Through the work of writing, I have learned first and foremost that nothing is what it tells us it is, because there is always another level, another way to play at naming, with reality, to bend untruths to be more true, as medicine, as savior, as demon filtered for taste, as a ritual mark of remembrance of tensile perceptual realities, disputed, fought for and reclaimed. There is a line after which language becomes less a tool for understanding and more a mechanism for undermining it, but that line is constantly in motion, and in language, as in physics, we now understand “reversibility generally does not exist”, as per Poincaré.

Writing teaches a person about language, in a very deep and sensory way, but language also teaches a person about existence in the human sense, existing as a human being, as an individual who is capable of not only perceiving and manifesting, but also articulating an identity. That, to some extent, is our most recurring, most insistent, most necessary and yet problematic, reason for engaging in serious explorations of language usage: how to articulate the untestable reality that is the human self.

It is an art of complex, but not always conscious, strategic engagement, to conjure up, locate and arrange the words necessary to any linguistic task. Assembling words is, to some extent, the fundamentally human undertaking that puts us both at odds with our surroundings and in touch with deeply useful means of reaching out to them, understanding them, bringing them into the folds of our awareness. To breathe a word is to make a claim on the nature of the universe, and our claims are contagious, so getting it right helps us to define the space of our agency, our selfhood.

In simpler terms, what the art of assembling words and their meanings teaches, as one learns what it is to forge new territory, to construct a landscape, to admire and to fear the rules that govern such activity, to honor and to evade those rules, what the whole process teaches is that experience happens in much the same way as language happens. There is a point of contact (a moment in time, a location in space, a ‘situation’ unique in itself) where experience happens, where it is gained, where we participate in its construction and it comes into being, and meaning accrues and something is stated, however quietly.

Language is that point of contact in the abstract, that plane where the intellectual life within us is enabled to assert itself as part of the overall experience of living. Language is that plane where the individual self is allowed repeated attempts at manifestation. What takes place in the process of writing, in the spilling of ink or the posting of digital characters, the slip toward defining a landscape, however brief, is the sanctification of an individual, and by extension of the human condition as such, the dignity of the human intellectual organism, as individual and of value in each case.

I could write a barrage of symphonic lunatic musings, trouble the world with my troubles, obsess, come apart at the seams, but instead, I will have breakfast and read a preferred selection with a soothing lilt, wake and exist and put myself to bed at night with an electrical hum, the din of an untroubled world, penetrating where I dwell and possess myself in solitude. From there, from that integral engagement, through choice and sublime expression and endeavor, I reach out, make contact, and we bridge the distance between us.

The choices we make in our experience have in many ways the consistency of the written word: they persist in their meaning insofar as we ask them to, and they fade away from the initial intent as we lose touch with that part of ourselves responsible for bringing them into our biography. Whether the mind engages its own work with a spirit of dissatisfaction or of pleasure, the experience of engaging the mind as such, of taking note of one’s internal existence, is akin to the expressive moment.

Contemplation becomes language as the individual seeks to emerge from the wells of the internal unknown, and to put a shape and a face on what was found. Everything, in the writerly/readerly moments when such tensions become apparent, is like medicine, for better or for worse. The medicine stays with us, changes our line of sight, molds our favorite haunting, guides us to water, dips us clean, refurbishes us in the tattered elegance of our everyday living.

The changing and refurbishing of one’s private world, even as it is the public face of that private self that is designed or reconfigured, is an intimate description of the process by which every intellect acquires knowledge. Accepting that experience and imagination come together on a plane between the two, and that there, in that landscape of intersection and semiotic contagion, of knowledge transfer and moral support, a vision of reality or of an individual’s experience thereof is formulated by the coming together of experience and imagination… that is recognition of what knowledge is, how it works, and why it must evolve if it is to be honest.

The honesty of knowledge, as opposed to its imagined truth, is a topic for another time, but it ties into the medicinal uses of writing and naming. Not every person is a writer, by trade, nor should they be —we need every skill and angle of dreaming to make the world that encompasses and gives place to our pursuits, our claims on the universe, our attempts at selfhood, sovereignty and interconnection—, but there is something about the act of writing that serves the writing individual as if it were a medicine for selfhood, a healing venture into clean waters.

And that can benefit any human being. Especially so when its intent is to be expressive of secret regions of the mind or to lay out new experimental vessels for such expression. It is the inherently, unavoidably, persistently semi-distant nature of all individual experience —sensorial, intellectual, emotional, spiritual— which writing not only addresses but reiterates and re-presents, thus serving as a means for understanding more deeply, and reinterpreting the difficulties and the joys of, what occurs in the endless flux of daily… temporal… human… existence.

These thoughts are just a beginning of the example of writing as medicinal naming, so I will offer a few examples. I pick up a newspaper, and side by side am able to witness Europe naming its first full-time president, and the president of the United States engaged in an important and never easy diplomatic dance in Asia. Asia, Europe, United States: each of these words gives us a world to mull over and to be filled with.

In Africa, we read of malaria, and ambitious efforts at prevention. The “bad air”, old prejudices, confusion, and the new world of possibility. We read that life finds a way, without saying that life finds a way. A windmill, no longer a quixotic phantasm, can help prevent the Maldives from being washed under by out-of-place glacial tides. To say “no, we cannot”, is a kind of obstruction, an effort at contributing to the chaos; the world is coming together, or it isn’t, we are responible, or we are not.

Each of these complex realities, indulged or anointed, or fostered or projected, through language, is a way of approaching the problem of selfhood, the problem of the in-here versus the out-there, of how can we know what lies beyond the all-too-near far edge of our perception? How can we understand the other, if the other is always on the other side of a divide? We fashion channels to relay meaning; we build civilizations of discourse; we cut back the rampant vegetation of incoherence and use language to say that one self might have something to do with another.

Medicine. There is “good medicine”, in the Native American sense, a healing spirit, in the work of language, if we understand that it can be that. We cannot really test our knowledge, or challenge it, or open it up and expand it, without language. Instruments of all kinds, from telescopes to laptops to mirrors to particle accelerators, cannot give us the metrics for judging our surroundings, if we don’t base what they are and what they do on an implied linguistic terra firma.

We name the universe, not so we can classify and forget it, but so we can move out into it with some confidence, so we can test our apprehensions and forge new terrain for experience, not only the conceptual terrain we need to understand ourselves and our role in the world, but the actual terrain which we will feel less comfortable venturing into if we have no way to talk about it, to make guesses about it, to advance our hopes and test our aspirations.

While science and literature are rarely considered parallel pursuits in the way of the same problem, science understands this problem of naming and its connection to knowledge. What, for instance, is a disease? It is a lack of ease, something contrary to discomfort… but what makes it different than discomfort? In Spanish, malestar has both a clinical and an emotional meaning: it can be a state of physical discomfort, severe illness or an emotional malaise.

A syndrome is widely considered to be different from a disease in that it is not a specific entity with a proven cause-effect dynamic: it is more an array of symptoms, or a recurring constellation of particulars, not always the same, which seem to fit a pattern. If we take apart the language, syndrome is a more clinical, more scientifically specific term than disease, but in practice, the reverse is true.

We could say the same of astronomy: asteroids are supposed to be “like stars”, and different from planets, but like planets, they orbit stars, and in fact, gaseous planets such as Jupiter, Saturn or Neptune, can be more like stars in a mechanical, structural sense, than are asteroids. But we use the word in the way that works, and we assign meaning based on experience.

The writer must grapple with these digressions and underminings of purpose in language; the writer must, whether knowing or not, engage in a constant hermeneutic struggle —interpretive interpretation, in relation to meaning intended or accrued— in order to make language what it aspires to be, what we need it to be. The writer is not so much a priest as a pioneer, not so much an entrepreneur as a watchdog.

To make life into something with life of its own —Life is hard… Life is opportunity… Life is too short… Life finds a way…— requires an approach to meaning that is both rigorous and adventurous, and the good writer, whether an amateur writing a memo to a friend or colleague, a single ephemeral composition, or a professional who spends many hours a day wrestling with the merciless bulk of the whole language and its attendant (unspoken) implications, the good writer must manifest that intertwining of rigor and adventure in a way that is credible, sublime and impressive.

Because we all understand the demand, even where it is unconscious, that writing be an advanced example of the process of naming our experience, in the interests of securing and conveying knowledge, in a way that is medicinal, a help to the human being generally and specifically. Every word is an expression of the case-by-case process by which writing makes language —the stuff of our attempts to turn the world into decipherable sounds— into something new, a new terrain, a new chance at seeing, a healing experiment.

That experiment is universally demanded, implicitly or explicitly, by human interaction, because we all need to map out the spaces and parameters of the self, the sometimes complex distinctions between aspiration and action, known and unknown, viable and perilously fragile. We write in order to play out the shape and spirit of the language, to give it human specificity, to make it relevant to not just our past but our future experience.

Writing and naming are intertwined; every use of every word is a new naming of a new iteration of something either very much like or very much unlike what came before. It is by this process that we can speak about what is known or unknown, knowable or unknowable, and that we can find a way to make the amorphous, ever-evolving life of the universe of experience, into something our own, something malleable, something that reinforces our dignity as human beings. The medicine of language is the medicine of acquiring knowledge, a trick of consciousness, but a trick that points us to the truth, to ways of approximating, testing and relaying, the truth that gives us meaning and humanity.

Newsmax had in recent weeks tried to debunk Keith Olberman’s report that conservative blogs, political action committees and front groups were buying Sarah Palin’s book in massive quantities to rig book sales, by claiming they are doing the opposite, with the following claim:

But the truth is that Newsmax has not purchased one book from Amazon.

In fact, we are offering the book both FREE and at an incredible discount to Amazon.

The defense is so transparent as to be an explicit confession: we’re not buying in bulk to rig bestseller lists, we’ve just bought so many, we plan to give the book free to booksellers so they can sell it for $20 off the list price (that’s 69.85% off), before it even comes out!

Newsmax is also offering free copies to anyone who subscribes to their propaganda rag, where they will continue to pitch foreign currency schemes they’re invested in and the shoddy wares of pseudo-politicos like Palin, who left her job as Alaska’s half-term governor to escape prosecution and to go on the paid-speech and talk-show circuit.

Newsmax not only fails to refute any element of Olberman’s report that they are trying to rig the book sales for Palin’s memoir, they actually confirmed the entire report by proudly championing their own efforts to provide free copies to readers of their material and to booksellers, in a flagrant attempt to promote their agenda of distortion and tribalization (i.e. discrimination) politics through Palin’s own distortions of major political issues.

In fact, beyond simply confirming Olberman’s allegation, Newsmax has once again provided concrete proof that it is not just an organization with editorial sympathies for the right-wing ultra-conservative agenda, but rather a tactical and organizational outlet providing practical assistance to the political and business interests of the right-wing ultra-conservative movement. It is, in fact, a marketing and campaign-services provider for a narrow focus of special interests.

UPDATE, 18:55 GMT: Newsmax proudly announces it has never so aggressively marketed a book as Sarah Palin’s memoir. In a mass email to its general online subscriber list, the faux news organization ascribes the massive number of copies it has bulk-ordered to public demand, saying “Americans are very anxious to read this book”, but then explains its efforts to distribute the book either free or far below cost.

The Newsmax editors pitch the book as flush with “sensational revelations” and free of “media spin”. Newsmax then goes on to explain that it will provide the book free of charge or at 70% off the cover price, far below wholesale costs. The aggressive Newsmax marketing effort marks its single most aggressive marketing and distribution of any book.

That the “sales” it claims are not in fact sales but promotional giveaways is made more and more evident with each new revelation about the Newsmax strategy for mass distribution of the book. The question is: what about Palin’s memoir is of such value to the Newsmax “news” team? It would seem that Palin offers a number of distortions akin to those routiney espoused and propagated by the Newsmax organization.

Capitalism is “survival of the fittest”… capitalism is rooted in the idea of merit; everyone should be compensated according to his or her contribution (to the common good?)… capitalism is about the movement of capital; the more it moves, the richer everyone gets… capitalism is an upgraded feudalism, where the capitalist is an overseer of an abstract terrain made up of investments, not of arable lands… capitalism is democracy; the free spirit of an open society requires capitalism to support the liberties of individual citizens, and protect against government overreach… capitalism is virtue… or, capitalism is the absence of virtue…

These are just a few commonly held ideas, not all compatible with one another or with reality as we know it. Depending on point of view, we find ourselves favoring or opposing some aspect of something we call capitalism, with sometimes radical swings in the underlying reasoning of our political philosophy — we being Americans, generally. And across the world, the same questions come up time and again: one nation’s democratic marketplace, rising tide that lifts all boats, is seen from a poorer nation as an upgraded feudalism, a new age of empire.

What about pragmatism? Capitalism is the best way we know, the idea goes, to achieve the best results for the largest number of people, so it is a pragmatist ethic. Or… capitalism is an efficient, “organic” model of wealth distribution: the market distributes wealth “efficiently”, because individual players in a free market make all their own interested choices about where they should send their capital in order to extract the benefits, the goods and services, they seek or require.

This is perhaps the truest statement about the potential virtues of capitalism, or what are widely accepted to be virtues any capitalist system should aim to embody. But, in practice, a system that privileges capital over cause often does so by giving special privileges to those who hold the capital, not to those who seek it, or who are laboring intensely in the harshest conditions to earn a share of it.

Capitalism is the enemy of communism: this idea is almost universally held, but actually, it refers to one of the biggest grey areas in the history of social philosophy. As a matter of social ethics, communism cannot really emerge in its Marxist form, as a philosophical approach to economics, unless it emerges within a capitalist society. Marx specifically says so: communism is not suited to old-style agrarian societies, because only the industrial societies, where democracy and capitalism have taken root, have the kind of civil structures able to reward the actions of collective bargaining organizations.

Hence the violent tendencies of many Marxist factions around the world: even in the US, there was violence during the heyday of 19th-century unionizing, but in the US, a dynamic, open democracy allowed for collective bargaining to achieve nearly all of the major socialist innovations the world has seen (the weekend, the paid vacation, the 40-hour work-week, over-time pay, the end to child labor).

Does this make the US a socialist or a Marxist country? No. It means that in the capitalist system, underpinned by the most experienced modern democratic system, the United States found efficient ways to achieve major social-policy goals of Marxist philosophy, without undermining or uprooting the capitalist system. Several European nations have now followed that example and gone further (Sweden is a commonly used example), but they remain democratic, capitalist societies.

Michael Moore has argued that capitalism is “legalized greed”, a view held by both critics and proponents, rooted in the idea that the most pragmatic approach to economics is to let vice have its purpose, and let self-interest power the mill. This idea is partly about social darwinism, partly about a near cynical approach to human freedom, or if you’re Michael Moore, it’s about the reasons why capitalism needs to be curtailed by democratically determined regulations.

Moore argues that what we now call capitalism needs to be cast aside in exchange for a different kind of market system in which democratic processes allow the citizenry to guide the hand of economic influence. But whether one agrees that capitalism is legalized greed or an organic model of resource allocation, it remains true that it is only as virtuous as those who apply it to the circumstances of human experience.

Capitalism, the same as any -ism, is not a hard-and-fast, unchanging object or species; it is a conceptual realm whose qualities vary as applied. It is what we make of it and only as virtuous or democratic as we shape it to be. Because capitalism, as a tendency, as a philosophical urge, operates among and across the lived realities of a society, it is only as democratic as its interrelationship with those realities.

Capitalism that fosters and cooperates with, protects and serves democratic processes and principles can be democratic in both purpose and in practice, but capitalism that interferes with, obstructs, undermines and abuses democratic processes and principles tends to be undemocratic in both its purpose and its practice.

It is a false choice that would have us choose between capitalism and morality, or between the service of profit and allegiance to the liberties and worth of individual human beings as a socio-economic priority. It is a false choice that asks us to choose between naked laissez-faire capitalism, unfettered by any social conscience and the crushing political bind of a planned economy in which no one is allowed to seek personal gain.

Capitalism is about privileging the flow of capital through society. It works better when those who do not have access to capital are able to come in contact with it, acquire some of it, and capitalize on their own merits, expanding their economic reach. That cycle must, however, be both persistent and pervasive. The freedom to seek personal gain and to innovate must share space with the need to ensure that human dignity is not eroded and free people subject to strategies of indenture.

The pastoral letter on a Catholic approach to economics, Economic Justice for All, makes clear that it is not only unnecessary, but unreasonable, to hand over the navigation of our economic policy to purely profit-driven considerations that ignore ethical accountability, erode community bonds and disrupt the human quality of human existence within our society.

In the preface to the 2006 edition of the pastoral letter, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops writes that:

… the measure of our economy is not only what it produces, but also how it touches human life, whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person, and how it promotes the common good.

In order to support and expand on that idea, they then offered five principles that must inspire the direction of major economic policy choices:

• The economy exists to serve the human person, not the other way around.
• Economic life should be shaped by moral principles and ethical norms.
• Economic choices should be measured by whether they enhance or threaten human life, human dignity and human rights.
• A fundamental concern must be support for the family and the well-being of children.
• The moral measure of any economy is how the weakest are faring.

