Friday, November 21, 2003
In Which I Accept My Challenge
I have taken myself up on the challenge to put my rather banal memories of childhood churchgoing into a poem.
Isn't it wonderful how "benediction" is, literally, "well-saying" and the anglo-saxon equivalent "blessing" has "blood" at its etymological root ? As blesser, in French, means to wound ?
CONGREGATIONAL
Tall, stainless glass lets Sunday in.
It washes over them, a flood of light.
Their ark fills up. They soak in it,
their weekly bath of God. The organist
noodles an endless introitus,
prelude to boredoms still to come.
They congregate in neat suburban pairs,
hatless, hatted, man and wife,
the children somewhere else, unseen, unheard,
fruit of the gross but sanctioned act
that, if one must wed, though it’s best not to,
it’s to do that to beget them, Amen.
The texts are lectionarily correct,
the sermons spiced with anecdote
to make kerygma somewhat relevant
to CEO and PTA.
And once a month the Welch’s Grape
(glass thimbles rattling in bronze slots)
and widow Martha’s loaf go round.
The bread stays warm to the third pew
but, by the last, gouged of its sweetest part,
it's hollowed crust as empty as a tomb,
bird-food or trash, the sexton’s call.
One final plate goes round, and then
they say Our Father in Protestant
(debts and debtors, kingdom, glory, power.)
before the minister depulpits, glides
through nave to narthex, leaving them
for thirty awful seconds all alone
to face the whitewashed wall on which it hangs,
tastefully clean, Euclidian, severe:
the bodiless rebuke. The preacher looks
out at his stricken flock -- the well-scrubbed necks,
the haircuts, stylish hats. He pauses. Skips
the benediction (may the peace blah blah)
and, furious, he thunders out: God Bless !
Isn't it wonderful how "benediction" is, literally, "well-saying" and the anglo-saxon equivalent "blessing" has "blood" at its etymological root ? As blesser, in French, means to wound ?
CONGREGATIONAL
Tall, stainless glass lets Sunday in.
It washes over them, a flood of light.
Their ark fills up. They soak in it,
their weekly bath of God. The organist
noodles an endless introitus,
prelude to boredoms still to come.
They congregate in neat suburban pairs,
hatless, hatted, man and wife,
the children somewhere else, unseen, unheard,
fruit of the gross but sanctioned act
that, if one must wed, though it’s best not to,
it’s to do that to beget them, Amen.
The texts are lectionarily correct,
the sermons spiced with anecdote
to make kerygma somewhat relevant
to CEO and PTA.
And once a month the Welch’s Grape
(glass thimbles rattling in bronze slots)
and widow Martha’s loaf go round.
The bread stays warm to the third pew
but, by the last, gouged of its sweetest part,
it's hollowed crust as empty as a tomb,
bird-food or trash, the sexton’s call.
One final plate goes round, and then
they say Our Father in Protestant
(debts and debtors, kingdom, glory, power.)
before the minister depulpits, glides
through nave to narthex, leaving them
for thirty awful seconds all alone
to face the whitewashed wall on which it hangs,
tastefully clean, Euclidian, severe:
the bodiless rebuke. The preacher looks
out at his stricken flock -- the well-scrubbed necks,
the haircuts, stylish hats. He pauses. Skips
the benediction (may the peace blah blah)
and, furious, he thunders out: God Bless !
Thursday, November 20, 2003
November
Today, under low clouds, the river looked black and opaque. Almost viscous. Last night's rain had was darkened the landscape. It was even more stripped and spare than last week.
Even through the sound of chain saws and construction, I could hear the wind blowing through a stand of small white pines. They billowed; their green, full boughs looked soft enough to make a bed.
The grasses, too, rustled; so did the remaining leaves on the bushes and trees. I saw small, abandoned nests in the crooks of branches. I saw clusters of berries, startlingly red. Seed pods and leaves littered the path.
I stopped to admire the stand of Beautiful Nameless Grass, now the palest of browns, its calligraphic efflorescences spare and delicate, swaying in the wind, rustling, hissing. Fat squirrels foraged everywhere, jostling the underbrush.
