The Samurai Next Door

Occasionally I volunteer my meager skills as a bicycle mechanic to the local bike clinic, run by Brian, who takes donated bicycles, renders them serviceable and passes them along to homeless indigents. The repair shop shares a large driveway with a halfway house where residents can undergo their probation and presumed transition into an enlarged realm of commerce and normalcy. One can easily imagine that the shop is frequently the theater of some raffish characters and lively conversation, much of it encouraged by Brian who readily engages them, transients and habitues alike.

On a recent weekend, as I was busily truing a wheel, the door opened and in walked a short, grizzled stocking-capped fellow in his 50s, I'd guess, a generous walrus mustache beneath a broad nose, an outmoded bit of eyeware above it. Brian recognized him from some past visit and promptly asked after his general well being. The following transcription is a true and reasonably accurate version of the ensuing conversation:

Brian: How are you? Haven't seen you in a while.

Protagonist: I just got out of jail.

B: Oh - what happened? Why were you in jail?

P: Well, back in December I moved into an apartment. On December 21st, pretty early in the morning there was a loud banging on my door. So I went and opened it but there wasn't anybody there. Then about 20 minutes later it happened again. Nobody there. I'm looking around and my neighbor walks over and asks if somebody was just banging on my door. I says yeah, somebody did it twice. I think it's the guy on the other side of you, he says. So I go back inside. Third time, bang bang bang - nobody. So I walk over to the guy on the other side and I knock on the door - hey, was you just banging on my door?

B: So what'd he say?

P: He says, yeah, turn yer goddam music down.

B: Oh, were you playing music?

P: Yeah, I was listening to some CDs.

B: Oh.

P: So I go back and shut my door, and he comes back over and bangs on it again!

B: Uh oh.

P: Yeah. So I get out my samurai sword and I go back over and he comes to the door, and I say, Do you know what this is? So he just says, Aw, put that effin thing away, you ain't gonna use it.

B: So what'd you do?

P: Well, I kinda poked it at him.

B: You didn't stab him did you?

P: Nah, I just kinda tapped him on the chest with it.

B: You didn't draw any blood.

P: Nah. I don't think so. Anyway, he called the cops.

B: So what happened?

P: I got a month in jail. They charged me with assault and menacing with a deadly weapon. And brandishing a deadly weapon. So now I owe three thousand five hundred in fines plus another fifty dollars for my probation.

"Gotta have my tunes."

Biography in Flannel

 A quarter-century ago when I first took up cohabitation with my wife, she sewed me a wonderful lightweight robe in a bold red-and-blue flannel as an apt and thoughtful welcoming gift. And I am still wearing it in good health and connubial joy. What could be better? It is a part of the warp and weft of my days, so to speak, enfolding me in another morning of my quick passage through this vale of light and shadow, like a familiar arm across my shoulders, a comfort in my dotage, my accustomed armor against the chances of another sunrise. 

Naturally, as it's cotton and not chain mail or rubber, it's worn thin in places over the interim. In fact a detractor might call it downright shabby. Each morning I tie around my waist its third belt. It drapes loosely now, the fabric in places a mere tissue, in other places it is no longer. It fails to cover everywhere, it is copiously patched until now there is no patching it since the flannel no longer has the structural integrity to hold the patch. It is in short become a classic, like the thousand-year-old kimonos that are a palimpsest of the time and labor of forgotten souls, ancient narratives of alien fabrics, repairs and loving reinforcements.

But now, within a scant quarter-century I hear murmurs of replacement, gentle yet persistent urgings from the other room to look at a new fabric (how about a nice gray plaid for a gray head?). So what, I protest, that the seat has been patched thrice, that the front is worn through, that the shoulders are so attenuated that they will not support the rest of it on a hanger, or even that the patch across the back is worn through again? It has been only twenty-five years; no need that it should last a thousand. It's fine. I'm fine. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't crawl back into it each morning. It has shared my morning surliness and my unfocused negativity ever since our first halcyon days in one another's company.

At a certain age, different I suppose for everyone, a person acquires a personal museum - a mental catalog of favorite things, or moments, or friends, departed pets, a favorite bicycle or doll or song, perhaps one's signed copy of The Critique of Pure Reason. An iconography of the self. In my own museum this robe will hang in the entrance hall like the feathered cape of a Kwakiutl chieftain or the leathern armor of Genghis Khan.

4.28 Monday (Diminution of Agia Elisaveta)

"The Elizabeth Warrens"

This past week, on one of my endless daily drives through the Rattlesnake Belt, having reached that point of blank distraction at which even the basest form of cultural diversion would suffice, I turned on the car radio. The instant jackpot was a political talk show, the topic was banking regulation, the sympathies of guest and host alike were faith-based conservative free marketeering. 

The guest was a spent intellectual force from American Heritage Action who began reasonably enough by pointing out a shared perception that the "banking industry" has perpetrated high crimes and misdemeanors with no consequences to itself. But if anyone were hoping for a bit of home truth about rigorous new regulation or strict oversight of an institution gone haywire, the speaker quickly volunteered that he did not agree with "the Elizabeth Warrens." A palpable relief emanated over the broadband (which Miguel still thinks of as "the airwaves.")