How the weakest are faring… a great and successful market economy must find a way to protect against starvation, deprivation, homelessness, and lack of access to quality medical attention when needed. Indeed, an economy in which the human person is made subservient to the imperatives of an economic machinery of resource allocation is totalitarian and not democratic, though one can imagine plenty of examples where something called ‘capitalism’ has this effect.

To protect the human rights and the human dignity of the individual, a democratic society must establish meaningful checks on the unfettered application of raw power through accumulated wealth. A social conscience must be part of a democratic society’s application of capitalism as an economic paradigm, or the primal urges of the marketplace will allow for distortions of the economic landscape, the rise of monolithic power structures, the blocking of dynamic resource flows, and the erosion of democratic freedoms and quality of life.

For this very reason, the American system has been a brilliant example of a free, democratic society, in which capitalism has fought its fight, but major achievements in the history and advancement of social justice have come, through democratic processes and the free assembly —Constitutionally guaranteed— of free people, demanding that capital not sideline the citizen.

Capitalism is not democracy, though the two can be mutually nourishing. And capitalism is not unfettered economic aggression. It is not imperialism, though it can be used to effect a kind of imperial control of resources and social patterns. It is not an ethos, not a way of measuring whether we are good or bad, right or wrong.

Capitalism is an idea, a way of looking at the priorities of a society, and the diffusion of power throughout a political system. It is a conceptual realm, in which pirates and villains compete with saints and public servants, where control competes with creativity, where concentration of wealth competes with discovery and the opening of new terrain.

The capitalist imperative is not to amass the most wealth imaginable, but to effect the most practical outcome for the most dynamic society possible. This will always be to the benefit of those with the most access to capital, even if their actual wealth is not as high as it might be in a less democratic setting.

In order to achieve that most dynamic society possible, however, virtually nothing is as vital as ensuring that the human individual, at all levels and across the entire range of that society, be as empowered, as capable, as free and as worldly a being as possible. Any one human individual that lacks the skills, the agility, the rights or the freedom, to choose a better, more dynamic and broadly beneficial path, slows the entire process of adaptation and makes the whole system more sluggish, less dynamic, less able.

This is where capitalism and democracy have their most vibrant and nourishing interaction, in their potential to adequately shape the dynamics of markets —for resource distribution, pricing, quality of the human contribution and reach of human mobility— in such a way that the human individual becomes society’s greatest asset, both economically of high value and socio-politically of primary worth and reliability.

No amount of stripping away of individual rights or the terrains of individual liberty will make a capitalist system more vibrant. On the contrary, such measures help to foster the concentration of wealth, but those concentrations have a sclerotic effect on the economy broadly and tend to pressure democratic systems in such a way that they must over-react or give way.

The Internet Archive is joining with major internet-related firms, such as Yahoo and Amazon, to fight Google’s settlement with the Authors’ Guild, allowing Google Books to publish copyright-protected materials online, if they are out of print, and to compensate authors according to the sales generated by the display of the copyrighted text (possibly 70% going to publishers or copyright holders, including a cut of ad revenues). The Coalition plans to fight the legal settlement on anti-trust grounds.

According to CNET:

Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo are joining with a few library associations to oppose the settlement, Peter Brantley, the Internet Archive’s director, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. The coalition, which is expected to be announced in a couple of weeks, will be co-led by antitrust lawyer Gary Reback, Brantley said.

The settlement treated authors as a class in a class action suit to prevent the unauthorized use of their material by Google, and was reached by the Authors’ Guild. It should be the case that only those authors represented by the Guild —some 8,000— are part of the pertinent class, but publishers and some Google competitors argue the settlement flies in the face of copyright law and gives Google far too much control over textual content online.

Google has also reached settlement with the Association of American Publishers, and would take 30% royalties from any revenues generated by its Google Books search site. Some authors view the process as a threat to their own control of their material, while the Authors’ Guild and the AAP view the settlement as an opportunity to make sure they 1) set a precedent for payment and 2) expand the basic revenue stream they can access via online media.

TG Daily reports:

Hundreds of writers, the National Writers Union, libraries and a group of professors from the University of California have already expressed concern over the deal, mainly in terms of the freedom Google would have to set prices and fears over whether Google would protect the privacy of users.

According to Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, Google’s intent is nothing less than to dominate or replace the entire library system in the US. “If this deal goes ahead, they’re making a real shot at being ‘the’ library and the only library”, he has told the BBC. The BBC reports that “Google would also be given the right to digitise orphan works. These are works whose rights-holders are unknown, and are believed to make up an estimated 50-70% of books published after 1923.”

Meanwhile, the US Dept. of Justice has opened an investigation into the potential anti-trust issues the settlement could raise. Kahle warns that “The techniques we have built up since the enlightenment of having open access, public support for libraries, lots of different organisational structures, lots of distributed ownership of books that can be exchanged, resold and repackaged in different ways — all of that is being thrown out in this particular approach.” Opponents fear Google’s control of so much textual material will lead to a profit-driven standard for access to most books, sidelining the system of free libraries and tradeable hard-copies in print.

The coalition announcement comes at a crucial time: in April, a judge ruled that authors should have four more months to decide whether they wanted to opt out of the Google Books settlement with the Authors’ Guild. The deadline for that process is now approaching —4 September 2009—, and Google is preparing to take full advantage of its rights under the settlement. A final hearing on the fairness of the agreement is scheduled for 7 October, and it will likely be there that the coalition first brings serious weight to bear on the process.

• NOTE: Cafe Sentido’s publisher, Casavaria, has agreed, on a case by case basis, to permit Google Books to show a “limited preview” of books it currently has in print and which are available for purchase. These are promotional agreements, aimed at driving online sales of the print book itself, and are not the same sort of online publishing involved in the Authors’ Guild case.

America’s banks have, over the last decade, entered into a dangerous fictional world of projected automatic wealth in which they expect that all payments they might receive will without fail materialize, regardless of circumstance. They treat the human beings with whom they have major financial relationships as if they were nothing more than endless fonts of easy money. This is the crisis of reasoning and cash flow we are, as a people, as a global society, trying to solve.

The idea of the ‘automatic’ in human affairs is an extremely dangerous fallacy — l’automaticité as a functional problem in French ethical and/or political philosophy. It presumes to be able to rule out nearly all human elements of any relationship: free choice, and by extension human error, the interrelationship of people in a community, or across a market. It dehumanizes for the sake of intellectual convenience, or in the case of banks, for the convenience of using accounting methods that ignore risk.

Though the ‘marketplace’ is the most efficient way of turning a sum of money into more than it started out being, and the marketplace is made up of human beings with human relationships, subject to the whims of timing, collective direction, the emotional cascades that dominate trends in trading and the rules set forth by major institutions (like the banks), the banks have sought to siphon as much wealth as possible out of the marketplace, while totally disregarding the humanity of the millions of players whose lives become the source of their profits.

So what’s the solution? Isn’t the automaticity of repayment part of what motivates banks to lend freely, as they have over the last decade? And aren’t the banks reminding us, day after day, by way of indirect protests against legislative action, complaints about the stifling effects of regulation, and over the last year their relentless devotion to the rigors of the not-lending marketplace, that they need such added motivation to do what it is that most behooves banks, which is to lend and hold debt as future income? (Why deprive ourselves of future income by falsely claiming it as past income?)

What can be done to make an institution founded on lending break its apparent addiction to not lending? The answer just might be in treating people like people, building human relationships that are not authoritarian in their zeal or fictional in their assumptions. The legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by Pres. Obama, in May, known as the Credit Card-holders’ Bill of Rights or the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, sought to make those ‘adjustments’ that would require more human relations between banks and borrowers, but it is just a start.

It should be noted, the entire nation has colluded in the grand delusion, letting the banks pretend that by making a loan and selling the loan, somehow the same profits it acquired would also be acquired by the buyers of the loan, and the borrowers would also locate the needed additional wealth to compensate everyone, in the time allotted. That conceptualization of lending and wealth-generation allowed for the delusion that new money could be made almost out of thin air, just by willing it.

A loan became a “product”, and the product could then be sold, over the counter, and morph from wealth projected to product sold to new wealth generated, eventually becoming an “engine” of economic growth. But with such a high percentage of all loans falling into this category of renamed, rehashed, and re-imagined value bases, the “engine” effect was getting too much like an effect and less and less like a genuine engine producing substantive thrust.

The idea of wealth replaced actual wealth. There was a bubble. There was a correction. We are living in the aftermath of the correction. But it is necessary to understand how widespread this financial market bubble was and what philosophy about the creation of wealth allowed for it to get so far beyond sustainable, or substantiable, expansion. The idea that by way of repackaging debt, new wealth would automatically emerge, underpinned an entire philosophy about how banking could be something new, something different, a break from the past.

But it was not the past from which these innovative finances were breaking; it was reality, the measure of the concrete, the measurable, the comprehensible. Money is abstract enough as it is: paper or coin that represents value, formerly backed by silver or gold, now just a currency with value against other currencies. So to craft whole new terrains of complex abstraction, within which money appears to do amazing new things, perform new functions, is to stretch the bounds of lived reality.

Here’s another way to look at it. Banks are required, at least in the US, to keep a certain amount of capital in reserve, to guard against losses and cover obligations to pay out withdrawals to account-holders. In the process of assessing the fallout of the 2008 credit freeze, banks that were taking money from the federal government were found to have inadequate capital in reserve: they had been using investments, bundled assets and projected earnings as “capital in reserve”, which they were not.

This fictionalization of the banking business has many causes, over many years, and cannot be attributed to a single individual, a single idea, or any one point of departure. But at some point, innovative thinking and the generation of valuable financial derivatives morphed into a fictionalization of value, in which there simply was not and could not be enough value generated, in a short enough period of time, to sustain the claims of value being made by those institutions generating and selling off the bundled assets, derivatives and exotics.

So, we can say, the fiction of automatic wealth is bankrupting the US. Yes, even today, even as we are in recovery. Because fictionalized finances found their way into the long-term investment strategies of major institutions, including state governments. California is now broke. Banks have refused to continue accepting IOUs from the state, and the state government now has to shut down one day a week. California, the world’s 5th largest economy, lost billions when the markets seized up and hemorrhaged wealth last year.

It is the second time in a decade that California fell head over heels into a massive swindle. The Enron debacle nearly bankrupted the state, because the power-trading giant had allegedly colluded with other power companies in California to fix prices, forcing the governor to sign an agreement to buy power at many times market rates for up to ten years. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to power in the wake of that collapse, and now the end of his second term is seeing another collapse, brought on by huge losses caused by a financial system whose claims of real value were simply not real.

The entangling of state pensions plans and other long-term investments with the esoteric workings of the financial system is a natural consequence of a mindset in which every player has a right to earn, and to profit, via financial investment. The problem is, someone generally has to lose wealth in order for someone else to gain substantially, so the more players involved, the more risk —one might think— that more players will wind up losing. Creative strategies have to be adopted to prevent this, or at least to make it look like it will not occur.

The math might change altogether. A 30-year mortgage, which may or may not ever be repaid at its highest projected value, is counted as an asset. The lender claims to in fact hold that wealth now. $500,000 was just paid out, but in fact, the bank will claim to hold the $500,000, plus all the accumulated future interest. It does not, in fact, have the money, but it says it does. And it makes this questionable logic look viable by selling the debt.

With most commodities, this works, because the risk of lower value is taken on by the buyer, and such is the speculation that comes with buying and selling commodities. At some point, there will be a buyer who has to know the risk is mounting and he may never see a higher price than he paid. But with debt, the value of the loan is fixed: the borrower will not in fact pay more than the highest amount allowable under the loan agreement.

So once the bank sells the debt at the highest price it can, the buyer is very likely never to see a higher price or a return on investment. To get around this, debt holdings were “bundled”. Or rather, they were fragmented, then recombined. So the $500,000 plus interest becomes 5,000 $100 values, each with potential accumulated interest, and each with a speculative price that might actually go up. The money multiplies, and the buyer has some confidence that this speculative commodity will in fact yield a higher price than what he pays for it.

But the problem remains the same: the underlying loan will never be worth more than the monetary value assigned to it in the initial loan agreement. At some point, someone somewhere will be holding debt, which they “bought” at a very high price, which will either be repaid at the initial agreed (lower) value, or not be repaid at all, because in fact the wealth necessary for the borrower to successfully repay the loan never materialized at all.

Imagine this happening hundreds of thousands of times across the financial system, then millions, over several years. Imagine people with fixed-rate mortgages, able to repay, refinancing their homes in order to get access to more wealth, buying into new loans that work in this way, so that a majority of all loans were in fact of this kind. Banks were long past the critical mass on unsustainable debt when the house of cards started to wobble last summer.

What happened between the spring and the fall of 2008 was that a scenario some economists had predicted for years actually became apparent and apparently inevitable: there simply was not enough real wealth in the world to sustain the claims of value being made by the financial sector as a whole: too many outstanding mortgages were in fact unpayable as it was, let alone in a world where repayment depends on a financial system with exorbitant growth levels and where wages are expanding too slowly —actually declining by $2,000 per household from 2000 to 2008— and cost of living skyrocketing — namely food, fuel, healthcare and credit.

We are still working our way out of the labyrinth of that fictionalized financial world. But it’s important to recognize the underlying big picture conceptualizations of wealth that led to the mess we are in. The idea that wealth can automatically materialize from cunning manipulations, or even from what might be essentially nothing more than a shift in vocabulary, is dangerous and must be guarded against.

Automaticity is a tempting idea: it periodically takes hold of and distorts entire political systems. It is the logic behind building ever more destructive weapons —logic that the use of brute force will automatically compel our enemies to respond as we wish— and of prejudice of all kinds —if a stereotype can be applied to an entire group, then why not pin the blame for all our ills on that group—, and so the logic of automaticity is at the root of some of the most massive and widespread suffering in human history.

In banking, it has led to millions of bankruptcies and home foreclosures, millions of layoffs, a frozen credit industry. A lack of government response may have allowed the nation to slide into a long economic depression, by many economists’ forecasts. So the lesson has to be: wealth is not generated automatically by any flip of the wrist, by any sleight of hand, by any cunning financial innovation; it emerges, over time, from real evolutions within the economy as a whole, and has to correspond to measurable real-world value.

Banks are no more entitled to an automatic unending expansion of the wealth they hold or claim to hold than is any one individual. Banks are no more virtuous than any borrower, when they make claims about future wealth projections. The virtue is in the human element, which is expressed by the measurable wealth construct, the figures that are not purely figurative but actually correspond to lived reality.

We must remember that banks are made up of human beings, just as the market landscape of borrowers and investors is made up of human beings. Ideas are tools we use to serve our purposes, but they cannot be bought and sold independent of the human world in which they function; innovative financial instruments must operate on the human scale, so that investors know they are not handing over real wealth in exchange for unsustainable wealth claims.

The Khmer Rouge sought to establish a red Khmer empire in Cambodia, with some ambitions of expansion beyond the nation’s borders, by stamping out any human life or mind that varied from the project, as narrowly conceived by Pol Pot and his murderous regime. The “killing fields” that ensued, with the mass slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million people, were an attempt to establish a new break in time, the time before and the time after the purification —as the regime proposed— of all Cambodia.

Beyond Utopia, it was a lust to fashion a paradise built on millions of purgatories. It was the paradox of a violent Heaven, a wisdom of intolerance, a corrupt purity, an abstraction drowned in the blood of innocents. In order to establish absolute power, either for themselves or their ideology, a purge was undertaken that would attempt to eliminate nearly all people of learning, leaving by one count only 4 highly trained Cambodian legal minds remaining.

The totalitarian nature of the purge was, like all political purges and all totalitarianism, based on the lie, the false promise of finality: The Khmer Rouge bet the lives of millions and the fate of their nation on the idea that once they had killed enough people, the perfect society would emerge and the ills that threatened their plans would be cured, purged successfully, overcome without risk of return.

If the political logic of the deranged practitioners of the Cambodian genocide are to be believed, they believed they could make a just and ordered world by attacking with thunder and steel everything vulnerable in the human beings they judged as outside their reach, and erasing human virtues like compassion, justice, tolerance, from the communities they favored, by shaping their society through a system of torture and murder.

The evils of the Khmer Rouge terror were nothing less than the wholesale abdication of humanity, in service of a power structure that elevated thugs and psychopaths, testing their merit by urging them to exhibit incomprehensible degrees of cruelty.

This is so much the case that in the ongoing trial of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch (pronounced ‘Doik’) —a prison director accused of a vast array of war crimes, committed in furtherance of the Khmer Rouge purge—, the defendant has alternately broken down in hysterical demonstrations of guilt and regret and attempted to delegitimize testimony questioning the identity of witnesses by saying he had long ago had that person killed.

The metaphysical arrangement of such a regime of bloodlust could be classed as habitual psychotics —more than as physics or metaphysics—‚ behavior so far outside what even the perpetrator’s heart and mind can countenance, that it amounts to a deliberate casting off of any intellectual or moral coherence, a descent into something antithetical to the involvement of anything we might call human qualities.