Queen Anne's lace is a bridal flower -- pure white, with a central red bud -- beautiful. When it dies, it browns, then grays, and involutes: the broad lacy plate-like flower head curls up like a fist. Which, too, are beautiful, but differently. In full flower, they seem sexually beautiful, alluring, seductive, dazzling. Involuting, they have a more cerebral beauty; something more subtle, formal, abstract.
I saw the river hermit leave his tent site on a bicycle. He didn't ride in my direction on the path.
Bed, nest, tent, berries, foraging: fall heightens the power of these primal images of shelter and preparing for cold.
Walking, I thought of the approach of Advent.
Advent strikes me as a season of absence and darkness; of being lost and alone. It seems more terrible than Lent. A pre-verbal world. A world that, within the context of its particular narrative, has not yet found the words to speak of its suffering.
Seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking: suddenly, the whole neurological substrate of my constructed world became apparant.
In such solipsistic moments I feel like the pivot on which the whole universe rests. If my brain were different, I would receive menacing, personal messages from the trees. The experienced world, the self, and the I that thinks about the world and itself -- everything's a fiery dance among my neurons. Fluxes across membranes.
But I'm not separate from "the world." The sun on my skin makes vitamin D; I breathe in the oxygen that the trees exhale, breathe out the CO2 that they inhale. My rods and cones fire up, mirroring the light; my eardrum vibrates like an aspen leaf. My brain serves up words, memories, judgments. Even the sense of beauty and aesthetic pleasure is neurological, probably as evolutionarily adaptive as our revulsion at carrion. And fall comes, we gather food, fatten, huddle around our fire, pull our children closer.
I recall Thich Nhat Hanh's concept of "interbeing," which he beautifully explicates in his commentary on the Heart Sutra, The Heart Of Understanding. The universe is all one big relational web. An organism. An immense responsive skein of particles and waves.
On the other hand, we experience our lives within separate, suffering incarnations. We feel incomplete, unsatisfied. We issue appeals, we cry out from the depths of our smallness. We grieve, we hanker. We cherish a ancient story about birth, compassion, suffering, endurance, persistance.
Sometimes the only possible prayer is prostration and silence.
Even through the sound of chain saws and construction, I could hear the wind blowing through a stand of small white pines. They billowed; their green, full boughs looked soft enough to make a bed.
The grasses, too, rustled; so did the remaining leaves on the bushes and trees. I saw small, abandoned nests in the crooks of branches. I saw clusters of berries, startlingly red. Seed pods and leaves littered the path.
I stopped to admire the stand of Beautiful Nameless Grass, now the palest of browns, its calligraphic efflorescences spare and delicate, swaying in the wind, rustling, hissing. Fat squirrels foraged everywhere, jostling the underbrush.
Queen Anne's lace is a bridal flower -- pure white, with a central red bud -- beautiful. When it dies, it browns, then grays, and involutes: the broad lacy plate-like flower head curls up like a fist. Which, too, are beautiful, but differently. In full flower, they seem sexually beautiful, alluring, seductive, dazzling. Involuting, they have a more cerebral beauty; something more subtle, formal, abstract.
I saw the river hermit leave his tent site on a bicycle. He didn't ride in my direction on the path.
Bed, nest, tent, berries, foraging: fall heightens the power of these primal images of shelter and preparing for cold.
Walking, I thought of the approach of Advent.
Advent strikes me as a season of absence and darkness; of being lost and alone. It seems more terrible than Lent. A pre-verbal world. A world that, within the context of its particular narrative, has not yet found the words to speak of its suffering.
Seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking: suddenly, the whole neurological substrate of my constructed world became apparant.
In such solipsistic moments I feel like the pivot on which the whole universe rests. If my brain were different, I would receive menacing, personal messages from the trees. The experienced world, the self, and the I that thinks about the world and itself -- everything's a fiery dance among my neurons. Fluxes across membranes.
