The Ruricolist

Finis

2011-12-02T11:08:00.001-06:00

The ending is the most important part. Not in all arts: pictures are endless. Not even in music, where skipping ahead is bad faith. But in writing the ending is definitive. You do not know how a sentence is meant, whether you are being told or being asked, until you reach the end.

The problem with endings is that they are all a kind of punctuation, artificial because the criteria of a good ending are abstract. A speech sums up; a sonnet turns; a story rounds off when something recurs. The key determines the cadence.

I have good reasons to prolong the Ruricolist; I feel how much I owe to it. But I must admit that the Ruricolist is over. The essay series has its natural term. These have been long years and I am different from the man I was when I began. His clothes no longer fit.

My intentions are that the Ruricolist will remain online; comments will remain open; and I will continue, from time to time, to revise my work here. When I have news of other projects, I will post it.

In conversation we are improvisers. For our improvisation to succeed, we must be willing to take whatever comes, trusting the outcome as we trust one another. We never say all we meant to say, or everything we think of, but that is the point: as much as we spend, we leave enriched. Now, at the end, I can affirm what I wrote at the beginning: I wrote for myself—not for friends, not for followers, not for an audience, not for posterity. This was my end of a conversation. And since this was a conversation, it must end as all conversations do, with a kind of aposiopesis, when the bill arrives, the sun comes up, the car stops, and suddenly we part.

Victory Garden

2011-10-31T13:26:00.001-05:00

"No, I'm happy for both of you. It's a great find and once the work is done, it'll be home sweet home.

"The thing is, it's not just water damage, or termites, or things like that you have to watch out for. You find things in those old houses. Think about people in the old days. No Internet, no TV: it was either get drunk or go nuts. Did I ever tell you about the cans we found when we started working on our place?

"The whole cellar was full of these old cans. Canning jars, I mean, you know, the glass ones with the metal tops. Shelves and shelves full of them, absolutely covered in dust. Some of them had labels on them. Let me see, there were beets, tomatoes, avocados, beans, pears, peas, everything. I want to say groats. Are those even a real thing, groats? But it didn't matter; you couldn't tell one from the other.

"The old lady we bought the house from told us it was all stuff her mother grew in her victory garden. You know about victory gardens, right? Back in WWII it was a big deal for people to grow their own food so there'd be more for the troops fighting overseas. People plowed up their backyards and turned them into these little farms and they called them victory gardens. The original urban agriculture, actually.

"Her mom put all these jars up right after dad went off to war. Keeping herself busy, you know? But dad never came home, so she just shut the pantry and never looked back. Out of sight, out of mind, all these years, and now it was our problem.

"You two are the same way about recycling. She wouldn't let me throw all that perfectly good glass away any more than you would. So down I go to this pantry in the cellar, and I start taking these jars up to the kitchen sink, one file box full at a time.

"You can image how creepy it was, looking down at the jars with the bleached shapes swimming around in them. It reminded me of the specimens in the lab, and you know how I felt about that.

"I had some WD40 so I could get the lids off. Then, with these big gloves on, I twist them open, one after another, and I dump them down the drain. I had a mask out but I never put it on. There was no smell at all. This stuff was practically embalmed.

"Now, understand, I don't have any proof. Everything that came out of those jars sort of melted. But I'm telling you, once I got through the cans in front there was something else in those jars.

"I had this jar of beets. I dump it, and there's a couple of them stuck at the bottom. I take a knife and stick it in there, scrape them loose and then, it's just a reflex, I dump them into my hand. I'm looking at my hand, and just for a second, before they melted away, I could have sworn what I was holding were a pair of human eyes.

"I know, it sounds crazy. It seemed crazy when it was happening. I decided it was my mind playing tricks on me and got back to work. I dumped all the jars, washed them out, and rinsed everything down the drain. But then when I went to wash the sink there were these little scales clinging to the bottom. They were these brittle little yellowish scales about the size of dimes. I wiped them out and threw them away.

"Then I put it out of my mind until the next morning. She went to use the InSinkErator and it jammed. So she calls the plumber and here I am, with this sinking feeling in my gut.

"I stood right there and watched with my guts getting tighter and tighter. And you know, I was right. The plumber's under the sink, and I can't see his face, but there's this moment when he just freezes. Perfectly still. Then he backs out and he's got something in his hand.

"I ask him what the problem was and he starts mumbling. I ask him again and he just holds out his hand and there it is. He's got a hand full of human teeth. That was the moment I realized what those scales were. They were fingernails.

"What could I do? I just picked the teeth out of his hand, like loose change. I actually thanked him for finding them. Then he left. He left in a hurry; we never even got a bill. I guess he figured us for a couple of serial killers.

"I've never told her about any of it. You know how much she loves that house. Why ruin it for her? And maybe they weren't teeth at all, you know? I'm not a farmer. Maybe there's some nut that looks just like a human tooth when you leave it in a jar for sixty years. How should I know?

"I'll you what I think, though. I think the daughter had it right. I think mom had her own personal victory garden."

Darkness

2011-10-26T10:00:00.000-05:00

Darkness is shadow. The golden shadow of the incandescent bulb; the stainless shadow of the fluorescent; the quivering shadow of the gaslight (seek it where it lives yet; deep down in oven, the pilot flame is the last gaslight). The footlight, the searchlight, live to dazzle, are stingy with shadows; but most generous of all is firelight, flicker and blaze, casting long shadows that strut and stride, the shadow players whose performance has never been commanded.

You will read that, for our ancestors, the succession of the long, dark nights of winter, solaced only by the wavering fire, relieved only by brief treks through a twilight world stifled with snow, gave on to a kind of trance, and that it is to the visions of the long winter that all superstitions may be traced. Now, the tropics have their own superstitions, but certainly the mind abhors a vacuum, and where there is nothing to be perceived, something will be imagined, as through those nights while they overlaid the everburning stars with bold constellations.

Darkness is night. Morning and evening circle, glooming and gloaming, matutinal rise intersecting crepuscular fall at the liminal coordinate where the spectrum unfolds. Twilight that never ends while the night lights burn: mercurial moonlight over the fields, mercury vapor skyglow over the cities, and the noctilucent auroboros rattling the northern sky, over forests quiet and umbrageous as the shadow lands. The stones under your feet strike triboluminescent sparks. Fireflies constellate with the stars. Far ahead a porchlight shines, generous intent as harborless as a lighthouse.

Darkness is night, darkness is shadow; the one thing darkness is not is the absence of light. The retina is stretched like a drumhead, strung with tense nerves that toll every photon, an inchoate kaleidoscope so sensitive that it need only be pressed behind closed eyes to coruscate with phosphenes like the scintillas of cold light that kindle the eddies of the troubled sea. What light conceals from us, what we see in caves and face-down on the pillow is not darkness but eigengrau, the eyes' gray, lightened by the twitches of our dreaming nerves. Seeing eyes have never seen full dark. Darkness is not even the opposite of light; it is only a mood of light.