Now I confess I was ignorant of any other Elizabeth Warren in political life or in the public notice, not to mention several of them. Who were these other Elizabeth Warrens, I wondered, that he had even heard of them, could know their views on regulation, could know of their universal agreement on the question? And why would these women, all sharing a name, necessarily agree in questions of banking policy? Isn't it at least conceivable that, of the set of all women named "Elizabeth Warren," at least one might have landed on the side of the free market angels?

Oh, Miguel (I chided myself), always too literal minded. I had at last spotted the rhetorical coup de grace, the trick of diminishing a policy or argument by reducing it to the name of its proponent (Marxism, Keynesianism), then reducing the proponent to a type; the implication is that there is not a single individual named EW, no such person exists in her own right, no one individual capable of advanced and clear thinking.

There are only "the Elizabeth Warrens," which is to imply a set of clones or nested Russian dolls or kittens, all singing the same monotonous mechanical tune without a single functioning consciousness. An ideology requiring no counterarguments.

In a more positive vein, one might speak of "the Ronald Reagans" as a single functioning consciousness.

 "The Ronald Reagans"

Critic's Notebook: Rhapsody in Cement

Ever since Alamos became a part of the weird world of Telenovela, the town has become self-conscious. So now with some regularity in concert with the local music festival a new bit of statuary appears amongst the derelict vehicles abandoned along its cobbled streets. Last year it was the unobjectionable likeness of a Mexican composer, a bronzed bust in the traditional style.

The latest installation was unveiled just down the street to sedate speeches and muffled applause in a small ceremony (Mexico is a country of ceremony) preceding the current festival. It is a larger-than-life full length of Albert Ortiz Tirado, another native son, the founder of the festival and a late local luminary. Ortiz was a doctor by profession, and the Festival Alberto Ortiz Tirado (FAOT) is his longstanding cultural bequest to Alamos. 

About seven decades ago I went on a school field trip to a museum, a re-creation of an 18th century farm in upstate New York. On display in a shallow open pit was the fabled Cardiff Giant, a crude bit of limestone carved in the 1860s by an upstate farmer and "discovered" by him buried in a field. It was a sensation - a demonstration of the biblical claim that there were indeed "giants in the earth" - and it duly made the rounds of local fairs, carnivals, tent revivals, mall openings and press conferences. Gazing at the crude likeness of El Ortiz I was reminded of my childhood foray.

This latest chunk of  plastic art is a mixed genre - "Brutalo-Impressionism," might serve to capture its various subtleties. It seems cast in cement which lends it a particular stasis, a lack of dynamism, a dearth of expressiveness. An aesthetic hole filled with concrete.

As the eye slides down the slab-like contours, the first thing one notices (after its resemblance to Mussolini in party dress) is the absence of any visible means of locomotion, like an anthropomorphic hovercraft. And of course the large snake clutched to his waistcoat, oddly evocative of some juxtaposed bit of anatomy, presumably a medical reference to the caduceus. Rather than holding it as one might hold a large snake, he is fingering it as though it were a saxophone, the digits spatulate rather than gripped.

The unsettling bit is the fact that the snake has a microphone where its head should be, tucked just at the good doctor's bow tie; an older style of microphone that Harry or Etta James might have tooted or crooned into. This seems an unfortunate mixing of metaphors, a transgression of artistic license. 

The silver lining in this intrusion on my good taste is the fact that it has engaged my civic spirit. If something like this should happen to the memory of Maria Felix, I'll take to the streets in protest.

 

Flights of Fancy

 I thought this post from 2016 might bear a re-post.

"Only the insane take themselves quite seriously." - Max Beerbohm

Logic 101: Lesson One

"Heat is in proportion to want of knowledge."  -  Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

In the summer of my sixth year, it must have been, I was lounging on the linoleum in my grandparents' sunny dining room while my grandfather plied his barber shears along the scrawny neck of another neighborhood elder in receipt of pretty much what he had paid for. My grandfather was an inveterate amateur barber whose tonsorial efforts veered from overweening enthusiasm for his tools into the realms of asymmetry. Over the years he had cut the hair of five sons and, from the gallery of family albums, the golden tow of even more grandsons. In his dotage he proffered his ministrations to some of his contemporaries, and the old fellow now seated in the dining room was a regular taker.

I remember this fellow in particular because as his hair was being trimmed, he was engaged with my grandfather in conversation, and specifically in what must have been a theological discussion. They were mining the subtleties of a hardshelled Presbyterian theology, probably some finer point as to whether good works were merely a signal of divine grace bestowed, or whether they were more like redeemable chits along the road to redemption. As points developed and various counterpoints parried, the pace of the conversation became brisker, the volume gradually increasing, until my grandfather in some heat and in complete exasperation said (a pretty direct quote), "Lyle, if you're going to sit here and say that then you can get out of my house!"

"Now George . . ." his interlocutor cajoled, and so the matter was put to rest, followed by an uneasy silence, some further harrumphing and clearing of throats, until one of them opened another gambit - along the lines of which of the McBurney boys had married the Carrothers girl with the walleye after one or another of the wars ("the war" being a principal signpost in the communal memory, exactly which war always a matter of context or pure supposition).