But I'm not separate from "the world." The sun on my skin makes vitamin D; I breathe in the oxygen that the trees exhale, breathe out the CO2 that they inhale. My rods and cones fire up, mirroring the light; my eardrum vibrates like an aspen leaf. My brain serves up words, memories, judgments. Even the sense of beauty and aesthetic pleasure is neurological, probably as evolutionarily adaptive as our revulsion at carrion. And fall comes, we gather food, fatten, huddle around our fire, pull our children closer.
I recall Thich Nhat Hanh's concept of "interbeing," which he beautifully explicates in his commentary on the Heart Sutra, The Heart Of Understanding. The universe is all one big relational web. An organism. An immense responsive skein of particles and waves.
On the other hand, we experience our lives within separate, suffering incarnations. We feel incomplete, unsatisfied. We issue appeals, we cry out from the depths of our smallness. We grieve, we hanker. We cherish a ancient story about birth, compassion, suffering, endurance, persistance.
Sometimes the only possible prayer is prostration and silence.
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
The Five Little W's On A Motor Tour
Or, Who What Where When Why and sometimes How.
NASA/Hubble
At work I keep a photo of the Andromeda nebula, a beautiful spiral galaxy like the one depicted above, tacked at eye level on the wall in front of my desk.
It helps me keep things in perspective.
It's a reminder that I have, improbably, awakened in the midst of an immense mystery. But maybe "mystery" is not quite the right word. Awakened into a big astonishment -- that contains the wonder, even the interrogation, but not the assumption that there is something as simplistic as a conundrum and a solution.
I am grateful to the astrophysicists and quantum chemists who work to elucidate and describe how the universe is put together and functions. I appreciate their metaphoric attempts to explain their discoveries to unmathed folks like myself. I have to take all they say on faith. I don't even know enough about math to frame any questions about the nature of it as a universe-describing language.
For all its esotericness, it's as far from my experience as Christian mysticism's "infused contemplation." (See Evelyn Underhill.)
One of my favorite cosmological metaphors is the expanding loaf of raisin bread. Not that I can remember, now, what point it was making. Something about distances and galaxies in an expanding universe.
And once, I think via Greene's The Elegant Universe I may have intuitively grasped, for a fleeting second, the space/time/movement/relativity thing. And it was not via the usual alarm clock in the speeding train example.
I think the "Big Bang" is "Fiat Lux" minus the speaker.
Mystic Cowboy has got me thinking a bit of creation stories and cosmologies.
Do we need to postulate a creator separate from creation ? A speaker separate from the spoken ? Creator/Speaker works as a narrative device. But I wonder whether the question "why" is even applicable to fundamental creation and existence. What and how, where and when seem relevant questions, but "why" is slipperier. It seems more particularly human, an interrogation of motive:
"Why did you eat the plums that were in the icebox and that I was saving for breakfast ?" "Because I was hungry and, like many doctors and poets, I am an inconsiderate, self-centered asshole."
When it's applied to the physical world, it asks for antecedents and causation: "Why is the driveway wet ?" "Because it rained last night." But isn't that a "how" question ?
I'm thinking of the old Bill Cosby routine "Why is there air ?" (We're talking comedy records of the late 1950's, gang. Mommy, what's a record ?)
"Why is there something instead of nothing" may be more of a neurogical symptom than a valid, useful question.
Calling existence a Mystery with a big M implies that there is a meaningful question with an ultimate, if unknowable answer. Maybe even a Perp. Whom we can apprehend if we read the clues right.
Let's take the famous question and rework it a little.
Why is there something instead of nothing ?
...is there something ... nothing ...
...there is something ... nothing
one more tweak
...there is something/nothing ....
Now that might be something I can sit with.
NASA/Hubble
At work I keep a photo of the Andromeda nebula, a beautiful spiral galaxy like the one depicted above, tacked at eye level on the wall in front of my desk.
It helps me keep things in perspective.