Hiroshima

2011-10-17T12:58:00.002-05:00

Every year we made a day trip to visit my great-uncle Denny. He lived with his wife in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, in a house older than the United States with wine-dark rafters and a cellar like a cave. The water cycle ran from pitcher pump to outhouse. The old house stood on a rambling property, all deep green, crossed by an abandoned and overgrown railroad.

Denny was an old man, a veteran of Iwo Jima with a steel plate in his head. If I understood his stories correctly he was one of those who raised the first flag there, the little one. Of the second flag, he said "If we'd known, we all would have gone up."

He had no interest in children. Perhaps I was oblivious; perhaps I was annoyed at being ignored; but when the subject of WWII came up, somehow, I parroted what I had been taught in school, where we had social studies instead of history: that the bombing of Hiroshima was a needless atrocity, only compounded by the spiteful destruction of Nagasaki—all typically American brutality.

That got his attention. He informed me that the only reason he was alive was because of the bomb. Had the war continued he would have been among the first. He would surely have died. He thanked God for Truman and his bomb.

Of course I shut up, but I was more confused than enlightened. We can number the dead and number the saved, but these numbers are not like other numbers. We can count them, but we cannot calculate with them. They are incommensurable.

Ask: who, exactly, died to save whom? If this were a question of math there would be proportions to work out. "You, lover, your man died to save ten lives. You, father, your daughter died to save three and a half lives. You, mother, your baby died to save half a life. You, child, your dog died to save one twentieth of a life."

And there would be responsibility to assign, givers to match with receivers. "You, survivor, see the face, read the name, of the man who lost his life to save your life and five other lives. Now you must remember him."

But there are no such calculations. These numbers only look like numbers. They are lives. They are incommensurable.

It is true but trivial that I cannot put myself in Truman's place; if I were Truman himself, I would have done as Truman did, and if Truman were someone else, he would have faced someone else's choice, not Truman's. But looking at the numbers we must remember that this is not an equation; there are no factors. These numbers only look like numbers. Nothing cancels out. There is no algebra of forgiveness, no solution for innocence.

Losers

2011-09-26T13:02:00.001-05:00

What makes a loser? There is nothing special about him. Being dull, awkward, foolish, and feckless only makes him unlucky, and being unlucky is not enough to make a loser. What makes him a loser is not that he loses, but that he does not know why he loses.

Losers have always been with us, since Thersites at least, but of course they are rare in hierarchical societies, where everyone is born with a part to play, where every kind of failure is keyed by coordinates of folly and vice. Being a loser is idiopathic, because losers are inconsequential; they do not even have anyone to let down.

He may have abilities, even remarkable ones, but he spoils them. He stops too soon, or he goes too far, and all his good intentions, all his hard work, come to nothing. Worse, just by being the one who has them, he makes his own abilities ridiculous. For his skills, we call him a geek; for his wealth, we call him vulgar; for his commitments, we call him pretentious. He is not a loser because he never wins; he is a loser because even when he wins, he loses.

What makes him a loser are not his mistakes but how he doubles them. Defying logic, he spans the extremes without ever touching the center, impaling himself on both horns of every dilemma, robbing Scylla to pay Charybdis.

He is the one who has nothing to say, but never gets to the point; the one who can't take a hint, and can't take a joke; the one who never learns, and the one who never gets over it; the one who can't talk around girls, and babbles around women; the one who can't express himself, and the one who gives everything away; the one who never takes a chance until he throws everything away.

In short the loser is a bad actor playing himself. Nothing feels real to him unless he is playing to the balcony. In the beginning, he tries too hard; and every time someone leaves, he tries a little harder. In the end the seats are empty and there he is, alone on the stage, the singularity where tragedy and comedy meet: the clown who does not know he is a clown.

The Traveler

2011-09-11T23:05:00.001-05:00

"You haven't gone yet? You should go. It's the right time of year, too. It's wonderful with all that space, and those views, and not a tourist in sight. I wish everybody could go.

"What? What did I…? Oh. That's an oxymoron, isn't it? Like 'nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.' But that really is how it goes. Whenever we find something that's really a jewel, people just descend on it until they suffocate it. I can't even go to Venice anymore. I swear it's sinking out of embarrassment.

"If we were smart, really smart, we wouldn't blab about things like that. We'd organize a guild or a secret society. We'd have apprenticeships and an initiation. Seven years of studying languages, and etiquette, and survival skills to become an Honorable Traveler with the right to visit. Plus another ten years of study before you get to take a camera.

"Instead, we love it so much we have to tell somebody about it. And they have to tell somebody and we all love it to death.

"Maybe that's too harsh. I don't want to seem elitist. The fact is I pity the tourists even more than I pity the places they ruin. They have no way out. They cross oceans and continents but they pack their boredom, and ignorance, and petulance.

"I don't know why they bother, unless it's because they still have that instinct that tells them growing up means leaving home. But no matter how far they go, they drag home along behind. It's not even travel; it's just a change of venue."

Pythagoras

2011-09-04T08:00:00.001-05:00

Notes repeat themselves, higher or lower, at the interval we now call an octave. Double or halve the speed at which a string vibrates and the sound, in some sense which is as convincing as it is gratuitous, remains the same. And between notes in simple ratios, most of all the interval we call the fifth, there is a sweetness sweeter and more dizzying than wine.

Between the octave and the interval, the world almost seems made for us. This appearance is deceiving. The world is not just unfair, but rigged. Chances are you know what it is to pick up part A, and part B, never having doubted they went together, only to find that they don't quite fit. The world is like that. Between the octave and the fifth there is a small but shattering discrepancy we call the Pythagorean comma.

The comma of Pythagoras is as bad as the flaming sword. It means that music, even music, must always be compromised, whether by a diet of a few safe notes, or an intricate microtonal dissection of the octave, or a distortion of the fifth.

This distortion (the Western approach) goes by the name of temperament. Since the Middle Ages the West has known and used several exquisite systems of temperament for particular purposes, but in the last century they gave way to a single system brutal in its simplicity. Equal temperament deals with the Pythagorean comma the way the senators dealt with Romulus, when they caught him in a sudden fog, hacked him to pieces and, walking away with the pieces hidden under their togas, called it apotheosis.

(Are the jitters of the West, its frantic days and restless nights, the symptoms of our addiction to this uneasy music, the Pythagorean comma working its way deeper and deeper under our skins?)

Of all things with value, music is the purest, the most abstract. If even music must compromise, what hope is there for anything else? None at all; but do not take it too hard. Consider poor Pythagoras, twice betrayed, once by music, once by math. Traumatic as Gödel, Turing, Russell, and Tarski were for us, how much worse was it for him, the philosopher who thought number was truth and music was beauty, only to find that numbers could be irrational and music sheltered wolves.