But even at the age of six I knew of a certainty that my grandfather, for all his heat, had just lost an argument. In the ensuing decades I have treasured this memory; it has enabled me to add a completely new logical fallacy to the pantheon of hoary old chestnuts cataloged by Aristotle and his medieval disciples. I call it the argumentum ad domicilium, and place it in its own niche in the catalog alongside such venerable groaners as the argumentum ad batulum ("If you maintain that position I and several of my friends and hirelings will beat you within an inch of your worthless life"); or the argumentum ad populum ("You may wish to maintain your position, Madam, but I fear very much that your friends and neighbors may henceforth shun you"); or the argumentum ad hominem ("I should have expected such an opinion from one like you who shares the embraces of his wife's chiropodist"). I could go on.

But to clarify: the argumentum ad domicilium is what I call the argument from the ownership of a private residence or business. It is a time honored favorite of bartenders and publicans ("Keep your voice down, pal, or I'll chuck you out"). But it, like any fallacy, cannot bear the weight of argument. The threat of force, or ridicule, or minority in opinion, or lowness of character has no bearing on the opinions or conclusions proffered. To such interlocutors, silence in a rhetorical opponent is tantamount to acquiescence. Their first premise is merely "Shut your gob."

Kay

 Our friend and neighbor Kay died yesterday, the day after Valentine's Day. She was her husband's valentine, and he held her hands until the end, when she slipped through his fingers in answer to an inexorable and exacting summons. This little world of Alamos is suddenly quieter and diminished. Geriatric diaries can become raddled with a litany of departures that leave friends standing in the airport lounge and not expecting anyone coming in on the next flight. 

Kay could sometimes be like a small stone in one's shoe. Sometimes you just had to sit down, remove the shoe and ask what exactly would you like right now? Missouri had given her some bracing edges which she deployed with great relish and telling effect. Dave's equanimity was always exemplary - legendary maybe - but Kay would always look over her glasses and grin at the others in the room after a particularly vigorous dressing down of anyone who had excited her impatience. All in good fun and no offense taken.

She was a confirmed atheist and so never felt the need to discuss further any spiritual encumbrances imposed by ideas of divinity. But at the end she agreed to see a local pastor, an apparently kindly woman who would come for an hour, speak quietly with Kay, sometimes play the guitar. On one of her last visits Kay looked up in her owlish way at the woman and asked, "Are you always this serene? Or are you just fuckin' crazy?" With Kay there were never any two ways about it.

Goats Can't Type

'Owners of a farm in Lancashire, England, said that they had earned as much as $50,000 by booking goats as guests for Zoom calls, including Lisa, who specializes in “passive-aggressive bleating.” '   Harper's Weekly Review, Feb. 1, 2021

In the new regime of virus sequestration and remote work, with the attendant loneliness and isolation, the Zoom meeting seems the sole podium remaining for the lone voice crying in a wilderness of neglected laundry, pet hair, badly-worn slippers, unopened mail, empty vodka bottles, a drift of weekly shoppers' guides strewn across undusted tables, yesterday's bowl of soggy cornflakes - the general wrack of lives edging toward the abyss. 

One might anticipate in the circumstances that Zoom would provide an ideal soapbox for the lonely loggorhetic bore, precisely the sort who even in first-person encounters mostly fails to perceive gentle cues like fidgeting, glazed eyes, yawns, glances at watches, flatulence, lint-picking and other such signs that it's time to sit down. Apropos is a tale a friend tells me of a young fellow of his acquaintance whose father pulled some strings to get him employment with reasonable pay. Came the epidemic and the ascendance of Zoom, and in meeting after meeting a fellow Zoomer inevitably held the (virtual) floor, droning interminably about his personal situation, his "issues," his hopes and dreams. At some point early-ish in the young man's career trajectory he lost patience and launched himself into an obscenity-filled rant. The ensuing silence in the Zoomfest was his cue that he had failed to hit the mute on his laptop. I understand he is in search of an alternative career path, though one can only sympathize with his pique and his momentary lapse from the passive to the aggressive.

A second attendant difficulty with zoom meetings, aside from the incidence of masturbating under the desk or Zooming naked, is the tendency to zoom in bathrobe and pajamas. My grandson's middle school guidance counselor was constrained to call the lad's parents and let them know that the young on-line scholar was attending classes while supine amongst rumpled bedclothes like an adolescent Hugh Hefner.

As I have no business to conduct, I have only attended Zoom meetings with family members (friends don't Zoom friends). Most of the preliminaries involve trying to 1) get an audio connection, 2) get a video connection, 3) get both signals simultaneously, 4) ascertaining who isn't present, 5) ascertaining whether those absent might eventually be present or why they can't be, 6) ascertaining why someone .of the party has a glare in their video feed, 7) someone explaining that they have just had to reboot their connection and could the aforegoing several minutes be repeated.