By casting off the restraint that stems from having human qualities like conscience, moral compass, tolerance and civil social structures, in exchange for an experiment with habitual psychotics, the genocidal regime is able to spread the logic of its brutality, by disqualifying virtually anyone from the broad category of humanity, both the victims and its allies in perpetrating the killing.

This accounts for the mysterious inability of any moral considerations to explain or account for the logic of genocide. It is not logical; it is not intellectually or morally coherent; it is not actually in service of any reasonable or worthy political aim. It is the sowing of injury and contempt in a way that will take root, leaving a landscape of devastation and tragedy in its wake, the fundamental crippling of a nation for generations to come.

Now, long after the killing ended, Cambodia has finally been able to put together a legal process for prosecuting and punishing the crimes of that era (1975-1979), but only with the help of international jurists assisting in an ad-hoc “hybrid” tribunal system meant to enforce and expand the scope of Cambodia’s own evolving humanitarian law.

The trials are a criminal prosecution that stands in for what has been tried in other places, the “truth and reconciliation” process aimed at fixing crimes and grudges firmly in the past, in order to clear the terrain of the society’s future for something better and more humane. Each society that faces the horrors of such a history has unique circumstances, unique crimes to address, and unique demographic makeup that may favor one solution over another.

Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, conceived a complex but broadly applicable process of community hearings, in which the perpetrators of the horrific Rwandan genocide openly confessed in front of their neighbors their involvement in the crimes of those 100 days in 1994 — when over 800,000 men, women and children were murdered by machete, dagger, fire and beating, by people who had always been part of their communities.

Kagame told Fareed Zakaria on Sunday’s edition of GPS —the “Global Public Square”— that “We had to bring the victims and perpetrators back together”, because those on either side of the genocide live in mixed communities everywhere across Rwanda. Zakaria praised Rwanda for finding a nuanced and well-thought solution to the problem of continued cohabitation of both communities, even as the nation seeks to recognize the genocide and prevent another round of the same, perhaps in retaliation or frustration for hard living conditions.

In fact, “spillover from the 1994 Rwandan genocide” is now sowing unrest in North Kivu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Cattle rustling used to finance militia activity is fomenting inter-ethnic conflict among Hutus and Tutsis, some of whom are émigrés from Rwanda, having fled in the time of the genocide. As the Christian Science Monitor is reporting:

While the trade in blood cows finances rebel activity here, but it’s also a form of psychological warfare. Another major rebel group in the region, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), is a predominantly Tutsi movement which sees itself as protecting its people. It also defends their traditional livelihood; For centuries, the pastoral Tutsi have measured a man’s wealth by counting his cattle.

“Nothing riles the CNDP and the Tutsi more than having their cattle stolen,” says Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. When they turn to battle, she says, the CNDP can be brutal: In a bid to regain villages controlled by Hutu militias, in April the CNDP killed over 100 civilians, some of them the elderly and children.

However galling or economically traumatic, the theft of cattle is substantially less significant than the mass slaughter of innocents, but the Kivu experience demonstrates how the unresolved fallout from the 1994 genocide is again stoking the fires of ethnic hatred. Can Paul Kagame do enough in his second term as president of Rwanda to establish a reliable civil society to effect a lasting truth and reconciliation process in which the crimes and animus of the genocide are relegated to the past?

The effects of the slaughter will be part of Rwandan life, part of the immediate life experience and family structures across the nation, for generations to come, as is the case in Cambodia, as among Europeans both Jewish and non-Jewish who lived through the Holocaust, as is the case for residents of the former Yugoslavia or of today’s Darfur. The false promise of the final solution will, in every case, become ingrained in the evolution of a people, and may impede any real ascent to ideal structures favoring harmony among rival groups.

We need to establish international structures with reach and authority that can detect and prevent such campaigns of slaughter. The prime minister of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan, decries China’s treatment of Uighur muslims in Xinjiang province as “genocide”, though many believe the programmatic “ethnic reordering” in which Beijing has engaged is not as dangerous as more aggressive “ethnic cleansing”. But some say such situations as those in Xinjiang, or the North Caucasus, need to be viewed as early warnings and halted without further loss of life.

Framing a social plan of any kind in the logic of ethnic cleansing or political re-engineering implies the desire to use force to command the restructuring of communities. Doing so in a way that takes lives or forces entire ethnicities or groups of political dissidents out verges on what could be called a purge campaign. Such ideas of a final solution are tempting to the subset of political actors who disqualify their rivals from humanity and seek to sweep them from existence, and are the root structure of a burgeoning genocide.

International structures that can provide for monitoring such policies that put a society at risk of ethnic cleansing need to be established, tested and strengthened. Observation of crimes like those ongoing in Darfur, and possibly ready to flare up again in North Kivu or the North Caucasus, is not enough: observation with vocal protest which amounts to no intervention empowers the perpetrators and condones their worst actions.

Building consensus among the “great powers”, namely the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council, each of whom wields a veto power over any action taken by the Council, is the first step. Genuine issues of sovereignty can be addressed, but Moscow and Beijing could be persuaded to see that reducing inter-ethnic conflict wherever it exists, especially within their borders and in neighboring countries, is in the interests of their existing systems of government and influence abroad.

Cambodia is now facing its savage and inexplicable past, and doing the truly hard work of trying to adjudicate who pays the price for the crimes of a regime whose legal framework for ruling could not be justified as “legal” under any recognized notion of legitimate government. Evidence presented in court may show that some of those responsible for the crimes were following orders; the orders, and the legal authority behind them, must be shown to be beyond the scope of any allowable legal structure.

What faces Cambodia, however, is more than just judging the guilty; it’s accounting for all that was lost, all the cultural potential of the lives cut short, all the vision and humanity that will never be recovered. That ache is memorial and immemorial, tightly woven into the fabric of Cambodian politics, and transcendent; it must permeate what takes place in the future, but also be put aside so that the future can be free of it.

Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.

Taking the ability to reason as the basis for a civilization’s deep resilience, we should emphasize reasoning and knowledge as wealth, as the bases for wealth in the life of every individual. Our education policy needs to work toward methods that do the most to stir the creative process of learning in the widest number of young people possible.

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The private memoirs of former Chinese Communist party (CCP) leader Zhao Ziyang are to be published, as we near the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and the massacre that ended them. The diaries will be published this month, under the title Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang.

Zhao was secretary general of the central committee of the CCP from 1987 until he was deposed due to his opposition to the government’s hardline crackdown on student demonstrators gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, in June 1989. Zhao was subjected to 16 years of house arrest, and died in 2005. But the journals were so secret, their existence has not been confirmed until now.

According to The Times newspaper of London:

So sensitive is this document, the first memoir ever to be made public by such a senior Chinese party official, that even its existence had been kept a closely guarded secret. Speculation had been rife during his nearly 16 years of house arrest and after his death in 2005 as to whether the man with the most intimate knowledge of the events of June 3-4 1989, had provided his own account of those dramatic days.

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Zhao reportedly describes how on 17 May 1989, in a top-level secret meeting with party “elders”, like Deng Xiaoping, a decision was made without even a vote by the politburo to declare martial law. Despite objections from Zhao Ziyang, the nation’s leaders planned a violent, military-based crackdown to end pro-democracy demonstrations.

Zhao resigned his office. He writes of those troubled days, “At that moment, I was extremely upset. I told myself that no matter what, I refused to become the General Secretary who mobilised the military to crack down on the students.” On 19 May, he went to Tiananmen Square and with then aide (now Chinese premier) Wen Jiabao at his side, delivered a tearful plea to students to end their demonstrations peacefully and disperse.

What Zhao wrote of the events of 3 June 1989 is the first known account acknowledging the government’s massacre of innocents. He wrote of the dark emotion at witnessing the crackdown, knowing it had been planned, observing: “On the night of June 3rd, while sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire. A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted, and was happening after all.”

A top aide to Zhao Ziyang, Bao Tong, says there is no doubt as to the authenticity of the memoirs, but that he was unaware of their existence until after Zhao’s death. Bao had been jailed for 7 years as part of the government’s effort to eliminate all history of dissent as to the events leading up to and taking place at Tiananmen Square. Bao says Zhao’s family had no knowledge of the existence of the memoirs, because the former party leader had sought to protect all of those close to him.

The Times reports:

The recordings include conversations in which he answers questions as well as sections that are apparently dictated from a now-vanished written document. The tapes took Mr Zhao about two years to make and he then found a way to pass them to several trusted friends. The materials were hidden and gathered together after his death, but much of the process remains a secret.

The former aide said the memoirs will serve as “an extremely valuable historical document both for China and for the West”.

El taller literario Pinzón Nueve, fundado hace 17 años por el gran poeta chileno Carlos Trujillo (chilote de Chiloé), hoy estrena el primer número de su nueva revista, Naufragios, en colaboración con el Departamento de Lenguas Modernas de Villanova University, en Pennsylvania, EE.UU.

El proyecto es traer al público la obra del taller y el trabajo del programa de maestría, y juntar a autores de calidad de múltiples países, algunos conocidos y algunos en el proceso de descubrirse, y formular una comunidad de escritores, académicos y gente interesada por la literatura y el arte en una celebración de ambas.

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Como explica el Dr. Trujillo en la nota editorial del primer número de la revista:

Nuestro proyecto esencial es el de abrir un nuevo espacio a poetas, narradores, ensayistas y artistas plásticos de cualquier lugar del planeta. Por lo tanto, Naufragios no es una invitación a zozobrar en mares borrascosos e iracundos sino un llamado a que nos colaboren, se encuentren y compartan sus trabajos de creación o crítica con otros muchos navegantes en el grandioso océano del mundo digital.

El taller Pinzón Nueve, con sus raíces en el programa de maestría de letras hispanas, actualmente incluye a dos profesores de Villanova (Carlos Trujillo y Salvatore Poeta), cinco estudiantes del programa de maestría (María Elena Arias Zelidón, Andrés González Sánchez, Tatiana Ripoll Páez, Carolina Yancovic y Carlos Yushimito), un graduado del programa (Joseph Robertson) y el luminoso poeta no villanovense, Rodolfo Figueroa.

Ya se aceptan entregas para el número de otoño 2009. La política de entregas de la revista se puede consultar en este enlace.

Brookdale Community College sold out its Collins Arena, Wednesday night, for ‘An Evening with Maya Angelou’, bringing three thousand people to see the poet, activist and educator speak. She moved the crowd to tears and laughter with personal stories, philosophical messages and a call to take pride and passion in the humanizing capability of learning. The caged bird sings, and beats its wings against the painful limitations of its situation, because it is deprived of opportunities to see, to learn, to explore.

The great American poet spoke for just over an hour, and she disarmed her audience with anecdotes of personal fare, humor about the weakness, presumption and sometimes astonishing kindnesses, of strangers, about how we fall into misconceptions or get lost in bursts of emotion. But her humor was dignified and sacred, throughout, and carried with it a message about the inherent, implacable value of humanity, and of sharing it.

Dr. Angelou cited Publius Terentius Afer who lived from 195 or 185 to 159 BC, a playwright commonly known as Terence. He said “I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me”, by her telling. Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. Terence was born a slave in Roman north Africa, and was sold to a Roman senator, who educated him and later freed him. Terence became renowned for his plays, but due to his station at birth could never be a Roman citizen.

Angelou told the story of Terence and noted the weight of his words, that being human, “nothing human can be alien to me”, emphasizing that his seeing Rome and his Roman audience as fully human, as flawed but made of the same fabric, is astonishing, a brave act of generosity, considering the exclusion he suffered. She urged her audience to see that “if you can internalize just a part of that statement, you are liberated”.

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Throughout her talk, she came back to the topic of how human beings are liberated by education. She sought to inspire her audience to “know… the power of a Brookdale Community College” (she emphasized these last three words with rhapsodic strains, a gift to her audience), to understand that the value of an institution of higher education is in the vision and abilities it brings to those who study there and the vision and passion they bring to learning.

At the very beginning, then again throughout her talk, she chimed a woeful melody, singing “When it looked like the sun would not shine anymore, God put a rainbow in the clouds” The meaning of that was that there is hope in unlikely places, that when the rains persist so long the world is flooded, the spirit still has ways of knowing, remembering, that the sun shines behind the clouds and a new day will come.

For her, that spirit, that rainbow in the clouds energy, was embodied by her Uncle Willy, a large man with a severe neurological condition on one side of his body, who took her and her brother in as children and pushed her to learn her multiplication tables and to read and write. His commitment to her learning had made her love to learn, and had inspired her to emerge from her hardships and be the searcher she became.

When he died, she returned to Stamps, Arkansas, where he had helped to raise her, passing through Little Rock on the way. There she was asked to meet with someone who wanted to meet her and express his gratitude. He told her that Willy had made him the man he had become, because Willy had instilled in him a love of learning.

As a kid, the man had worked at Willy’s store in Stamps, and Willy had forced him to learn his multiplication tables, and commit to his studies. “Arkansas lost a great man when Willy died”, he told her, expanding on the sentiment to say the United States, and then the world, had “lost a great man”.

The kid who worked for Willy at his general store had become Mayor Charles Bussey, the first African American mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas. They traded stories about Uncle Willy holding them in their seat at the kitchen table, demanding a full report of the multiplication tables, demanding evidence of the fire of learning. The light of the rainbow that was Willy had reached Mayor Bussey, and by extension all the people of Little Rock.

That light was reaching everyone in attendance at Brookdale as well. Angelou told of having to hide Willy on nights when “The Boys” would ride, a fearsome band of hulking young white men who menaced black men in and around Stamps. Mayor Bussey gave Angelou a police escort all the way to Stamps, a group of “eight white men, with guns” she would say, a kind of happiness coming over her as she settles on the ironic beauty of that gesture, how in a sense good outlasted bad and the sun came through the clouds, after all.

She urged the students in her audience, or anyone who might have access to a library, to go the following day and ask a librarian to show them the way to some poetry, that would enable them to feel “the courage and humor and dignity” fit to make them “a rainbow in the clouds”, a light for others to learn by, a spirit that says yes and can persevere.

When the United Nations celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding, she was asked to write a poem for the occasion. She wept at the beauty of going to San Francisco to deliver those words, to honor the hopes of the world, because she remembered watching Eleanor Roosevelt and the educator Mary McLeod Bethune entering that building, feeling that if she were not “16 years old, and 6 feet tall, and black”, she might be able to be one of the interpreters there.

Then “Imagine 50 years later to be invited to write a poem”… she reminded her audience, gracious to her core in recognizing that “I could not have done it without the rainbows in my clouds”. Those lights in the darkness, those acts of human generosity, make it possible to get through dark times.

She urged her audience to know that “all of this has already been paid for”, that the right to be there, to learn at a 21st-century American college or university, had been “paid for” by the blood and the sweat and the tears of past generations, the sacrifices of those who had come to America either seeking their freedom or curled up in bondage, forced to lie in excrement “and menstrual flow” aboard slave ships, or Asian immigrants in the mid 19th century “who came to build this country, where they were not allowed to bring their families for many years, or ever own land”.

Those ancestors had made this country and now the opportunity to learn and to be something great came down to the current generation. And this heritage was not only cultural, not only about America and its sins and its strengths, but about the sanctity of life in the world: “All of this belongs to all of us, all the time — stop limiting yourselves!” the poet urged.

She added that “They have paid for each of us, already … and all you have to do is liberate yourselves, so you can liberate those yet to come.” She cited a relative who used to say to her, “When you get, give; when you learn, teach.” She ended her talk with “A Brave and Startling Truth“, the poem she wrote for the UN, which calls on all humanity, saying “We must confess that we are the possible…”

All systems fail, all organized interactions are vulnerable to entropy, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And at best, we are but stardust, a beautiful yet haunting explanation of our origins. Infused with light. Doomed to shadow. Whatever your spiritual beliefs, in the mortal physical realm, entropy is always interfering. The intellect often uses convenient conceptualizations to feel it is better understood or more secure, more real and lasting, than it is.

Remember: the only constant is change, so to oversimplify is to willfully strip ourselves of needed understanding, the power of intellect that can do the best work against entropy. To paint in broad strokes an entire universe of experience to exist only in dualities of black and white, up and down, matter and void, is to confuse simplicity with clarity, at our peril. While the best explanation is usually the simplest one, the truth is almost always more complex than we can perceive.

So, we are left to navigate a universe of traumas and disappointments we cannot just dismiss as signs of the wrong thing happening or the other side gaining temporary control over our otherwise pure and decent environs. Darkness and light are lies in that they are not so diametrically opposed as they pretend; there are better options for understanding what they mean. As R. Buckminster Fuller has written: “We have relationships, not space”.

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Relativity posits that light and other cosmic forces or expressions of energy and mass are not constants, but exist in a relational continuum. Moving at the same speed as an object makes it appear not to move at all, as with the Earth that carries us through its orbit around the Sun, and our Sun’s orbit around the galaxy’s deep center. We also experience this when we are traveling inside an automobile or an airplane. Light and dark are both wave dynamics relative to perception, frequency, local electro-magnetic activity, even the refractive capabilities of gravity, distance and time.

