The human cost of that “broke and rolled back” was vicious in lives, health, and hope. Even as early as 1971, Thompson bemoaned the “fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip”:

He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a though to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. . . What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

It was among the terror of those “grim meat hook realities” that Philip K. Dick (PKD) often lived and wrote, combining, in his later novels, the sweaty dregs of the drug culture with the All-American horror of H. P. Lovecraft. In his A Scanner Darkly, the protagonist, Bob Arctor, covertly works as a narcotics agent in a bleakly futuristic Orange County California. Coupled with an array of high-tech surveillance gear, Arctor’s growing intake of the schizophrenia-inducing drug “Substance D” is driving him to narc on himself. Arctor is a burned out divorcée living with other thirty-something bachelor freaks in a drug den of a suburban house, a setting inspired by PKD’s own shattered home in Marin County of the early seventies. PKD, according to biographer Lawrence Sutin, was near broke and addicted to amphetamines. He suffered from bouts of agoraphobia and kept an open house policy for teenage hippies and dealers. During roughly the same time, an exiled Tim Leary was enjoying the life of a coked-up ski bum in Switzerland, haunting through force of celebrity and charm, the chalets of dubious aristocrats in a dance of mutual scams.

In A Scanner Darkly, one of the more psychotic characters, in order to burn the luckless protagonist Arctor, impersonates him on the phone and signs off with “Tune in, turn on and good-bye,” a stunt seemingly calculated to call down the wrath of the straights. Leary’s most famous phrase, of course, was “Tune in, turn on and drop out” and the last clause was already a tacit admission that the initial flush of psychedelic potential had failed to radically transform America . . . that the drug culture should simply “drop out” and either go into internal exile or live parasitically off of the straights. Funny how touchy straight society got on that score.

Leary was a fan of PKD’s sci-fi, and through a bit of druggie synchronicity, the guru manqué has a connection to the current movie version of A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater. Leary’s archivist through-out the sixties was Michael Horowitz, the father of the Hollywood actress Winona Ryder, who co-stars as in A Scanner Darkly. (Ryder regarded Leary as her godfather and has written a foreword to one of Leary’s latest biographies.) Horowitz, as archivist and friend, was put in a terrible bind when Leary started collaborating with the Feds in prison. He agonized over whether to surrender Leary’s files as Leary requested and was dismayed by the personal pressure to turn over incriminating letters. The New York Times reported that with the archives seized, the FBI hoped “they would be able to solve every drug case of the 1960s”. While the high aspirations and naiveté of the Feds were comical, the resulting paranoia among the drug culture was very real. The flood of undercover agents that hit the streets at the end of the Nixon administration, and the tactic of dealers to turn in the competition, were part of the reason that narcs were an obsession of both Thompson and PKD. The idea that the necessary intimacy of drug use could be contaminated by the subterfuge of a cop was the ultimate buzz-kill, the recession of that “high and beautiful wave,” and Leary’s betrayal helped to show how hollow the whole show was to begin with.

Called in front of a grand jury in 1975, Winona’s Dad refused to testify, befuddling the prosecuting attorney by maintaining that archivists possesses the same privileged confidentiality that is bestowed upon priests, spouses and attorneys. A clever tact, he escaped without indictment, and decades later, his daughter, in a PKD derived movie, would play a narc that plots to drive another narc insane in an elaborate plot to bust a drug manufacturer. That schizoid mirroring and fear/fascination with undercover cops was not just a literary trope for PKD. According to Sutin, in February of 1973, despite his still occasional use of cannibinoids, Dick wrote to the Justice Department offering up A Scanner Darkly as part of the fight against drugs.  Throughout the seventies he corresponded with the FBI to let them know that despite the appreciation of his novels by left-wing and even French literary critics, he, PKD, was a patriot.

Of all the many films that have been based on PKD’s works, Linklater’s is the closest in spirit and tone to such schizoid deliberations. The book, despite its thin veneer of sci-fi, was an obvious cri de coeur emanating from the sixties hangover. Stripped of its proper temporal context, Linklater’s film recalibrates much of Philip Dick’s horror and anguish as comedy, substituting gritty poverty and the bitterly-earned paranoia of the early seventies for nineties style slacker wit. In Southern California of the early seventies, it was possible that a bunch of edgy hippies and drug dealers might actually know someone, or have connections to, radical terrorist groups like the Weather Underground.  Similar connections between psychedelic slackers and today’s radical terrorism are hard to imagine, and the film characters efforts to make them stretch into silliness.

Imagining the future through science fiction was a shared fixation of Leary and Dick, one with flippant optimism and the other with tendentious horror. Their idiosyncratic approaches as futurists provided downright, well . . . . trippy codas to their lives. Leary briefly flirted with the idea of cheating death and getting a glimpse of tomorrow. Intrigued by cryogenic preservation, Leary, on his deathbed, talked of having a sketchy cryonic corporation sever and freeze his head for future re-animation. Owing to a lack of trust with said corporation, Leary backed out and passed away in front of cameras and surrounded by friends. Dick, who popularized the existential dilemmas of androids, died in 1982 but recently served as a model for a highly-detailed robotic head, a showcase for the work of Hanson Robotics Inc, complete with an “artificial-intelligence-driven personality”. The construct was designed to simulate a conversation with the dead author, but alas, David Hanson, the builder, misplaced the head on an airplane in December of last year and it has yet to reappear. Given such material, one’s tempted to ponder the bizarreness of it all, perhaps even by drifting into one of PKD’s parallel realms, a dark future in which the frosty noggin of Timothy Leary and the android cephalos of PKD bullshit each other on the nature of reality.

The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze décor…

—Wallace Stevens, Of Mere Being

These are the lines that keep repeating themselves in my mind as I sit in the church, the dull buzz of insects outside rearticulated by the dull buzz of the humans within, all of us repeating prayers and hymns and poems as though they are zen koans or Heraclitean fragments. We are in shock: that would explain it. The mind shuts down like a freezing thing here, even in July’s heat; in the landscape of despair memory goes numb and occluded monuments rise up to limn the horizon of one’s thinking. You end up grasping, half-blind and with stiff fingers, at words. And what are words? Puffs of air, aspirated, spent, already-too-late, guttural gestures. Words do not exist.

We are at a funeral. For a boy. Six months earlier I had been building a fort in winter with this boy, shoveling blocks of wet snow into the shape of a wall, then spiking it, Transylvania-like, with pine cones and fir boughs. I had watched him inhale the resiny tang of the boughs before he laid them into the snow and thought to myself, “I remember that. I remember smelling winter as a boy.” And now, in July, I am sitting in a church muttering poetry, remembering my memories of this boy and celebrating his death.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

Churches tend to be dead things, all hard, marble surfaces, shellacked canvases, dingy clothes and stale water. That’s why they burn incense: to cover up the smell of death. And then there is the absurd, vertical orientation they force upon you. All this standing up, raising your voices to heaven, getting down on your knees, standing up again, bowing your head… God doesn’t live in the steeple or the sky. But we do anything in a church to avoid looking along the horizontal axis, to avoid looking at one another, because that would mean looking the thing in the face.

“Something terrible has happened,” we would have to admit. “It cannot be contained; we cannot contain it. It creeps in upon us and it creeps beyond us.” So we look up, we sit down, we lift up our hearts and pray. But if you look along the horizontal axis in a church, if you eschew the vertical to which you are beckoned, you begin to perceive the shimmering aura of alienation in which every human being is enveloped. In church, each of us is alone.

Which of course is one of the reasons for going to church in the first place—to transcend alienation (rather than puncture it), to remind ourselves that we are brothers and sisters in the eyes of God, that we are together in this, not separate, and that God is with us. We are not alone. But God is mute, and we in this church cannot speak. We can only pray.

I am so angry, I have to pee. So does my sister. Thankfully, I follow her out down the aisle.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

There were two hundred people in the church; there are fifty more in its entranceway and another two hundred outside. Most of them seem to have their mouths open. They are panting, weeping. The sky looks incredibly stupid above their heads. It is an oily, dull sky, thick with stupidity. It must be cruel as well, because it is raining heat down upon them. It is torrid outside. Everyone is suffering. My sister and I relieve ourselves, go back in and sit down. More prayers. Still no answer. That’s when I notice the canopy of green in one of the side doors. The boy’s father stands up and delivers a eulogy. It is one of the most stunningly courageous acts I have ever seen a human perform. He does not break. He speaks of a “brotherhood of pain,” how people used to derive their identities from suffering. Then he implores us not to join them. “Andrew had a good life,” he says, “Please. Leave your pain behind you. Leave it here.”

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Through a side door there is a green canopy that I have been studying for some time now. It is a riotous growth of vines and leaves that smothers everything beyond. It emanates coolness. It glows. I feel like sitting there for fifty years and letting it grow over everything, the whole church and me too, smother everything, lend us a bit of shade from the idiotic, hysterical sky with all its light and heat and scuttering clouds. I would like to feel that green canopy envelope me, then start growing inside me. Death.

There’s a thick strand in philosophy’s braid that curls around death. I am not a philosopher, nor a poet—though some of my best friends are. (Wallace Stevens was both, it seems.) But I know that studying philosophy can make your life better, in no small way because it can help you deal with death, calmly and with equanimity. I’ve been puzzled by this poem since the first time I read it. Perhaps it is a measure of callousness on my part, but sitting in that church I found myself realizing not that philosophy illuminates death, but that death illuminates poetry:

The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze décor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

The rain falls ever harder, and noon is as grey as six in the morning. I’m in a tiny mill town in the Salzkammergut region of Austria, and it’s rained consistently for the past eleven days. Although the geographic distances aren’t much, this Austria is culturally quite far from the Vienna of Zweig, Hundertwasser, Jelinek et al., and even farther from the Mozart delirium (chocolates, operas, and 250th birthdays) now taking place in Salzburg. I’ve come here for a congress of papermakers, and suppose Steyrermühl was chosen more for the historical presence of paper along the Traun River than for the industrial paper mill that now seems to be the sole life of the town.

I’ll be giving a brief presentation about watermarks—those oft-misunderstood marks most visible when paper is backlit. Over the past few months, as I considered what I might bring to this show-and-tell, I got sidetracked.

Getting over History

On my way north from Italy I traveled through Trentino-Alto Adige, or Südtirol, and stopped in Bozen and Meran. When I mentioned this to an Italian friend from a bit farther south, he was repulsed, asking why I would want to go someplace where everyone’s a Nazi. This was said in jest, of course, but not completely. I said such an opinion would be like saying all Italians are Fascists, to which he replied “no, that’s very different, you see, because we had partisans fighting the Fascists, but none of the people stood up against what was going on in Germany and Austria.” Our little disagreement aside, when I was considering how to introduce watermarks, I figured my first stop should be Google; after all, fewer and fewer people still think of going to a printed, bound, multi-volume encyclopedia. So, I googled “watermarks,” and the first link, followed by many others in the top ten, was the website of a documentary that debuted last year about a Viennese Jewish female swimming team, the women’s forced flights to several other continents in the nineteen-thirties, and their recent reunion. That’s one more strike against my bicker-backup. I’m either naïve, or would just really like to think that people and nations can eventually get over their histories.

A Do-it-Yourself Digital Future

Several more of the top ten links for “watermarks” sent me to sites for creating my very own digital watermark to protect documents and impart my otherwise generic, Wonderbread copy-paper printouts with a distinguished air. The truth is that real watermarks, as they were born several hundred years ago, are an endangered species, while their imitators are proliferating right and left. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, or trying to change the inevitable course of things; I just mean that it’s really refreshing when I meet someone who has even a vague idea of these symbols’ rich past.