The last century was not, as it boasted, the moment when thought ran up against the limits of certainty and perfectibility. From the very beginning, the whole arc from faith to doubt, from certainty to anxiety, has always been with us in Pythagoras and his comma.

The Entrepreneur

2011-08-26T18:29:00.001-05:00

"Did I ever tell you about my grandfather? Of course I didn't. He was nobody. He spent his whole life at the factory, retired, boom, dropped dead. That's the one thing I've been afraid of my whole life, turning out like him, a nobody with nothing to show for himself, nothing to show he ever existed except for a chip of stone at the veterans' cemetery. Which one? I don't know. I have his medals around here somewhere.

"After I'm gone, people need to know I was here. They need to know my name, and remember me. I want to be up there with the greats. I want to leave a legacy. For all he did with his life my grandfather might as well never have been born. My life has to mean something. The world has to be different because I lived in it. So thanks for your concern, but I'm fine. And I kind of have to get back to work, so if that's all . . ."

Cell intelligence

2011-08-17T10:15:00.001-05:00

Before we live by ideas, we seem to live among them. Nothing goes unprophesied. The shadows of ideas fall ahead of them and mark out the shape of things to come for those who care to trace it. The prophecies of science fiction writers are an obvious example: I nominate Looking Backward. In 1887 Bellamy felt the shadow of the radio and colored with fancy the pattern of affordances he traced from prophecy.

There are a number of music rooms in the city, perfectly adapted acoustically to the different sorts of music. These halls are connected by telephone with all the houses of the city whose people care to pay the small fee, and there are none, you may be sure, who do not. The corps of musicians attached to each hall is so large that, although no individual performer, or group of performers, has more than a brief part, each day's programme lasts through the twenty-four hours. There are on that card for to-day, as you will see if you observe closely, distinct programmes of four of these concerts, each of a different order of music from the others, being now simultaneously performed, and any one of the four pieces now going on that you prefer, you can hear by merely pressing the button which will connect your house-wire with the hall where it is being rendered. The programmes are so coordinated that the pieces at any one time simultaneously proceeding in the different halls usually offer a choice, not only between instrumental and vocal, and between different sorts of instruments; but also between different motives from grave to gay, so that all tastes and moods can be suited.

Contrast this prophecy, made in the heat of fiction, with another, made in earnest. I own a book—a curiosity—entitled Cell Intelligence, self-published 1916 by one Nels Quevli: registered pharmacist, bachelor of law, and flaming eccentric. The argument of the book is encapsulated in its full title:

Cell Intelligence the Cause of Growth, Heredity, and Instinctive Actions, Illustrating that the Cell is a Conscious, Intelligent Being, and, by Reason Thereof, Plans and Builds all Plants and Animals in the Same Manner that Man Constructs Houses, Railroads, and Other Structures

This sounds stranger than it is; try The Selfish Cell. Quevli in 1916 maps to Dawkins in 1976. Both Quevli and Dawkins conclude that life does not fall out of any equation, and that since it is not a force or a property of matter, its existence at all is contingent, and its forms must be historical.

There are two main theories by which the growth and development of plants and animals in life are explained: First, chemical and mechanical forces; second, Intelligence or a Divine Being. However, so far no one has yet ventured the proposition or statement that the intelligence that has caused the production of all these structures we see, such as plants and animals, was the property of the cell.

And since it is not determined, it must be intelligent (or selfish) because its survival and ramification imply something equivalent to memory.

I do not pretend to know what intelligence is, nor what memory is, but I want to show that the cell is a being possessed of that something, whatever it is. If man is intelligent the cell must be.

Both are asserting that cell intelligence and human intelligence are the same. The difference is whether we follow Quevli in applying the vocabulary of human intelligence to the cell, or Dawkins in applying the vocabulary of the gene to human intelligence.

I offer two examples in order to contrast them. Bellamy's prophecy is interesting, but after Bellamy radio still had to be invented. But Quevli in 1916 knew what Dawkins knew in 1976. Ideas are autologous: the description of an idea, is an idea. To predict it is to bring it about; to imagine it is to create it.

This property of ideas leads to certain perversities. Everywhere we find that the longest training, the deepest commitment, the finest specialization yield ideas that could just as easily have been dreamed up on a long walk or talked out in a bull session. The difference is the imprimatur.

But if specialization does not yield better ideas—if it only makes them more persuasive—then somebody who is more interested in understanding than persuasion might ask whether it would be better not to specialize, and cultivate the faculty for ideas directly?

The case could be made that the person who has one idea, then devotes their life to advancing it, is wasting their life: settling for an idea that, being their first attempt, probably isn't even very good. The case could also be made that intellectual monogamy ought to be the goal of anybody who takes ideas seriously, and that though essayistic dalliance with a series of ideas is perhaps charming in the exuberance of youth, it becomes absurd and pitiable if protracted into maturity.

This tangle recalls others. Being one person—having one personality—is enough for most of us; yet we see writers and actors contain multitudes where each member, whether absorbed from life or condensed from fancy, is as much a person as the person who contains them, having virtues and vices of their own they do not pass on to their host. If myself is something virtualizable, am I wasting myself in being only myself?

But writers and actors are not the best people; what they contain they do not combine. The conversation of Shakespeare was surely very, but less than Hamlet times Falstaff times Rosalind. And actors especially may owe their multiplicity to nothing but the quality that Borges imputes to Shakespeare (who was also, remember, an actor): they can become anybody only because they are nobody.

The homuncular fallacy is not a real fallacy. It could turn out to be part of the definition of consciousness that it is built from what is also conscious, a potential infinity like two facing mirrors. We contain cells, cells abridge us; we are people with personalities and yet we contain people with personalities. Sometimes it seems that everything is recursive, that even reality only represents itself: considering Robertson's Titan, for example, I cannot help suspecting that the world, too, only serves to perform what has already been anticipated in imagination.

Nondefinition #33

2011-08-10T18:58:00.001-05:00

Sharks. The shark is no pilgrim: half as old as life, streamlined by a million generations bent on the same restless, uncompromised purpose, he has never yet doubted. He has an ancestry but it does not matter. Once hunger met water the shark was inevitable. He is written into the laws of physics between the ratios of buoyancy and the equations of flow and drag. He belongs utterly, and when he dies he leaves no bones to protest it. They say that deep enough there is no more up or down, but they should know better. The shark is down. The moment your blood enters the water, you start to fall. In the whole wide ocean there is nothing to catch you. First he smells you; then he hears you; then he sees you; then he feels the current flutter in your muscles as you try not to breathe. But you have nothing to be ashamed of. The hunger you feed was not a vain hunger like the lion's, not a grubby hunger like the worm's, but perfect hunger, unhurried, impartial, and pure.