Resilience in the face of complex pressures requires nothing less than complexity, at the root and at the growth point, in any system, a diverse barrage of tools and relations, the corresponding adaptability, instead of the all-or-nothing, hit-or-miss romantic balladry of monoculture, of uniform essence, of limited relatability. Resilience requires the ability to perceive and adapt to challenges that come from beyond the one-versus-other, either/or, bipolar mentality that informs phenomena like the Cold War, religious fundamentalism, or military rule.

So, what happens to matters of principle in the face of such prevaricating, precarious, uncertain socio-metaphysical structures? The dogmatic would say it cannot survive, that to acknowledge flux or atranscendence is to do away with principle and submit to the random indulgences of pure moral relativism. This is wrong, in every way. Our best option, and the one that brings us closest to the truth of things, is to first acknowledge the failings of dogma.

Dogma is a lie: it operates on the assumption that those who submit to its power will experience genuine terror at the very idea that the dogma be overturned or made irrelevant, and by way of that moral terror, they will be unable to see beyond the mandates of the dogma they follow. Dogma operates not by speaking the truth, but by ruling out what it cannot absorb.

Accepting that the prevailing narrative may need to evolve, not because truth is relative, but because we can only experience truth relationally, and our prevailing narratives can never be complete, is the best way to understand how principle survives the transition from one paradigm to another, how to find intellectual transcendence in the midst of general atranscendence or the entropy of a given system of thought and consequence.

We cannot give in to the temptation to oversimplify the landscape of human experience and human endeavor, then expect to have the tools necessary to address the compounded complexities from which the world that sustains us emerged. It should not be dogma that complexity is preferable, but it would be best for us to understand that excessive simplicity leads to dogmatic thinking, hostility to new approaches to understanding, and rivalries in the world of ideas that can limit our ability to find our way through the night of the unknown.

We need to bring as many factors of understanding, from as many diverse disciplines as we can, to the process of locating, illuminating and examining those aspects of our vast sensory and intellectual experience, as a species, that will point us to the next major opening up of new understanding, knowledge and innovation. And in the age of resilient complexity, or which seeks it, we need to be able to find the real values of hyper-specialization and of a renewed and intellectually curious, determined devotion to creative generalism.

How fear keeps us from manifesting the best in ourselves

Politics is informed with some of our best intentions, with much of our lust for ‘improvement’ and with all of our fears, petty and grandiose, paranoid and consequential. We have seen a great and resonant turning toward better instincts in the US, with an election that for good reasons inspires hope and may allow us to manifest more than ever those “better angels of our nature”, but we must recongize that in order to manifest the best in ourselves, we must start by overcoming our own habits of fear and division.

It is still commonplace, all too much so, to hear the phrase “human nature” used to excuse or explain unspeakable betrayals. It is still commonplace for people on the street, or in grocery-store checkout lines, or at airports, to mutter under their breaths about the types of people they fear or would like to be rid of. We are still caught up, in some way, in ever corner of our global civilization, with the need to know who it is that we should dislike, ostracize or fear.

It is a temptation, like any vice, that runs throughout the entire notion of political organization, in every society that has ever existed, it would seem: figure out who the bad actors are, and then direct all the energy that would go into defending against prey in the wild, or preparing for storms gathering on the horizon, or denouncing evil spirits, at them. And thus to save ourselves from some imminent destruction.

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But do we need to think this way? Is the truth of the matter that we, whoever “we” are, are always the good and the righteous and the unimpeachably well-intentioned, and they, the undefined other, the capital “They”, are always after us, snarling at the gates, ready to tear us to shreds? Or is it something more to do with the mismanagement of fear?

When we give into the zeal of collective fear, we derive all sorts of spiritual “benefits” from the exercise. We feel part of something, we feel justified, and therefore Just, we feel wise and aware, and therefore Safe, we feel insecure yet buffered against decay, we feel empowered by numbers, and therefore Powerful.

Fear is a trick of the mind: at the level of instinct, it can warn us of danger, or shade a situation just enough with doubt to let us know it is best seen as dubious. In that, it can be a virtue. But as commander of our emotional order, as master of the universe, it is a tyrant and a cheat. Fear makes up its own rules, distorts our vision and undermines every valuable perspective we might gain as to the nature of our problems.

There are degrees of fear, ranging from mortal fear of social infamy to petty fears about whether minor events in daily life will work out. Dishonor leads people in some dark corners of the world to murder women in their own families for absurd reasons: either because they have fallen in love or because they have been raped, neither of which should “dishonor” a family if there is any amount of basic empathy in the community.

It is also true that when a nation breaks down into “red states” and “blue states”, when factionalism takes over and we identify value by way of identity categories, when colors and phrasing and style and origin dictate how we should react emotionally to someone we may not even know, when we fail to give a fair hearing to people as a result of it, we have let the stingy cunning of fear into our hearts, and we will pay a price for it, whether we recognize that the payment has been taken or not.

In such climates of fear and disavowal, of denunciation and animosity, we relinquish the hopes of dialogue, we build up walls where there might be public squares, we look askance at anyone who dares to cross over and seek some amount of communication with the “unclean” that occupy the other side of the metaphorical divide.

Empathy is not a sign of weakness, but of strength. Nations should not scorn and assault one another’s dignity or good will, because only by cultivating that dignity and good will, mutually, can any agreements be made between rivals. And we should be wary of claiming for ourselves an unshakeable high-ground, lest we be ousted from it by our own arrogance and inability to see the interests of those around us clearly.

How do we deal with the hardships that have been unfairly put upon us by rogue leaders or by the common injustice of mobs steeped in confusion? How do we not adopt the logic of fear and confrontation, and yet confront the hard challenges of a moment of real peril and consequence?

Somehow, we need to find that part of ourselves that understands the basic truth of a shared humanity, even in the difficult energy that runs between us and those with whom we compete for access to resources, to power or to the mere privilege of having a voice, and respect that others should as well.

No principle, no religion, no system of government is truly strong or legitimate in its intentions and its methods, if it cannot operate within this sort of interpersonal humanity. We cannot rule out the value of others as a matter of principle; we cannot rule out the voice of those we disagree with, simply because we think we have proven their past claims inadmissible.

elindulnék :: Es un paisaje de relevancias inesperadamente centrales e imprescindibles que he descubierto en volver a pisar este territorio almado, sentido, visceral, es una geología de acontecimientos inmersos en el espíritu, confesiones casi imposibles, miradas que lo explican todo tan abierta como cautelosamente, un oleaje de necesidades que por suerte son también gustos y lujos, intermitencias y alas que nos llevan a algo más duradero : me doy cuenta a cada rato en estos días que veo posibles interpretaciones alternativas para mis sentimientos, que por reflejo voy rechazando, para después darme cuenta que no sería auténtico no reconocer que todo se se ve influenciado por el hecho de que me vea así forzado a dejar esta ciudad que tanto amor me ha proporcionado, y en la que tantas dificultades quedan irresueltas : amar y dejar a la vez llega a ser un conflicto que es también paradoja, que es insostenible, que tiene que decantarse en otras decisiones, tiene que ser amar para saber amar, estar para saber estar, y vivir lo que es un reto del momento, de este momento del camino, un proceso de enfrentarse con dificultades cuyo fin será posibilitar que esté más cerca del territorio donde ese amor existe…

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Concretamente : viernes, noche de leve ensueño, de incredulidad, de los absurdismos del ser humano en su habitat natural, cómo cantan los gestos y el estilo el nivel de soltura, convención o pánico profundo de la persona, El Almirall, entre sonrisas fáciles, lágrimas contenidas y crisis no citadas, horizontes, novedades indefinidas, es una noche de palabras de suave incendio, temas del alma, “la esencia de la persona no sabe que se acercan viajes, que hay fechas, simplemente se acerca a lo que le atrae” se declara, y parece de las verdades más precisas sobre estos días; me he encontrado con una tras otra persona que ha podido despertar en mí esa esencia, una suerte será, o una extensión de lo que en lo profundo estoy buscando, me doy cuenta de que siempre he abierto caminos en Barcelona, sin desear que si cerraran, y por eso, voy dejando asuntos pendientes, comportándome como si tuviera todo el tiempo de siempre, como si no me fuera : en estas encrucijadas, se puede aprender muchísimo de una sola persona, de una sola conversación con ansia de buscar, la noche sabe a pausa, a interrupción, a despedida obligatoria, exilio y cortina pesada, pero también sabe a encontrarse, a fluidez, a verse y dejarse ver…

Distrust is not a mood or emotional state, it is not a reaction to misfortune; it is a doctrine, and there is a diverse and dispersed sect of believers who propagate it with passion. This sect is comprised of people who openly proclaim their faith in distrust, as a cosmology or a lifestyle choice, a poisonous logic against which little can be done, because its power is rooted in the total decisiveness of its community of believers about living systematically in a state of distrust, trusting until the last in there being no more intelligent way to live.

Ths fallacy is used, then, to pursue two key goals: 1) to reduce the value of situations in which trust brings strength, wellbeing and a healthy resilience; 2) to justify behavior that could not be justified within any coherent ethical framework. As such, doctrinal distrust takes advantage, in its application as a weapon, of the possibility of using disappointments already experienced by others in order to avoid entering into any sort of responsibility —nor even into awareness of responsibility— for the disappointments they might occasion by way of their distrust in personal relationships.

The most delicate part of any contact with the feverish and zealous followers of doctrinal distrust tends to be having to avoid, at all costs, revealing the distrust of the other, and its meaning and effects. This basic rule stems from the fact that although it may only be on a subconscious level, we all recognize that a certain desirable quality of life can only be achieved by way of trusting relationships. So the devoutly distrusting tends to fall into a habitual paranoia, and is startled whenever the faith they truly profess comes to light in too evident a way.

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Revealing the distrust of the devoutly distrusting is often times the spark that sets fire to any sort of sensible or committed dealing one may have with that person, eventually reducing the relationship to ashes, because the distrusting individual is put on the defensive, and launches into a struggle for the eternal truth of their beliefs, with blind and even bloody zeal.

Distrust is also intimately linked to radical and sudden mood swings. Anyone can go through this process, for a number of reasons, but the self-assured and faithful doubter gives in to these mutations almost as a vice, because their doctrine requires they live in the extreme pressure of constant and universal suspicion.

The mask most often donned by the devoutly distrusting is the idea that radical things (moving toward or away from their extreme) are rare: in fact, the doctrine of distrust requires a fundamentalism so extreme that it disqualifies as absurd nearly all other points of view.

Now, the distrusting quickly learn to conceal their totalitarianism —not wanting to awaken in others those same “defense mechanisms” they themselves so aggressively deploy—, hiding their meditations in a downy cover of logic and “realism”. Everything is evident, and the same mystic devotee of distrust will say there is proof, however imprecise or subtle they may be. Sometimes you will hear of messengers, individuals or events that have signaled definitively that there remains no other option but to dedicate oneself for life to a mysanthropic and even missionary distrust.

But the tremendous mythology informing the arguments of one who speaks passionately of his own self-convinced distrust is that this way of life has something to do with accepting that there is disappointment and suffering in life. Not so. It is, in fact, quite the contrary. The religion of distrust is really based on the fear of disappointment and the prejudiced rejection of anything —any hope, any idea, any situation— that might invite it.

It is a heavy armor which is costly to wear, which blunts the senses, smothers perception and auctions the imagination to the most puerile and fleeting obsessions. And that’s part of its charm, the way it distracts devotees from their hardships, helping them to remain convinced that the most trivial examples or incidents carry a near universal importance, allowing them to build a world according to the diseased vision of obsessive distrust. And that perversely “constructive” energy is what is most to be feared in contact with a true devotee of distrust, because an underlying fundamentalism obliges the devotee to attempt to make you part of their great self-deception.

Intense heat, the suffocation of the great metropolis that stingily carries on not recognizing that it was made by human hands and minds for the benefit of human beings in their endless daily slog… tiresome, choking, trellised, the city-creature, the layered amplitude, the hard grace and threadbare unbecoming, the will at odds with its own purpose…

I want wholeness amid the grey and acquiescent stupor, I want rhythm amid the fine-boned dissonance, a special coven of mind-meld and revelers, and the agility and courage to make sense of things…

but time runs out, it disappears into the gloom and is scarce remembered as what it was, a cool rapid current of trilling waters, trailing over the edge of things, and never stopping to be taken, held or tasted…

we seek the quietly problematic, enervating, constant, we seek the contradictions that we know will persist like hard gemstones and so carry us and our emotional life and our struggles beyond the grip of time’s trilling rapids…

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we seek to be plural, to be expansive, to make or achieve meaning by extending our intentionality and understanding, with painstaking care and quiet fire, into the broader societal energy: in this, the explosive periphery of human passions, for it is at the periphery that we find friction, frailty, agitation and the spark that makes words softly spoken or not so, or not at all uttered, into incendiary devices…

in the teeming folds of excess and absence, in the landscapes of opening up, desire and aggravation, we find the serene, and the promise of the serene is an explosive moment, is a life-binding way onto the great uninhabited plains that span across all the theories about a happy life…

in the need to play out the experiment of first seeing, then imagining more, then desiring, obtaining and sustaining, in the need to see that what is worth desire’s exhausting flame is also worth desiring to begin with, we mythologize, we martyr ourselves, we try to hold up the flag of an imagined idol, as if it were not only a mirror to the object of our desire, but the very gift of life renewed…

we hope to ‘get beyond’ the imperfect, to resist those places, those facts, those methods, that seem to stain or sully the imagined life, but we are wrong to aspire to this specifically; we do it from weakness and from the false promise of impatience…

faultlines are lifegivers, places where deep primordial energy comes up to the surface of the living world and makes more world; flaws in the perfectly smooth terrain are landmarks and give meaning to the surrounding landscape, become nameable places and so exist at the root of language…

we are wrong to want to ‘get beyond’ or even ’smooth over’ the imperfect, because that separation between one thing and another, even between ideal and actual, is what gives the constellation of difference in which we all come to be, in which all human relations situate both the core and the outer limits of their reason for being…

the truth is that the unobtainable ideal informs all of its offspring and all of its progenitors, but it is unobtainable because only those imperfect fragments and temporalities can inhabit this world, only that which fits intermittently within the unfinished, can come to exist as such…

those imperfections and injuries that come with breaking the law of the stoics and trying to love earthly bodies, or rather, manifestations of this existence and in this sensorial realm, should be seen as gifts, or at least as intensities from which we gain, in the contact we in fact have, in the chance to love, with that which, though it dies away, remains imprinted in us, in this world, which so thirsts for that remaining, which in turn can only arise by our committing ourselves to such unstoical desperations…

it is not true that we as mortal beings are here to suffer or to be suffered and no more, but rather that at times we forget —and too easily— that what seems difficult, or even insurmountable, is actually a kind of joy, living in us, burning in us, calling us to celebrate and to find new life in the midst of agony…

Helium.com :: Poetry is the frontier where language in use comes in contact with future meaning, and in the process, when best executed, brings a wealth of transcendent truths into the present. Poetry is relevant to all uses of language, though there may be trends that suggest popular culture is looking to new forms of poetic activity to replace specific old models: many musical artists now play the role of mythic historian or wandering troubadour, but poetry is not confined to these purposes.

The art of the rhyming couplet, the frenetic ebb and flow of iambic pentameter, sometimes seem in today’s language environment more a distraction than a vehicle for delivering meaning across time. Poetry now resides in subtler places in more intricate and interrelated forms. It seeps into political discourse, into rap, into the dialogue between two characters on a movie screen, often for brief moments, then pushed aside by a mass of prose and fact and circumstance. But this is not new and it is not hazardous to poetry’s survival as a concentrated art-form fashioning new molds and opening new horizons.

It has always been the case that the oracular function of poetry, looking deep within or to the far reaches of the known and knowable, happens at the edges of the prosaic, at the fringe of our collective normalcy, in a place where in direct proportion to the intensity of the vision we confront those basic truths of our existence we often prefer not to engage.

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The impact of poetry on the dexterity and relevance of meaning, in all other areas of linguistic or even expressive activity, broadly, is not lessened by the frequency with which we now change topics, shuffle from style to style or distance the moment’s future from the once most-desired vision of it. On the contrary, poetry fits the moment, always, in some manner, precisely because far from having to evolve to suit the moment poetry’s function is to drive meaning deeper into the core of all that is swirling around us.

We must first remember that an art must be judged by its best practitioners, not by the common trend. From this vantage point, we can see that the ancient vanguard of the written word continues to infuse our core realities with meaning more efficiently and cogently than any other related art-form, filling its host environments with the casual essence they might not otherwise have noticed.

Seasonal photography, by Café Sentido editor J.E. Robertson, a visual essay about a season of historic, urgent & uneasy change

A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.

We are emerging from a period of over-accustomed abundance, in which there was never supposed to be any doubt in the popular consciousness that generalized prosperity had reached a mythic level of sustainable undeniability; circumstance could not turn it back. That there was little real structural planning for sustainability was ignored. Economists, politicians, accounting firms, major banking institutions, and governments across the world, ignored the clear signs that flaws in the flow of matter and energy through an increasingly globalized economy were being obscured by convenient assumptions and poorly underpinned strategies.