I’m enchanted by these signs. The subtle white-on-white mark, transparently traced out by minute differences in thickness, can be missed if one isn’t paying attention. There are catalogues upon catalogues of the most common signs used—grapes, coats of arms, hands, initials, anchors, fool’s caps—and, like runes or linear A, their origins and meanings remain largely mysterious. They have political implications as well: one of the more common watermarks in European handmade papers is the Pro Patria (any Vaterland remarks, anyone?) mark, usually a sword- or staff-wielding sovereign enclosed by a fence or within a walled city-state. Imitation, quality control, and copyright issues had come up in paper long before the industrial revolution and information-age; the Baselstab, or Basel crozier, was first used by papermakers in Basel, as it is the city symbol. Because they also made what was widely known as the best (and most expensive) paper, this mark was copied all around Europe, allowing the lesser papermakers in many countries to tell their clients it was a high quality imported paper, and therefore charge them significantly more.

Then there are the kitschy chiaroscuro watermarks with heads of state and other prominent figures—oversized, more pompous relatives of the tiny ones found in paper currency. The practicality of the line watermark, usually used as a maker’s mark or mill’s signature, is more humble, and more easily written over, than the flashy, cameo-like portrait chiaroscuro sort.

I suppose it’s the sheer understatement of most watermarks that so attracts me. As directing trends produce more and more thirty-second television spots with hundreds of images flashed for mere milliseconds, and Photoshop allows anyone to crank up the contrast to create oceans of saccharine, Technicolor images of a brighter, better world, watermarks are a humble, slow, quiet presence. The signs are there, and are easily overlooked.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.

Given recent events in Cuba it seems appropriate to post this piece I wrote about a trip to Cuba four years ago. It was published originally in Radical Society.

COMING FROM THE AIRPORT THE CITY creeps up slowly and then it’s street after street, twilight, a kind of beige everywhere, not quite enough light, figures in the streets, shades, building after building, beautiful, post-beautiful, falling away into themselves, into the street that is drifting from itself back into them, constrained slow dissolution, a chaos in which no one is afraid, a sky going quietly black and all the old cars are lonely souls, a yellowish light that might be sad but is there and then not there and then almost there. You wouldn’t say that the streets are alive but they aren’t dead, perhaps they are waiting for something. Everyone is drifting; everyone is drifting in the middle of the streets. The great sea is just behind a tiny wall at the end of these roads and it is flowing and lapping and the city is drifting and the moon is the same color as the crumbling earthy road.

***

Some time ago communists wanted to end history by beginning it. The idea of progress was exploded. This path that we are on is a time bomb, they said, and when it blows itself up we pick up the shards and begin to construct a real history, human history. The previous history of class struggle, they said, bears the seeds of its utter transformation, in which it cannot but leap outside into a new framework for history. It was a balancing act between past, present, and future in which the past prepares the future and the present crashes through them like an ax, freeing them both in the obliteration.

But history moves on somehow anyway, or not history, but worlds organizing and disorganizing, people cutting through times and places to make their lives, the old sea washing past it all, constant forgetting and reremembering and making up other things that are the same and different. These things happen, they’ve happened.

Some time ago, more recently, history started to end for some, but not with the cataclysm of a leap into some Utopia outside of previous history. It has started to end more as the running into a cul-de-sac from which there seem to be no other options. The future has died. This is felt either in terms of exhaustion, fear, or disgust,…or complacency. Our world will no longer envision itself as something else, cannot bear to envision itself as something else and by correlate will no longer risk the loss of its advantage. That is a burden for others to bear now.

***

Cuba is still waiting for something, still preserves itself in an anticipation that makes the whole world here paused and swaying like long strands of seaweed on a cold calm sea, swaying a little and drifting in some kind of pause. This sky is grey and these buildings are blue, yellow, pink, imagine that, but they’re dying too. How can a building die, a neighborhood die? It does it like this in stages that take a lifetime and then die. It jumps forward all of a sudden and then everything is different.

At the museum of the revolution in Havana there is a diorama, life-sized, of Che and Camilo emerging from the jungle in full guerilla regalia and they have smiles that only revolutionaries have when they emerge from jungles. The display is a testament to those smiles, a desperate attempt to do justice to those smiles of the revolution that are surprised smiles and vindicated smiles and terribly otherworldly smiles and the diorama is nothing but a mechanism of death. Nothing could kill those smiles more than this testament to those smiles. They die over and over again on the second floor of the museum of the revolution and yet are never allowed to die partly and simply because they cannot pass. The smile of the revolution is the kind of smile that no one sees, or no one is sure they ever saw, it happens in that one moment of emergence from the jungle when everything is different and such things are never witnessed, they are the kinds of things that cannot be witnessed. These kinds of smiles fly across faces somehow but also they don’t exist at all, they get reconstructed in memory, maybe they never really happened. There is so much memory in Cuba, memory and waiting. The youthful smiles of Castro, Camilo, Che seem to signify something in the old pictures that hang on the old walls. It is clear that they do, but the big sun is shining another hazy day and everyone is out being alive and disappearing into mysterious doorways and courtyards where the passage between inner living and outer living is just a threshold, but you can’t cross it. All things are open and closed.

***

People in Cuba are starting to be driven crazy. They are starting to double. You cannot have two worlds in one place, or perhaps you can but it starts to have effects. One can imagine a situation in which every Cuban has two personalities, they borrow from one another, they both draw from a font of social cohesiveness that is still a wellspring but they are distinct and separate. This schizophrenia will not be the result of some specific trauma for which the splitting is a result, it will be the slow workings of necessity. Thereby, it will be a schizophrenia, a splitting that precedes trauma, that leads up to crisis instead of the more usual reverse.

The moon leads you to Camaguey because it just sits right on the earth down toward the end of the road and is a red orange that fell out of the sky. That is how you get to Camaguey, if you should want to get to Camaguey. There is a man in Santa Clara who is the angel of death, he prepares the way to Camaguey when he says “I am death” and the clouds open up with a rainless storm. he is what got left over when they brought the bits of Che to Santa Clara in a few black boxes and buried them in a concrete mound outside of town that no one ever goes to, no one ever could go to because it was built not for people so much as for the ability to say that it exists. They saved bits of his clothing and letters and personal effects. It is the morbid cataloguing of herodom, it is the bits of a human being assembled and displayed in order to replace humanity with deity. It could make one want to cry. Across the hall is a simple tomb for Che and other martyrs of the revolution. It is eerie and mysterious and wonderful. There is something great in it that could make one want to cry. There is no point in staying, you have to leave it all, those two rooms, two rooms that have everything in them. It wasn’t built for the present and it certainly wasn’t built for the past; nothing, ever, has been built for the past, but is was built for a parallel present that is the constant ghost here and if the sky and moon make magical displays they don’t touch the day with their raving, they stay out beyond the fields in autonomous fury.

***

The islandness of this island should never be forgotten and should be thought about again and again and again. This is an island surrounded by the sea that is a great water among us. Islands are for trying things. Plato went to Syracuse for many reasons that intersect the contingency of the event but he would not have gone there had it not been on an island, he would not have even thought of going. A long time ago Atlantis sank to the bottom of the sea maybe and became the perfect island because it managed to make its boundaries permanent and forever separate from the real. An island is but a brief interruption of the sea. Atlantis had the good sense to make that interruption permanent. This sense of boundaries and their fragility may be why Cuba does not manifest the kind of eschatological visions of other socialisms. It is a kind of true revolution insofar as we take revolution to be the turning around of things. The motto of this revolution could be “We put the poor on top.” It wouldn’t be entirely true of course, privilege seeps into cracks and crannies, but it would be a version of truth. Cuba puts the poor on top precisely as that, as the poor. One can imagine the surprise confronting a more European vision of socialism where the implicit promise lies in the opening up of bourgeois privilege to everyone else. Cuba’s vision is both more honest and more terrifying and one wonders that the projections of human meaning have tolerated it so long, though barely. The Cuban vision is essentially a compact among beasts of burden, a recognition that there is still toil at the heart of the division of labor. Cuban socialism sees limits everywhere, just as all its borders meet the sea. These limits have made it sober, sober and sad, and waiting infinitely for a shifting of limits that only gods hand down.

***

Fidel said that history would absolve him, would redeem him, long before any prophet had dreamed a vision of his celebrating a seventy-fifth birthday as president of Cuba. But history has layers and overlappings. There are so many histories. The genius of Fidel has not been to foretell but to project. The genius of Fidel has been a constant working on past and future. It was a great service to Fidel for Che to have committed revolutionary suicide, it got rid of the temporal constraints and now he is eternally future. At the entrance to a terrifying nickel-smelting factory outside of Moa there is a picture of Che. The hills are stripped and blanched red for miles around. It is a brand new world there somehow. Next to Che are the words “imagine the future.” Perhaps it is meant to say that this can only be endured insofar as we already imagine that it doesn’t exist because it really isn’t part of the present. The future can be used as a negating force and it can be negated. All things are at play here and they amount, of course, to the reproducing of what is already at hand. These are techniques of survival until the new man comes, who never comes.

To move east across Cuba is to move further and further into a social vision and dreamscape in which everything is just as real as it is. It is a social dreamscape in which the symbol of fantasy is simply itself. The inwardly coiled vision is wrapped around itself multiply to the point where one can encounter a billboard proclaiming simply “Cuba si.” In a town like Holguin one finds not so much a cult of the revolution as its dominating everydayness. If it is a cult it is a cult without magic, that is, a cult with no real sense of alchemy or transcendence. Perhaps the genius of this revolution has been to toggle back and forth almost seamlessly between a concept of the present as packed with some transformative power and a future that always just looks like what is already here. Thus both things are preserved in an oscillation that is inoculated from space and time. It is a rounded thing, a capsule, but a capsule that needs constant maintenance and is losing its circularity now at a rapid rate. The spiral is unraveling again into a strip with past, present, and future aligned in their traditional order instead of wrapped round each other in the great blur of the revolution. Cuba is beginning to exchange its history at the global rate again, and this rate is set by a world that Cuba has placed all its bets against.

***

The great waters curl again onto the shores grabbing and replacing, slowly refashioning according to the blueprint of an infinite mind that, because infinite, would not be a mind at all. The young peaks stumble upward directly from these shores and groan, holding their particular storms. The way the streets just go through the day in these small towns can make all things feel connected, in some kind of secret correspondence with the run of green up those cliffs beyond and the blueness that has settled on the sea for now–green and brown and then back out to blue again. The sun has the horrible properties of an eye but one day is laconic and so is the next. It is not clear where came the movements that swept all to change when all got changed. And then again it seems again that all things are working on some form of communication. Such communication always harbors explosions because while meaning builds up it only ever happens all at once, when it ever happens. Are there great stores of energy here and again or is everything seeping slowly away, being stolen infinitely by a sea that slips out under the sun’s eye and guidance? On these streets are found repetition and repetition but something of a restlessness too. It is not clear who is communicating with whom.

In a brief glimpse through a break in the green on a broken road that crosses and re-crosses the same dead rail tracks that shuttle no trains a gaggle of young boys in a brown stream splashing in a circle of joy. Just circling and splashing, circling and splashing, enacting some ritual whose rules are a concoction only of their immediate need. These are the ones who are in some correspondence with their world. They are the best of Cuba and the last to know. You only see them for an instant and then the fields cover it all up again and the road opens up some other vista.

“No man can be said to know anything, until he learns that every day is doomsday,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once famously observed. By that standard, there is no one more knowledgeable than Jack Chick, the controversial founder of Chick Publications, purveyor of fine evangelical propaganda since the 1960s. For decades, Chick has been a one-man prophet of doom and gloom, seeing Satanic conspiracies  and signs of the pending Apocalypse lurking in every corner.