It's a reminder that I have, improbably, awakened in the midst of an immense mystery. But maybe "mystery" is not quite the right word. Awakened into a big astonishment -- that contains the wonder, even the interrogation, but not the assumption that there is something as simplistic as a conundrum and a solution.
I am grateful to the astrophysicists and quantum chemists who work to elucidate and describe how the universe is put together and functions. I appreciate their metaphoric attempts to explain their discoveries to unmathed folks like myself. I have to take all they say on faith. I don't even know enough about math to frame any questions about the nature of it as a universe-describing language.
For all its esotericness, it's as far from my experience as Christian mysticism's "infused contemplation." (See Evelyn Underhill.)
One of my favorite cosmological metaphors is the expanding loaf of raisin bread. Not that I can remember, now, what point it was making. Something about distances and galaxies in an expanding universe.
And once, I think via Greene's The Elegant Universe I may have intuitively grasped, for a fleeting second, the space/time/movement/relativity thing. And it was not via the usual alarm clock in the speeding train example.
I think the "Big Bang" is "Fiat Lux" minus the speaker.
Mystic Cowboy has got me thinking a bit of creation stories and cosmologies.
Do we need to postulate a creator separate from creation ? A speaker separate from the spoken ? Creator/Speaker works as a narrative device. But I wonder whether the question "why" is even applicable to fundamental creation and existence. What and how, where and when seem relevant questions, but "why" is slipperier. It seems more particularly human, an interrogation of motive:
"Why did you eat the plums that were in the icebox and that I was saving for breakfast ?" "Because I was hungry and, like many doctors and poets, I am an inconsiderate, self-centered asshole."
When it's applied to the physical world, it asks for antecedents and causation: "Why is the driveway wet ?" "Because it rained last night." But isn't that a "how" question ?
I'm thinking of the old Bill Cosby routine "Why is there air ?" (We're talking comedy records of the late 1950's, gang. Mommy, what's a record ?)
"Why is there something instead of nothing" may be more of a neurogical symptom than a valid, useful question.
Calling existence a Mystery with a big M implies that there is a meaningful question with an ultimate, if unknowable answer. Maybe even a Perp. Whom we can apprehend if we read the clues right.
Let's take the famous question and rework it a little.
Why is there something instead of nothing ?
...is there something ... nothing ...
...there is something ... nothing
one more tweak
...there is something/nothing ....
Now that might be something I can sit with.
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Justice Speaks, Theocracy Gives It A Rasberry
Massachusetts has a reputation for being a "liberal" state. Remarkably, this reputation has survived the recent succession of unpleasantly Republican governors.
Sure, Brahmin Bill Weld, taking a much needed break from being tough on crime and Welfare Moms, did manage to come up with the phrase "a ferret in a Barcalounger." I'll give him credit for that.
When the dilletantish Mr Weld grew weary of governing, his unpleasant lieutenant Governor inherited the job. There was nothing even faintly amusing about Mr Cellucci, who also abdicated the gubernatorial throne and currently is lavishing his scowling, churlish presence north of here as ambassador to Canada. His sidekick, Jane Swift took the helm. Crying, as had all her forbears:
Land ho ! Avast ye lubbers ! Anchors aweigh ! No new taxes !
Let's gloss over the embarrassment of the Jane Swift administration.
Which brings us to pretty boy Mitt, Olympics Man, fresh from the oddly conjoined worlds of Venture Capitalism and the Mormon Church. For the full lowdown, and it is low, on Mr Romney, I direct you to RIAF, one of my favorite political blogs.
(By the way, remember his campaign ads ? The ones in which he pretended to be a Working Class Guy ? Remember how CLEAN the garbage was in the "I Am A Trashman" ad ? )
What I wish to say is this.
Today our state demonstrated a bit of the old liberalism.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court stated, quite plainly, that to deny single sex couples the right to marry is unconstitutional. They gave our legislature 180 days to accommodate this. To make it happen, basically. They could have gone farther and ordered the plaintiffs to be issued marriage licenses, but they left the implementation to the legislature.