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Moments of exquisite beauty, of reverence for the mystery of the natural marketplace, became pervasive: the worship of plenty was so far-reaching, it seemed to be assumed that fashion icons could hold a philosophical stable center by waxing poetic about baroque ostentation. The bawdy glitz of Las Vegas, the all-at-once beaming-up of skyscrapers in Dubai, a quixotic-hubristic race to colonize the Moon, were hallmarks of the ’98-’08 balloon economy.

Meanwhile, the land of abundance was yellowing at the edges, the rich foliage of its temperate heartland was fading: the state of Ohio reached beyond 25% of the entire population officially on food stamps. Bankruptcies hit their highest level since laws were tightened in 2005. The fading of excess into a tired dream from an era of blind ambition meant we began to see that vast treasures could be diminished to a faint reserve of solace, scattered like guarded oases across the economic landscape.

Property values dropped. Oil prices soared. Banks pushed to cover unsustainable debt by 1) adding more unsustainable debt to their portfolios, and 2) using Congress to legislate against individual consumer bankruptcies. In August, home foreclosure filings again hit an all-time high —not the first record-setting month of 2008—, revealing a shocking level of underlying economic malaise. The dawn of an era of scaled-back expectations, of limited budgets, of belt-tightening and solemn fireside chats, had arrived.

As if every flaw and pitfall built into our way of functioning were invisible to even the most well-trained eyes, we basked in the golden distractions of a notion of manifest destiny, as if history were paying us its due for having imagined prosperity, suffered for it, and brought it into being. We thought nothing of the responsibility that comes with using with such endless hunger the resources available to us.

But the signs of a new “gilded age” were visible and were seeping into the consciousness of concerned observers. The problem was, however, what to do to forestall the onset of institutional chaos, an economic quagmire, the emotional unraveling of markets which had become the backbone of our projected fortunes. The political climate was calling for good news, not for good ideas, and so we collaborated in putting off awareness of what was in store.

Now, words like “depression” are on the winds of mass culture. John Steinbeck’s dustbowl epic The Grapes of Wrath is again a popular seller, not just for high-school required-reading lists. As a nation, we now face the problem of wanting to find warmth and solace, economically and spiritually, in a time of silver-cold rushing waters and a gathering storm of painful, forced change. In times of unwanted struggle, at the root of our basic humanity, we ask how much light and warmth we can derive from a bankside campfire, around which we tell the hopeful stories of a better day to come.

A thread running through those stories was the epic struggle of the 2008 election season, which began in earnest in the fall of 2006, officially during the first months of 2007, and led to an entire year of neverending dialogue about all things political, legislative, presidential and economic. The election was like a campfire culture that sprung up in cities and towns across North America and the world, in which people at the individual level, disenchanted by years, or decades, of political disappointments, began to think something new might be in the offing… an example of community-based leadership.

Yet the singular truth of the moment, related to that adage that “all politics is local” —what we learned from the need of so many to interact on a high plane of social discourse, of civic involvement— was that the individual will, the nature of one’s ability to grasp and to face difficulty, would be the root of recovery. If left on the open sands of desolation, the individual will could be strong, could be noble and definite, and yet falter; but coming together, negotiating around a campfire mentality of solemn devotion to a shared vision of liberty and prosperity, that individual will could be something more, something both brilliant and effective, part of a vibrant declaration of intent.

Admittedly, we could ask ourselves: can we direct our best efforts by way of “tried and true” mechanisms for steering the ship of state? Are the old ideas now out of touch, out of date, aged, brittle, risky? The ancient dichotomy between central planning and laissez-faire had been rusted over and abandoned; the split between social conservatives and economic progressives had withered; the logic of political confrontation was wearing thin. Something new was bursting on the scene.

As if to illustrate that a free people freely reinvents itself, and charts a new course, at will, with special vigor in the hardest of times, political strategy became a liability and complex examination of the facts and the future course of a people at last became the fashion. Clarity of thought before prejudice; hope and determination before fear and division; a sea change coming over the political culture of a deeply divided nation, struggling to find its way.

With the logic of edges, of the far edge of aspirational capitalism, the far-edge of binary politics, the far-edge of belief in ideals, combining to threaten the capacity of individuals, communities and political entities to envision a future of possibility, a logic of horizons grew up in the midst of concern and even panic. We saw that there could be a root structure deep enough to keep us from falling over the edge, into the deep of unsettled failings. We could reach the horizon and beyond.

The white of clear light, the blue of nourishing waters, the red of whole forest-scapes clamoring for a few last waves of warmth before winter: a dizzying but reassuring landscape of old growth entities, ideals and genuine concerns, informed our rudderless drift. Somehow, there might be another way, aside from sliding with the momentum of unstable ground, down into the waiting abyss; there might be the root-structure necessary for a fertile regrowth of economic and spiritual fortunes.

What may come next, what policies are precisely appropriate, what the existential value of competing political philosophies might be, if inclusion or exclusion are wise or perilous, became topics for discussion. Political discourse became a kind of heating oil to warm the spaces between living, working and fretting about impending upheavals, despite the persistent injection of wisps of hysterical fear-mongering. The space of political debate expanded into vastly divergent realms of life and culture, became a warmer, more habitable space.

As a nation, the United States of America has swelled from a band of small colonial villages to a continent-wide solid-state political union. Its history of democracy and humanist values has been fraught with dangerous threads of injustice, bias, hardship, combat and hypocrisy, yet its cultural thrust has been continually to move toward more openness, more inclusiveness, more equality and shared opportunity. The fall of 2008 was a season in which it became reasonable to most people to express concern that in fundamental ways, the nation had veered from that steady course, and needed new direction.

Like a pointilist composite of brushstrokes, the concept of new direction, together with the heat and light of economic distress, the urgency of concern about the security of one’s family’s wellbeing, the genuine worry that communities could spin apart or basic economic structures be allowed to decay, we found humanity seeking stalwart examples, straight arrows, a view of the land beyond the woody time of doubting.

Letting the old assumptions fall to earth, we seek a path to the other side. It could fairly be said there is a new atomization of the structure of society, a new decentralization of the tools of governance, in that politically, the vast center of American politics has summoned forth a style of campaign and a style of leadership that speaks to small entities across a vast narrative of history.

Local organizers moved thousands to volunteer, and the process of a general awakening about the difference between media-fomented cognitive dissonance and fact-based examination of safe passage to the spot beyond the horizon, refit the mechanisms of political discourse, and put control together with principle, in the hearts and minds of voters, citizens, actual people out across the landscape. The “conditions on the ground” became apparent, because a composite sketch of the emotional landscape, the moral and political priorities of a people, was better able to be drawn, from a debate about quality of ideas, as ideas and as practiced.

The old-model social-spending paradigm, as a way of competing with the “supply-side” fund-the-investors paradigm, shifted, and has been replaced by a complex ecosystemic mindset, which conceives of economic processes not as simple ‘expansion’, but part of a fabric of growth processes, a cultivation of longer-term potential for sustained abundance. A generative economics coalesced out of a host of strategies competing for absolute dominance of the political center.

If we could make something real and fecund out of the bewildering tangle of disappointments and excesses, if we could apply that reality like a ritual medicine to the workings of the collective mind, we could perhaps discover that amid the fallen visions and the dying embers of collapse, there is an already-existing road out of the wilderness, back to the heart of what we are as human beings. Generative economics is part of that renewed aspirational style, that desire to defy difficulty and the encroaching gloom, and seed the sustainable future, with what we have at our disposal now, in the present.

The startling array of concerns, perils, styles, ideas, crises, and best efforts, flowing together, could seem at times an unwieldy array of competing claims on our attention or our faith. But somehow, maybe because there is no other way, the future as seen from the real danger of extreme crisis comes to include illuminated approaches, that bridge gaps, heal fractures, draw from pools of shared awareness and reorient the mind to craft a more intelligent way forward.

There is a basic parallel between the growth of the individual mind, the salvage of a desolate spirit, and the process to which democracy, as a way of life and on the plane of ideals, of necessity, tends. The ability to reinvent a problem, so it can be better dealt with, to reinvent a social environment, so it can better adapt, to reinvent the meaning of government or principle or hope or failure, the ability to redefine crisis, is stitched into the process of changing a government, casting a vote for a philosophy about the future.

So, asking your forgiveness for the indulgent streak running through this essay, I return to the original question: what will this turning bring? We can see a new boldness, a feeling that somehow, it is necessary to filter the foreground from the background noise, to make a sincere effort at renewal, to put faith in actual human beings to do right by their fellow citizens.

We should see, coming into being, in coming months and years, new political coalitions, new social organizations, visions that seed the cultural landscape for improvement, working to ensure that the lessons for democracy that we now have at hand can actually be remembered, examined, and practiced. This is a time in which the aspirational and the factual can actually be seen coming together, in which we have given ourselves room to breathe, because we have trusted in the possibility of working to bring the real substance of a better day into being.

TheHotSpring.com :: Complexity is not an outlandish tendency of troubled souls and pretentious intellects; it is the basic state of nature as we know it. The more we discover, the more certain we can be of this: even elemental particles are less solid than they seem, behaving like tightly bound arrangements of spherical bodies —irreducible monads—, they apparently achieve this physics by behaving like something they are not (now widely accepted in particle physics, “string theory” proposes that elemental particles are actually 2-dimensional vibrating “strings” whose vibration causes them to interact as if they were not strings at all).

The human body is an astonishingly complex organism, programming with viral code (DNA) the arrangement, development and physical or chemical task assigned to each cell, organ and extremity. The brain is so complex, we can only begin to grasp it as “circuitry”, though it processes information through chemical processes that allow it to achieve many millions of times more computational capacity than even the most advanced neural networks. Consciousness is part of this, or is the result of this, but we can say almost nothing with certainty about how consciousness itself arises.

For many, the mystical or spirital approach still yields the best explanation: a force more powerful than the sum of all things, a conscious creator, a God, an energy field that pervades and unites all other phenomena. Jean-Luc Marion calls it the <em>saturated phenomenon</em>: that reality so vast it could never be approached by human understanding, which is quickly saturated and overwhelmed by all the lesser component phenomena, and which —as limited by time and mortality, by the laws of physics, which prevent simultane multifocal presence, being in two places at once— cannot possibly acquire enough information to even initiate a viable definition of what lies beyond saturation.

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But, we now understand that simple complexities abound, even within reach of our limited phenomenological potential: five senses feed into one consciousness, which also in optimal conditions absorbs information through language, through text, by way of human gestures, settings, emotions, by fearing and desiring, by approaching or getting distance from an object of its attention, by creating, by dissecting, by appreciating or by competing with other realities. The depth of that “other reality”, the reality of the vast multiplicity of otherness, existing “out there”, but also deep within the basic structure of our body, our physical existence, our chemical awareness of self, that complexity is the lifeblood of what makes being human more interesting to us than being a mass of granite.

In this light, complexity is really a fundamental truth for us all, and as such is increasingly a <em>right</em> of every conscious individual. We are entitled to experience, to seek to know, to indulge in and to express complexity, <em>entitled</em> because complexity is what the human life is made of. Simplicity, or the “simple life” as it is often called, a life away from the chaos of big cities, even the aesthetics of “clean edges” or a so-called minimalist style, are all complexities designed by the individual or by human surroundings, to indulge an aspect of our humanity that we prize above others.

In the complex and intertwined human relationships that comprise today’s global village, in friendships that exist across far borders, as with diplomatic negotiations, we can find there is something deeper and more true, more accurately applicable to the human element in that connection, in the contradictions, in the vast terrain of “gray area”, in the relational vortex that is neither black-and-white nor non-negotiable. We find that one moment’s staple truth is another moment’s straightjacket, that we evolve, not just as a species, but as individual spirits, to consume and to make contact with an ever-broader range of information —not so we can be corrupted and post-modernized, but rather—, so we can better adapt to environmental factors, and carry out the natural imperative of survival and procreation.

Natural ecosystems depend upon a bewildering degree of complexity to remain dynamic, adaptable, resilient. The degree of elasticity in an ecosystem —its ability to absorb harmful interactions or infusions of matter or energy— determines its “fitness” for survival in the wilds of geological changes over time. Climate variations and intrusive organisms can upend a seemingly balanced and harmonious ecosystem suddenly, leading to disaster for its most habitat-dependent species; the degree of biodiversity, of food-web complexity, of climate-elastic characteristics, determines the long-term viability of an ecosystem, and by extension the possibility for relative homeostasis in surrounding ecosystems or the broader natural environment.

This elasticity issue also affects directly how human civilization is able to interact with the natural environment. Where monoculture cropping exists, meaning only one variety of a given species of plant is cultivated, an entire agricultural economy can be in danger of sudden collapse, as happened in Ireland in the 19th century, due to its dependence on a single variety of potato. All human activities depend on the persistence of natural “services” that emerge from complex webs of relational phenomena — basically, for example: <em>what happens to rainwater after it hits the ground, how much is absorbed into the soil? or runs to the sea? what force does this give to river currents across a given region?</em>

We cannot say that poverty is caused by ignorance or by negligence or by laziness. We cannot say that wealth is caused by knowledge or by perseverance or by merit. There is no clear answer to such questions, because the relational data is so multifaceted, so layered, so many-threaded and intertwined, it is effectively impossible to make singular declarative statements of universal truth that ably define all related circumstances. So we must travel to the frontiers of our awareness, and seek out the best and newest information, the closest thing we can get to the actual experience of another point of view, and we must shape composite ideas, that play well in our own and in others’ narratives.

Without this ability to work through the complexities of plural-interest relationships, we cannot ably locate or respect the freedom of the other, which means in a world now globally interconnected, we cannot guarantee our own. Science is demonstrating that, while elegant theories can be crafted to make universal statements of fact —E=mc2, for instance, or the idea that all matter is really just impossibly minuscule vibrating strings—, complexity is better able to explain what really is the truth of the physical universe than is simplicity.

Our choice is to understand that we must never stop inquiring, we must never claim there is nothing more to learn, and embrace complexity and the work of living within it, or ignore it, build up superstitious complaints against its effects, and hope for the best. Technology has reached a level of complexity such that most people could not fashion from scratch most of the basic tools they use to get through their everyday existence: this is a demonstration of complexity, both the virtue of its vast efficacy and the difficulty of its dominion over us. The right approach to complexity is the thing we must pursue, not the means by which to erase it from our consciousness.

“On Laze & Malaise in Mass Culture, Part”

[Part 1 :: Part 2 :: Part 3 :: Part 4]

Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.

Without variety, there would be only pure uniformity. All of existence would be one: one mass, with no constituent particles, with no variation of properties, no mobility and no place to go besides. Without the interaction among particles, among diverse forms, forces, materials and beings, nothing of the universe we know could exist. It is the collision, the mechanics, the action and reaction, the combination and differentiation among existent bodies that makes life, gravity, beauty, freedom and invention possible. Within the intelligent recourse to variety, there exists for humanity a maximum possibility for resilience in changing and adverse conditions. Inherent in this variety of choice is not only existence, but the possibility of freedom. Choice is not freedom as such, but together with intellect, offers us the possibility of really approaching it.

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In the spirit of this re-examination of what wealth is, we need to take into account the attributes that help to locate, formulate and communicate knowledge. Eloquence is wealth, as it represents an intelligent sorting and refinement of vastly diverse ideas and elements of the surrounding world, offering clarity, harmony, and again, the possibility of freedom, through the use of cultural knowledge and variety for the most inventive yet apt expression of human reality. Precise expression of complex ideas liberates the individual, and eloquence is more what it aims to be when it speaks the truth, its options expanded — so in the best case, it is a measure of the potential for liberation through ideas, in any given context.

The Declaration of Independence or Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech are eloquent not merely as expert wordsmithy, but because they transmit transcendent truths, and they comment on evidence of what most needs addressing: truth upon truth, distilled into fluid language, freeing the mind to believe in hard-won solutions. Barack Obama’s use of language falls into these transcendent categories: it is important to recognize that what his campaign has injected into American politics is not flowery rhetoric or ideological fluff, but a very real contact with the urge to get at, make sense of and share through the use of language, those timeless truths about the human condition that give democracy its purpose.

It could be said that all social ills are the direct result of insufficient communicative agreements between and among individual people and the constituents they represent, whatever the political structure within which those ills arise. It could be said that most political structures are the direct result of insufficient eloquence, having led to the use of force where it would otherwise not be suggested at all. In order to engage in dialogue, or in heated disagreement, we need to have an agreed semantic base, use shared measurements, make common assumptions about the world —we live on the Earth, it is round, it has a geological history, there were civilizations that pre-date our own, trees that shed their leaves in winter and those that don’t are categorically different—, so at least we know what concepts we agree or disagree over.

Culture, the vague and potent mix of ideas, traditions, changes, principles, language, will and expression, which defines all civil structures and to some degree all human communication, is an abstract category within which we conceptualize the intelligent diversity of a society. The more numerous the contributions, the more tolerant and open the means of administering and delivering cultural expressions of all sorts, the more knowledge there is available, the more possibility for new directions there is, the more resilient a system of human interaction within which those cultural expressions occur, will be. To benefit from such diverse inputs, from such productive oppositions, frictions and propositions, is to gain vital cultural and organizational resilience, to increase the wealth —as against decay— of a community, is to project its future potential as far as  possible, in as many directions as possible.