It’s a safe bet that anyone reading this has encountered at least one example of Chick’s work. He has both rabid fans, and equally rabid detractors, inspiring both the Jack Chick Museum of Fine Art, and an archive devoted to parodies of his signature style. Yet very little is known about the man himself, who is notoriously reclusive (partly from natural shyness, and partly out of paranoia, convinced — like any true conspiracy theorist — that his enemies are trying to assassinate him). He hasn’t granted an interview since, oh, about 1975. But here’s what little we do know.

Jack Thomas Chick was born April 13, 1924 in Los Angeles, California. A sickly child, he was fond of drawing cartoons growing up. He was also a member of his high school drama club, which sparked a long-standing interest in the theater. In fact, he attended the Pasadena Playhouse School of Theater on a scholarship in the early 1940s, whose former students also include Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. After a stint in the army, Chick returned to the Pasadena Playhouse, where he met his future wife, Lola Lynn. She was the daughter of fundamentalist Christians, yet apparently agreed to marry him anyway, even though he was, by his own admission, a foul-mouthed heathen. Thanks to his in-laws’ influence, he eventually converted. 

Chick took the biblical exhortation to spread the Gospel very much to heart. He dreamed of being a missionary, or a preacher, but was purportedly too shy for public speaking. That’s when he hit upon the idea of evangelical tracts, inspired by their use as mass-market propaganda by Chinese communists. He worked days as a technical illustrator at Astro Science Corporation, and drew his comics at night. His first, and most popular, tract, This Was Your Life, appeared in 1964, in which a drunken, lustful, godless protagonist dies suddenly and is forced by an angel to view scenes from his “wasted life” before being condemned to the fires of hell. It is still in print today.   

The huge success of that first little tract spawned an entire industry: Chick Publications now has tracts  devoted to every conceivable threat to evangelical Christianity (real or imagined), denouncing premarital sex, abortion, evolution, homosexuality and AIDS (God’s judgment, of course), astrology, Freemasons, Halloween, witchcraft, rock music, and just about every other facet of modern American life. By the 1970s, Chick had conceived of a more elaborate, full-color, full-sized comic series. He teamed up with an African-American painter and illustrator named Fred Carter to produce The Crusaders, detailing the adventures of two men, fighting evil and spreading the Gospel wherever they went. I was addicted to the series as a child: they had all the elements of good horror, and didn’t skimp on the gory details. Carter’s illustrations are so vivid in their depictions of sex and violence that some critics have described the series as “spiritual porn.”

But then Chick made a serious miscalculation. He published a new adventure featuring the Crusaders, this time based on the “testimony” of a supposed former Jesuit priest named Alberto Rivera. Rivera claimed to have left the Catholic Church after uncovering the Vatican’s plans for world domination, beginning with its systematic discrediting of mainstream Protestant churches (usually through sexual temptation of spiritually weak ministers). The first tale, simply titled Alberto, was followed by six others, each more paranoid than the last, accusing the Catholic Church of (among other things) participating in the Holocaust, the Jonestown massacre, and the rise of Communism.

The Alberto series proved too crazed and paranoid even for diehard evangelical Christians accustomed to fire and brimstone. They could accept that record companies and rock bands worshiped Satan, that demon possession was real, and that Halloween was evil, but not that the Pope was out to get them. It didn’t help Chick’s waning credibility that another tale in the Crusader series, Spellbound, turned out to be based on fraudulent allegations by a supposed “former Grand Druid” named Johnny Todd, who claimed there were Satanists in the US performing human sacrifice. And on July 15th, a longtime Chick collaborator, Ken “Dr. Dino” Hovind, was arrested for tax evasion — specifically, for refusing to pay taxes on his religious theme park, Dinosaur Adventureland. (Hovind helped Chick revise the classic anti-evolution tract, Big Daddy, among others.)

In response to the growing outcry, many Christian bookstores stopped carrying Chick’s comics entirely. (When I tried to buy the Crusader series as an adult — in a misguided fit of nostalgia — the salesclerk confessed they usually kept them in a special “restricted” section in the back, and were currently “out of stock.” I ended up ordering them online.) Even Christianity Today, a popular magazine with mainstream evangelicals, denounced Chick Publications for its overly zealous anti-Catholicism. The dislike was mutual: Chick eventually resigned from the Christian Booksellers Association, claiming they had been “infiltrated” by Catholic operatives. Rivera himself apparently died in 1997 of colon cancer, although no self-respecting conspiracy theorist would ever accept an official death certificate as proof of anything other than a massive cover-up. Chick and his followers claim Rivera was assassinated by the Jesuits via a special poison designed to give victims terminal cancer.

Chick has a few scattered fans outside the wingnut evangelical enclave, most notably underground comic artists R. Crumb (whose work Chick would frankly find appalling) and Daniel Clowes, whose screenplay for the film Ghost World received an Oscar nomination. Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning creator of Maus, is far less complimentary, telling The Independent in 2003, “It makes me despair about America that there are so many people who read these things.”

Spiegelman has it right, in my opinion. Chick comics are nothing more than propaganda masquerading as harmless entertainment. Their only purpose — overtly stated by Chick himself — is to quite literally scare the hell out of us. It’s a tried-and-true method of manipulation, used to great effect by evangelical groups in their zeal to “win souls for Christ.”  It certainly worked on my childhood self; even adults find them disquieting. I once loaned my collection of Crusader comics to PUNK co-founder Legs McNeil, whose tastes ran to the extreme, to say the least. They gave him nightmares. Clowes reported that one night in college he read 80 Chick tracts in a single sitting, and admitted, “I had never been so terrified by a comic.”

When I was around 10, I saw a Christian film called A Thief in the Night, about the supposed “end times.” (The title derives from a Biblical verse pertaining to the Second Coming, which says that Jesus will return “like a thief in the night,” when we least expect it.) Chick had nothing to do with the film, yet it followed the same simplistic formula: a skeptical, unbelieving woman is warned repeatedly that the Rapture is imminent, yet even when her husband converts, she puts off making a decision — until one morning she wakes up to find he has been raptured, along with all the other born-again Christians, and she has been Left Behind. The sequel was even more grim: we witness the rise of the Antichrist, who turns America into a police state where everyone is required to receive the Mark of the Beast (a bar code on the forehead or back of the hand). Anyone who resists is rounded up, imprisoned, and summarily executed. The final scene depicts our unfortunate heroine being forced to watch as a close friend is guillotined for refusing the Mark — her final chance to be “saved.” (The implication: accept Christ now, so you can be raptured and not have to go through that whole guillotine bit to get to heaven — or otherwise burn in hell.)

Evangelicals milked the effect on audiences for all it was worth, following every screening with an “altar call” — in which those now scared out of their wits were invited to come forward and accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. Needlesss to say, my ten-year-old self was terrified. Even though I had technically already been “saved” at the age of 8, largely to please my recently born-again mother, I figured I’d better head up for the altar call again — you know, just in case. Nor was I the only one. Practically every single person in the church did the exact same thing. A former college roommate of mine saw the same films as a child and confessed to being equally traumatized.

Are fear-induced religious conversions sincere or genuine? I doubt it. It certainly didn’t “take” in my case. These days I’m a diehard agnostic, and far happier for it. I prefer cheeky biblical irreverence to evangelical horror, eschewing Chick comics for the far more entertaining Web comic, Holy Bibble.  But like Spiegelman, I am dismayed by the seemingly unquenchable American thirst for the kind of Apocalyptic, fear-mongering garbage being disseminated by Chick and his ilk. There are more than 500 million of Jack Chick’s comic books and tracts in print, and they have been translated into over 100 languages, making him the world’s most published living author. (Technically, he’s self-published, but still…) Then there’s the bestselling Left Behind series of end-of-days novels penned by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, using the book of Revelations in the bible to weave a story of apocalyptic events — again, little more than thinly disguised Christian propaganda, yet hugely popular among the Christian community.

So what? You might be thinking. People like a good scare now and then, and besides, it’s only fiction. But it’s far more subversive than one might realize, especially since the line between fact and fiction is so easily blurred when it comes to things like Bibical prophecies and religious beliefs. For instance, the tragic outbreak of violence in the Middle East  over the last week or so seems to have fanned the flames of Apocalyptic conspiracy theorists. LaHaye has been featured in Newsweek (with the heading “Are These the End Times?”). His co-author, Jenkins, and another Christian author, Joel Rosenberg, were interviewed by Kyra Phillips on CNN in a segment specifically citing the current conflict as a sign of the coming Apocalypse. That’s right: CNN interviewed two writers of fiction as if they were expert scholars on the Middle East. (You can read portions of the transcript here.) That’s right up there with Congress asking Michael Crichton to give expert testimony on climate change.

I confess to puzzlement as to why the mainstream media would give so much prominent space and air time to this kind of unfounded conjecture. It’s probably all about ratings, but that’s no excuse. My objection has nothing to do with sincere personal faith, with which I have no quibble. But this is exploitation of tragic events at its most despicable. Yet once again, people are lapping it up unquestioningly. Perhaps it is more comforting to take refuge in wild religious scenarios and conspiracy theories, rather than face up to the truth: sometimes the worst, most fearsome “monsters” are to be found in the darkest hearts of men.

When not taking random walks on 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette muses on science and culture at her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics.

Michael Blim

In Turkey, they call it “the deep state.” Inside their state, Turks believe, is another state composed of key people spread throughout its military and civil administrations that conspire to move Turkish society in directions they prefer, regardless of what the nation or its politicians want. If the deep state considers that Kurds once more pose a threat to Turkish sovereignty, a Kurdish independence sympathizer is killed and his bookstore blown up, as happened in November, 2005. Though persons attached to the state police intelligence division are discovered involved and likely responsible for the attack, the indictment is quashed and prosecutor is sacked. On May 18, a judge against state employment or university enrollment for Muslim women wearing headscarves is shot down in his courtroom. His murderer, though portrayed as a right wing Islamist crazy, is also shown to have had cell phone contacts at the time of the assassination with a low level military official. The military orders a “spontaneous” demonstration of tens of thousands that reaffirms the secular nature of the Turkish state before the Ankara grave of Kemal Attaturk. Provocations, it seems, make for great marches, and for well-aimed warning shots across the bow of the current Islamist government that very much wants women to be able to wear headscarves.

The deep state, then, is not exactly a complete second state. It does not collect taxes, control borders, educate children, and so on. It is a network of well connected persons whose organization acts as a parasite on the official state. The deep state borrows its host’s powers from time to time to redirect both the official state and nation toward courses of action the deep state favors. Precisely because it is not the surface state of post offices and public works, its workings are only partially visible. This murkiness provides it with plausible deniability both as an organization and with respect to its actions. Sometimes a deep state gets lucky when one of its own takes over the official state by election or by coup. Other times, the deep state so batters or usurps state power that it succeeds in what Andrew Bacevich calls a “creeping” coup.

With September 11, the American deep state took over, and the coup galloped rather than creeped. Bacevich writes about the post-September 11 Congressional resolution: “The notorious Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 was a straitjacket compared to this spacious grant of authority.” (London Review of Books, June 8, 2006, 3) The American deep state, that is the organizational network created inside the state among cold warriors located in successive Republican White Houses and the Defense Department since Nixon’s reign, and whose most visible present figures are Cheney and Rumsfeld, received its mandate. State violence in all its forms was their weapon, and they could now use it with impunity. The virtually unlimited war-making powers of an American president were their cover, much as European tyrants long ago used the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Congress and the Judiciary supinely gave up what little of the Magna Charta remained the American constitution.

Still, there were things that a deep state, even in charge and legitimate, chose to hide. Wholesale wiretapping, torture of combatants and suspects, secret torture camps, domestic spying are (thus far) among them. Like war crimes, our deep states apparently realize that it is best to keep one’s plausible deniability in some sensitive areas.