The Early Adopter

2011-07-30T17:20:00.002-05:00

"People are afraid of the future. I can understand that. The one thing we know for sure about the future is that everything's going to go wrong, am I right? You're going to get older, and your marriage will fall apart, and your kids will speak a different language and listen to bad music.

"But I'm in love with the future, because while I'm getting older, and getting shaky and confused, something else is happening. Technology is accelerating so fast that even as I'm coming apart the space of what I can do gets bigger and bigger.

"I may need thicker glasses, but I can talk to somebody in China on a video phone. I may be out of shape, but I can carry a thousand books in my pocket. My hearing, maybe, isn't as good as it used to be, but I have my own personal pocket radio station that plays all my favorites and follows me everywhere.

"So, sure, it's true. Maybe if I wait a year the next model will be better and cheaper and they'll have the bugs worked out and that thing everybody hates, they'll have changed that. But I'm not getting any younger in the meantime.

"You be sensible. What's one more year of circling the drain? Mine's on pre-order."

Names

2011-07-26T13:10:00.001-05:00

To say something unusual in specialized language is easy. A few formulas may unmistakably express a new worldview. To say something unusual in everyday language is very hard. You must choose your words not only to say what you mean, but to refuse to say what the reader expects. Names alone cannot do it; it takes sentences.

Consider how advanced ideas become basic ones. The joke goes that in 1919, when Eddington was asked whether it was true that only three people understood general relativity, he hesitated and finally excused himself: "I was wondering who the third one might be!" Now undergraduates study it. Postulate that our undergraduates are not smarter than the best minds of 1919. Consider musicians: the violinist's vibrato, the guitarist's tremolo, were once the distinctive techniques of particular virtuosos; now they are part of mere competence. This letdown holds everywhere, even for life. Climbing Everest was once a feat; now it is a vacation.

This is more than a pattern; it is a phenomenon. What happens is naming: giving something a name is the first step in its domestication. The wild equations of general relativity were tamed by the associations that gathered around the name: the bowling ball on a rubber sheet; the paradoxical twins; the absentminded professor; the starship Enterprise. Any whale can be handled once it has enough harpoons in it.

There is a tension between thinking in names and thinking in sentences. Math and science work with names; verbs only participate syntacitly. This is an envied state. Whenever we see a field on the make we see it embrace gerunds, copulation, and anaphor. The textbooks always show the development from sententious thinkers to name-wielding scientists as the axis of progress.

But something is suspicious here. To be useful names must be unlike other words: they must have definitions, and there must be some procedure to ascertain that two definitions refer to the same thing. Otherwise a name is not a name at all; it is just another word.

The decline of Freudianism comes to mind. Freud gave names—ego, id, repression, neurosis—with a certain drama between them. The names and the drama were then taken up by a series of schools. Each one recast the roles with new definitions, or rewrote the old roles into a new drama, until finally the names, because they meant everything, no longer meant anything in particular, and were heard no more.

This matters. How many brilliant thinkers, who might have enriched the study of the mind if only they had been content to write sentences, went to waste following a dumb faith in names? They should have been warned that mere sentences are never wasted: good writing is always good thinking. It can be translated into whatever names are current, and lasts when names fail.

On quirk

2011-07-17T10:46:00.004-05:00

Quirkiness is what breeziness was: the default style of the writer who writes not as a maker, but as a performer. It may be interesting to compare the two. Breezy and quirky are both inexhaustible. When you lay two breezy or quirky pieces by the same author end-to-end, the grain matches up where the word count cuts off. They are as reliable and predictable as utilities and readers love them for it: the breezy or quirky writer who is not absolutely incompetent can expect their following, however small, to be loyal and loud.

They do the same job, but in different ways. Breezy is world-wise and wide-awake; quirky is innocent and dreamy. Breezy is suspicious and confrontational; quirky is trusting and fragile. Both are overbearing, but breezy is pushy where quirky is cloying. Breezy is cool and takes things in stride; quirky is breathless and labile. Breezy is a mover, in constant, purposeful coming and going; quirky is a dweller, a homebody. Even when quirky travels, it settles. (Corollary: breezy and quirky both value living light, but for different reasons: breezy streamlines where quirky simplifies.) Breezy and quirky are both fun, but both under false pretenses: breezy is fun because it pretends to be ignorant; quirky is fun because it pretends to be crazy. Of course since real insanity (like real ignorance) is no fun at all, the insanity is aspirational: boredom becomes ADHD, neatness becomes OCD, absentmindedness becomes Alzheimer's.

That much is condemnable, but both are too easily mocked. True, breezy and quirky both talk about themselves as if they were endlessly interesting, but neither is narcissistic or needy. They claim interest vicariously, by representing something: whenever they are an X they are just another X. True, breezy and quirky are both indiscreet; but though they are highly personal they are totally unrevealing—a sacrificial persona intervenes between merely human writer and inhuman audience like a patronus.

Of course neither is bad in itself. Archie Goodwin should be breezy; Amélie Poulain should be quirky. For the writer, breezy and quirky are both shams, but shams are not so bad: somebody who demands that you be yourself deserves the same reaction as somebody who demands that you to go naked. Still, when they go wrong, breezy is very bad, but quirky is worse. Breeziness is at least an adult sham; quirkiness is falsely childlike in the fairy-friendly way that only fools adults who have forgotten being children, when they would have caught fairies to pull their wings off.

The Miser

2011-07-05T16:02:00.001-05:00

[New feature; the idea is something between Theophrastus and Browning, like the "letters" in the periodical essay series without the framing device.]

"I learned something very early on. I saw that you can survive without friends, and you can survive without money, but it has to be one or the other. And I turned out to be much better at making money than I was at making friends.

"I don't have anything against people who go the other way. Everybody wants to give you a hand—great! Nobody ever gave me a hand. They wanted me to beg and I wouldn't beg. So I did it anyway, and then—it's true—I rubbed their noses in it. That's only natural, if you don't take it too far.

"I'm not happy; who's happy? I know money isn't happiness; I'm not stupid. But I don't have any regrets because I never had a choice. I wish you people understood that. I wish you people didn't look at me like I'd gone over to the dark side.

"I know what it is. It's because you need me and you don't want to admit it. It's resentment. Your friends can't do anything for you unless they have money, and when you follow the money what do you find? You find me. If I tagged my money the way they tag migrating birds, you'd be amazed how far it goes.

"Miser? I'm the most generous guy in the world. In fact I'm the only generous guy in the world, because it's my money to start with. It doesn't count when it's somebody else's money."

Technique

2011-06-21T15:45:00.001-05:00

We do not know what our bodies may do. Biology is made of physics. All our movements only permutate the universal grammar of simple machines. The body is a vocabulary: it contains little, but comprehends much.

Physiology maps the possibilities of the body's range and extension; but the means by which we concert them—techniques—either ignore physiology or imply a false one. Knowing where the muscles are and how they connect gives us no handle on them. We control our bodies only as a gestalt.