If the pandemic radically alters the notion of a workplace, if such platforms as Zoom become the usual forum for the conduct of the world's business, then why not, after all? Entropy is the law for the ages and the world seems to be slipping no less smoothly into the abyss even in the absence of face-to-face transactions. I foresee a rosy future in which entire military operations are transacted exclusively over Zoom, like a "World of Warcraft" for Proud Boys and other really serious adults.

The goats-who-Zoom are on hire as an antidote to "Zoom fatigue," the Python-esque syndrome for the modern age which includes such symptoms as boredom, lowered morale, loss of good humor (see above) - the "existential alienation" of the 1950s repackaged for the digital age. And there are other domesticated beasts at least as photogenic and vocally endowed by their Creator as is the goat. Someone innured to a caprine charm may respond more promptly and favorably to the bovine, or to the jackass, the burro, or any member of class Ungulata. 

An entire presidency has been conducted over a Twitter feed; where were these goats when we really needed them? 

Notes Toward a Cultural Anthropology (3)

Winter quarters here in southern Sonora are a small casita inside the walled grounds of a larger villa, which sounds exactly as comfortable and peaceful as it is. The back wall of the casita forms a length of the wall surrounding the property and abuts the street along the property front. In fact, all the residences along Durango are similarly walled from the street in a continuous and varied stucco and brick parapet, save for a large tract of vacant, scrubby ground immediately across the street, the holding of an old tequila factory (now a residence in its own right). The street, with its stretch of unoccupied ground, stretches about 100 meters, up to the corner where it makes an ell and continues along another outside tract of trees and cactus.

I mention all of these particulars because in Mexico such places are known as "Tailgate Heaven: An Amazing Free Party Venue." The ell at the corner, with vacant space on the outside of the bend in both directions, forms a comfortable nook for six or eight vehicles, many of them cumbered with the sound capabilities of a national soccer stadium or the Nuremburg Platz in its heyday.

The ell tends to draw a crowd after about 9:00 p.m. ("gringo midnight") on any holiday. And holidays are frequent here - the "Twelve Days of Christmas" is more than a harmless if cloying Christmas carol, it is a confirmed and pernicious custom, something to be taken literally. According to some perverse gloss on the gospel account, it took the three wise men exactly twelve days to track down the young spawn of a miscreant deity, and to offload their cargo of luxury items (which have apparently been subsequently absorbed into the Vatican treasury). As a consequence, the Nativity in Mexico stretches on for an interminable span, culminating on the twelfth day, when every good child gets to explode its gift of fireworks in the street outside my window.

The generous disbursal of holidays throughout the calendar offers an instructive lesson in the cultural relativity of time, both as a general concept and as an arena within which people conduct their daily comings and goings. Time in Mexico is not (yet) the same as money. Time is a flexible, ever-slowing and quickening stream, an arena in which the tempo changes according as the gods may pipe the dance. The clock has little say in the matter, and the calendar, as I say, is studded with the lacunae we call Navidad, the Day of the Magi, the Day of the Dead, the feast of one or other of the vast necropolis of saints, angels, Benito Juarezes and other fathers of the nation.

Winter is a slow time as I have just explained. In winter also comes the Day of the Dead, another quasi-religious celebration. (Mexico is somewhat encumbered by its religion, though blessedly little with theology.) On my first visit to Alamos, nearly a decade ago, I spent a month in a camping park that abuts the local cemetario, its own village of sarcophagi in which a bevy of tearful angels vie with Blessed Virgins of Guadelupe for majority. The resident dead, you'd expect, would be quiet sorts, and so they were until the weekends when, each Friday and Saturday night, the locals would invade the peace of the graves and roister well into the next day. The old caretaker at the trailer park, Firmin, was a regular at these Tecate-cum-tequila bouts, and would often appear at his post late the following day, looking and moving more like an honoree than a participant in the weekly Dia de las Muertes.

The stereotypical picture of a Mexican holiday used to be the lazy tourista lulled into siesta time by the strains of a gentle guitar quartet serenading below the balcony. Maybe a mariachi group strolling amongst the tables in a cantena. Not that I'd particularly look forward to that, but I can imagine the all-inclusive-resort-and-cruise crowd thinking it was quaint. Back at the ell the music and the party go on until someone calls the police, who obligingly move the revelers on. And perhaps the noise would be less objectionable if it were not car radios pumping out Mexican rap and tech-Mex pop and the dreaded ballads with a section of horns and oompah-pah tubas. 

These are merely cultural observations, you understand. I'm not really complaining, I hope. Still, I never thought I'd ever say the words, "Give me a high school band playing Sousa." I haven't said it. Yet.

Notes Toward a Cultural Anthroplogy (2)

The city of Alamos, like Belle Epoque Paris, still employs a brigade of street sweepers who deploy through the barrios each morning with brooms, dustpans on short poles, and large black trash bags. They clean up the bottles, broken glass, empty cans and gutted snack food wrappers from the night before. But mostly they are there to gather up the considerable deposits of biomass left by the city's innumerable band of street dogs.