What of other deep state shadow worlds? Is Pakistan’s deep state responsible for the Mumbai bombings, just as it has been so assiduous in creating paramilitary groups in Kashmir and friendly neighbors out of the Taliban in Afghanistan? Is its president, General Musharraf, the successful head of the deep state, or its oft-embarrassed creature? (It begs credulity to think of Musharraf in this context as a victim.) While American deep staters fume, they seem unsure of the state(s) to which Musharraf is a part, or they know and are either powerless or pleased.

In Italy, a deep state thrived throughout the postwar period, abetting the Mafia, suborning bomb-throwing neofascists, and punishing native Communists. For a long while, it seemed institutionally unable to cope successfully with the leftist terrorism. Many people then and now have wondered whether the deep state was using left terrorism as a weapon against the communists themselves (by the eighties, they were its primary victims), and as part of a campaign to turn the country further to the right. American involvement helped the development of the deep state along. The US CIA during the Cold War had organized and bankrolled its own version of a Masonic lodge called Gladio through which key politicians, generals, state bureaucrats and business people stood ready to step in to stop a left-wing takeover and to cover up American breaches of Italian sovereignty. Another self-described Masonic lodge, the P-2, bankrolled by influence-peddlers and most likely the Mafia, struggled to erect a deep state of a more domestic, entrepreneurial sort, though the membership list often overlapped that of Gladio. The P-2 list, however, added a key Vatican banker and illustrious Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian premier, monopolist media magnate, and one-time Mafia money launderer. P-2 was exposed and discredited, and the Gladio story surfaced after the Berlin Wall fall as just another tale of how the cold war had created deep states in many sensitive political outposts of the American empire. Along with the fall of the Italian postwar political elite in the beginning of the nineties, the Italian deep state seemed done for, though ordinary Italians found it hard to shuck the impression that nothing in their country’s political life is what it seems.

But America’s worldwide war against terrorism had need of one once more and began in Italy under Berlusconi to create one, this time based largely (as is known so far) in the intelligence services. The deputy head of the Italian CIA was arrested several weeks ago for helping the US CIA kidnap and deport a certain Abu Omar from a Milan street to an Egyptian jail for torture and possible private execution. Italian magistrates are now trying to figure out how far the conspiracy goes, but no one would be surprised if Berlusconi, America’s self-proclaimed best European friend, were finally shown to be cognizant of the plot.

Omar’s kidnap by the CIA was one of scores conducted throughout Europe. The European Parliament has traced over 1000 secret, unauthorized flights flown by the CIA in European Union territory over the past five years. The purpose of the flights was to kidnap EU citizens or residents like Omar and to deliver them to secret locations worldwide for “rendition,” torture under an Orwellian tag.

So our deep state meets their deep state(s). The tracks between us and them, as in the Cold War, are becoming deep furrows once more. The American war on terror, and the legitimization of our deep state’s coup, have quickened the pace of illegal, undemocratic acts by it among many and fostered the growth or revitalization of deep states around the world.

And finally we return to the Turks, for whom we might thank for the highly ingenious concept of the deep state. In thanks, we might warn them that they had better watch out. For some time, relations between the US deep state and the Turkish deep state were quite cordial. The Turks were the right kind of Muslims (secular), and their military was determined to keep Islamists from weakening Attaturk-inspired secular state. Its military and ours have had strong links since World War II, and our government, overtly but often deep state-wise covertly has supported several Turkish military coups. The Turks gave Americans air bases for no-fly Kurdish zones after the first Iraq War. Turkish generals had developed strong ties with the Israeli military, and had stood against Turkish Islamic movements seeking a more religiously friendly domestic politics.

But the Turkish state refused to open up or permit a northern front against Iraq in the 2003 war, a source of lasting pique among American deep staters. A recent blog reported that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld expressed concern that Turkey was moving toward Islamic fundamentalism. Policy institutes close to the Defense department, it was said, were sounding an alarm that current Islamist premier Recep Erdogan was using the EU admission process to both weaken the deep state-involved military and to make Turkey more Islamic at home and abroad.

One wonders what might happen if Turkish internal tensions increase. Now that America is a unitary state and the deep state is in charge, Turkish politicians probably shouldn’t expect the usual American split-the-difference advice, consisting of the ambassador that supports the government, and the Pentagon general that supports the coup. America now speaks with one voice, and the Turks among others should beware.

Justin E. H. Smith

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

An eighth-grade English textbook published in Bucharest in 1978 begins with an inspiring hortation from President Nicolae Ceasescu: “Let you learn, learn and learn,” he beseeches the pupils. “Let you explore, explore and work. Let you relate tightly education to research and work. Only by so doing can you become good patriots, good revolutionaries, reliable citizens of socialist Romania, devoted champions of her independence and sovereignty.” As we advance through the lessons, we find many such helpful phrases as: “I hope I shan’t get too excited in front of the Union of Communist Youth members!” and: “The umbrella opens and closes by itself. It is an automaton.”

For the past month I have been hidden away in a small village in the Carpathian mountains, attempting, when not writing the book I came here to write, to learn, learn, and learn a bit of Romanian history. We are in the village of Parau, halfway between Sibiu and Brasov, about 50 kilometers to the west of the old boundary between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that part of the world under at least nominal control of the Ottoman sultan. The inhabitants travel in horse carts, wear traditional clothing, and every evening drive their cows home from the fields down the village’s dirt roads.

Picturesque, indeed. But some days, when I long to go to the little shop in the village to buy some near-stale bread or a can of corn without being stared at like some alien, I can’t help but think to myself: this is the last and greatest stronghold in Europe of what Marx dared to call “the idiocy of village life.” Old ladies scurry past the town’s church making the sign of the cross in fear and ignorance. Kinder, Kirche, Küche, as the Germans say, seem to constitute the ultimate horizon of these women’s dreams and ambitions.

The villagers stare at us with absolutely no concern for discretion as we take our nightly post-prandial strolls. It is summer and the weather is fine and we are in need of a stroll after dinner, that is all, but the intensity of the gazes from every nook and, presumably, behind every window-shade always make us feel as though we are doing something terribly wrong, as though we ourselves were the devil incarnate. You’re just lucky I’m not black, I tell my wife.

Half of the population of Romania is engaged in subsistence agriculture. For the most part, the peasants conduct their lives without using money, getting what they need by producing it themselves or bartering what they’ve produced. Most of the people who live off the land, I was told by a member of the Romanian learned class, have no idea what Europe is, let alone anything like a considered opinion on the pros and cons of EU accession.

Yet everywhere one goes one sees signs of Romania’s longing to join. The little schoolhouse in Parau has waving outside of it, from left to right, a Romanian flag, an EU flag, and a NATO flag. This is particularly odd when we consider that Romania is not yet even a member of the European Union, and we certainly wouldn’t find this sort of EU-pride in countries that are members. The EU flag, it seems, reveals no official affiliation, but is rather a symbol of psychogeographical orientation: do not confuse us, it says, with our neighbors to the East.

Americans who, in the PC-frenzy of the 1990s, trained themselves to stop saying ‘Oriental’, would be amazed to observe how that term is employed around here: ‘Oriental’ is whatever the Romanians hate about themselves, whatever is left over from Ottoman domination, whatever cultural contagion the nomadic Gypsies –whose language is closer to Punjabi than to Romanian— have spread to their hosts, whatever it is that is making EU accession so difficult. Corruption is ‘Oriental,’ as are potholes, inflation, and street dogs. The desire to purge the ‘Oriental’ also manifests itself in the form of a general aversion towards Arab, Turkish, and Indian cuisine, and a common belief that this food is prepared unhygienically. One woman I spoke to reported that her lips sprouted blisters within hours after she dared to try a Lebanese restaurant in Bucharest. Another woman told me that, while she has never actually been to Turkey, she believes that Turks are very dishonest, and that the widespread habit of dishonesty among Romanians must be a consequence of Ottoman influence. I lived for a year in Istanbul, I replied, and I experienced no significant instances of dishonesty. In Romania, in contrast, I have experienced a total of one significant instance (I foolishly gave a vendor a large bill and he gave me too little change in return).

Anyone who spends more than, say, five minutes in Bucharest will inevitably hear, blaring from cars and restaurants and homes, some very, very bad music. This music is “manele“, it is the perpetual soundtrack of lower class men in muscle shirts and gold chains and in Mercedes Benzes they ought not be in a position to afford. As in rap, the texts consist principally in boasts and threats. As far as I can tell, it is produced with no real instruments, it is cheap and forgettable, and it sounds to my ear as though it could just as easily come from Egypt or Turkey. And needless to say, the learned classes hate it. An anti-manele campaign that has been picking up steam recently instructs Bucharesters to blast Mozart from your homes and cars in the hopes of drowning out the ubiquitious trashy Oriental synth-pop.

This is meant to be a defense of high culture against the vulgar, but does it not also perfectly reflect the fundamental divide in the Romanian identity: The Ottoman Empire versus the Austro-Hungarian, Istanbul versus Vienna? Tipper Gore may hate the violent and misogynistic content of rap music, but it has been a long time since any respectable American has been permitted to bemoan the popularity of “jungle” music, to speak as though we are under musical siege by the savages. But the anti-manele rhetoric is not just about music. It’s also about geopolitics and history.

More than one Romanian has explained to me that it is simply Romania’s destiny to be ruled by some empire or other. In bad times, the empire is based in the East (Istanbul, Moscow); in good times, it is based in the West (Rome, Washington). A Romanian ambassador I spoke with in Western Europe described the routine visits he paid to other ambassadors shortly after arriving in his new assignment. The American ambassador was warm if busy, as were the Europeans. The Russian ambassador, in contrast, had a succinct speech he was evidently instructed by Putin to give: don’t think you’ve seen the last of us. The threat is not (and probably never was) communism, but Oriental despotism. I have heard more than one Romanian claim that the Russians are the direct descendants of Genghis Khan, and that there is a discernible continuity from the days of the Mongol invasions to Russian politics today.

Romania is not the only country with the bad habit of projecting everything it doesn’t like about itself towards some geographical or imaginary East. I’ve heard many Russians describe Chinese food as ‘dirty’, and Turks themselves disdainfully describe their version of manele as ‘arabesk’. Much of the rhetoric of Southeastern Europe as the last line of defense against Muslim invaders turned much nastier during the Yugoslav wars than at its present, irritating din in Romania. But what is interesting about the Romanian version is that, in their case, unlike that of the Slavs, Greeks, and Albanians, there is some solid historical, or at least linguistic, reason why they imagine themselves as more Western than their neighbors.

On the European side of the Bosporus Strait, in a northern suburb of Istanbul, there stands a tower erected in the 15th century. It is called the ‘Rumeli’ tower, this being the Turkish form of the ethnonym ‘Roman’. Romans, in this sense, are not citizens of Rome, nor even directly the one-time citizens or subjects of the Roman Empire. They are, rather, Europeans as opposed to Turks. Until 1453, the Bosporus was understood to be the absolute and final barrier between the two realms, but with the fall of Constantinople and the following centuries of Turkish advances –most famously all the way to the gates of Vienna in 1529–, the southeastern part of Europe was transformed into a grey area between two worlds.

All of this is particularly pertinent for our understanding of avian flu, an odd media phenomenon that may or may not have some distant correlate in epidemiological reality. Avian flu, the story goes, is a plague that encroaches upon the West from the East, and that has as its cause unhygienic Oriental food-handling practices. When we first heard of it, it was wreaking havoc in China. Before long, it had made its way to Turkey, and immediately after that cases were reported from Romania: it had snuck past the Rumeli Hisari as Rome’s watchmen dozed. Soon enough, entire neighborhoods of Bucharest were under quarantine, even though not a single case of human-to-human transmission had been reported, anywhere.