It didn't take Mr Romney long to check in with the usual theocracy-based, homophobic, right-wing-pandering, human-rights violating, antediluvian boilerplate.
"... Gov. Mitt Romney disagreed with the decision, saying that marriage should be an institution between just one man and one woman. He said that he is going to do all he can to stop marriage licenses from going out to nontraditional couples.
Romney said that he will support an amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution that will limit marriage to a man and a woman."
The forces of darkness are gathering. The name of God is being invoked. "Think of the children !" is being screeched. Fred Phelps is making his way eastward. (Think Yeats. Rough beast. Slow thighs.)
But for now let's savor the unfamilar taste of today's progressive moment.
Sure, Brahmin Bill Weld, taking a much needed break from being tough on crime and Welfare Moms, did manage to come up with the phrase "a ferret in a Barcalounger." I'll give him credit for that.
When the dilletantish Mr Weld grew weary of governing, his unpleasant lieutenant Governor inherited the job. There was nothing even faintly amusing about Mr Cellucci, who also abdicated the gubernatorial throne and currently is lavishing his scowling, churlish presence north of here as ambassador to Canada. His sidekick, Jane Swift took the helm. Crying, as had all her forbears:
Land ho ! Avast ye lubbers ! Anchors aweigh ! No new taxes !
Let's gloss over the embarrassment of the Jane Swift administration.
Which brings us to pretty boy Mitt, Olympics Man, fresh from the oddly conjoined worlds of Venture Capitalism and the Mormon Church. For the full lowdown, and it is low, on Mr Romney, I direct you to RIAF, one of my favorite political blogs.
(By the way, remember his campaign ads ? The ones in which he pretended to be a Working Class Guy ? Remember how CLEAN the garbage was in the "I Am A Trashman" ad ? )
What I wish to say is this.
Today our state demonstrated a bit of the old liberalism.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court stated, quite plainly, that to deny single sex couples the right to marry is unconstitutional. They gave our legislature 180 days to accommodate this. To make it happen, basically. They could have gone farther and ordered the plaintiffs to be issued marriage licenses, but they left the implementation to the legislature.
It didn't take Mr Romney long to check in with the usual theocracy-based, homophobic, right-wing-pandering, human-rights violating, antediluvian boilerplate.
"... Gov. Mitt Romney disagreed with the decision, saying that marriage should be an institution between just one man and one woman. He said that he is going to do all he can to stop marriage licenses from going out to nontraditional couples.
Romney said that he will support an amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution that will limit marriage to a man and a woman."
The forces of darkness are gathering. The name of God is being invoked. "Think of the children !" is being screeched. Fred Phelps is making his way eastward. (Think Yeats. Rough beast. Slow thighs.)
But for now let's savor the unfamilar taste of today's progressive moment.
Monday, November 17, 2003
Speaking of Escape
"Let's move to Iceland," has been my traditional escapist request to DK. It began with my plan of what to do if George Bush won the election. DK, not a fan of ice, or even of the idea of ice, begged to differ. Suggested Amsterdam as a better expatriate venue for a jazz musician. My Bjork argument didn't wash.
In the midst of my escapist fantasies, I thought of Philip Larkin's poem:
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off
"Poetry of Departures," Philip Larkin
Larkin's poem is about self-loathing, about wanting to escape the heavy, quotidian ennui of one's particular life. The idea of escape is briefly energizing, but the depressive realization comes at the poem's end: what you've escaped into is simply another self-created version of a "reprehensibly perfect" life.
There's an old Latin adage: you change only the sky above your head when you cross the sea.
A part of my attraction to Thomas Merton has taken the form, I think, of identification. The fantasy of becoming him. In the same self-obliterating sense of identifying with a character in a book or in a movie. For a moment, the dense and troubling "I" stops yammering and inhabits a pretty illusion: the contemplative, creative solitary.
It's one of the ways, riddled with bad faith, of chucking up everything and clearing off. Only to find oneself, well, still oneself.
Simone Weil, again: The imagination is constantly filling up the fissures through which grace might pass.