The extreme is the idea-shaped technique of qi; attention to qi will help you do almost anything better and more easily—but (except as a gestalt) qi does not exist. Or consider relaxation. The perfect balance of loose and tight for a muscle is the same as for a knot—not so loose that it slips, not so tight that it binds. But we cannot calibrate this balance by feeling it, because the real action of the muscles is the sum of the voluntary tension we perceive and the involuntary tonus we do not. We have to think of relaxing just to prevent the mistake of bracing. It helps to be told to relax, it helps to try to relax; but if you actually relaxed, you would sacrifice control over the good alignment of your joints, and destroy your body as you used it.

The new techniques that research has devised promise that technique as gestalt is about to be overtaken by technique as applied physiology. Of course physiology is relevant to technique; but this is nothing new. Take the long view: give it another century or two and this technique will be just another gestalt. Duellists applied the discoveries of anatomy in the fencing hall almost as soon as they were dissected out in the morgue (and thus kept the morgue supplied). But fencing survives as technique, not theory.

And research may be an impediment to technique. Techniques are of two kinds. Some techniques amplify our powers, improving what we would do anyway—jump, run, hit. Research benefits these by aligning the technique with the underlying complex of mechanism and instinct. But other techniques rather enable than help: they let us do unprecedented things. For these research may be a mistake. Science invented the triangular pen to make it easier to write with the fingers; but in the technique of the penman the fingers must not be used at all.

Techniques like these, though not analytic, are not arbitrary; they have their own logic and converge across centuries, and civilizations. The knights of Christendom and the samurai of Japan each worked out the technique of the two-handed sword (modulo certain constraints of metallurgy) interchangeably. Or returning to calligraphy, the peculiar penhold used in Eastern brush painting is paralleled exactly in the technique of flourishing with the pointed pen.

A technique, like a sentence, has two parts: what and how, like content and syntax. The content of a sentence instantiates a pattern of syntax: the what, according to the how. For techniques there are three patterns: cues, checks, and controls. Between them they make an act effective, as syntax makes a sentence comprehensible.

Cues belong to the mind. If we could see athletes and performers as they imagine themselves we would see the strangest beasts, like the boxer with the wings of a butterfly and the stinger of a bee. Every discipline has its own imagery of this sort, which is part of its mystery, consecrating its pursuit as a shamanic ecstasy of communion with totemic essences.

Checks are miniature acts: the things you do before and after the main act, how you get ready and make sure. A check may be as formal as a routine or as spontaneous as a wind-up. Checks are mostly important to the learner. Techniques are not behaviors; they cannot be shaped, in the behaviorist sense. Practicing wrong just reinforces the mistake. Checks splint the fragmentary elements of technique so they knit together true. Half of knowing how to move is knowing how to stand; half of knowing how to use a tool is knowing how to hold it.

Controls are what prevails, the meanwhiles and the durings. They are the simple things that take time to master, the first things you learn that you must always recall: "keep your eye on the ball" or "keep your weight on the balls of your feet." A control is a sort of lever: it is easy, because all you have to do is pull, but it is slow, because by pulling on it you are moving everything else. Controls, as we turn them on and off, almost seem to let us switch between different bodies, adapted for different purposes.

As technique matures it becomes less and less a matter of what and more and more a matter of how: it less and less attempts, and more and more, knowing itself correct, it expects. The proof of having learned to do something correctly is when you can no longer demonstrate how to do it wrong.

Technique has many enemies.

Strength is an enemy of technique.

Of course brutish, blundering strength is the opposite of technique. But feats of strength have their own technique; the strongman is an athlete, not a species. He uses more sense than muscle.

Strength is problematic because it hides bad technique. With enough strength you cannot feel for yourself the difference between the right and wrong ways of doing something. The wrong way may even feel better: what feels more effortful often seems more efficacious. Jumping in and slugging through feels good, feels like something to be proud of, in a way that taking your time and doing it right cannot.

And strength hides not only bad techniques, but even harmful ones: keeping the harm silent until it is irreversible.

Instinct is an enemy of technique.

Instinct is problematic for learners. The hardest technique, for you, is the one that comes naturally to everyone else. It is not taught, because it is not obvious that it is something to be known. Sometimes those who do not have the instinct give up on the skill; but they, though slow to learn and likely to be discouraged, may prove best, because they earn an awareness others lack.

Instinct is also problematic for masters, who are always want to streamline their technique—to do more with less. In doing so they risk omitting something essential they did not know was there, because it was never named to them; something they may find it difficult to regain, as Schumann ruined his hands for the piano trying to make better use of his ring finger.

Skill is an enemy of technique.

Masters are rarely good teachers. They may be impatient—ars longa. Even if they are patient, they may be unsympathetic—was I ever such a...? Even if they are patient and sympathetic, what they teach may be not what they do now, but what they did when they still had to think about it.

Even if they are patient, sympathetic, and self-aware, they may teach the wrong things. Techniques feel different when they are new. The gestalt the master experiences is not raw but cooked. Trying to teach it directly accomplishes nothing.

Moreover teaching is a rare and demanding ability; of the few masters who are also among the few good teachers, even fewer have time for it.

And skill has a different use for technique than ignorance has. Ignorance has only two outcomes, getting it wrong or getting it right. Skill has many outcomes. Subtle adjustments and accomodations imperceptible to the ignorant produce wide divergences for complicated ends. The techniques the skilled pay attention to are thus ones the ignorant have no use for. Trying to impose them is pointless.

Bad technique is an enemy of technique.

Techniques link to one another; a bad technique unchains those that depend on it. (To invert, when a generally accepted technique fails to do anything for you, it usually means you have a deeper problem.)

Good technique is an enemy of technique.

Technique is its own enemy because the better you become, the harder it is to tell what works. When you are used to bearing a technique in mind, as your muscles learn to perform it on their own, your consciousness of it becomes redundant and may gradually exaggerate means into mannerism. It becomes harder to test a technique; any change feels like an improvement when its rests tired muscles and favors rested ones. And, once you have assimilate good technique, any technique, no matter how self-defeating, can work for a while. The body's mechanisms for self-protection have been disarmed. You could run wrong your whole life and never suffer more than an ache, but once you run well you might run wrong once and never run again.

I am no hellenizer. Mens sana in corpore sano is a good thing, but only because it is the sum of two good things. Of course the mind and the body benefit each other: a feeble body means a confused brain as a feeble mind means a clumsy body. But the one may be excellent while the other is only adequate, and when both are excellent it is just a case of two excellences. (I am not fair in these imbalances; I prefer the feeble scholar to the ignorant athlete.) But it remains that technique exists between brain and body: that it is its own kind of thinking, not thinking about the body, but thinking with it.