The impression this westward progression no doubt left on readers of low-brow newspapers like Das Bild in Germany or The Sun in England was nothing new, but only the latest reinforcement of a basic feature of European geography since at least the 15th century, according to which civilization as we know it is threatened from the east, and the greater Balkan region is conceived as the buffer zone. Once any menace, whether bird flu or the infidel hordes, moves across the Bosporus from Asia Minor into Europe proper –that is, from Turkey to Romania– the uncontested Europeans in Bremen and London know it’s time to worry.

Every Western scholar who has studied Balkan nationalism inevitably comes back to Freud’s famous description of ethnic hatred between neighbors as ‘the narcissism of minor differences.’ Increasingly, it strikes me that Southeastern Europe is that part of the world where the differences between Christianity and Islam begin to disappear, where the one smoothly transitions into the other. One might propose that the head scarves women wear in the Christian East are an indicator of the proximity of Islam. What are mislabeled ‘babushkas’ in the United States, in an unconscious jump from the garment to its wearer, are said to be merely ‘cultural’, while Turkish head scarves are a feature of ‘religion’. In spite of having read the French government’s report on ‘laïcité’, I dare say I still don’t really understand the difference, since I’m not sure what religion could be if not a set of arbitrary rules that appears, from the inside, to be grounded in the eternal order of things. A Bulgarian babushka will feel just as naked with her hair exposed as any Turk, and she will probably feel that this nakedness is bad for reasons having to do with the moral order represented by her big-bearded priest and his thick-walled house of worship. That sounds like religion to me.

The great Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, who figures on the new Romanian one leu bank note, defended the idea throughout his long and distinguished career that Romania is, in its essence, what is left over of Byzantium after the fall of Constantinople to Mehmed II. According to him, “after the transformation of 1453, in many ways only on the surface, Byzantine culture annexed itself to the Gothic world of Transylvania… to the Romanian principality of Moldavia, and, through different means, transmitted itself to the West during the Renaissance.”

Iorga was a nationalist and a chauvinist, who wrote dismissively of “this Stambul of the Turkish rulers, who were not even able to find a real new name for it.” I am an amateur observer of all of this, one who has spent time on both sides of the Bosporus, but always with other, pressing professional obligations that have prevented me from studying the history that interested Iorga in more detail. I have learned enough, however, to have become convinced that the questions of national and religious identity that interested Iorga are of tremendous importance, and that they must be studied by scholars who share none of his allegiances.

The babies are here! Boy (Gwyneth’s Moses), Girl (Brooke’s Grier), Girl (Angelina’s Shiloh), Boy (Gwen’s Kingston).  But where is Suri Cruise?

For me the story starts in March 2005.  I was walking up Third Avenue in the early evening and passed by Katie Holmes. She stood in front of Pop Bar and wore a white trench coat and passed a cigarette in and out of her lipsticked mouth and said loudly to her male companion, “I think it’ll be really good for my career.” She then blew a puff of smoke out the side of her lips toward a floodlight and glanced at the passersby, shifting her weight from right stiletto to left.  I didn’t think much of this.  The last news item I could remember about the WB-star was a terrible picture of her feet in a celebrity rag captioned “Katie has hammer toes.”  But by the end of April, Katie was everywhere, lurching along next to Tom Cruise at this premiere and on that talk show, eyes glistening and mouth either grinning or kissing.  She didn’t say much.  In June she was engaged and planning to convert to Scientology, and in October her pregnancy was announced.  Things moved fast.

That speed was the hallmark of the story, even more so than the sheer strangeness of the coupling.  Tom and Katie were in front of the camera so often, vehemently declaring their love so constantly, that in order to maintain the attention the romance had to progress.  Perhaps it was coincidence that the lovers each had a film to promote during their courtship – perhaps they just happened to be in the public eye during those momentous few months.  I’ve wanted to shout some private things to the entire world on several occasions, and perhaps Tom and Katie just had the chance.  But when the two ran out of vague news (love, religion, marriage, baby) to announce, well, the story slowed, and only the hovering cameras remembered the initial pace.  TomKat won’t announce a wedding date, won’t state whether Katie has converted, won’t show their daughter, Suri, to the world, and won’t answer why to any of it.  That story is stalled, pregnant and overdue, stuck in a long engagement, and the new story is no story at all.

Katie’s well documented pregnancy and undocumented parenting are a remarkable counterpoint to Britney Spears’ painfully public mothering.  Where Katie has seen her celebrity swell along with her stomach, Britney’s post-pregnant physique and baby-related gaffes have invited ridicule and scorn.  Katie exists in a fantasy land – marrying Tom Cruise, joining a top-secret religious organization, giving interviews she could never book before, having a mystery baby – and Britney’s just too awfully real with her wastrel husband and improperly installed car seat and surprise second pregnancy.  Neither woman is working (no movies, no albums). The tabloids go back and forth between them, upstairs and downstairs, and leave American women on the ground floor wondering if a baby’s a good thing at all. 

In fact, the celebrity baby sagas seem to me rather like horror stories.  Owing to her utter absence from the photographic record, Suri Cruise is now akin to something like a unicorn, sea monster, or Rosemary’s Baby.  She’s so mysterious that King of Queens star (and Scientologist) Leah Remini made the front page of CNN.com just by declaring that she’d held the little Cruise, and that Suri was a normal size.  Is Suri older than she should be?  Are there two babies?  Does she exist at all? For those of you who haven’t been following the conspiracy theory, some suspicious evidence:

1.    Katie’s belly: Pictures show it seemingly decrease in size a few weeks before Suri’s birth.
2.    Katie’s walk: Video shows a heavily pregnant Katie walking like someone who isn’t heavily pregnant.
3.    Suri’s birth certificate: It was filed late and is signed by a nurse who never saw the baby and an unidentified friend (on behalf of the parents).
4.    Suri’s name: My sister and I find it strange that Suri is composed of letters found in Cruise.

I think the secrecy is probably the result of a health problem, or a Scientology custom, or just a desire to keep a newborn out of the spotlight.  Or maybe Suri’s a little funny looking. Maybe it’s a PR ploy.  Pictures of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt sold to People for a reported $4.1 million and Suri couldn’t command more at birth.  Could be that TomKat is maintaining the attention by lying low, and is waiting to sell later.  In any case, the whole business gives me a creepy feeling in my neck.  I’ve never seen a celebrity trying so hard to be noticed as Katie Holmes was on Third Avenue last March (it sounds fantastic, but the story’s true), and now she can’t get to a Starbucks in Colorado without paparazzi on her tail.  But what really gets me is this focus on a phantom baby in tandem with all the other baby frenzy.  Now ambivalence about celebrity pregnancy has a name, and it’s Suri Cruise.

The second line of the declaration of independence “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is ambiguous for a good reason: ambiguity in politics is as rewarding as precision in science. The authors of these lines were aware that only the pursuit was an “inalienable right” but not happiness itself. But this right may be wrong and the pursuit futile. Here is an example from Abd Er-Rahman III of Spain: (960 C.E): “I have now reigned about 50 years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my neither call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen.”

Dearth of happiness seems to be the nature of existence and considerable human activity is geared to enhance it. What haven’t we done to chase this mirage! Our irrational tools are: war to attain peace; marriage-divorce–remarriage; crime and cocaine and of course Viagra for failing happiness. But the most bizarre is for religion to assert that my-god-is-better-than-your-god and if you agree, you will be happy but if you disagree I will kill you – that will make me happy.

Prophets, philosophers, psychologists, economists, biochemists and cynics have attempted to dish out prescriptions for utopia and their emphasis reflects the bias of their system.

The chase for the happiness mantra started many centuries ago. Buddha’s (540BC-480BC) doctrine of “four noble truths” acknowledges there is suffering, the cause of suffering is desire and the control of desire alleviates suffering. Dhammapada, a Buddhist text gave a prescription for happiness (verses 197–208) more than 2000 years ago “Live without hatred, anger and passion; stay healthy; avoid pursuit of worldly pleasure and possessions, stay tranquil in victory and defeat; seek company of noble and trustworthy kinsmen and avoid ignorant people”.

Socrates who lived a few years after Buddha echoed that a virtuous life was the essential prerequisite. The ingredients of the happiness cocktail have not changed: love, trust, kinship, achievement, money, health, self esteem and engaging activity. While Buddha would extol the virtues of suppression of desire, other disciplines would urge us to pursue them passionately.

Economists would like to inspire us to chase wealth. Fortunately for the uninspired, they have found no constant correlation between income and happiness. We know that the hungry poor are miserable and they are less so when they get some money, but happiness does not increase after a certain level of income. Richard Layard, a British economist calculated that fifteen thousand dollars was the threshold and any richer is not happier The Japanese have six times more money compared to 1950 and the Americans are twice as rich compared to 1970 but the populations are not any happier. (Layard, “Happiness: lessons from a New Science”) Wealth increases consumption but not happiness.

Can a Buddhist economic system increase happiness? Can the notion rooted in Buddhism — the ultimate purpose of life is inner happiness– be delivered by state intervention? Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the king of Bhutan (a Buddhist nation) suggested in 1972 that countries should be more concerned with “Gross National Happiness” than with Gross Domestic Product. His four pillars of GNH are: economic self-reliance, environment preservation, promotion of indigenous culture and good democratic governance. Richard Easterlin, professor of economics at the University of Southern California a supporter of this concept says “We have been misguided in dismissing what people say about how happy they are and simply assuming that if they are consuming more apples and buying more cars they are better off.” But history bears the evidence that economists’ failure to distribute happiness equitably is as successful as their distribution of wealth.

So much for the economists; what do the psychologists say? Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, conducted an elegant experiment with people from various cultures. He distributed pagers to a few thousand people and paged them randomly. He asked them to write down what they were doing and how they felt when the pager beeped. The investigation tried to capture the activity at the moment when people said they were happy. The study showed that people were happy when they were immersed in what they were doing and were oblivious even of the passage of time. They were experiencing what Csikzentmihalyi called “flow”.

Psychologists have even tried to quantify happiness. Interviews with more than 1,000 people has yielded the following: Happiness = P + (5xE) + (3xH). Here, P is personal traits like outlook and adaptability, E is existing health , finances and relationships; H stands for higher attributes like aspirations, expectations, self esteem and humor. Sounds like it is Dhammapda wine in a mathematical decanter.

Other psychologists have shown that happiness is not a formula but an inherited endowment. The level of happiness stays at a predetermined ‘set point’ and alters only temporarily after a life changing event. You would presume that a lottery winner will be eternally happy and a person crippled by an accident sad for ever. Not so. Both return to their original frame of happiness after about a year. Consider this formula: H=S+C+V. Here, H is happiness, S is your set point for happiness, C is the life situation and V is voluntary activity.

A formula can give you understanding of the happiness but cannot enhance it. Enter the biochemists who don’t want to be left behind in the pursuit of joy chemicals. They have matched our glandular secretions to our emotions. Some molecules seem to mirror our emotions:

• Oxytocin – a hormone that augments uterine contractions during labor- is our bonding agent. The hypothalamus exudes it abundantly during bonding, mating, pregnancy and even a sensual massage.
• Endorphins are internal opiates that relieve pain and induce a ‘high’ during strenuous jogging and are also released during laughter and orgasm.
• Dopamine is the achievement and reward hormone; the levels rise not only after an accomplishment and also with the anticipation.
• A passionate romance stimulates neural growth factor but the high levels recede after about two years. Nothing lasts for ever, especially romance.
• And then there shines the star of mind modulators: 5-hydroxy tryptamine (5HT) also known as serotonin. When Marcus Aurelius meditated “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself” he may as well have been referring to 5HT.The vagaries of this single molecule suffuse mirth or misery; this alone decides who to bless and who to punish.