One minute of sitting meditation makes this perfectly clear. At least the "imagination" part. The "grace" is a bigger leap.
There's another poem that refers to escape, psalm 55, a psalm that always astonishes me with its contemporary resonance.
I would hasten to escape
and make my lodging in the wilderness
What is the psalmist escaping ?
violence and strife in the city
trouble and misery in the midst of her
corruption at her heart
oppression and deceit
Circle back, if you will, to my reference to Iceland and George Bush. Misery, corruption, oppression, deceit.
the psalmist goes on to say
For had it been an adversary who had taunted me
then I could have borne it
But it was you, a man after my own heart
my companion, my own familiar friend
And there's the heart of it, where the bitterness of the disappointment lies. How humans, all of us, so capable of selflessness and compassion, bring such violence and strife into the world. Some, of course, more than others.
I read in the paper this morning that Mr Bush had finally commented publically on this last week's carnage in Iraq. He took the opportunity to inform the world that he'd prayed for the dead and their families.
"Today, I spent some time in prayer for our service men and women who are in harm's way,' he said before answering questions. 'I prayed for their families, I prayed for those who are still in harm's way, whether it be American troops or coalition troops."
How can the man who set in motion the chain of events that led to this slaughter now use the carnage as an opportunity to showcase his "Christian" piety ? George, as your first assignment, go read the Sermon on the Mount. Start with this gem from Matthew 6 --
Beware of praticing your piety before others in order to be seen by them...
Then go back and study Chapter 5.
While you're at it, check this prayer out.
No Cliff notes.
And, yes, it will be on the test.
In the midst of my escapist fantasies, I thought of Philip Larkin's poem:
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off
"Poetry of Departures," Philip Larkin
Larkin's poem is about self-loathing, about wanting to escape the heavy, quotidian ennui of one's particular life. The idea of escape is briefly energizing, but the depressive realization comes at the poem's end: what you've escaped into is simply another self-created version of a "reprehensibly perfect" life.
There's an old Latin adage: you change only the sky above your head when you cross the sea.
A part of my attraction to Thomas Merton has taken the form, I think, of identification. The fantasy of becoming him. In the same self-obliterating sense of identifying with a character in a book or in a movie. For a moment, the dense and troubling "I" stops yammering and inhabits a pretty illusion: the contemplative, creative solitary.
It's one of the ways, riddled with bad faith, of chucking up everything and clearing off. Only to find oneself, well, still oneself.
Simone Weil, again: The imagination is constantly filling up the fissures through which grace might pass.
One minute of sitting meditation makes this perfectly clear. At least the "imagination" part. The "grace" is a bigger leap.
There's another poem that refers to escape, psalm 55, a psalm that always astonishes me with its contemporary resonance.
I would hasten to escape
and make my lodging in the wilderness
What is the psalmist escaping ?
violence and strife in the city
trouble and misery in the midst of her
corruption at her heart
oppression and deceit
Circle back, if you will, to my reference to Iceland and George Bush. Misery, corruption, oppression, deceit.
the psalmist goes on to say
For had it been an adversary who had taunted me
then I could have borne it
But it was you, a man after my own heart
my companion, my own familiar friend
And there's the heart of it, where the bitterness of the disappointment lies. How humans, all of us, so capable of selflessness and compassion, bring such violence and strife into the world. Some, of course, more than others.
I read in the paper this morning that Mr Bush had finally commented publically on this last week's carnage in Iraq. He took the opportunity to inform the world that he'd prayed for the dead and their families.
"Today, I spent some time in prayer for our service men and women who are in harm's way,' he said before answering questions. 'I prayed for their families, I prayed for those who are still in harm's way, whether it be American troops or coalition troops."
How can the man who set in motion the chain of events that led to this slaughter now use the carnage as an opportunity to showcase his "Christian" piety ? George, as your first assignment, go read the Sermon on the Mount. Start with this gem from Matthew 6 --
Beware of praticing your piety before others in order to be seen by them...
Then go back and study Chapter 5.