The dog population here may or may not be domiciled - most dogs are generally free to roam at will, to skulk, bark, menace, cower, amble or in the other more tangible way to express their inner beings. Most of them by all reports are regularly and forcibly innoculated against rabies. They remain nonetheless reprobate, uncivilized, generally indifferent to people and to the hour of the day or night in which they live, move and have their being. They only incur one anothers' wrath when they wander, unwittingly or not, into an adjoining barrio and are identified by their resident fellows as interlopers.

I say they are mostly indifferent to humans, though a cyclist pedalling through the narrow streets can occasionally be surprised by the sudden noisy onrush of a heel snapper from a dusty doorway. Generally a kick will dissuade further intimacies, but they're elusive, cagey, and it can prove difficult to effect a solid human connection. 

The dogs in the countryside are more persistent and less easily distracted from their hellish intent. There is nothing in their immediate surrounds more interesting than a pair of hairy legs at eye level; there's nothing they'd rather be doing; it's basically their territory, especially if they're up the road and dozing under the occasional sparse tree; and frankly, there's nothing else, or better, in a barren landscape to talk over later. It's all in good fun.

It may be that the bicycle is distraction enough - most of the people I know who have suffered a bite have been on foot - slow-moving target with no machinery interposed. I don't mean to test this theory by any extensive research. I'd rather think it may be correct than discover for a fact that it's based on an insufficient sample or fails to fully appreciate the reptilian responses of our putative best friends.

Lowells, Cabots and Gringos

 And here's to the good town of Boston, 

The home of the bean and the cod, 

Where the Lowells speak only with Cabots, 

And the Cabots speak only with God.

There are Cabots here in Alamos, reputedly scions from the Boston stock of Cabotry. They live within a large walled estate with a Mexican family in residence on the grounds as caretakers, about a quarter-mile from Miguel's humbler bespoke villa. I do not entertain hopes of enjoying their nearer acquaintance and should probably only stammer should chance bring us together. 

The late lamented Rip Torn owned a villa in the old centro - a grubby streetside wall of peeling stucco surrounding a courtyard rubbled with chunks of cement and capsized palm fronds, still much as he loved it and left it when he departed, though his quarters within were perfectly habitable during his sojourn here. Carroll O'Connor once lived just around the corner in a fine manse at Avenida Chihuahua and El Chalaton. Further down El Chalaton is a hotel once the home of the Mexican actress Maria Felix. All departed.

Alamos, with a sizeable population of resident gringos, is itself a simulacrum of the cultural divide within the United States. It is not that the Lowells speak only with Cabots (and none, by all the available evidence, speaks with God). It is that the Republicans speak only with Republicans, so far as they can manage it, and the same is true of the Democrats, although they generally speak to Mexicans as well, and in a wider range of voices than the imperative or the diparaging. The Canadians seem above it all, having their own peculiar troubles. And the French have all stayed home.  

Cultural Divide

The population being considerably smaller and people generally remembering one another from before the days of le toxicite mauvais, everyone makes some effort to get along. No one is perfectly anonymous, as they can be in the larger gene pool to the north, and consequently there is less gratuitous hostility among the factions. But the divide has appeared and persists nonetheless. The unfolding Senate runoffs in Georgia are being tracked here as raptly as in the U.S., the Congressional post-election charade plays here, just as across the border, as shabby street theater, but mercifully muted. All the impoverishment of human character in the national capital seems distant and not very urgent.

Counting Birds

The annual Christmas Bird Count is nearly finished for the season. Miguel managed to struggle out one early morning to peer rheumy-eyed into the pre-dawn chill and pencil some candidates for posterity onto a sheaf of lists - from the social (flycatcher) to the solitary (vireo), from the greater (pewee) to the least (sandpiper), from the rough-winged (swallow) to the silky (flycatcher), plain (startthroat) to elegant (trogon), gray-ish (saltator) to mottled (owl). I could go on. A grown man can sometimes feel a bit precious when reciting the names of birds - the yellow-bellied, rose-breasted, red-naped, green-tailed, violet-crowned, or even saying a word like "kiskadee." (I note that a kiskadee has no relation to a chickadee, nor will the one acknowledge or speak to the other.) "Buzzard" seems a manly word but not every bird is a buzzard, nor for all of that, is every buzzard a bird.

Nonetheless, in this age of data management and cheap digital storage they require to be counted, so off I went with Madame de Montaigne and two other volunteers to tabulate numbers of species and little fuzzy heads. At a time when wiser heads are chary of close association, the count in Alamos this year was largely curtailed to a few local areas. I volunteered to do one of the less populous and least scenic areas on the verges of town, figuring that the nicer walks would already be spoken for and that the head counter would appreciate having an additional purlieu in his final tally.

I had engaged my small party to walk up an arroyo known locally as Las Cabras, fully knowing that no one else would choose to go there. The birding is only fair, the arroyo itself a matter of navigating rock and sand where a quarter-mile can seem like a mile, not quite the same as a walk on the beach. It is also the arroyo that runs just below the municipal waste ponds. It goes without saying that the municipal infrastructure in Mexico, much like its impoverished, Spanish-speaking neighbor directly to the north, is not all that its founding fathers could wish. The air is redolent, nearly visible with various essences, the trickles of water along the bottom of the arroyo do not invite trespass. The birds seem to like it just fine but what do they know, presumably having nothing like a glass of Domaine Romanee-Conte '47 with which to compare it.

