On a day sunny last week, my son took me to a beach, El Pescador, near Malibu, where he occasionally fishes.
A beautiful spot, with the tide still out, allowing me to explore the rocks and tide pools and all that they house. Every new bird set off a quick heartbeat, from cormorants, to king fisher to whimbrels.
A beach where benevolent pirates decided to make it easy for you to find treasure… DIG HERE!
I was particularly taken by the range of colors, not those of the sea as in Mary Oliver’s poem, but those of the rocks, fauna and flora surrounding me.
Reds, greens, yellows, ochres, turquoise, purple, oranges, grey and blues filled the eyes if you looked closely. Lots of pictures, then, and few words – treading with light feet and a full heart in view of nature, once again.
Tides
Every day the sea
blue gray green lavender pulls away leaving the harbor’s dark-cobbled undercoat
slick and rutted and worm-riddled, the gulls walk there among old whalebones, the white spines of fish blink from the strandy stew as the hours tick over; and then
far out the faint, sheer line turns, rustling over the slack, the outer bars, over the green-furred flats, over the clam beds, slippery logs,
barnacle-studded stones, dragging the shining sheets forward, deepening, pushing, wreathing together wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures
spilling over themselves, lapping blue gray green lavender, never resting, not ever but fashioning shore, continent, everything.
And here you may find me on almost any morning walking along the shore so light-footed so casual.
By Mary Oliver,
From A Thousand Mornings, 2012
The stone formations and differing colors never cease to amaze.
Here is a musical offering to the oceans from around the world.
Walk with me. A first exploration of a neighborhood, with many more to come, I’m sure. Share my pleasure at discovering diverse sights, some funny, some spectacular, some moving, all embedded in a long history of a place that was originally inhabited by the Hahamongna (or Hahamog’na) tribe of the Tongva people. Spanish colonialist built the San Gabriel Mission a bit southeast of Altadena before they settled Los Angeles.
The Mexican government had dibs on the region in 1826 after they had claimed independence from Spain, before it came into the possession of the US in 1848. A 14,403-acre area called Rancho San Pascual* was given to Mexican citizen Juan Maríne in 1834 as a land grant. The rancho (which covered parts of modern-day Pasadena, South Pasadena, Alhambra, San Gabriel, San Marino, and San Pasqual in addition to Altadena,) was eventually parceled into many distinct neighborhoods. (Much of what I learned comes from the Altadena Historical Society, founded in 1935.)
Non-hispanic immigrants started to move into the area that is bounded on three sides by wilderness (the Arroyo Seco, Angeles National Forest, and Eaton Canyon), and on the south by the city of Pasadena, founding nurseries and farms. One of the new nurseries owners, Byron O. Clark, coined the name “Altadena” from Spanish “alta”, meaning upper, and “dena”, a Chippewa word meaning “crown of the valley”. This was a reference to the fact that Altadena was in higher elevation or north of Pasadena, which was founded years earlier. His friends, the so-called “fathers of Altadena,” John and Frederick Woodbury who brought development to the subdivision with hotels, roads, train station all attracting new settlers, were given permission by Clark to use this name in 1887.
Fences echo diversity – from Piet Mondrian to rushes.
Main crops grown were grapes, expanding into oranges, olives, walnuts — and in the early 20th century, dates, avocados, and commercial fruit and ornamental plant nurseries. The vineyards were one of the reason that Altadena insisted on staying unincorporated, since Pasadena which tried to stall the area was ruled by temperance minded Mid-western immigrants and serious about prohibition. To this day, that independence has held, with around 40.000 citizens preferring a looser political structure.
Altadena originally attracted rich folks, in addition to the farmers, with many millionaires building large estates to flee the heat of the summer wherever they lived. An originally 96% white population saw a large change with a subsequent flurry of white flight during the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movement, the Vietnam War protests and issues of school integration combined with the ever increasing, thickening layer of smoke from L.A. that piled up against the surrounding mountains. Non-white residents moved in, establishing Altadena as one of the most diverse places of the region today. Ethnic diversity is reflected in civic life, making for a wonderfully integrated community.
Horses hang out in front yards, unicorns in garages. Chatted with a friendly leather worker who restored a saddle in his garden.
On Sundays, families meet in the public parks for soccer games, taking their picknick lunches and blowing bubbles for the kiddos. You hear predominantly Spanish, but other foreign languages as well. I had just read Clint Smith’s new poem Nomenclature in The Atlantic and was thinking of how language of familial origin gets lost across generations for so many reasons, a topic to be explored at a future point. The facts that words with similar sounds can mean different things, or change meaning with just a barely perceptible sound switch fascinates me to no end – fully aware that none in my family will ever share the complexities of the German language, and not really sad about it, as long as they use the riches of language of their own. But that would be different if the language of origin is at the verge of disappearance, as for so many enslaved tribes, or small minority groups.
Your mother’s mother came from Igboland though she did not teach your mother her language. We gave you your name in a language we don’t understand because gravity is still there even when we cannot see it in our hands.
I ask your mother’s mother to teach me some of the words in hopes of tracing the shadow of someone else’s tongue.
The same word in Igbo, she tells me, may have four different meanings depending on how your mouth bends around each syllable. In writing, you cannot observe the difference.