The Locomotive

2011-06-12T12:37:00.001-05:00

On viewing a restored locomotive displayed in a pavilion.

Black beast, gnarled in heavy sleep
Red sun thaws cold iron.
Slack boiler swells, remembering steam.
Fused wheels flex, grasping the rails.
Scraps of shadow pour from the cold chimney
Silent shrieks rattle the mute whistle.
Face to the sun, I borrow a flush of hope.
Back to the sun, I tread a path of shadow.

Stock market

2011-06-06T12:31:00.001-05:00

The stock market exists to discharge the gap between capitalism and reality. To a greater extent than capitalism's most vicious enemies imagine whether a company is in the red or in the black, whether it is getting by or flourishing, is tacit. The bottom line is like the horizon: exact, but it changes with your perspective. Accounting is an etiquette, not a science: the principles of accounting are accepted, not discovered. And because (in the short definition of capitalism) business can run as well on credit as cash, any large aggregation of capital that is not openly burning money remains viable as long as it remains credible.

The purpose of the stock market is to assign to the companies that submit to its judgment another value besides the one that stands on paper: one that answers not the accountant's abstract question, "What is it worth?" but the more cogent and interested question, "What is it worth to me?"

Capitalism did not invent the bubble. Sri Lanka, I have just been reading, is covered in the ruins of a massive, ancient irrigation network that was abandoned just as it was finished. The most parsimonious explanation is that ancient Sri Lanka had a bubble in aqueducts. Perhaps the answer to why the Maya built so many splendid cities, and then abandoned them, is a bubble in the building of splendid cities. Egypt had a bubble in tombs; Rome had a bubble in conquest; Europe had a bubble in chivalry. Bubbles are a human failing; capitalism is unique because it pops them. The stock market is this pointed instrument.

When we look at the quotidian tergiversations of the stock market we are watching the ebb and flow of an argument conducted in the binary code of short and long, buy and sell; an argument to which we are all parties. Every time you spend money or time you express an opinion about the economy. Buying a car is tantamount to saying "Car prices are fair." Getting an education is tantamount to saying "My prospects are good." Planting a food garden is tantamount to saying "Food prices are too high." (Of course you may have other motives, but the economy is touchy and takes everything personally.) The stock market is the great bookie who takes these opinions about the economy and turns them into bets.

To put it another way: the stock market is an arrangement that pays people for predicting the future. The more unlikely the prediction—the longer the odds—the greater the payout. Thus as the belief behind a bubble becomes more unquestionable, the reward for questioning it grows. 1929 was the year it became worthwhile to wonder if an upward trend in earnings really meant endless future growth; 2007 was the year it became worthwhile to wonder whether the housing market really could continue to grow forever without ever slowing down.

Crude as it is, this mechanism of homeostastis is unique; and it is what makes the gross, awkward, grasping, adolescent behemoth of capitalism fecund and invulnerable.

Self-deprecation

2011-05-23T11:17:00.001-05:00

Self-deprecation is easy to explain, but hard to justify: what it may be is not what it becomes.

It may be a gesture of meekness, like a dog that shows its belly: a sign that you mean no harm, or are not worth harming. It may be calculated to lower expectations: whether out of discretion, not to disappoint them, or out of policy, to surprise them. Or it may be an indulgence, to extort praise by threatening self-harm. In this way self-deprecation helps define friendship: what is a friend but someone who praises you for what you regret, someone who finds unthinkable the things you fear may be true? These precious offices can only be performed when self-deprecation in one provides the opportunity to the other. It may be a way to evade responsibility; "I couldn't X to save my life" is a polite way to say no when it was wrong to ask. And it avoids embarrassment: perhaps you could X, if you put your mind to it, but when there is nothing to gain, why risk failure when you can excuse inaction?

Of course self-deprecation is not always serious. It may be an indirect boast. "All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare." Which is harmless if it is not invidious. Or it may be a provocation. Montaigne appalled his friends by insisting that he had no memory. In the French of the time memory stood for intelligence: but Montaigne made the distinction, and his self-deprecation enforced it.

All these uses may be legitimate; but none of them can excuse the habit of self-deprecation. If you expect to be taken seriously you should try it for yourself. Tell me often enough how stupid and useless you are and I may begin to believe you; apologize for yourself often enough and I will begin to believe you have something to be sorry for.

Of course some lives are that wretched, some people are that burdened; if patience can help them, let us be patient. But I have no patience for people who fear being resented more than they fear being despised. It doesn't even work. You may resent the people who had the things you could never have; but the people you hate are the ones who had them, and despise them.

Aristocracy was invulnerable as long as aristocrats took pains to enjoy, and be seen to enjoy, their wealth and privilege; but the moment they started to doubt themselves the masses rose up and devoured them and raised the clear conscience of plutocracy in their place.

The lesson is that mere spine has its own persuasion, which cannot be substituted: and since respect will be given, if those who deserve it cannot stand by their words, deeds, and lives, others will receive it undeservingly.

Causes

2011-05-17T15:16:00.002-05:00

The axiom of finance is that having something now is better than having the same thing tomorrow. One who calculates by how much is said to discount. The same axiom holds elsewhere, but no one wants to do the math. The sacrifice that would be saintly if it were selfless is too often only thoughtless.

Take those who abstain from a dish because of ethical objections about how it is now made. Someone who abstains from foie gras has made a permanent stand against an inherent evil, and means it. But someone whose argument begins "Do you know what kind of—" may not have weighed their position. You will not live forever. You are not guaranteed the ability to enjoy food even as long as you live. While you could still enjoy food, your health may forbid it. Whether or not you have bothered to count, at the end of your life there will have been only so many meals and far fewer good ones; are you certain you want to subtract this one?

Anyone who proposes to change the world needs to be asked: "If the world were as you want it to be, what would you do with yourself? Could you be doing it now? Why don't you?" Perhaps the answer would deprive a worthy cause of a capable partisan; but if there is nothing good, nothing worthwhile in the world but making what is bad in it less bad, then there is nothing good or worthwhile in it at all.

(Besides, the most dangerous people in the world are the ones who try to change it without having learned to live in it. Danton on Robespierre: Cet homme-la ne saurait pas cuire des oeufs dur: "That man couldn't boil an egg." A man might become a monster only because he was good for nothing else.)

The taste for causes can be a jaded one. Helping people is one way of hiding from them. Trying to save the world is one way of giving up on it. Devoting your life is one way of throwing it away. Perhaps the fruits justify the tree; but who would eat of it, if they knew how it grew?

Laika

2011-05-10T11:22:00.003-05:00

How right that a dog went first, and that, for a time, she was between us and darkness. All our proud rockets, our brave pioneers, and we entered space as a child might enter a basement, holding onto a dog's tail. She was a Moscow stray. A stray, and therefore nobody's dog, or everybody's—yours and mine, even. A Moscow stray, distant aunt to that remarkable unbreed of hustlers and idlers—Russia's last aristocrats.