Four hours and about two miles later we were back at the truck. The birds were gone for the day, we needed some lunch and a rest, and we were done as well. We tallied 30 different species, a modest number but not bad for the arroyo we had walked. The fellow who organized the Alamos count sent me a jubilant email that evening - 40 species and a 14-mile hike up the mountain behind Uvalama. "Young people," chuckled Dave, my fellow bird counter.

Ostensive Definition

 Ostensive definition: defining an object by pointing to it; a dictionary comprised of actual objects.

A cardinal rule of good writing is that no literary production - novel, essay, aphorism, memoir, autobiography nor any such bijou - should commence with the word "I". To do so immediately circumscribes the purview of what follows and promises no further scope to the imagination. The case is nearly the same should "I" occur somewhere within the first sentence. Even to begin with "It . . ." can be treacherous. Nonetheless, my candidate for the best opening sentence of any novel whatsoever violates the latter two of these observations. It is the initial sentence of Anthony Burgess's novel Earthly Powers: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

The sentence occurred to me because my next sentence trumps it, at least in the matter of prelates: I was seated on my portico yesterday afternoon when I heard a light thump and watched a cardinal somersault over the side mirror of my pickup truck. The poor chap had spied itself in the mirror and, beset by all the devils, it had rushed the intruder only to send itself ass over tincups onto the flags of the driveway, knocked silly among a tangle of garden hose.

I climbed onto the driveway, cupped him in both hands and set him in the shade on the portico to see if he might recover. He was the very ostensive definition of "crestfallen." By contrast, the female of the pair was rifling through a tray of sunflower seeds, crest erect and as perky as any member of her species. Her counterpart sat on the flags motionless for a quarter hour, finally cocked its head to one side, and relapsed into his semicoma. Eventually something startled him enough to send him careering into the nearby garden wall, where he flopped onto the driveway, sat for another moment, then fluttered off into the bushes. I haven't seen him yet today, but he is doubtless taking the day off from his clerical obligations.

In the short length of his stay under the porch shade, however, he did demonstrate a profound philosophical problem with Bertrand Russell's claim for the fundamental nature of ostensive definitions, that “all nominal definitions, if pushed back far enough, must lead ultimately to terms having only ostensive definitions.” For if we are looking to him as a defining example of "crestfallen," he did let something beside his crest fall on the flags. There is always the potential for confused messages in these matters.

Notes Toward a Cultural Anthropology (1)

In the palmy years between the Great Wars as the United States reached its ascendancy, the British frequently chaffed Americans at their national pride in the impeccable superiority of their domestic plumbing. Americans discerned no irony in this. As far as Americans were concerned, the Brits were content with their damp wc's, hesitant toilets, smelly drains. The Brits could have them. The American bathroom was a point of technological chauvinism. Elger, Standard, Royal, these were the Google, Microsoft and Apple of their day, a veritable Silicon Valley of crappers.

What made the Brits smile at this, of course was a quiet pride in their own cultural high points, not Elger so much as Elgar. Chaucer and Bede, Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne and Fielding, Dr. Johnson, Dickens and Trollope, Yeats, all these were a source of their own national pride. Still, they were not far off the mark - there are few proscriptions in the use of the American loo beyond hygiene and general consideration for others. It goes without saying that in the heyday of American advancement, nothing larger than a small dog could be flushed into eternity without incident. 

The case is different in  Mexico, where the state of the nation's drains can be parlous in the extreme. The passage of a Post-It note into the national acqueduct can still occasion flooding and nashing of teeth across entire municipalities. Every genial host, every luxury hotel, convenience store, gas station, church, museum, music venue, all have their list of proscriptions and procedures on the safe and inconsequential operation of their plumbing. In the United States, these protocols are only matched for their exhaustive and byzantine intricacy by similar signboards stipulating proper conduct and refusals of liability found at public parks, swimming pools and precipices.

None of this should reflect badly on Mexico as a polity. We proscribe behaviors and set protocols where ever they might hinder or help the smooth running of the national gears. 

Discretion the Better Part of Valor

How vain the opinion is of some certaine people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speake but will not, for fear they should be imployed and sette to work.

                                                - Antoine le Grand, Cartesian philosopher and priest (ca. 1675;                                                                 cited by David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs")

"A simple 'oooh ooooh ooooh' would have been enough, 

but you had to open your big mouth!"

Unfit for Gentlemen

Politics: "[A] vaguely degrading . . .occupation. . . . plainly a career wide open to all-but-unmentionable talents and an occupation blatantly unfit for gentlemen - let alone gentlewomen."

-  John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason (2000)

 

 Politicians (eating hot dogs)

My neighbor Zeno, an agnostic in most things except in his zealous prosecution of Christmas, might have spoken those very words in any of our desultory, Armagnac-fuelled afternoon confreries. A gentleman, he recently opined, is secure in his own opinions; these he has well considered. Further, he feels no need either to broadcast them nor to have them accepted by anyone less informed than he. En court, son assurance c'est complet.