This may appear to be a redefinition of wealth, but it represents nothing more than honest thought about thought itself and its central and unimpeachable role in every individual human being’s life and navigation through life, and by extension the role that diverse and adaptable thought processes play in the life of a community, culture or nation. To address the faultlines where we find our political faith cracking, or to heal the wounds and cleanse the infections that seem to be inviting a long-term economic decay, we need to privilege the access to knowledge, but also to the ability to develop, disseminate, modify, adapt and expand it, for the overall wealth of a nation, a culture, a community, and the realm of individual freedom itself.

• Part 1: With or Without Ideas
• Part 2: Navigational Tools (Point of View)
• Part 3: Fate, Victimization & Sovereignty
• Part 4: Do we have an academic culture?
• Part 5: Culture & Resilience: a Redefinition of Wealth

[from Cave Painting, at Casavaria]

ThoughtPossible.com :: It is often lamented that the United States suffers from a culture that plays to the “lowest common denominator”, even as it gathers its collective urges to proclaim the loftiest of philosophical aspirations. So we are forced, as citizens, as intellectuals, as free spirits —as followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson or of Kerouac, Jerry Springer or Madonna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.— to grapple with the argument that American culture is inherently “anti-intellectual”, and therefore unable to deal with overtly complex thought patterns, or convoluted, multiply parenthetical (or as Woody Allen might say it, polymorphously nested) sorts of syntax.

The first argument I would make against this is that we have produced too many resonant intellectuals to be a society that does not value, seek and promote intellectual behavior. We can go back to our founders: Franklin, Jefferson, Adams (let’s not forget Abigail), Madison, Hamilton: each of these were serious intellectual heavyweights, using a deep understanding of millennia of philosophy, science and politics, to approach the formation of a nation “of ideas”. In the environment, we have others like Thomas Paine, whose intellectual treatise (necessary to our revolution as other treatises have been to others throughout history) helped to motivate mass support for a revolution based on ideas.

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Paine’s “Common Sense” is arguably the most important “pamphlet” ever distributed anywhere, its achievement the distilling of heroically complex meditations about the nature of human beings, power and society, into a vernacular that not only made them accessible, but took the reader deeper into the personal relevance of those ideas. It is hard to overestimate the achievement of the work as writing, but what is truly astounding is the degree to which Paine’s contribution demonstrates that the United States of America was founded as a nation loyal to specific intellectual examinations of the world and its contents.

Frederick Douglass, a great American statesman, orator and author, was the first African American US ambassador, named by Abraham Lincoln as our first envoy to the independent nation of Haiti, 60 years after it declared independence from the French empire. Douglass was an ex-slave, and an intellectual. His case is known because of the work he did to make it known, by developing his intellectual abilities and by courageously touring the Union to make the case for abolition. The greatness of Frederick Douglass, his place of pride in our nation’s turbid history, is not down to his having escaped slavery, for others did that, but to his passionate intellectual pursuit of a yet-unrealized world of truth and justice.

Soundbite journalism, writing to the headline, making every turn of phrase another “hook” to stop the reader’s eye from wandering to something less tiring, is, I think, the main reason why such writing strategies appear necessary. A lack of complex, deeply relevant writing, is what pushes the best-soundbite headline to the forefront of our collective awareness. Not its inherent usefulness or interest. The potent soundbite headline is usually also the thesis statement of its attached text, meaning the argument is already made and understood and the reading seems, ultimately, either disappointing or unnecessary. So the mind becomes accustomed to wandering, incessantly.

The parenthetical expression —and I recognize the irony involved in taking so long to get to this point (part of me would like to think it was an artful wordplay, but it’s just the nature of this discussion)— is not about lateral movement, distraction, or fuzzy disinterested over-intellectualizing… it’s about going deeper. In Arabic folk tales, going back to ancient times, the oral tradition is “knit” into the fabric of a story, so that history and wisdom can be passed down through time, by way of wholecloth parenthetical renderings of a tale within a tale. One character tells a story, within which another character tells a story, and by the end, you must re-emerge, layer by layer, back to the surface, so that the entire story is cohesive, a closed circuit, comprehensible.

One can easily get lost —as with the complex familial relations spelled out by the long lists of three-part names at the beginning of many Russian novels, or the indulgent lyrical descriptions of landscape, manners and quotidian minutia, found in so many classical American or English novels— at any point in the descent into or re-emergence from the inner folktales, but they play a vital role in the memory-game that is oral tradition, the telling of a culture, the making and conveyance of ideas. Not just moral codes, but tested truths, aesthetic preferences, the cadence of language, are all captured by these techniques, and the story is made ever more relevant.

The 1,001 Arabian Nights is this kind of story. It is a single harmonious ship of narrative, within which we find stowed away a myriad —vastly more than 1,001— of vignettes, crucibles of faith and conflict, loves and narrow escapes, recounted for so many reasons that one quickly loses count. But we still value this collection of masterful stories today, because it works. The underlying wisdom here is that meaning is always layered: one meaning cloaks another, necessarily, or to put it another way, we often cannot see the forest for the trees. What focuses our attention also narrows our focus, in most cases, so the ability to first focus, then go deeper, allows us to also expand the ground our thought-processes can cover, without letting go of the original narrative.

If we shy away from phrases within phrases, from departures from the scene from within the scene, if we turn our backs to the Grand Canyon, at its very edge, we might be in danger of forgetting what gravity does to off-balance objects: to look at what we have before us, even in the midst of another tale, is not to lose touch with our preferred reality, but to know more clearly what surrounds and limits us. To do this is, frankly, to limit our freedom in a comprehensive way, and it is a caging in from which we cannot easily escape, perhaps not without the ability to imitate the liberating journey of telling the tales of the 1,001 nights, for that was the purpose of the surface-level narrative of the captive Sheherazade.

The meandering narrative, the open book, the chronicle of river systems of the everyday human, is our model of a free press, a decentralized, layered non-hierarchical web of meaning and fact, interrelated, referential, critical, and of necessity: parenthetical. We have retired our gaze from the most potent truth about our culture, when we propose that long, difficult reasoning is somehow contrary to our nature, when we forget that thousands of physicists among us have devoted their lives to the search for maddeningly, almost impossibly complex truths, at the level of elementary particles, that their minds are working to help our society as a whole keep pace with the complex aspirations we conjure up in our daily slog.

If we are afraid to go deeper within the body of any given thought or meditation, then we should put aside the undulating history of ideas, of instructive departures from simple clarity about those ideas, the violent clash of philosophies that plays out civilly in our judicial system, that is sometimes begrudgingly slow, but deliberate enough to give us back what we put into the system, our belief in common ideas, the patience to wade through the eddies and inconsquence of meantime arguments. If we are afraid to hash out our meditations in the school of layered and interlacing discussions of ideas, then we negate the fundamentally free-to-parenthesize nature of the American intellectual, and we give in to the temptation to negate our origins and believe again in the simplicity of a dangerous feudal clarity.

Order from simplicity is not the strength of the American system or the American mind; quite the contrary, we have fashioned our improbable experiment precisely to be resilient in the face of and even inviting to the expansive riches of infuriating complexity, of living in the gray area, keeping afloat in the mind-meld, working to craft individuality always from the omnibus of overarching concerns. We have sought nobility of spirit in the dignified complexity of those minds that have shaped our history, those heroic feats of imagining that have ushered in one after another bold new era of resonant upheaval. Without departing from our basic interest in the ideals of a free society.

We are, in short, parenthetical to our own narrative, which is to say, highly inclusive, overwrought with the prospect of being forbidden to be so, and in each individual, we are as such a universe of pretensions and hopes and relations, which for all our protesting to the contrary, desires the room complexity affords us for personal expansion. We should return to an awareness of the value of complexity in language, and use our trust in fact and truth-telling to reinvigorate the culture of reporting and comment, which has in recent years, been so corroded as to assert its right to infinite over-simplification, regardless of all that would deprive us of living.

I want to write about hope, about the nature of optimism and how closely linked the quality of imagination is to our ability to conceive of, work for and see through meaningful improvements to the human condition. I want to write about it because it is such a vital commodity in our times, such a spiritual enigma and a challenge to our political systems, but then one glaring fact becomes clear that seems to limit what can be said about hope: that vital spiritual resource does not stand alone, but is linked in every case to human specifics, inseparable from what we seek to apply to it, and so hope is different to all people, even in its most essential manifestations.

For some, hope is a question of finding belief, finding vision, finding willpower, in the abstract, in the nested particulars of inner life; for some, it is about what comes before finding, on the way to resolution or achievement, the summoning, the calling forth of energy and possibility; for others it is about what summoning does for the one who issues the call, how that act translates into hope. And still others find it to be the distilled question of will it or will it not work out: if so, then I can believe; if not, then all is lost and the human condition is hopeless.

It is easy to discourage those actively searchng for hope, because it is most necessary and most applicable precisely when events seem least hopeful, and because we forget, with equal parts frequency and convenience, that what has happened is not and never was the only thing that could have happened. We imagine that a negative result occurs because it was 100% likely to occur, even though a small amount of effort, concentrated or otherwise, may have made almost any other outcome more likely. We forget to examine the landscape and reformulate the potential enclosed in the unrealized past-future.

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It is easy to say that all good things come to an end and that entropy is the basic direction of all things, simple or complex… but that reading really depends on timescales, metabolism and intent: all biological organisms, all solar systems, eventually break down, all concentrations of energy eventually come apart, but it is worth noting how successfully energy and matter first self-organize, how star systems and life forms first come together in astonishing utilitarian precision and complexity, with purpose and efficiency, each part playing a role that benefits other segments of the system so that the whole might exist at all.

Is that a tragic thing, or a stroke of incredible, incalculable good fortune? How can we who survive to speak, as cynically or hopefully as we see fit, not see some heartbreaking beauty in the functional fragility of what we are?

So, to write about hope is to write about the fact that it is a question and not an answer, that it cannot exist if not enmeshed with the specifics of what we suffer or strive for, that it springs from our recognizing that questions, obstacles and uncertainty are not dread irreparable crises but part of what brings forth the value of the good in life, that to face questions, to sink into doubt and to recoil against loss, is not to be lost, but to be involved in the same summoning of what comes next, that plays out in hoping.

Before entropy and disintegration, there was a healthy metabolism of self-organization, interstellar atomic elements coming together to make the soft tissue and the dreaming life of a human being, made from the inheritance of so many prior generations: why do we so easily forget how valuable that has been to us? Before admittedly taking the “wrong road”, there were right choices: why do we not go back and explore some of these, turn ourselves over to the fact that possibility does not cease altogether with a single mistake or an unwilled bad outcome?

Is it determinism, or a misapplication of religious spiritual traditions, that makes us believe that everything is pre-scripted, intended from a distant original urging, that we have no choice, that vision after-the-fact is somehow more divine than vision in-the-moment? The pressure to demonstrate control over events leads us to believe that it would be rational to claim control over events, and this can lead to a flawed application of the intellect to working out the problems at hand, undermining our agility and imagination instead of feeding into them.

Hope is not a mystical reality, not an elixir, not a character trait; it is a process of thinking toward, in living time, the ways in which what should be better might be. Hope is not a blind or blissed-out waiting-game for easy luck; it is a process of claiming responsibility for the energy and the material action that in often halting steps, in often turbulent surroundings, bring us closer to what we aspire to. Hope is not merely a solemn prayer for a best result when all factors of circumstance are beyond our control; it is overcoming the problem of control, robbing Fate of its false power and starting from the place where you are.

Give to barrows, trays, and pans
Grace and glimmer of romance;
Bring the moonlight into noon
Hid in gleaming piles of stone;
On the city’s paved street
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet;
Let spouting fountains cool the air,
Singing in the sun-baked square;
Let statue, picture, park, and hall,
Ballad, flag, and festival,
The past restore, the day adorn,
And make each morrow a new morn.
So shall the drudge in dusty frock
Spy behind the city clock
Retinues of airy kings,
Skirts of angels, starry wings,
His fathers shining in bright fables,
His children fed at heavenly tables.
‘T is the privilege of Art
Thus to play its cheerful part,
Man in Earth to acclimate,
And bend the exile to his fate,
And, moulded of one element
With the days and firmament,
Teach him on these as stairs to climb,
And live on even terms with Time;
Whilst upper life the slender rill
Of human sense doth overfill.

Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the popular distinction of works according to their aim, either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim. In landscapes, the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the landscape has beauty for his eye, because it expresses a thought which is to him good: and this, because the same power which sees through his eyes, is seen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of nature, and not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy, the features that please him. He will give the gloom of gloom, and the sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait, he must inscribe the character, and not the features, and must esteem the man who sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within.

What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler symbols. What is a man but nature’s finer success in self-explication? What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape than the horizon figures, — nature’s eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love of painting, love of nature, but a still finer success? all the weary miles and tons of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of it contracted into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the pencil?

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But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation, to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the work, and gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as the spiritual character of the period overpowers the artist, and finds expression in his work, so far it will retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite exclude this element of Necessity from his labor. No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share. Though he were never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will, and out of his sight, he is necessitated, by the air he breathes, and the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times, without knowing what that manner is. Now that which is inevitable in the work has a higher charm than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artist’s pen or chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history of the human race. This circumstance gives a value to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese, and Mexican idols, however gross and shapeless. They denote the height of the human soul in that hour, and were not fantastic, but sprung from a necessity as deep as the world. Shall I now add, that the whole extant product of the plastic arts has herein its highest value, _as history_; as a stroke drawn in the portrait of that fate, perfect and beautiful, according to whose ordinations all beings advance to their beatitude?

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is carved and painted, as students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our happiness and unhappiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a pleasing trance, but his individual character and his practical power depend on his daily progress in the separation of things, and dealing with one at a time. Love and all the passions concentrate all existence around a single form. It is the habit of certain minds to give an all-excluding fulness to the object, the thought, the word, they alight upon, and to make that for the time the deputy of the world. These are the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. The power to detach, and to magnify by detaching, is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object, — so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle, — the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. The power depends on the depth of the artist’s insight of that object he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world. Therefore, each work of genius is the tyrant of the hour, and concentrates attention on itself. For the time, it is the only thing worth naming to do that, — be it a sonnet, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, of a campaign, or of a voyage of discovery. Presently we pass to some other object, which rounds itself into a whole, as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden: and nothing seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens. I should think fire the best thing in the world, if I were not acquainted with air, and water, and earth. For it is the right and property of all natural objects, of all genuine talents, of all native properties whatsoever, to be for their moment the top of the world. A squirrel leaping from bough to bough, and making the wood but one wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion, — is beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature. A good ballad draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done before. A dog, drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies, and is a reality not less than the frescoes of Angelo. From this succession of excellent objects, we learn at last the immensity of the world, the opulence of human nature, which can run out to infinitude in any direction. But I also learn that what astonished and fascinated me in the first work astonished me in the second work also; that excellence of all things is one.

The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes which make up the ever-changing “landscape with figures” amidst which we dwell. Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and, as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw every thing, why draw any thing? and then is my eye opened to the eternal picture which nature paints in the street with moving men and children, beggars, and fine ladies, draped in red, and green, and blue, and gray; long-haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish, — capped and based by heaven, earth, and sea.

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the same lesson. As picture teaches the coloring, so sculpture the anatomy of form. When I have seen fine statues, and afterwards enter a public assembly, I understand well what he meant who said, “When I have been reading Homer, all men look like giants.” I too see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of its function. There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What a gallery of art have I here! No mannerist made these varied groups and diverse original single figures. Here is the artist himself improvising, grim and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes him, now another, and with each moment he alters the whole air, attitude, and expression of his clay. Away with your nonsense of oil and easels, of marble and chisels: except to open your eyes to the masteries of eternal art, they are hypocritical rubbish.

The reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power explains the traits common to all works of the highest art, — that they are universally intelligible; that they restore to us the simplest states of mind; and are religious. Since what skill is therein shown is the reappearance of the original soul, a jet of pure light, it should produce a similar impression to that made by natural objects. In happy hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected, — the work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the highest charm is the universal language they speak. A confession of moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes from them all. That which we carry to them, the same we bring back more fairly illustrated in the memory. The traveller who visits the Vatican, and passes from chamber to chamber through galleries of statues, vases, sarcophagi, and candelabra, through all forms of beauty, cut in the richest materials, is in danger of forgetting the simplicity of the principles out of which they all sprung, and that they had their origin from thoughts and laws in his own breast. He studies the technical rules on these wonderful remains, but forgets that these works were not always thus constellated; that they are the contributions of many ages and many countries; that each came out of the solitary workshop of one artist, who toiled perhaps in ignorance of the existence of other sculpture, created his work without other model, save life, household life, and the sweet and smart of personal relations, of beating hearts, and meeting eyes, of poverty, and necessity, and hope, and fear. These were his inspirations, and these are the effects he carries home to your heart and mind. In proportion to his force, the artist will find in his work an outlet for his proper character. He must not be in any manner pinched or hindered by his material, but through his necessity of imparting himself the adamant will be wax in his hands, and will allow an adequate communication of himself, in his full stature and proportion. He need not cumber himself with a conventional nature and culture, nor ask what is the mode in Rome or in Paris, but that house, and weather, and manner of living which poverty and the fate of birth have made at once so odious and so dear, in the gray, unpainted wood cabin, on the corner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of the backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he has endured the constraints and seeming of a city poverty, will serve as well as any other condition as the symbol of a thought which pours itself indifferently through all.