The human body has only 5 to10 milligrams of 5HT, ninety percent of which resides in intestines. Only half to one milligram lies ensconced in small packets, in the nerve cells of medulla, pons and midbrain. With an incoming signal the packets burst into the space between nerve cells and attach to receptor proteins. Scientists have characterized fifteen such receptors and each one modulates a different function like sleep, hunger, body temperature, muscle contraction and depression The quantity of 5HT and its attachment to a specific receptor determines individual’s psychological destiny.

Numerous studies in animals and humans have shown that low levels of 5HT are associated with depression, suicide, aggression, self destructive behavior and poor impulse control. Drugs like Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft increase the levels of 5HT and can alleviate these symptoms. Recreational drug ‘ecstasy’ surges the serotonin level in the neuronal synapse and inordinate excess results in ‘serotogenic syndrome’ a potentially lethal condition. Futile pursuit of happiness sometimes starts as a pursuit of hedonistic sensory pleasure but often leads to a contrary state – unhappiness.

So here we are: from Buddha to biochemists, happiness can not boast of a glorified past but can it envision a promising future? Ray Kurzweil says, “The essence of being human lies not in our limitations but in our ability to transcend them.” And can we break beyond our natural boundaries? Some experts think the answer lies in biotechnology:

The pursuit of happiness and self-esteem—the satisfaction of one’s personal desires and recognition of one’s personal worth—are much more common human aspirations than the self-conscious quest for perfection. Indeed, the desire for happiness and the love of excellence are, at first glance, independent aspirations. Although happiness is arguably fuller and deeper when rooted in excellent activity, the pursuit of happiness is often undertaken without any regard for excellence or virtue. Many people crave only some extra boost on the path to success; many people seek only to feel better about themselves. Although less radical than the quest for “perfection,” the quests for happiness, success, and self-esteem, especially in our society, may prove to be more powerful motives for an interest in using biotechnical power for purposes that lie “beyond therapy.” Thus, though some visionaries—beginning with Descartes—may dream of using biotechnologies to perfect human nature, and though many of us might welcome biotechnical assistance in improving our native powers of mind and body, many more people will probably turn to it in search of advancement, contentment, and self-satisfaction—for themselves and for their children. [The President’s Council on Bioethics, Washington, D.C., October, 2003]

That was the past and future of happiness but what about the present. Well, cynics are the only people who seem to have got it right. As George Burns quipped “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”

Julia is a bright-eyed girl of 14, with shoulder-length chestnut-brown hair and a winsome smile. One recent July morning, she, along with her 16 year-old sister Jane, drive into downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, in their father’s battered F-150 pick-up truck, on their way to fulfilling a dream. She pulls a damp wad of ten- and twenty-dollar bills from the pocket of her jeans, carefully saved from a weekly allowance and regular babysitting jobs. “I’ve been working for this almost a whole year,” she says excitedly, as Jane rolls her eyes in the driver’s seat. “But I’ve wanted it a lot longer–like, since two years ago, when Jane got hers done.” When they reach the corner of Benmont Avenue and Fifth, they pull into a metered parking space and walk the remaining two blocks to Rickys Tattoos, a grimy storefront parlor on the main drag of this sleepy town. Julia is so thrilled she can barely keep herself to a measured pace, which she must do if she doesn’t want to leave her sister struggling alone on the sidewalk. Jane walks with a pronounced limp. “Come on, Jane,” she cries, bouncing on the pavement, half a block ahead. “We’re almost there.” Jane rolls her eyes again, then turns to me and confides, with charming sympathy she conceals from her younger sister, “I was totally just as excited as she is. It’s, like, a really big day for her.”

Jane and Julia are but two of the many thousands caught up in what is fast becoming a fashion craze among American teen-age girls. It’s called “crippin,” and among the few sociologists and psychologists fully versed in the practice, it is one of the more worrisome new developments in a culture of low self-esteem, best characterized by drug and alcohol abuse and rampant sexual promiscuity. Liz Harmon, a developmental psychologist at the University of Rhode Island, who is among the foremost authorities on crippin, is unsurprised at the speed with which American girls are submitting themselves to the quasi-medical procedure. “It’s really the next logical step, isn’t it?” she says. “With the ubiquity of tattoos, and after piercings have become practically de rigueur, why not crippin too? It was right around the corner, but still nobody saw it coming.” She sighs with a depth of fatigue one might expect from someone who makes her living studying the ways of American teendom. “I think nobody really wanted to see it coming: That’s how disturbing it is.” But opinion is not monolithic on the subject. Jack Stiles, a sociologist at UCLA, says the widespread concern is overblown. “Look, it’s difficult to understand, without a doubt, but is there anything about growing up in America that isn’t? These girls aren’t doing long-term harm to their bodies, at least nothing that isn’t superficial. The fact is, much like tattooing, it’s a reversible procedure. Expensive? Sure. Painful? Absolutely. But it’s a correctable thing, and if it answers a psychological need, then maybe we should be focusing on that. Maybe we shouldn’t be marginalizing these gals for just trying to fit in.”

Ronnie Jendick’s left arm is covered with tattoos: a naked woman, Chinese characters, complex circular designs of what looks like barbed wire. He lifts his shirt and points proudly to his ample belly, to a fierce-looking eagle whose wings span a rippling American flag. “Took two weeks for this one,” he says enthusiastically, “and painful as hell. Belly flesh? That’s tender shit, got to be honest. But it was worth it.” Ronnie is the proprietor of Rickys Tattoos. “I bought it a few years ago. Dirt cheap, too.” When asked about the name on the hand-painted sign out front, he says, “Ricky? Croaked on his bike.” He makes a dispiriting sound through the baffle of his thick lips. “Totaled, man. It was ugly. Semi behind him sort of finished him off for good. But it was quick, though. Definitely not the worst way to go out, you know?” He crosses himself in the Catholic style. Ronnie leads me to a back room, the “fracking room,” as he calls it, behind the main floor of his establishment, where body art is commissioned and performed. “This is it, man. I got the chair from some dentist across the street a couple years ago. He was retiring, wanted five hundred for it, but I talked him down. It was pretty easy to modify. I got the leg irons off this freaky sadist dude I know–traded for some body work.” The chair is of the normal variety–red pleather cushioning, a head rest, a welter of hinged metal limbs coming out from both sides, most of them unused in its new function. What distinguishes this chair from one you might find in any dentist’s office are the leg clamps, two on each side, rust eating away at their metal bindings.

The procedure is a simple one, but that simplicity hasn’t stopped sixteen states from outlawing it. Commonly called “fracking,” which is short for fracturing, Ronnie is willing to describe it only because Vermont’s legislature is famously reluctant to curtail the freedoms of its citizenry. “Those laws are about the anesthetic, not the procedure, ’cause they couldn’t even outlaw the procedure, you know. But I bet they tried.” The anesthetic is local, but nonetheless potentially dangerous, and its administration is usually subject to state licensing. Ronnie himself is not licensed, as is the case with most frackers, and so fracking is often performed at night, after normal business hours, in back rooms similar to the one at Rickys Tattoos. He brandishes a large hammer, larger than one you’re likely to find in the local hardware store, and equipped with a narrow, clawless head. “Ready?” He swings it with startling force. “See, you got to come down real hard to get it done right. That little head? It concentrates the force. You better know what you’re doing though, or there’s some serious damage. Shut your ass down quick if you’re not careful.” He mimes the striking procedure again. “I make a little target with a laundry pen, a little x, right there on the leg. It’s the fibula you want, but it’s easy to miss. You crack the tibia instead, you’re screwed.” At the sound of this reporter’s uneasy laugh, Ronnie asks, “You want to hop in, have a try? Give you a special discount.”

There is a distinct look of anxiety on Julia’s face as Ronnie calls her into the back of the store. Jane, who is examining tattoo samples, encourages her. “Let’s go, Jules. We gotta get back by four, and you’re gonna have to sit around for an hour afterwards. Let’s go.” Julia has consented to the presence of an observer, and we walk back to the fracking room together. Trembling, she gets into the chair, and Ronnie locks the clamps around the ankle and knee of both her legs, even though only the right will be fracked today. “Keeps ’em still,” he says by way of explanation. He pulls out a large hypodermic needle, the sight of which elicits a cry of fear from the 14 year-old girl. “Don’t you worry, little honey,” says Ronnie. “I know just what I’m doing.” After injecting the anesthetic and giving it some time to take effect, Ronnie tests Julia’s responsiveness with a few mild taps of the hammer. “You feeling that?” Julia grins up at him from the chair and says, “I’m ready.” With a single fearsome blow, Ronnie fracks Julia’s right leg. The resultant cracking noise is surprisingly sharp and clean, not at all what one expects from such a violent act. Apparently, Julia hasn’t felt a thing. Ronnie sniffs with satisfaction. “Good frack, I can hear it, and I’ve done enough to know when it’s wrong. There’s sort of this chunky sound when you miss. Kinda hard to describe.”

Ronnie insists that all his clients remain in the chair for an hour, to allow the anesthetic to wear off. “There’s no law or anything, but it seems like a safety thing to me. Plus it gives me a chance to put the brace on, teach ’em how to do it, ’cause you don’t want ’em coming back again, you know, demanding another frack. Big waste of time if the bone goes and heals right.” He wraps the effected portion of Julia’s leg in a small plastic brace designed to prevent its setting properly. “You got to keep this on for two weeks, understand? Go ahead and walk around without it, the normal stuff. The more you move the better. But when you sleep you put the brace on. Same in school and everything, when you’re just sitting around. Not my responsibility if it sets right, got it?”

Back on Benmont Avenue, Julia and Jane move at a halting pace, side by side. It’s almost 3 o’clock, and Jane is annoyed. “We’re gonna be late and Dad’s gonna be pissed,” she says, but Julia is unconcerned. She’s crippin now, and happy. “My boyfriend Nick? He’s totally excited. I’m calling him up right when we get home.” Jane rolls her eyes at me. As I watch the girls make their way back to the pick-up truck, I’m struck by the controlled violence of the procedure, the primitive equipment, and I’m reminded of Liz Harmon’s weary words. “These girls,” she said to me, “they’re damaging themselves for the rest of their lives, and it’s a sad commentary. It shouldn’t even be allowed. You have to ask yourself: What does it mean for us, as a society?” Having witnessed the procedure, having seen the result, I’m not sure I have an answer to her troubling question. And yet I confess I can’t help but appreciate the girls’ simple beauty as they struggle down the street. The gentle scrape of their shoes on the pavement, the slight bobbing of their heads as they limp away–there is an appealing vulnerability there, and I am not unmoved. It’s easy to condemn crippin out of hand, without taking time to understand the process and appreciate its aesthetically pleasing outcome. Perhaps we need to look a little deeper before we judge so harshly. As we part, Julia turns to me and says, “Crippin? It’s not about being rebellious, all pointless and everything, you know? I mean, that’s what everyone says, but it’s totally not like that at all. It’s my choice, and it’s got nothing to do with anyone else, right? Crippin–it’s just a way to express myself. It’s a way for me to be me.”

Why do I love Crosby Street?  It inspires in me the kind of preference I remember having as a kid for lucky talismans, strange everyday objects I became attached to and took with me: I have a sentimental feeling of loyalty when contemplating it.  Streets go to work with their parallel neighbors and perpendicular interceptors, sharing affinities and sometimes friendships.  Crosby is friends, in my mind, with Howard Street, and Grand.  It’s cordial with the slightly tony Prince, affable with Mott.  With Houston, it forms a strangely superfluous intersection.  To its grander parallel neighbors, Broadway and Lafayette, it functions as the humble employee, the service road, or the mews, maintaining their emporia’s delivery entrances and fire escapes. 