 My neighbor Zeno

But what about Bill Clinton, I proposed. Or Barack Obama, for all of that. Surely Obama's opinions are by now those of an expert, worth the $400,000 he was paid to address those Wall Street bankers. He is finally being listened to by people who were once his sworn enemies.

Zeno lifted his balon of Armagnac and studied it in the warm April sun streaming across the north lawn of the chateau and into the belvedere. He sipped it and set it down deliberately on the wicker tabouret at his knee. As perhaps I should have said, he rejoined, a gentleman is secure. A gentleman could never receive what is dubiously called an 'honorarium' for his considered opinion.

So, I asked, former presidents and official dignitaries - the Clintons, Obama, the various Rices and Powells and Bushes - all offer their expertise and you suppose that they aren't gentlemen - or ladies - because they accept a fee?

Ah, he said, I spy a drop remaining in that flask at your elbow.

Fox and Hedgehog

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

                                                                        -- Archilochus, 700 BC.

There is an old line occasionally whispered around the ivied halls of academia in its rare moments of honest self-evaluation: that academic politics are such a nasty business because so little is actually at stake. It is a (rare enough) recognition that, though the pursuit of accuracy and the love of knowledge are worthy and significant pursuits, the institutional maneuverings incident to any such foregathering of competitive souls inevitably trivialize an otherwise honorable enterprise.

Intellectuals have always furnished easy marks for humorists since Aristophanes skewered Socrates. And when academics arrived on the landscape, like hedgehogs who, being close to the ground, must ignore the big array and endlessly rootle the one thing at the end of their noses, then Rabelais and Cervantes, Sterne and Swift were swift to follow with the guffaws. It's been the way of the world ever since, the sages and brahmins tweezing out the dwindling crumbs and gnats of wisdom to the evident merriment of the imps and the Great Unwashed.

So it seems almost foreordained that the posh little liberal arts school down the street should offer up  a symposium on "The Music and Lyrics of Billy Joel." Billy Joel, whose name conjures the kind of ham handed piano banging and the trite imagery (an elderly barroom piano player!?) that shouts 'Tin Pan Alley!"

From a Slate profile ("The Worst Pop Singer Ever"): "No career re-evaluations please! . . . . He was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. . . . Billy Joel's music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: 'Mock-Rock.'"

Now playing in a grocery store near you.

The music department's overheated blurb describes the event as "a scholarly symposium" on "the consummate singer-songwriter whose compositions translate larger cultural concerns into accessible and compelling musical narratives . . . . aim[ing] to share academically oriented insights . . . in an accessible and approachable manner." 

All this over the course of 30 separate "academic" presentations and a live phone conference with Himself. I am not certain what all this means; would "Mammy's little baby wants shortnin' bread" translate cultural concerns into a compelling musical narrative? How about that anthem for the era of legalized weed, "Love Potion Number Nine," in which the protagonist "didn't know if it was day or night"?

Then there's the honors history course on the life and times of Dolly Parton, offered without apparent irony by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. "I think there are some stereotypes associated with the area, especially in rural Appalachia," admits the student body president without apparent irony.

It's probably worth noting that Dolly is now 71 years old and so has become a legitimate object of merely academic interest. I suppose this brand of painless curiosity and effortless intellectual endeavor does no one any harm, but it does seem like the sort of material one might find covered in an Elderhostel class. It's a way to seem to get an education but still allow the moral imagination to remain untouched.

While we're on the subject of trivial pursuits, there will always be the unfolding historical panorama of the U.S. presidency, which continues to invite close study.

In the weeds, Mar-a-Lago

Flights of Fancy

"Only the insane take themselves quite seriously." - Max Beerbohm

Trending Upward

"Arrogance is lording over a planet where a majority of all species that have ever lived are now extinct, without giving it a second thought . . . . Evolution does not always mean advancement."
                    - Timothy Egan, "The Arrogance of Jeb Bush," NYTimes, May 29, 2015

All the prejudices I here undertake to dispose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God directs all things to some certain end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God."
                   - Spinoza, Ethics, Pt. 1 (Appendix)

Tim Egan's New York Times column glosses a recent, breathtaking bit of Jeb Bush pre-campaign pandering in anticipation of the Koch Brothers' privately funded Republican primary: “And for the people to say the science is decided on, this is just really arrogant, to be honest with you,” he said with affecting sincerity. “It’s this intellectual arrogance that now you can’t have a conversation about it even.”

Naturally Jeb's talking about climate science, or climate "science," as he might prefer it. "The people" who say these things, of course, are the very sort who belong to the Royal Society and the National Academy of Science, who issue "reports" which refer to climate change as "one of the defining issues of our time." Always these same people - the ones with the arrogance to pretend to know anything about the very topic they are trained to investigate, who have the unbounded gall to marshall orderly data in support of their contentions, who have the temerity to present a nearly unanimous front, across the global community of climatologists, in their public pronouncements.