I remember, when in my younger days I had heard of the wonders of Italian painting, I fancied the great pictures would be great strangers; some surprising combination of color and form; a foreign wonder, barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons and standards of the militia, which play such pranks in the eyes and imaginations of school-boys. I was to see and acquire I knew not what. When I came at last to Rome, and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierced directly to the simple and true; that it was familiar and sincere; that it was the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms, — unto which I lived; that it was the plain _you and me_ I knew so well, — had left at home in so many conversations. I had the same experience already in a church at Naples. There I saw that nothing was changed with me but the place, and said to myself, — ‘Thou foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over four thousand miles of salt water, to find that which was perfect to thee there at home?’ — that fact I saw again in the Academmia at Naples, in the chambers of sculpture, and yet again when I came to Rome, and to the paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci. “What, old mole! workest thou in the earth so fast?” It had travelled by my side: that which I fancied I had left in Boston was here in the Vatican, and again at Milan, and at Paris, and made all travelling ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent example of this peculiar merit. A calm, benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name. The sweet and sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise, yet how it disappoints all florid expectations! This familiar, simple, home-speaking countenance is as if one should meet a friend. The knowledge of picture-dealers has its value, but listen not to their criticism when your heart is touched by genius. It was not painted for them, it was painted for you; for such as had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and lofty emotions.

Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we must end with a frank confession, that the arts, as we know them, are but initial. Our best praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of the resources of man, who believes that the best age of production is past. The real value of the Iliad, or the Transfiguration, is as signs of power; billows or ripples they are of the stream of tendency; tokens of the everlasting effort to produce, which even in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art has not yet come to its maturity, if it do not put itself abreast with the most potent influences of the world, if it is not practical and moral, if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it do not make the poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art than the arts. They are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end. A man should find in it an outlet for his whole energy. He may paint and carve only as long as he can do that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new artists.

Already History is old enough to witness the old age and disappearance of particular arts. The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect. It was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a savage’s record of gratitude or devotion, and among a people possessed of a wonderful perception of form this childish carving was refined to the utmost splendor of effect. But it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labor of a wise and spiritual nation. Under an oak-tree loaded with leaves and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes, I stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works of our plastic arts, and especially of sculpture, creation is driven into a corner. I cannot hide from myself that there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as of toys, and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. Nature transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret we do not yet find. But the gallery stands at the mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it becomes frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton, with an attention habitually engaged on the paths of planets and suns, should have wondered what the Earl of Pembroke found to admire in “stone dolls.” Sculpture may serve to teach the pupil how deep is the secret of form, how purely the spirit can translate its meanings into that eloquent dialect. But the statue will look cold and false before that new activity which needs to roll through all things, and is impatient of counterfeits, and things not alive. Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form. But true art is never fixed, but always flowing. The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with these. All works of art should not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or a romance.

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy to declare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy its separate and contrasted existence. The fountains of invention and beauty in modern society are all but dried up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-room makes us feel that we are all paupers in the alms-house of this world, without dignity, without skill, or industry. Art is as poor and low. The old tragic Necessity, which lowers on the brows even of the Venuses and the Cupids of the antique, and furnishes the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalous figures into nature, — namely, that they were inevitable; that the artist was drunk with a passion for form which he could not resist, and which vented itself in these fine extravagances, — no longer dignifies the chisel or the pencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now seek in art the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from the evils of life. Men are not well pleased with the figure they make in their own imaginations, and they flee to art, and convey their better sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same effort which a sensual prosperity makes; namely, to detach the beautiful from the useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty from use, the laws of nature do not permit. As soon as beauty is sought, not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High beauty is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in stone, in sound, or in lyrical construction; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is all that can be formed; for the hand can never execute any thing higher than the character can inspire.

The art that thus separates is itself first separated. Art must not be a superficial talent, but must begin farther back in man. Now men do not see nature to be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and inconvertible, and console themselves with color-bags, and blocks of marble. They reject life as prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic. They despatch the day’s weary chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. They eat and drink, that they may afterwards execute the ideal. Thus is art vilified; the name conveys to the mind its secondary and bad senses; it stands in the imagination as somewhat contrary to nature, and struck with death from the first. Would it not be better to begin higher up, — to serve the ideal before they eat and drink; to serve the ideal in eating and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions of life? Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish the one from the other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and road-side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious heart it will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint-stock company, our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist’s retort, in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, — to mills, railways, and machinery, — the effect of the mercenary impulses which these works obey? When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.

New York is a place where everything is just a little off kilter, pushed and angled by unwavering momentum, but there is flow and the hope of flow working in the depths of personal metaphysical craft, there is the dewy first light of possibility and the wisdom of the tempest-tossed, if —as Kipling says it— “you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”.

The city breathes and compresses, inhabits and yearns, makes patterns and delights in the rupture of unnecessary patterning, it aspires abruptly, consistently, and seeks self-definition, is wounded and implored and billowing with the call for anything more like or less like its oblique time-wary self-fashioning : every woman is a woman and brings all the joys and abilities of woman to the metaphysical calamity of feasting, and every man is a man and brings all the hardships and fantasies of man to the physical incarnation of the feasting dance : no matter what harangues and woodjumbles, what indelicate armors or ill-encumbered sanctities we assign them on first or second sight, or on the last flitting edge of visual contact, the tired judgment, the game of collapse collapsing within and draining away the sound and the sense of things, pushes for an even score, and then beyond into something more complicated, more unabashed.

It is an other-world, a mix of cultures, of acute binging instances of culture beginning, a weave of timing and tempo, of taste and absence, a place where solitude bleeds into reflection, concept, the sticky whimsy of a place that is also a form of place, a soughtafter lover for the placeseekers, a continuation of inward lacking and of the rhythms of spheres of memory and indication, halfway between being-here and not-being.

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Everyone is alone in the world, separate from all else, at all times, and never truly capable of saying with certainty that things could be otherwise. This is both a fundamental existential problem and a flawed way of looking at human relationships. It is true: each individual is separated from the world by his or her perceptions, but: there is a reason why human beings cooperate, why we integrate ourselves into larger social fabrics, why we maintain relationships from birth to death, or for as long as possible.

We are “social beings” is a common way of saying it. The human being is the “grammatical ape”, a talkative species that uses codified sounds to create and transmit meaning and to build a community of individuals, ideas and voices, in which the individual can benefit from having connections as well. The “human” is an idea, not a fact, another way of looking at things, and so we should not even go as far as to say that the individual is apart from everything else, as we cannot define totally what it is that makes us a group in which that is true, aside from DNA and appearances.

These are all cultural refrains that repeat themselves in sometimes subtle, sometimes unsubtle ways. But the key to this examination is the problem of solitude, isolation, abandonment: what barriers are there to reaching a level of connection and reliability in one’s relationships, or at least in most important one(s), that allows one to feel that not everyone is alone, but there are bonds, safe spaces, enduring affections, and constructive complexity in human relationships?

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The first barrier is the idea itself: everyone is alone… this seems true, and it is true that everyone, probably by the nature of human awareness and perception, must experience this, sometimes. But what does that really mean? The 9th century Chinese zen master, Huang Po has been translated as having said to a student of the zen way:

Once you stop arousing concepts and thinking in terms of existence and non-existence, long and short, other and self, active and passive, and suchlike, you will find that your Mind is intrinsically the Buddha, that the Buddha is intrinsically Mind, and that Mind resembles a void.

Huang Po’s words relate to the idea of “Buddha” as absolute enlightenment, and Mind as the realm in which one moves either closer to or further away from that enlightenment. “Void” is not a negation, it is not a vacuum, in zen thought, but means “beyond tangible perception”. It means that the truth as such can be conceptualized for the convenience of human thought, but that conceptualizations are not the truth, as such.

So, are we alone? How do we know? Does our perception, or our mind, hold this evidence? And if so, is it reliable? To each of these points, it is possible to respond by saying “possibly”. There are moments in which we are without substantive human contact, in a moment, or in a specific activity, and we must find a way to share our truth with others, if we desire to. We are alone. But this is not a permanent state of being, and it is not, ultimately, the truth of things.

Our perception notes in such cases that we are out of touch, we are without immediate open connections, we are alone, but this is not the only truth. We are also in touch, we are also, in most cases, close to part of our own story which is bound up with human connections, and which we cannot keep from view, not entirely. We are known, to some degree, and that knowledge, in the experience of those we have come in contact with, is part of who we are.

We cannot always access it, and the feeling of being unable to influence how that information is received, stored or called up, by the other, can be a kind of existential solitude that troubles the soul, deeply. But it is not necessarily that way, because the experience that in such a case manifests itself as frustration is shared with other people, though each person lives it in their own way, often away from the perception of others.

It is this distance between the perception in its moment and the perception as experienced, the one relating closely to a complex array of interpersonal circumstances, and the other held back from that closeness of contact by the vastness of what is not certain about that intermediate terrain between one and the other.

So, we must first ask ourselves what is the truth of an experience of absolute perception. Camus writes that:

La première démarche de l’esprit est de distinguer ce qui est vrai de ce qui est faux. Pourtant dès que la pensée réfléchit sur elle même, ce qu’elle découvre d’abord, c’est une contradiction. Inutile de s’efforcer ici d’être convaincant.

So perception of the self is by its own nature “unconvincing”. It is rooted in the inherently unconvincing nature of fact-perception itself: to perceive is to cross a distance, and so to become aware of separation, but to perceive humanity, whether in oneself or in another, is a kind of closing of that distance, a transmission of an implausible inner reality in which that distance is shared, and so is an experience of proximity. A contradiction.

As we seek to impose on our perception the task of proving its distance from the world it perceives —prove its ability to discern not only true from false, but also self from surroundings—, we fall into a trap of far-reaching consequences: any such judgment is inherently incomplete. Because the mind assembles all perceived reality always within reach of its own perceptive capacity, it can only truly perceive itself, not the real place of what lies beyond it.

So yes, in this way, we are always detached from what we seek to know, and it is always possible to perceive that perceptual distance as a void, unyielding and uncrossable, but in this, we are joined by all perceptual beings. The sensation of a deep existential aloneness is not so much a study of the facts as it is an awareness of the nature of human consciousness not meeting our most overwhelming desires.

It is important to get a sense of the limits of perception and immediate communication, so that we do not let the weight of untenable desires push our vision of the possibility of making contact with others over the line toward despair. That despair is another lie that emerges easily from adherence to desires with a distorted objective and from a misperception of perception itself.

In fact, there is room for a near total conversion of the traditional role assigned to perception: it is commonly professed that perception, via the senses and the mind, is intended to help us acquire knowledge of the world outside, but we could argue that percpetion is a mechanism for building the world of the self, within us. Not particularly ideal for mapping the full scope of the larger universe, our perception corresponds to our preferences about the inner world in which we make sense of the outer world.

The senses do give us the ability to assess our environment, to catch danger in our consciousness before it is too close, to navigate toward sustenance and away from mortal threats, but perception as a whole functions more as part of a project of making and maintaining a coherent, referential inner world, so the distance we perceive with concern in times of isolation is actually a vital element in the healthy functioning of an individual consciousness.

Everyone is alone, sometimes, when these difficult realities or our perceptual selfhood become all-too-evident, and it is possible to doubt what, if any, connection we have made with external entities —people, facts and resources—, each a stimulus, a reference and a ghost carrying meanings we can only suspect. But that aloneness is only a sometime interference in our more constant experience of being bound to those elements that provoke and inform our perception.

It is that complex intertwining of sameness and difference, of embrace and distance, of communication and isolation, that pushes us to defy the need for times of solitude, but which causes us to long for it when excess imposition from the exterior impedes our ability to discern what is true from what is not or what is our own from what is fed into our consciousness. Like dreaming, remembering or imagining, the experience of aloneness is a part of our lifelong project of crafting a personal consciousness of the world, a necessary element of the process, a gift as much as a burden.

The historic and landscape canvases of J.M.W. Turner have invaded the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a bath of vibrant color and the artist’s characteristic ability to paint the energy of forces converging in space and time. The exhibit is more than a mere retrospective; it will deliver to many visitors their first real taste of the pioneering British painter’s ambitious experiments with light, scale and texture, and it illustrates how his work informs many of the innovations that would later come in imrpessionist and avant-garde movements.

Turner’s early work looked to history and to dramatic natural scenes. With “Fall of the Reichenbach, in the Valley of the Oberhusli, Switzerland”, we find a powerful examination of the scale of nature and its meaning for the frail hope of humanity amidst its immense power. We see in deft combination the permanent masque of rock, the deep forgiving sky, the haunted intimacy of mist, a fervent beaming light, the impenetrability of nature’s organization at this place, the mystery of such providence, a vital softness that equates all beings facing the combination of forces, in sum, at the falls.

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We read that the artist has sought to convey the following:

philosopher Edmund Burke’s notion of the Sublime as the terror humans experience before the overpowering force of nature. The steep, rocky landscape —dominated by the 2,000-foot waterfall— towers over the shepherd and his flock.

And he has. It was Turner’s unique ability to perform these feats of historic ingenuity, of philosophical reflection, of commentary on the vast uncertainty of the fate of humanity, that made it possible for him to move so ably between depictions of daunting natural landscapes and crucial historic encounters, structures, or of monuments that mark the landscape of history. Turner was a translation, somewhat knowing, somewhat lonesome and unwitting, of the romantic movements, bold and garish, caught up with heroic resonance, into the impressionist, able to see without seeing, to envision the act of encountering light, shape and meaning in once complex interplay of phenomena.

In the painting “Temple of Jupiter Panhellenius, Restored”, Turner tempts us to share in a study of plenty, refinement, restoration, beauty. It is a song for the replenishment of the hungry soul, Bacchic festival, a ritual exploration of the romance of Narcissus, the elegance of natural light, architecture in its ancient aspiration and its nowaday claim to continuing. There is a question about the origin and the repetition, which means precisely that dewy elegance of the mind working on the environment, taking stock and shaping new directions, informed by experience.

It would be simple to say the painter could not be thinking these things as he worked to copy from his imagination the qualities of a now ruined ancient structure, but the restoration as presented is a sign of what is lacking and aspired to in a new modern age, a comment on the golden and the greener ages, the “aspirations of memory”, the hope of what a future of dreamscapes might be, if realized. What Turner does so well, thematically, is nest these questions in the visual landscape: what amount of courage is involved in recreating what once was emblematic of excellence? How to do it in a way that speaks today’s language?

“The Battle of Trafalgar”, the artist’s largest canvas, was painted from memory, from sketches, from other works, 14 years after the fact, under George IV. It is, for this reason, both heavily criticized on grounds of inaccuracy and heavily lauded for capturing the spirit of a moment that shocked the British world, jolted it with electric urges, and yet had become more mythology than history just a few years later. [continued below...]

In Turner’s rendition of the maritime battle, we find humanity falling out of the rigging, falling out of the human-built structures of intrigue, nation, contest, combat, value, propriety… humanly falling to the flaming tide… nature threatening to prove it is more vast, more patient, than so much bloodlust and gallantry. The battle is structured as if it were a whipping of plasmic amorphous agglomerations of human pretense and vehemence, a merengue of pale fire and clean light in which the fog of war and the mists of legend combine to tell of gain and loss together.

In this massive canvas and in his depiction of the event from the base of the mizen-mast on Nelson’s ship, we see Trafalgar is a pyrrhic victory: the loss of the heroic leader, the end of something and the edge of chaos, all telling a story about the years to come, at least as much as of the years preceding. There is a conception of what combat means, the failure of the human world to govern itself, to make sense of relations, attitudes, cravings… Turner’s approach to combat is simultaneously moralistic, Spartan and Baroque, insofar as this is possible.

In Turner’s depiction of combat, humanity crashes against itself with the violence of great tides and celestial fire, a storm of natural energy that breaks in a definitive way the everyday order of the human world: victory is loss, death is emergence, the aftermath is the manifestation of a tragic foreboding that ruled the preceding history, the vertigo of a great falls, the roaring isolation of that place of destiny where the falling river cascades into the mist of its own pools, the accretion of uncontainable irreconcilable forces, the explosion of sunlight coming through cloudscape.

Turner’s lyric “The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire” ventures into classical themes, historic-event landscapes, the old model of decorative masterworks, palatable from countless disciplines, and aims to bring to this art, now reshaped by techniques of the romantic movement, strains of perfect light, perfect atmosphere, the yellow glinting of departure, of ongoing, of the meaning of transition, surpassing, cycle and the setting sun. [continued below...]