Those fire escapes: Crosby retains, more than any other street besides perhaps Greene, the trademark look of Soho, all cobbles and rickety rusty iron-rung ladders.  Because so much of it is back entrances, there’s very little flash, and the traffic is mostly of the type given to handcarts and freight elevators.  Its sidewalks meld quickly into metal plates and loading docks.  Food is delivered to Dean and Deluca, which leaves its refuse on Crosby so as not to put off the paying customers with the smell – even when Broadway is at its most oppressively populated, on summer Saturdays, Crosby’s quiet.  Crosby’s an honest street like that. 

Yet there is grandeur, too.  At the very top of the street, at Bleeker, lies the Bayard-Conduit building, New York City’s only work by Louis “Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor” Sullivan, complete with gorgeously ornate plaster facade.  Growing up in Buffalo my favorite building was always Sullivan’s red Guaranty, and I always like glancing up Crosby at its fairer sibling.  To be a little mythopoetic about it, it makes my life trajectory seem more continuous.  But that’s not the main reason for my liking Crosby; if anything, it’s the exception that proves the rule.

No, Crosby’s appeal lies in its steadfast resistance to being pedestrianized, mallified, the way every other street in Soho has – except maybe Wooster below Grand, where street art sanctifies wrecked facades.  Crosby is a living, working street.  The Housing Works used bookstore is nice, but next door the Housing Works itself conserves some of New York’s social diversity.  Where once Houston Street was peppered with gas stations, the only one left is at Crosby.  Accordingly, the Lahore Deli across from it is a permanent cabbie break, and one with excellent samosas, chicken patties and tea with cardamom (which I guess some might redundantly call “chai” tea). 

An alley-ish street, Crosby also crosses one of the most beautiful New York alleys north of Canal: Jersey Street, connecting to Mulberry.  Balancing my chicken patty on my teacup lid, I often look through to the back of the Puck Building, with its beautiful pink iron window shutters.  Back when Keith Haring’s Pop Shop felt like an arty outpost in the dystopia below Houston, the alley had more life: people practically squatted there.  Now it’s free of the homeless and the Pop Shop was too lowbrow to survive next to Triple Five Soul’s seventy-dollar hoodies.  But Crosby has not gone that way completely, yet.  Either that or it has, in a more complicated way.

Crosby Street is both what it is and a stage set at once.  It is a working street of deliveries and tea breaks, recalling an earlier downtown, but that very appearance makes it more desirable as real estate for the wealthy.  Because of its untimeliness, it’s a magnet for loft-dwellers, their places’ value concealed by the tasteful disorder of the street itself.  Some of the most expensive and celebrity-filled co-ops in the city are here.  For these residents, Crosby’s anonymity provides both relief from the paparazzi and a satisfying, faux-hemian sense of keeping it real. 

This may be the time to bring up the great postmodern institution at Crosby and Spring: Balthazar.  Opened in 1997, most first-time visitors would be more likely to guess 1897, so successfully has Keith McNally’s ready-aged restaurant settled in.  At first, it seemed ridiculously contrived, a Parisian brasserie-fantastique composed of cracked mirrors and stained teak, the walls painted the perfect shade of nictotine.  The bathroom attendants were a particularly audacious touch.  Yet over time, Balthazar started to seem less inauthentic, especially by comparison to *actual* classic Parisian brasseries, La Coupole and Brasserie Nord, now owned by the conglomerate that runs the sterile European steakhouse chain Chez Gerrard.  The food’s good, if too buttery (the one false note, like they’re trying too hard), the bakery is just excellent, and the restaurant repopularized of the plateau de fruit de mer.  It’s a set, but one so well art-directed that it makes you question whether no art direction is just one more form of art direction.

Given Balthazar’s confused relation to reality, it makes sense, then, that it’s located on Crosby, which returns me to the question: why do I love Crosby Street?        After all, the things I mention–working life, humility, unreconstructed looks–are things that make it out of place in its neighborhood.  Am I nostalgically romanticizing the street?  Making New York’s industrial past the pastoral idyll and its current incarnation the debased present?  What kind of ethnographer’s lens am I looking through, approving the signs of labor and deprecating idle wealth? 

I don’t want to be the Wordsworth of Crosby Street, endlessly bemoaning lost authenticity.  I just know it will be a more boring city if Crosby turns into Mercer.  And, economically, it makes good sense for me to hope places like the Lahore Deli stick around – I can’t afford their replacements.  And what’s important about Crosby Street is that it renders a diversity that in other places is largely hidden.  Fulton Street Fish Market, like La Pigalle and Covent Garden before it, has been outsourced.  Now it’s free to become another museum.  But we’re poorer for it, culturally.  Likewise, Keith McNally, who hastened the demise of the old Meatpacking District with Pastis, once laughably remarked that he wanted it to be the kind of place where meatpackers might pop in for a croque monsieur and a café au lait.  Sure, Keith, sure.  But I understand his impulse. 

I’ve never been to Beirut but I’ve always held a few romantic, probably somewhat naive, notions about it as the kind of cosmopolitan and complicated city toward which I’ve always been most attracted. The practice of labeling various cities around the world “The Paris of X” has always struck me as distasteful for all the obvious reasons, but calling Beirut the Paris of the Levant sounds more appropriate than many of them. Certainly, given the cosmopolitan ideal that Beirut has represented for some, the traumas suffered by the place in recent decades were all the more heart rending. One wants Beirut to do well. It is a place to root for and the recent attempt’s to find a way for Lebanon to stand on its own two feet, outside the smothering arms of Syria, sounded a note of hope even as they were laced with the dangers that bubble just below the surface of Lebanese life.

Beirut is fragile in the same way that the cosmopolitan mode of life is fragile. It hangs in a precarious balance between mutually coexistent beliefs that must both be robust enough to mean something to people, and flexible enough to give way in the name of tolerance. The glue of this mode of life is that most difficult to define of quasi-institutions: civil society. That’s the transcendental ground, the condition of possibility, and without it the competing sets of traditions and beliefs that somehow manage to negotiate the social space fly apart into the very opposite of the cosmopolitan mode of life. At the heart of urban cosmopolitanism is always that powder keg. It can always go off, as Beirut reminds us. The work of the cosmopolitan mode of life is never over and it never gets any easier. It can’t be solved, it simply has to be lived, day after day, year after year, generation after generation.

Which is why the objection to the current Israeli incursion into Lebanon can step to the side of the political debate about causes and blame. I’m not interested, for the moment, in claims about Israel’s territorial ambitions or the politics of Kadima, about Iran and Syria and the power axis that wields Hezbollah. These are perfectly important things to understand, but they don’t drive to the heart of this particular problem.

And the problem, right now, is that the tenuous fabric of Lebanese civil society is currently caught in a crossfire. There are things that can be accomplished through military force and sometimes military force is necessary. But civil society has never been created or sustained through military force. And the problem, even from the standpoint of Israel’s self-interest, is that a Lebanon without a functioning and reasonably stable civil society teeters toward becoming a failed state once again. And failed states are breeding grounds for further violence, strife, regional instability, political extremism, etc. And thus the terrible cycle renews itself.

The question for Israel is whether its day to day security concerns and military struggles with armed factions in Lebanon and elsewhere are to be waged at the expense of Beirut and its fragile cosmopolitan space. Israel may win this battle in one sense and lose it another. Hezbollah may be suppressed, but Israel will continue to live as an island surrounded by failed states.

It is easy, perhaps, for me to say this but it continues to strike me that there is a road not taken here. It is a difficult road, no doubt, and the political realities on the ground make it difficult to fathom how it would be traversed. But so what. There is a place for imagination in politics, too. In this possible world, Israel would declare itself the avowed ally to the fragile civil spaces of the Levant. We are strong enough, and powerful enough, and confident enough, Israel would declare, not to be goaded into the abandonment of that dream. We do so out of genuine idealism about what the Levant can be, but we also do so out of genuine self-interest. States that can sustain a thriving civil society are states that are naturally less threatening to their neighbors and, by definition, more stable.

And this would not be an acquiescence to the worst aspects of Hamas or Hezbollah, but an attempt to outflank them completely. For extremists in general will suffer in precisely the degree to which the civil society of the cosmopolitan mode of life can thrive.

The one overriding principle of this approach would be a simple motto: “The Levant Must Flourish.” From that perspective, what Israel is doing in Lebanon can only tear apart the fragile fabric that is the very material from which flourishing societies are constructed. And at this moment in particular, I think it is important to take this concept of flourishing very seriously. A flourishing Levant would be a better Lebanon, a better Palestine, and a better Israel too. Israel has shown time and again that it is a strong and powerful state, but that power and strength has begun to feel petty and mean in the paucity of its vision. I think Israel can do better. The little dream that lays nestled in the bruised up body of Beirut deserves at least that much.

This has been an interminably bad summer for movies. Not one of the blockbusters has been interesting or diverting: X-Men 3 was a lackluster addition to the franchise; MI3 was, well, too Tom Cruisey to get me in the theater; and Superman Returns just seems dull. And so in a reversal of the normal order of things, my attention has been drawn lately to the small screen, where the action has indeed been heating up. Back when original programming was limited to the major networks, summer was the worst of all times for television—the season of reruns and never aired pilots. Now that we are fully in the post-Sopranos era, and original programming is a permanent feature of the premium channels and extended tier (HBO, Showtime, FX, and the like), we do not have to wait for the fall for new shows or episodes to appear. While Jack Bauer takes time off to recover from yet another bad day or the team at CSI or House goes on hiatus, we can change channels to catch up with Vinny Chase and his Entourage, or see how the suburban soccer mom-cum-pot dealer is doing on Weeds, or (on my newest favorite) look in on the Irish politico-mobster Road Islanders on Brotherhood.

Of the three I’ve mentioned, Entourage (HBO, Sunday, 9:00 pm) has the largest claim on the zeitgeist. The trick of the series is to blur what is on the show and what is outside the show. Nominally about the exploits of a freshly minted celebrity and his cronies from back-in-the-day, Entourage is “about” the very industry that makes the show itself. And so the real world subject matter of the show is constantly intruding into the fictional world it creates: “real” celebrities play themselves mixing with the “fake” celebrities on the sets of made-up movies shot by real directors. We’ve seen this before, of course, in movies by Robert Altman for example. The difference here is the complete absence of satire. Entourage takes as a given our love of celebrity culture and its industry of images; it just finds nothing in that love to criticize. Rather, it makes celebrity culture all the more alluring for being turned into an aesthetic artifact. After all, what we watch on Entourage is not the tedium of reality itself. Even the “real” celebrities are playing themselves as characters in delicately crafted narratives. Rather, we watch artfully done 24-minute nuggets that serve us our favorite object of interest.

Like many others, I’m sure, I’ve been waiting anxiously for the return of Weeds (Showtime, Sunday, 9:00 pm) for a second season on August 15th. The premise is simple: a recently widowed mother of two from the wealthy “community” of Agrestic California, Nancy Botwin has turned to selling pot in order to maintain the lifestyle to which she and her family have grown accustomed. According to Showtime’s inevitable “behind the scenes” documentary, the creative minds who brought us this series seem to think their insight is to expose the “dark underbelly” of the American suburbs, as if that underbelly hasn’t been exposed time and again (even before the much over-rated and overwrought film American Beauty). What is brilliant about Weeds, in fact, is precisely the opposite. The show takes all the threatening or counter-cultural implications out of dealing and smoking pot. Marijuana blends seamlessly into the give and take of suburban life, with its failing marriages, anxious parents, over-achieving children, and slacker adolescents. The ostensibly outré activity of being a drug dealer is not so much a contrast to the staid and conformist culture of Agrestic as something easy to assimilate to that culture. The result is a very nicely turned comedy of manners, in which selling pot looks a lot like running the PTA.