Jeb Bush is supposed to be less appallingly stupid than his older brother, who admitted while he was president that greenhouse gas, to which climate change is tied, "is due in large part to human activity." So to give Jeb the benefit of the doubt, he's probably not stupid, he's only pandering for that imperceptible nod from the Koch Brothers without which no Republican can any longer hope to bear the scepter and wear the royal accoutrements.

"He'll say what I say"

Whatever brief enlightenment may have invested our species in the 16th century, when Spinoza wrote, has been suborned, squandered, recklessly spent, traded for a specious idea of our own 21st-century evolution. We've unwisely combined the 13th-century superstition (lifted from Aquinas who lifted it from Aristotle) of a providentially guided universe in which humanity is the acme, perfection and sole purpose, with the (otherwise salutary) idea of evolution. 

The hybrid notion, of a providentially-guided evolution, is a travesty - the idea that humans evolve according to some divine plan which tends towards the survival, eventual perfection and assured persistence of (at least the more advanced examples of) the species. (Technology abetted by capitalism make, on this view, but a pair of God's handmaidens.) Things don't, of course, work like that in Darwin's world, a nonfictional realm in which the inapt and nonadaptable can not persist, a world directed towards no end, a realm in which survival is merely one outcome of natural process and not a goal towards which things necessarily tend according to some benign inevitability. 

To suppose otherwise, to ignore the fate of the coelocanth and the great sloth, is true arrogance; it is the arrogance that supposes humans alone are exempted from the natural mechanisms that drive the habitable planet. We will likely become the sole species whose extinction was due to its own stupidity.

Jeb's earnest wish to be able to have this "conversation" is another specious bit of Republican open-mindedness. No, such a conversation is no longer edifying, useful or instructive. Here's NASA's version, if you really want to have that conversation, a version which accommodates the Fox Newsers' claim (accurate so far as it goes) that the mean global temperature has dropped in the past decade :

Memento Mori

Listening to certain favorite pieces of music can call up strange and sudden intimations of mortality wrapped in a perfectly consonant sense of transcendence - all of which is, admittedly, temporary if a bit heady. One such piece is Jehan Alain's organ piece, the "Litanies," which comes out of the quiet with suddden bravura, high tones bordering on atonalities that lend a kind of awful immortality to its young composer, a sense that the listener may also share in such good fortune.

The Litanies is probably the most remarkable of Alain's not so many other organ compositions, mainly written in the 1930s when he was a young organist at the church of Saint-Nicholas de Maisons Lafitte in Paris. Alain was a regular prize winner at the Conservatoire de Paris, a composer of ethereal and dissonant "modernist" compositions - tight, structured, mostly meditative rather than exuberant - whose tonal qualities (not entirely "harmonies") are perfectly matched to the high, reedy tones of a French organ, an instrument which exchanges the grandeur of a German cathedral organ for refinement, a high madness and finesse which suggests immortality founded in spirit and irony rather than in forcefulness and overbearing strength. The Litanies seems to me the swelling exception to this, the intimation of death and transcendence.

Jehan Alain (1938)

" . . Alain was a skilled motorcyclist and became a dispatch rider in the  . . .French Army," Wikipedia records. "On 20 June 1940, he was assigned to reconnoitre German advance . . . and encountered a group of German soldiers at Le Petit-Puy. Coming around a curve, and hearing the approaching tread of the Germans, he abandoned his motorcycle and engaged the enemy troops with his carbine, killing 16 of them before being killed himself. He was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre . . . and was buried, by the Germans, with full military honours."  He was all of 29 years old, and a musician at that. It is not implausible that the mechanical sound of such a near and sudden approach of the rebarbative was sufficient to make him die for music.

The other bits of music that have something of the same effect - a kind of transcending of thought, an immediate sense of something supra-human which religion never seems quite able to illumine in an ironic soul - are Beethoven's symphonies, especially the Third, the "Eroica," (with its grand and awful 'marche funebre); the Seventh (with its even more g. and a. funeral march); and of course the choral Ninth which, with its depth, power and optimism, subverts our post-20th century judgment that (given what we've done to one another in the interim) such a sanguine view of humanity must have been naive.

The 'Eroica' was written as a tribute to Napoleon, a tribute which was rescinded when, in 1804 Napoleon declared himself "Emporer of the French," thereby becoming, according to the composer, "no more than a common mortal." As are we all. But perhaps, Beethoven seems to whisper and shout, mortals all, we can do better than where the last two centuries incline us.

After 11 Israeli athletes, in Munich for the 1972 Olympics, had been held hostage and then assassinated by Arab terrorists in the wake of Israel's six-day military assault on Arab territories, the Munich Philharmonic under Rudolph Kempe performed a memorial performance of the "Eroica" - less than three decades after the liberation of Hitler's concentration camps, a memorial to Jews performed freely and in great deference by Hitler's hometown orchestra.  If nothing can ever be said, say it with Beethoven.

Hostage takers, Munich 1972

 And then there is Max Bruch's violin concerto #1, Romanticism in its dark and driving quintessence, the violin wafting in just after the first dark bars of ominous strings, the solo persisting in fleeting and answering strains. A swallow chasing a wasp above a deep and uncompassed sea, the picture of any soul, today and tomorrow.

A lost happy soul