As with the sun rising pale and hopeful in “Dido Building Carthage” (above), here we savor riches seen, unseen and expended, empire falling away before the brash caresses of sunlight. There are delicate precise lines and turbulent luminous mists, telling equal truths, at odds and in kinship with each other, alternating between the placid and the awesome. Turner’s narrative is housed in a passion for the expressive quality of the visible brush-stroke, the texture of the optical experience, dimension raised to the eye as against the predetermined meaning with which a place would have been invested by ambition, fortune and failure.

“The Tower of London” gives us a glimpse of how, for Turner, watercolor is more the art of seeing than is oil. This is because the colors must work together on a single plane of light and shadow. A color cannot be blended and reworked, kneaded obliquely into the desired hue. It is, or it isn’t, and when it isn’t, it’s already too late. Light is thinness; shade is density.

The piece tells us that landscape, for Turner, is not about what is seen, but about how it might be seen. It is not about perspective as much as it is about the layering of light, the problem of intervening shadows, the glazing and distortions presented by fog and weather. In “Approach to Venice”, the artist offers a palette of unabashed luminous spaces, gaseous parameters of world-making, and the sleek densities of the human hand, each working to reveal the muted auspices of a social urge, coming near to shore, the beginning of a day of trade, or a visit to foreign shores.

“Europa and the Bull” is an unfinished work, which is congruent with the origin myth. Europa is ravaged by the bull in which Apollo has manifest himself. The piece swims with Hindu and Hellenic underpinnings, that make the Christian narrative a weighty comment on the future evolution of Europe as a civilization, steeped in conflict, hoping for something more pure, more liberal, somehow free of the weight of its origins, free of the weight of its dark history, ready to engage the entire world in open dialogue.

Unfinished, the work speaks less plainly than it could of the artist’s intent. It is, in some ways, no more than a teasing of one of the lost origin myths, a study of social pretensions, a wishing in action… but there is room for speaking about the unfinished work as a new representation of Turner’s approach to light, as a comment on light itself: “Sunrise with Sea Monsters” is not only unfinished, its title is apocryphal, and relates only to what the posthumous viewer may think is the subject of the work.

This unfinished canvas opens onto the “role of the reader”, gives us a vision of light, water and life, a snapshot of multidimensional kinetic energy. Caught up in a lemon-ivory wash, a whirl of density at the center of the work was misread by the 20th century fascination with arbitrary harbingers of the unconscious, where life and motion, intent and accident become dark, monstrous hints of an unseen world. So the painting acquired its speculative moniker of “sunrise with sea monsters”.

Leaving the exhibit, I am overstimulated, have seen too much, have seen a ravishing exhibit that was just beginning to be born to this audience of the moment, to this New York phase in the life of the artist. I can safely say, anyone paying attention to what is on show here, will find their perception enriched, focused, and put on course to see deeper into the mythology of our moment and our collective comment on the art of perception. This, I think, was part of what Turner himself was working for all along.

The ‘hard truths’ are those that make us cringe, that give us pause and drive us to worry that we must ignore the truth or conceal it or find the most adequate disguise, even before our most intimate relations. They are a powerful driver of human behavior, and they often come into everyday conversations about the need to deal with problems or to assimilate a difficult emotional burden. The problem is: they don’t exist.

The so-called ‘hard truth’, alias: the ‘cruel reality’, is a myth that emerges from the feeling that there must be acceptable reasons for which the things we seek are unattainable. Those who rely on the argument that speaking of, reinforcing the power of, and accepting the supposed hard truths —those metaphysical bludgeons that permit no reflection or unpacking—, is a noble alternative to taking refuge in the projection of martyrdom, should remember it is in fact very much the same complex of psychological motivations.

The ‘hard truths’ we are so fond of claiming as both laws of the universe and as reasons we suffer hardship are an attempt, by way of false convergences, to impose absence on the awareness of presence, an attempt to enforce a regime of scarcity and nausea where there is otherwise the light of the human soul. When we feel the stinging absence of a generosity we seek, or which we have traveled long swaths of time believing will come to us, it is all too easy to claim omniscience and pronounce the eradication of emotional abundance, to preach to the world that the world is a dead place.

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The ‘hard truth’ purports to affirm that there is not emotional depth to be found beyond the reaches of one’s self: there are no dreaming souls, the ‘facts of life’ are a heap of cold calculations and desperate deceits. But in fact, it is the converse: the truth that is difficult to grasp, to take in, to digest, is that our disappointments are often the result of trivialities that split two or more experiences of emotional depth.

That abundance which is a source of so much richness in the personal realm is also a distraction that keeps others from savoring what we celebrate in our own narcissistic indulgences. Or rather, like rights and freedoms, the automatic perception of one’s own importance “ends where that of the other begins”. We must wrestle with this truth, but it is not the static, concrete, pseudo-realist ‘hard truth’ that those who have lost hope like to bat around, in order to dissuade others from examining too closely how suffering comes to be.

The reference to the ‘hard truth’ as an explanation of the otherwise unjust is a rhetorical tool used to reduce the length of conversations, sometimes serving as a psychological bulwark against topics one would rather not face. It is, far from being the logic of the stoic who faces her own mortality, the logic of flight and evasion.

In this, there is the peril of the practice: to avoid, to play defense to keep from losing, to minimalize the usefulness —or even the right— of others’ expressing a fair interpretation of a problem, of thinking it through, so to speak, is not only counterproductive, it opens up a series of new-build vulnerabilities that increase the likelihood of not working through whatever problem is at hand.

The ‘cruel reality’ is an exaggeration of the true underlying truth, a falsification aimed at dissuading; it is an excuse, usually deployed to assist in avoiding obligation of some sort. And the avoidance of obligation —finishing an arduous conversation, arriving at peace and agreement, following through on a promise, watching the clock in consideration of others’ needs, the considering of others’ needs, living under the weight of another’s emotional distress, caring, excelling, achieving, even dreaming— is a vice that develops its own logic, its own fashion trends, its own proverbs, prophets and priesthood.

The hard truth, if I daresay, is that the ‘hard truth’ [shackled here by the marks that punctuate its unreality] is not enough, not a solid enough truth to be of use in justifying the untoward, deceitful, destructive or lazy; it is not enough to excuse us from the challenges of living in a world full of beauty and disappointment, violence and attempts at compromise. The stakes are always too high, always beyond the influence of a petty defense mechanism that makes liars of the well-intentioned.

There is a more than notable tendency among human beings to adopt profound attachments to other human faces, even if those faces are known not as flesh but only as patterns of light. In the much-seen, or much-envisaged, visage, there comes an air of the familiar, almost the attachment of identity. The face celebrated either by adoration or by derision can have the effect of assisting in a psychology whereby the individual sees him or herself in the face of another.

It is from this sense of identification that the subject of ethical interaction extends its reach and offers its vast projections and proposals. One is confronted with the call of the Other, the moral demand that there arise some form of cooperation and mutual struggle between individuals, so that the species may have its own culture, through which it may survive. There is a basic compassion that motivates this experience of the call of the Other, a sense that one should reduce suffering wherever possible. But there is more than altruism; there is also a fundamental curiosity, and an instinct to interact favorably with one’s surroundings, so as not to provoke or stumble into any hidden dangers.

Entangled in these considerations is the heart of psychological temptation: the urge to persist, to overcome the mortal limits of physical existence, to perfect the activities of one’s inner life in a way that will somehow ensure their immortality. It is in this stew of altruism and the urge to self-preservation that basic human sympathies, agonies, and affections are forged. It is for the sake of this potent mix of personal motivations, interpersonal ambitions, and sublime sensations, that we celebrate individuals and their activities, their mannerisms, their proclamations, their creations. We choose a face that has meaning to us, that touches a chord, and we assign surpassing value to it, to that image, to the personality we believe it represents, to the extended landscape of the relationship we may have or may imagine we have with a familiar visage.

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Of course, we celebrate the faces of those closest to us; they are the substance of our lives, and they incur a profound wealth of meaning, protection, and identification, through which we openly seek to perpetuate the moments of our own existence, and of theirs. But the face of the known Other, the intimate, the cherished or despised, is not the only celebrated visage. Often, it is the unknown stranger, the famous paragon of societal attractions, the much-discussed, the photographically ubiquitous visage that gains our affection.

The celebrity face becomes an icon, a fetish which indicates continuity over time, familiarity, the protected condition of a home one has chosen, one’s identity. The icon works as a proof, a certificate of authenticity for the context in which it occurs, and the proof of the icon is the power of visual familiarity. Once the individual moves toward identifying with the icon, the act of recognizing the icon’s image is projected onto an external plane inhabited by the celebrated individual. The priveleged space of the icon becomes an extension of the internal life of the one who perceives and recognizes it. The face of a celebrated individual, or the landscape of a favorite place, becomes symbolic, a vessel for the conveyance of perceived reality.

By providing, by accessing, pools of recognition, in the landscape of the mind, a fixed symbol carries the weight of time’s passing, of the role of the individual in the navigation of time’s current, and of perpetuating a preferred identity. The proof of the icon, the authority lent to any situation by the apparition of a particular image to which one has ascribed particular meaning, is the beginning of art, of discourse, of politics. What is familiar becomes good, because it promises not so much the continuity of the Known, taken altogether and at once, but the continuity of Me as I know Myself, the continuity of my way of seeing, of being as I am, something which is both more diffuse and more essential than what is perceived as fact or archived as data.

Here, the celebration of the familiar visage is not so much an ethical matter as an economic pursuit. The cultural agent who engages the familiar face of the unknown celebrity intends an economic guarantee of continuation. There is an implicit alliance, in the abstract, between the celebrated individual (through the act of celebration—repetition, elevation, promotion, reception) and the spectator. In this way, the common culture fulfills a sense of the need to address the call of the Other, in oneself, and in the world at large, for mutual protection and coherence; it acts as an ethical soup that makes few demands but projects a vision for constant approval.

It is in the impersonal nature of this intimate sense of identification, that the familiar visage surpasses ethical relevance and becomes a primarily psychological tool. In this light, immortalizing celebrated faces amounts to immortalizing the contents of our selfhood, to the extent possible, or as a trick of the psyche. The mind acts upon itself to modify one’s perception of the familiar visage, the celebrated icon, so that in recognizing a pattern of light, one’s mind is assured that its existence has been shared, in a way, and that proof of having existed is manifest in the proof of the icon.

The ultimate irony of this process is that celebrating certain popular icons exaggerates their importance to the actual circumstance of the individual as such, and tips the ethical balance within a society toward foci which do not necessarily require such assistance. The result is a distortion of perceived reality, and a complication of the most basic human project of pursuing some knowledge about existence and its meaning.

There is a fundamental peril which resides within the urge to experience the repetition of those faces, places, and icons, with which one has a sense of identification. This peril is intellectual, and emerges when one’s predilection for the Known becomes a tacit approval of all familiar or repetitious phenomena. The face of the Other is vital to the human pursuit of understanding, both of self and of the world of circumstance, but the focus of this pursuit should be sincere involvement, acknowledgement, deferrence and understanding.

The call of the Other (the possibility of recognition, or protection) should not serve as an impetus to psychological self-satisfaction, but rather to challenging oneself to reside within the world gracefully, and without deceptive disguises. It is only at this deeper level, where the biases of mass culture cannot reach, that the call of the Other, the lure of the familiar visage, makes genuine sense. It is in this inner sanctum, unprotected by the high walls and the labyrinth of pretense, naked repetition, or dogma, where the real humanity, the real Self and Other, can be found. It is from there that the human Self should emerge to confront the face of the Other, to transcend self-serving protocols and express meaning for the sake of sharing the shelter of what is human.

EXCERPT FROM PLAN B 3.0, CH. 9: “FEEDING 8 BILLION WELL”

Lester Brown, EPI :: One of the questions I am most often asked is, “How many peo-ple can the earth support?” I answer with another question: “Atwhat level of food consumption?” Using round numbers, at theU.S. level of 800 kilograms of grain per person annually for food and feed, the 2-billion-ton annual world harvest of grain would support 2.5 billion people. At the Italian level of consumption of close to 400 kilograms, the current harvest would support 5 billion people. At the 200 kilograms of grain consumed by the average Indian, it would support a population of 10 billion.

In every society where incomes rise, people move up the food chain, eating more animal protein as beef, pork, poultry, milk, eggs, and seafood. The mix of animal products varies with geography and culture, but the shift to more livestock products as purchasing power increases appears to be universal. As consumption of livestock products, poultry, and farmed fish rises, grain use per person also rises. Of the roughly 800 kilograms of grain consumed per person each year in the United States, about 100 kilograms is eaten directly as bread, pasta, and breakfast cereals, while the bulk of the grain is consumed indirectly in the form of livestock and poultry products. By contrast, in India, where people consume just under 200 kilograms of grain per year, or roughly a pound per day, nearly all grain is eaten directly to satisfy basic food energy needs. Little is available for conversion into livestock products.

Of the three countries just cited, life expectancy is highest in Italy even though U.S. medical expenditures per person are much higher. People who live very low or very high on the food chain do not live as long as those in an intermediate position. Those consuming a Mediterranean type diet that includes meat, cheese, and seafood, but all in moderation, are healthier and live longer. People living high on the food chain, such as Americans or Canadians, can improve their health by moving down the food chain. For those who live in low-income countries like India, where a starchy staple such as rice can supply 60 percent or more of total caloric intake, eating more protein-rich foods can improve health and raise life expectancy.

In agriculture we often look at how climate affects the food supply but not at how what we eat affects climate. While we understand rather well the link between climate change and the fuel efficiency of the cars we buy, we do not have a comparable understanding of the climate effect of various dietary options. Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin of the University of Chicago have addressed this issue. They begin by noting that the energy used in the food economy to provide the typical American diet and that used for personal transportation are roughly the same. In fact, the range between the more and less carbon-intensive transportation options and dietary options is each about 4 to 1. With cars, the Toyota Prius, a gas-electric hybrid, uses scarcely one fourth as much fuel as a Chevrolet Suburban SUV. Similarly with diets, a plant-based diet requires roughly one fourth as much energy as a diet rich in red meat. Shifting from a diet rich in red meat to a plant-based diet cuts greenhouse gas emissions as much as shifting from a Suburban SUV to a Prius.

The inclusion of soybean meal in feed rations to convert grain into animal protein more efficiently, the shift by consumers to more grain-efficient forms of animal protein, and the movement of consumers down the food chain all can help reduce the demand for land, water, and fertilizer. This reduces carbon emissions and thus helps to stabilize climate as well.

• EPI: “Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” [Get the Book / Read Online]
• Crisis Policy Forum: “FOOD SUPPLY RESTORATION & SECURITY: AFRICA” [Discussion-solution Forum]
• Quipu Economic Forum: “Confluence of Housing, Energy, Commodities, Banking, Jobs & Food-price Strains Called ‘Economic Perfect Storm’”
• Quipu Economic Forum: “Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008″

Flow. Halt. Normalcy. Accident. Order. Chaos. Progress. Slippage. Solution. Obstacle. Crisis. Adaptation. Instigation. Bloodshed. Education. Coping. Surviving. Intact. Dissonant. Sense. Confusion.

A morass of hope and upheaval circumscribes the human experience, the fact of living in the world, at odds with the world, in contention for a patch of sunlight amid overturned ambitions and frustrated ideals. Most severe human conflict emerges from the complexity of such contention. One method of surviving, emotionally, as an intellect, as a human being refusing to give up on humanity, is the resort to beauty.

Mountains sage and lavender in opaline mist. A ruby sun nestled in cool streams of fire, inventive fire of eventide. Small blue avian beings canting eerie recollections of abundance. Mindscape without color, crystalline and teeming with life. Sojourn away from contention, braced by natural fact. Beauty.

Beauty, though mysterious, undefinable, even variable according to subjective experience, is woven into every aspect of life and lived experience. Maybe it is the poet’s province alone to take on the burden of working this through, seeing it always, being aware of the most menial, severe and terrible beauties. But the poet’s work has resonance because it conjures up a latent awareness of improbable charms, hidden among the tortuous threadwork, the causeways of consciousness.

Life itself, as biological fact, is such a magnificent achievement, it lends a certain quality of beauty and wonder to everything that occurs within it. But beauty as such arises with the consciousness of it; it is a conscious condition, a state of the mind, however sensual, in which one deliberately approves of being in the world, and one’s whole self resolves implicitly to continue life’s exploration of the living world. And though it overtakes the mind, even steals the breath, beauty (being a conscious experience) is far from absolute. Beauty can be experienced in/as/through joy or pain, in/as/through aspiration or irony, in/as/through victory or defeat.

If one engages the self, the living fullness of one’s own existence, if one confronts the tiny absurdities of dwelling within circumstance, if one filters out the jagged edges of social pressure and brings forward the unmasked rhythm of meaning that underscores and gives shape to experience, one finds that around the edges, and at the center, of virtually every body across the plane of fact is the real possibility of beauty, of a recognition that knowing that one exists is in itself the beginning of all joy and connectivity… [Complete Text]