While you're at it, check this prayer out.
No Cliff notes.
And, yes, it will be on the test.
A Stunning Realization
Since my crack-up on 9.27, the world has seemed a darker, more menacing place, inhabited by powerful cars and distracted, careless, even purposefully malicious drivers. All shouting into cell phones.
Yesterday, cowering in the passenger seat beside DK, an extremely careful driver, I realized that it's not going to get any better. Cars will not get fewer, less powerful, slower. Drivers will not become more cautious, more polite, less narcissistically hell-bent on their own itinerary, the world be damned. Cell phone users will not become fewer, more circumspect, less rude. It can only get worse.
The only possibility, it seemed to me, was to leave for less civilized parts. For my Ted Kaczynski cabin in the woods.
I've seen a TV ad lately in which a man is shaving a car. Well, not really shaving -- the elegantly dressed, continental-looking actor is running a sleekly designed, emmollient-dispensing electric razor over the fender of a beautiful, exotic, expensive-looking car. Cut to a close-up of the moisture trailing from the device, and evaporating. The man strokes the car several times. I will leave further deconstruction of this ad to those more schooled in French literary theory than I am. I simply offer it as an example of the fetishiztion of cars. As I offer the David Cronenberg movie as an example of the fetishization of car crashes. And this website as an example of the fetishization of the medical consequences of car crashes.
I had no idea I was such a sex kitten.
Yesterday, cowering in the passenger seat beside DK, an extremely careful driver, I realized that it's not going to get any better. Cars will not get fewer, less powerful, slower. Drivers will not become more cautious, more polite, less narcissistically hell-bent on their own itinerary, the world be damned. Cell phone users will not become fewer, more circumspect, less rude. It can only get worse.
The only possibility, it seemed to me, was to leave for less civilized parts. For my Ted Kaczynski cabin in the woods.
I've seen a TV ad lately in which a man is shaving a car. Well, not really shaving -- the elegantly dressed, continental-looking actor is running a sleekly designed, emmollient-dispensing electric razor over the fender of a beautiful, exotic, expensive-looking car. Cut to a close-up of the moisture trailing from the device, and evaporating. The man strokes the car several times. I will leave further deconstruction of this ad to those more schooled in French literary theory than I am. I simply offer it as an example of the fetishiztion of cars. As I offer the David Cronenberg movie as an example of the fetishization of car crashes. And this website as an example of the fetishization of the medical consequences of car crashes.
I had no idea I was such a sex kitten.
Sunday, November 16, 2003
A Good Word
There's been a recent discussion on and across several blogs I read about acquisitiveness, both literal and informational.
Kurt's mention of the "reading eight books at a time" phenomenon certainly hit home. It reminded me of another recent blog discussion of what books one would grab and flee with in time of war. Some bloggers posted a digital photo of their pile of chosen books.
I discovered this discussion on Joseph Duemer's site, and, after scouring the titles in his photo, had to send off immediately for Barnstone's translations of Wang Wei, which now resides in my pile of "formerly seven now eight books at at time that I am reading."
And, to top that bit of consummated acquisitiveness, I began to hanker after a digital camera so I might post my own photos. Is there no end to desire ? My inner Puritan and inner cheapskate can probably hold the camera at bay. But book lust is a different animal.
Somehow book greed seems less evil. But is it ?
Take the Amazon wish list. I have one. And it pisses me off when the Amazon home page, which, like so much other marketing text, is creepily personalized, waves one of my selections in my face and hisses "You know you want it." Does that strike any one else as lewd ?
Book greed is probably less evil than wanting a new Benz SUV every year, or gold bathroom fixtures, or a half dozen Rolexes.
The truth of it is that I simply can't read eight books at once. I'm sure some people can. But my own "reading eight at once" often devolves to flitting from one to the other in a state of distraction, and reading none of them well, or even at all.
Shall we post photos of our piles of the "eight books we're reading at once" ?