Strays live by the old covenant. Dogs never needed us. The deadliest hunter of the African plains is not the lion but the wild dog, whose kills are efficient, coordinated, and relentless. And they chose to throw in their lot with us. What honor! And what responsibility! There is a play (a radio play of Dunsany's) where mankind is put on trial. One by one the animals testify against us; only the dog speaks in our defense, with such praise as is, in its way, worse than accusation:

He is man: that is enough. More is not needed. More could not be needed. All wisdom is in him. All his acts are just; terrible sometimes, but always just.

Bacon writes (against atheism) that men are better for having a god as dogs are better for having a master: a strange and improper argument. But if our faith is as heavy as the faith of dogs is to us, we can have a sort of sympathy, and imagine how gods might know shame.

Muhammad relates that a woman was forgiven a lifetime of sin for giving a thirsty dog a drink of water. Consider how the balance is weighed; what does it mean to harm a dog? "Who could eat a dog?" is really the same question as, "Who could eat a man?" Nobody eats a dog for its meat; men eat dogs like men eat men: to absorb their power. It is at least respectful. When dogs are twisted into brutality, neglected into savagery, beaten into helplessness, there is no respect; better to be eaten. And yet each new puppy is a fresh expression of absolute trust, never diminished. Our terrible debt vanishes in that unquenchable devotion.

In his last years, isolated in deafness, Goya gave up canvas and impasted the walls of his own house with a series of alien images, primordial and apocalyptic at once. A lone dog—all alone—sinks below the horizon, howling as she recedes over the edge of the world. We sent Laika to die; we sacrificed her. She died within hours. And then for five months, dead, in her dark, silent capsule, she circled our bright world, falling and falling as the horizon slipped away from beneath her, one dead dog keeping solitary watch over the billions. Then she fell as a star falls, a burnt offering, trailing fire, scattering earth and sea with her ashes. Even the sky is haunted.

Genteel tradition

2011-05-01T11:40:00.004-05:00

In 1911 Santayana was ready to leave the United States. In California (already liminal America), he said what he could not say in Boston:

The truth is that one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the backwater, while, alongside, in invention and industry and social organization the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This division may be found symbolized in American architecture: a neat reproduction of the colonial mansion—with some modern comforts introduced surreptitiously—stands beside the sky-scraper. The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.

This phrase, "genteel tradition", became the weapon of choice for the Mencken gang. They carried it in their hip pockets like a flask of violet perfume, ready to dash it over an opponent's head. And once the scent was on you, whatever you had to say, all anyone heard was the calico whine of a high-minded Protestant spinster.

What is this genteel tradition? What did Santayana mean by it?

He defines it as a form of anthropocentrism: an anthropocentrism that emulsifies transcendentalism—the sense that the world is your creation—with calvinism—the sense that the world is your fault. Historically he traces it to the seventeenth century and the renewal of orthodoxy.

But where it comes from is not what it is.

The genteel tradition opposes education to life. It wants things done the right way, openly, and for the right reasons, or not done at all. It requires play to be exercise; thinking to be persuasion; learning to be study. It wants us to be unfettered and spontaneous, but not to run in the halls. It approves of sports, not games; themes, not essays; literature, not writing. It does not care what is avoided, unless it approves of what is done instead. Just avoiding apathy, boredom, ignorance, prejudice, and stupidity—in the judgment of the genteel tradition, avoiding them is only permissible when they are avoided properly.

Wealth, learning, and beneficence, even on a grand scale, must leave them cold, or positively alarm them, if these fine things are not tightly controlled and meted out according to some revealed absolute standard.

Santayana thought the genteel tradition was dying; instead it enjoys absolute victory. It has coopted or outlasted every challenge made to it. How did this coffin case recover and reconquer?

In his speech Santayana names Whitman and William James as models of what was to come after the genteel tradition. How badly his prophecy failed shows in how unthinkable either man is as our contemporary.

Whitman's generous sympathies would wither in our frost. How dare such a creature of privilege—white, male, educated—presume to contain us? His faith in active humanity—in discoverers, settlers, builders, farmers—is embarrassing. He accepts where we require indignation; he holds faith where we require doubt.

James it no such outcast: his state is worse. He has been brought as low as a dead thinker can be brought: one says he anticipated recent discoveries—"Now that we know everything, we can admit he was right all along." This is safe to say, because he has no heirs. Our psychology is blithely built on the compulsive, thoughtless quantification that he travestied; and when we classify pragmatism as hypocrisy. If you expect to change a judgment, you must not stake too much on it. But the impulse of the genteel tradition is theocratic: it will have you only hot or cold, never lukewarm.

(In the low genteel tradition, such offenders by tenuosity are denounced as middlebrow; in the high genteel tradition, they may be anathematized for the practice of midcult.)

So what happened? This is hard to see because Santayana's future is our past—it belong to the middle distance; we cannot see it for our own shadow. But Santayana's examples have aged badly: aggressive enterprise has been outsourced; skyscrapers turned out to be a gimmick, not half so efficient as the anomie of the exurban office park; the colonial mansion was not reproduced, but renovated.

More importantly, women made their own claim on the future: not just assuming male roles, but dignifying female ones. Gender is the worm in the apple of Santayana's thought. Even for his period he is obtuse about it.

The American intellect is shy and feminine; it paints nature in water-colours; whereas the sharp masculine eye sees the world as a moving-picture—rapid, dramatic, vulgar, to be glanced at and used merely as a sign of what is going to happen next.

Santayana underrated women—women as people, and women as a subject: he did not ask them questions, or question his ideas about them. He observes a divide down the middle of humanity, and assumes that one side mirrors the other: left for right, weak for strong, shy for brash, sentimental for enterprising.

(In The Sense of Beauty, for example, while investigating the mutuality of sex and aesthetics, he infers that, because women are the most interesting thing in the world to men, men must be the most interesting thing in the world to women; whereas (aesthetically speaking) women are the most interesting thing in the world to men and women both.)

When Santayana made this metaphor—the genteel tradition is female, modernism is male—he corrupted his view of the one dilemma with the quality of caricature that spoiled his view of the other. Thus he sketches both the genteel tradition and modernism (as he names its opposite) clownishly, in greasepaint. If the genteel tradition is feminine, retiring, domestic, careful; then the opposite must be masculine, daring, upthrusting, public. On these terms there is only one complete escapee from the genteel tradition in American letters: Ayn Rand. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer; posit the genteel tradition in Santayana's playground terms and you get modernism (as metastasized in Objectivism).

I cannot say how far Santayana is, himself, to blame; but even if others made the same mistake, it is still the same mistake, and bears the same analysis. Every form of modernism is tantamount to testosterism. It is the one thing every species of modernism had in common, the weakness they all shared; so when the thing happened that no one expected, they were all susceptible to it, and the genus went extinct.