I was happy to discover last week that Showtime’s new crime drama, Brotherhood (Sunday, 10:00 pm), is as good as suggested by its advance hype and previews. Here setting is everything. Few places seem more provincial on TV than medium-sized American cities: large enough for anomie and crime, small enough for gossip and tradition. Brotherhood is set in a white working class neighborhood of Providence RI, the kind of moldering, forgotten place that is littered with exposed tar paper roofs and detached lonely bars, where everyone knows not only you but your grandfather, where “mom-n-pop” stores are run by consumptive alcoholics, etc. etc. The show has as its backdrop, in other words, the melodrama of Irish New-England culture on the skids, in Boston’s smaller and less storied neighbor. It would be unfair to call the show an Irish Sopranos, though the comparison is inevitable. To the ordinary stuff of mobster theatrics Brotherhood adds the interesting element of local politics. The show follows the parallel and overlapping stories of two brothers, one an ambitious state assemblyman, the other a ruthless gangster. The point is not just to show that local politics is bound up with the mob (a theme explored to a lesser degree by the Sopranos); it is also to show that local politics is not so far from a gangland activity itself, with deals made through force and money, lives threatened and ruined, coffers plundered. Providence is of course a notoriously corrupt city whose notoriously corrupt mayor now lies in Federal custody. But that only serves to underscore what seems so perfect about the setting. Larger cities and more cosmopolitan locales tend to swallow crime narratives of this type— the vastness of the canvas dwarfs what are ultimately small minds. The not so big city on the decline, however, provides in Brotherhood both an image and context of organized crime and organized politics in the petty provincialism of their sleaze.

For Mother’s Day in May 2002, my husband Harvey ordered Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind Of Science for me. Harvey died a few days later and the book arrived after his memorial service. That summer I read the 1200-plus pages of this self-published tome, and I felt grateful to Mr. Wolfram as the book proved to be engaging, exciting, and helped to carry me through the aftermath of losing Harvey.

The British-born Mr. Wolfram has been educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech, published his first scientific paper at 15, received his PhD in Theoretical Physics at 20 (a student of the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman), won a MacArthur genius grant at 21 and then became independently wealthy through his software “Mathematica”. A New Kind of Science may have been the first science book since Darwin’s The Origin of Species to sell out its first printing on its first day. It took him ten years to complete the book, during which Mr. Wolfram lived as a recluse, working all night long and running his software company for several hours during the day. Mr. Wolfram estimates that while writing the book, he typed 100 million keystrokes and moved his computer mouse more than 100 miles.

The reason this book’s message represents a paradigm shift is because of its potential for filling the gap in science related to the limitations of conventional mathematical equations which are unable to predict issues such as the shape that smoke from a cigarette is likely to take or the manner in which a forest fire will burn. At the heart of A New Kind of Science is Wolfram’s revolutionary idea to replace mathematical equations with algorithms and his assertion that the Universe is better explained on the basis of simple computer programs.

This is from The Economist: “Mr. Wolfram unashamedly compares the potential impact of his work to that of Sir Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica”, and suggests that his discoveries can answer long-standing puzzles in mathematics, physics, biology and philosophy, from the fundamental laws of nature to the question of free will.”

Wolfram’s work has its origin in cellular automata invented by the Hungarian physicist John von Neumann. Briefly, a complex system can be represented by using squares on graph paper that can be colored either black or white. Starting with one initial black square, a rule can be written which determines how its neighbors will be colored in each succeeding step forward. The properties of cellular automata are best explored using a computer which can generate thousands of iterations instantaneously. Wolfram found that with repeated iterations, complexity can arise out of simple rules.

From Forbes:

At the center of Wolfram’s research was a quest for a new level of simplicity. To do this, he moved from a two-dimensional grid to the one-dimensional world of the line. Why one dimension? Because, like the Universe itself in the beginning, it is cellular automata in their most elemental form. If Wolfram could find complexity in one- dimensional cellular automata, the simplest construction imaginable, then he could find it anywhere. For years Wolfram worked through the night to determine the unfolding of hundreds of thousands of possible rules, typically going to bed around 5:00 a.m. and getting up in time for lunch. Most of the rules quickly devolved into predictable, endless patterns. He began to fear that he had been lured into one of science’s many dead ends. But then one night in May 1984, an epiphany: Wolfram realized his mistake. He had entered into the project with a predetermined idea of how nature worked, assuming that natural systems begin with randomness and move toward order. But, now, he asked himself, what if you turned the whole idea upside down? What if you began with ordered conditions and looked at which rules spun out greater complexity? Through a long night, Wolfram tore through all his past work, papers flying, looking for examples that would prove his new model. Finally, close to dawn, he found it: Rule 30, a pattern that grew more intricate and unpredictable with each step. It was stuffed with what mathematicians call “emergent effects”: events that cannot be predicted in advance. From the simplest of parts, Wolfram had created infinite complexity. The aha! moment had arrived. “The Rule 30 automaton is the most surprising thing I’ve ever seen in science,” Wolfram told London’s Daily Telegraph. “‘Even though it starts off from just one black cell, applying the same simple rule over and over again makes Rule 30 produce [an] amazingly complex pattern.

And again, from The Economist:

This was Mr. Wolfram’s Eurekamoment: it suggested to him that complex systems in nature—be they weather systems, turbid fluid flow, a zebra’s stripes or the human mind—might all be governed by small and simple sets of rules”. Wolfram’s critical realization was that “many very simple programs produce great complexity” leading to his “Principle of Computational Equivalence: that whenever one sees behavior that is not obviously simple—in essentially any system—it can be thought of as corresponding to a computation of equivalent sophistication.

With repeated iterations, cellular automata can produce pictures of great complexity (such as the one shown here).

Many critical problems are not solvable by conventional mathematics, for example, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation which only applies to two bodies in space, but dissolves into chaos with three bodies when the method of first integrals is applied. Wolfram’s “new” idea is that the Universe functions on the basis of an algorithm and not on the basis of mathematical equations. In fact, he confidently predicts, “Within 50 years, more pieces of technology will be created on the basis of my science than on the basis of traditional science. People will learn about cellular automata before they learn about algebra.”

Implications for Biology: Theseus was able to slaughter the Minotaur because Ariadne gave him a golden thread that allowed him to retrace his steps out of the labyrinth. Wolfram has provided us with the means to solve many complex problems by retracing steps from complexity to simple algorithms. Since I am a cancer researcher, the sections in the book which deal with the implications of this new science for the highly complex biologic systems are the most fascinating for me, particularly Wolfram’s challenge to natural selection as the defining force in evolution. Darwin was able to collect an enormous amount of physical evidence to convince his contemporaries that all living organisms can be traced back to a single origin of life; that species evolve gradually through an accumulation of small changes; and that evolution occurs because there is genetic variation in every generation, and relatively few individuals survive and pass on their favorable genetic characteristics to the next generation. Even if certain genes confer only a very slight advantage, they gradually become more common over a long period of time. Thus, natural selection of favorable traits leads to both survival of the fittest and causes the species to adapt to natural environments. The neo-Darwinists like Dawkins, Maynard Smith and Dennett believe that natural selection is the only driving force in evolution, which occurs gradually over a long period of time. Gould and Eldridge who consider themselves as pluralists (as opposed to the neo-Darwinists who are reductionists) on the other hand, suggest that evolving species should be viewed as complex systems and that evolution is not a slow, gradual process but occurs in short bursts when new species appear, followed by a long period of stasis (punctuated equilibrium). Finally, they also maintain that organisms can often have traits which have no apparent useful purpose, but appear as a mere by-product of evolutionary changes (“spandrels”). In fact, many very important characteristics of humans such as reading and writing are examples of such “emergent properties” since the brain had become large prior to existence of written language. In this debate, Wolfram’s new science supports neither Darwin nor Gould:

One of the most esteemed documents of modern paleontology is Stephen Jay Gould’s doctoral thesis on shells. According to Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only a half dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection. Not so, says Wolfram. He’s discovered a mathematical error in Gould’s argument, and that, in fact, there are only six possible shell shapes, and all of them exist in the world. In other words, you don’t need natural selection to pare down evolution to a few robust forms. Rather, organisms evolve outward to fill all the possible forms available to them by the rules of cellular automata. Complexity is destiny—and Darwin becomes a footnote. “I’ve come to believe,” says Wolfram, “that natural selection is not all that important.” The more sciences he probes, the more Wolfram senses a deeper pattern—an underlying force that defines not only the cosmos but living things as well: “Biologists,” he says, “have never been able to really explain how things get made, how they develop, and where complicated forms come from. This is my answer.” He points at the shell, “This mollusk is essentially running a biological software program. That program appears to be very complex. But once you understand it, it’s actually very simple. —Forbes

In order to illustrate how complexity in biology arose from simple programs, I will summarize a few of the salient findings from the book here. (ANKS pp383-428)

• In the past, the idea of optimization for some sophisticated purpose seemed the only conceivable explanation for the level of complexity in biology. Take the example of fish which manifest so many beautiful colors. One Darwinian explanation would be that these colors improved survival through either allowing the creatures to evade being hunted by blending with the environment or shocking the predator with their brilliant, contrasting colors. In other words, every one of these colors and patterns evolved for a purpose. But then why do all the multi-colored fish have the same exact internal structures while having such radically different patterns on the outside? Wolfram’s beguilingly simple explanation is that the most visually striking color differences have almost nothing to do with natural selection, but are reflections of completely random changes in underlying genetic programs. On the other hand, the vital features such as the internal organs have changed only quite slowly and gradually in the course of evolution because those are precisely the ones molded by natural selection.
• “The range of pigmentation patterns on mollusc shells (picture) correspond remarkably closely with the range of patterns that are produced by simple randomly chosen programs based on cellular automata. There are already indications that such programs are quite short. One of the consequences of a program being short is that there is little room for inessential elements and any mutation or change in the program, however small, will tend to have a significant effect on at least the details of patterns it produces. Or biologic systems should be capable of generating essentially arbitrary complexity by using short programs formed by just a few mutations” (ANKS).
• “But if complexity is this easy to get, why is it not even more widespread in biology? The answer is natural selection, which can achieve little when confronted with complex behavior. There are several reasons for this. First, with more complex behavior, there are huge numbers of possible variations. Second, complex behavior inevitably involves many elaborate details, and since different ones of these details may happen to be the deciding factors in the fates of individual organisms, it becomes very difficult for natural selection to act in a consistent and definitive way. Third, whenever the overall behavior of a system is more complex than its underlying program, almost any mutation in the program will lead to a whole collection of detailed changes in the behavior, so that natural selection has no opportunity to pick out changes which are beneficial from those which are not” (ANKS).
• In the picture here, one can see the shell shapes generated by the simple model and those actually found in nature. The computerized array shows systematic variations of just two parameters.

Progress in science occurs when a new order is discovered which can unite seemingly unrelated facts. ANKS has achieved just that by showing that it is possible to get complexity from simple programs in any system. The job of a scientist in the conventional sense is to understand how things work and not why. Wolfram has combined the two by asking not only how evolution occurs, but also the meaning of it all. And the answer is terribly disturbing. No meaning at all. “So why do higher organisms exist at all? My guess is that it has almost nothing to do with optimality, and that instead it is essentially just a consequence of strings of random mutations that happened to add more and more features without introducing fatal flaws” (ANKS p398).

Richard Dawkins observed, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. But for the theists, Wolfram has changed the concept of God from being a mathematician to being a software engineer.

Dr. Stephen Wolfram will be the honored guest speaker at the 4th Harvey Preisler Memorial Lecture to be held at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester on July 28, 2006.