Western History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library
Then there are all the other sources of information that Kurt lists -- NPR, BBC, newspaper, internet news, blogs, the movies, netflix, TV, magazines, professional journals -- the list goes on. And then there's music. A whole other universe of, if not information, how shall we put this, important aesthetic input that unscrolls in time.
Because time factors into the dilemma.
I've been, because of a thankfully minor fracture of my second cervical vertebra (in an accident instigated by a driver "distracted" by his cell phone, speaking of failed multi-tasking) been out of work since September 27. My whole sense of time, previously regulated by the hours spent at work, has been altered. I've certainly had more time to read, and am chagrined at how inefficiently I've used it. Maybe having less time forces one to focus more, to spend it more wisely.
Cassandra's words on cleaning out the house and paring down also, literally, hit home. Both DK and I have had, quite recently, elderly relatives who have moved into small, assisted-living quarters. From larger houses crammed with a lifetime of things. The sheer accumulations were frightening to contemplate. The mementos, the bibelots, the knick-knacks, the souvenirs. My Auntie, wisely, ruefully, shook her head and asked "Why did I ever think I needed all those things ?"
To cheat memory, time and death ? We all know how well that project turns out.
My excellent, witty and eloquent (read down to the "diamond of a novella" part) friend, GG, gave me a most wonderful word this week. Syllogomania.
It means "the hoarding of rubbish."
Good word, eh ?
Kurt's mention of the "reading eight books at a time" phenomenon certainly hit home. It reminded me of another recent blog discussion of what books one would grab and flee with in time of war. Some bloggers posted a digital photo of their pile of chosen books.
I discovered this discussion on Joseph Duemer's site, and, after scouring the titles in his photo, had to send off immediately for Barnstone's translations of Wang Wei, which now resides in my pile of "formerly seven now eight books at at time that I am reading."
And, to top that bit of consummated acquisitiveness, I began to hanker after a digital camera so I might post my own photos. Is there no end to desire ? My inner Puritan and inner cheapskate can probably hold the camera at bay. But book lust is a different animal.
Somehow book greed seems less evil. But is it ?
Take the Amazon wish list. I have one. And it pisses me off when the Amazon home page, which, like so much other marketing text, is creepily personalized, waves one of my selections in my face and hisses "You know you want it." Does that strike any one else as lewd ?
Book greed is probably less evil than wanting a new Benz SUV every year, or gold bathroom fixtures, or a half dozen Rolexes.
The truth of it is that I simply can't read eight books at once. I'm sure some people can. But my own "reading eight at once" often devolves to flitting from one to the other in a state of distraction, and reading none of them well, or even at all.
Shall we post photos of our piles of the "eight books we're reading at once" ?
Western History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library
Then there are all the other sources of information that Kurt lists -- NPR, BBC, newspaper, internet news, blogs, the movies, netflix, TV, magazines, professional journals -- the list goes on. And then there's music. A whole other universe of, if not information, how shall we put this, important aesthetic input that unscrolls in time.
Because time factors into the dilemma.
I've been, because of a thankfully minor fracture of my second cervical vertebra (in an accident instigated by a driver "distracted" by his cell phone, speaking of failed multi-tasking) been out of work since September 27. My whole sense of time, previously regulated by the hours spent at work, has been altered. I've certainly had more time to read, and am chagrined at how inefficiently I've used it. Maybe having less time forces one to focus more, to spend it more wisely.
Cassandra's words on cleaning out the house and paring down also, literally, hit home. Both DK and I have had, quite recently, elderly relatives who have moved into small, assisted-living quarters. From larger houses crammed with a lifetime of things. The sheer accumulations were frightening to contemplate. The mementos, the bibelots, the knick-knacks, the souvenirs. My Auntie, wisely, ruefully, shook her head and asked "Why did I ever think I needed all those things ?"
To cheat memory, time and death ? We all know how well that project turns out.
My excellent, witty and eloquent (read down to the "diamond of a novella" part) friend, GG, gave me a most wonderful word this week. Syllogomania.
It means "the hoarding of rubbish."
Good word, eh ?