The kind of thinking modernism liked was the kind of thinking that felt most like work: laborious, therefore masculine, straightforward without the effeminate detours of inspiration or insight, muscular and tense, measurable in foot-pounds and horsepower. What no one expected was the computer. Suddenly, there appeared a machine that proves that there is no connection whatsoever between how hard thinking feels and what it is worth. The labor theory of value does not apply. Thinking feels hardest when it is most trivial. Math is effortful, but not difficult—even a computer can do it.

Somehow we still regard feats of memorization and calculation as if they marked intelligence. What computers show is that that these feats are trivial, no more enviable than the strength or speed of a horse: mental mathematics, total recall, musical prodigality, are not signs of a powerful mind, but of a mind that has plenty of room because so little is going on in it.

This is how the computer refutes modernism. Consider painting. I expect that art historians will someday marvel that the computer was not invented until the twentieth century was already half over. Probably the masses will assume that Picasso was a programmer; it will be difficult to convince them otherwise; and even so no one will discuss Picasso except as a prophet of the computer.

This sounds strange; but, for a moment, forget the name Picasso, and look across, from the first half of the twenty-first century, at the first half of the twentieth. What do we see there? We see nothing worth doing. There are no more pointillists, impressionists, cubists, because Photoshop trivializes them. There is no more abstract expressionism, no more suprematism, because the possibilities of these schools are exhausted by the screensaver.

"No," someone says, "the computer no more refutes abstraction than the camera refutes representation." But a painting is different from a photograph: one cannot see a photograph as a painting that could have been made, but wasn't. But a work of modernism is always something that could have been generated by computer, but happened to be made by a human being.

(This definition applies to more than painting—Serialism, Brutalism, Oulipo, &c.—but less than everything that has been called modernist. Of course if everything that has been called modernism must be admitted, then modernism has no definition. I draw the line here.)

If we mute the caricature—if we correct for Santayana's error—what is left then? The idea of a genteel tradition will stand. But what of the accompanying diagnosis? Do we have that divided mind? Certainly we have inherited the division as Santayana made it, and as others elaborated it: we find ourselves obscurely constrained to destroy the genteel—even under other names, like pretentious or inauthentic—wherever we encounter it, like the tribe of Amalek.

But the things the genteel tradition wants and provides are good in themselves. There is sufficiency and even bounty in it. It preserves what might be lost, and incubates what might be stillborn. But for the sake of these good things the genteel tradition sacrifices things that may be better. It smothers everything it touches with an anxious sobriety: it would rather leave us in marmoreal disgust, than let us enjoy too meltingly. This I oppose. I side with ecstasy, rhapsody, and multitude.

Dream places

2011-04-22T15:33:00.003-05:00

Dreams, though they are unstable on every other ground, have some constants. One of these is the dream version of a real place. Little as they resemble the places they represent, in the dream we recognize them, and across dreams we return to them, and find them as we left them. Often they are on a larger scale than their models. For places known in childhood this is explicable. Imagination magnifies and interpolates the facts until they match the impression we retain from when we were small in a place and looked up to it. But all my dream places are magnified, whenever I knew them. Perhaps cinematography is to blame. Many who grow up watching black and white dream in shades of gray; perhaps my dreams are tuned up to match the geographical key of New Zealand. True, I return to dream places which are born of dream stuff, and have no anchor in experience; but dream places, when they are born of real places, retain a connection with them. The change that a place undergoes in becoming a dream place is not lawless: there is a topology, with invariants. The shape of a coast or the path of a river may change, but not the presence or absence of bodies of water. The dream place has the same palette as its model; no new colors appear. Trees never appear singly, always in stands. New buildings are found, and new features of old buildings, but always of the same materials as the real ones. Roads widen and narrow, but never change their course, nor whether they turn or go straight. In order of instability the elements of dreams are events, things, people and places. This is a lesson in the mechanics of imagination: even when anything can happen to anyone at any time, it must still happen somewhere.

Paths

2011-04-16T10:35:00.001-05:00

The far-voyaging French explorers of North America kept running into one another. One explorer could hardly enter a village without finding another in residence or having just left. They could leave one another letters and expect them to be delivered. In Paris a man could disappear; in the wilderness he had to guard his reputation.

Think of traffic as a force. The canal is the artificial version of something natural—the river; likewise the road is the artificial version of the path. Roads are permanent; paths, unless anchored by permanent settlements or fenced out of property lines, shift freely, like the rivers they involve. The paradox of the wilderness is that the more open and unobstructed it is, the more traffic can converge along optima conditioned by the difficulty of the terrain, the availability of resources, and the use of waterways. In the wilderness all ways are highways.

When we consider ancient or prehistoric peoples and their connections we should not imagine of a web of short links between evenly spaced nodes, news and goods moseying from village to village; we should imagine them swept up into a handful of gigantic, continental paths: stable in their broad geographic sweep, changeful in their fine, local structure. Call them fractal: at ten thousand feet, there is one path; lower there are ten; on the ground there are hundreds, routes and rerouted circumventing any obstacle with the ingenuity of tunneling particle or flowing water.

The existence of paths on a continental scale does not imply a continential consciousness. In their scale these great paths would have been invisible to those who used them: like the Silk Road (the last great path), each path would have been cut up by jealous middlemen, until one end of the road was a myth to the other.

One can imagine, if not document, a vision of universal history hanging on a set of Great Paths, where it is not migrations that leave paths behind them, but paths that educe migrations. They have always been with us: from the beginning, the human race spread not by spilling over from one valley to the next, but by processes that, penetrating the lines of least resistance, became the salients of our advance. The ascent of man was not just something that happened; it was a single phenomenon, having its own structure—structured in paths.

Four Years

2011-04-15T20:40:00.001-05:00

I decided, before I began the Ruricolist, that four years would be a good place to stop. Beyond that, I feared, I would be protracting something that belonged to a certain moment in my life beyond its natural term. But I was making the rare mistake of overestimating the prospect of change. All my reasons for writing the Ruricolist stand. Now that I come to it, four years is not enough.

April fools

2011-04-09T10:16:00.001-05:00

On the net, an effective April Fools' joke works like contrast dye—you can discover, by following its path, who does and does not read the stories they pass along. April 2d is a good day to unsubscribe, unfollow, and defriend. And we owe to April Fools' Day some great moments: say, table syrup or the spaghetti harvest. But surely there is already enough deceit and treachery in the world. Why dedicate a holiday to it? Perhaps it has the significance of certain seeming-perverse religious performances, honoring the hostile gods of death and ruin, recognizing them in turn so they don't obtrude themselves out of turn. If we must be fools, if some god of fools will not be spurned, then, indeed, let us dedicate a day to his honor. And perhaps the holiday inoculates us: being an April fool is painful, but it forearms us for when we are made fools out of season.