The Igbo word n’anya means “sight” The Igbo word n’anya means “love”
Your grandmother said, I cannot remember the sight of my village or Your grandmother said, I cannot remember the love of my village
Your grandmother’s heart is forgetting orYour grandmother’s heart is broken
Your grandmother said, We escaped the war and hid from every person in sight orYour grandmother said, We escaped the war and hid from every person in love
Your grandmother was running from danger orYour grandmother was running from vulnerability
Your grandmother said, My greatest joy is the sight of my grandchild or Your grandmother said, My greatest joy is the love of my grandchild
Your grandmother wants you present or Your grandmother wants you home.
In any case, hearing everyone’s supportive screams during the game produced joy – like any sense of community in action. Kids getting ice cream, just dropping their mini scooters, people proud of their old timers.
And since today is International Women’s day I’ll celebrate one of the strongest female wordsmiths of the English language and equally strong champion of community, MacArthur fellow Octavia E. Butler, who lived and is buried in Altadena. Here is funky music compiled in her honor.
Facing west from California’s shores, Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar, Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled; For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere, From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero, From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands, Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d, Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous, (But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)
by: Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Departure Day in PDX
I have always related to the feeling that (most) travel implies search; even if you can’t quite name what you are searching for: you do know if you found it or not. It might be the thrill of adventure, it might be vast increments in knowledge about the world otherwise unavailable to you, or, as was regularly true for me, new insights into who you yourself are, when taken out of your habitual context. You might or might not like what you discover, but there you are.
Stop for a Covered Bridge (1907/1945) originally fording the Willamette river – now an interpretative center for the history of the region before the Dexter Dam flooded the area.
All of this still applies even when you travel primarily to be with someone, if the journey takes you to a place that is sufficiently different from the one you come from, as is the case here and now, in Southern California. Really, the entire drive down once again affirmed the incredible spectrum of landscapes this beautiful continent offers.
Closed pass over Mt. Shasta re-opened the next day. Plowed snow and abandoned trucks on the right.
It was not without challenges. What looked like a sunny day after a safe escape from the snows of Portland, turned into a nail biter. Winter weather closed more southern portions of I 5, forcing an unanticipated stop in Ashland, OR. Luckily we found accommodations.
Major damage to blossoming fruit trees once entering the plains. I wonder how much the weather will hurt a region dependent on agriculture. It is not just the break from the load of the wet snow, or the freeze. The heavy rains probably decimated the blossoms a lot.
Not what you expect the California’s fruit bowl to look like…
Rains and thunderstorms made for intense navigation out of San Mateo, the next stop, once yet another closed part of the Highway across the San Gabriel Mountains reopened. But no ice and snow on the road, at any time, with plows working overtime.
Crossing the bay in San Francisco.
Getting greener once south of San Mateo, although the storm clouds gathered and opened their spigots eventually.
Flooding along the road and cold cows….
First palm trees appeared, whipped by win
as did miles of fracking for oil.
Green hills giving way to snow-capped mountains along the stretch of I5 called The Grapevine.
Then snow flakes in L.A.! Or more precisely Pasadena, where I rented a small studio in lush green gardens that didn’t quite know what to do with 35 degrees.
You’ve got the visual diary of the route. Once I’m settled, I will report on the current sights. Here is a teaser from the view out of my window. No bird remains unfound…
Music today is more of an introduction to the diversity of immigrants and their folk music (16 languages) of California. A fascinating project in the 1930s that withstood the xenophobia of the time. Here is a link to the Library of Congress where you can choose which of the above mentioned music you want to listen to.
Pull up a chair. We are not walking today but looking out of my window, something I was forced to do most of last week since I had to navigate the consequences of a fall. (All good now, no worries.)
I resumed photographing the squirrels on my balcony. When you stare out of the windows for hours at a time you can eventually identify a cast of characters by their distinct markings. By now we are on a first name basis.
Meet Fire Ear, my favorite, since s/he’s fearless, happy to look me straight in the eye and defiantly pees into my flowerpot during visits. Every single time.
Then there’s Mohawk, whose tail is either fashionably barbered or the proud emblem of victory in a previous fight.
Nipped Ear has obviously been victorious as well, and is aggressively defending his position at the peanuts when other squirrels arrive.
Red dot is the leanest of them all and shy,
Butterball only appears when the big guys have had their share,
and occasionally there’s an enterprising Baby.
The word squirrel is Greek in origin: it comes from skiouros, from skia, meaning “shadow,” and oura, meaning “tail.” When they sit up and move their tail straight one could think of it as a bit of an umbrella, I guess.
There are a whopping 200 species across the world, all born altricial, or completely dependent on their mothers for the first three months of their lives. They hoard food in caches for lean times, able to dig up stuff even under a foot of snow. Some 25% of those stores are lost to raiders, some are never dug up, which in turn helps to grow new trees, in theory. Not in my flowerpots, where nuts disappear en masse.
They are crepuscular, that is most active at dusk and dawn, so they can hang out when it gets hot during the middle of the day. They also sport hyper mobility (they can rotate their ankles by 180 degrees,) which allows them to climb in amazing ways, with forearms stretching, while the backless are anchored to the tree limbs. Oh, and their teeth never stop growing. Good thing, too when your perennially wear them down on hard nuts.
It brings me such joy to watch them, prohibitions to feed them close to the house (they might start nesting in the rafters) be d-mned. The poem below could not be more apt.
Checking out what’s inside the house!
Here is a field recording of Squirrel Flower – longtime readers might remember the location, deCordova sculpture park in MA, I wrote about it here.
Hike with me. Pack the sunhat, yes, I mean it. If you are lucky we encounter another windless, cool but sunny day that brings the landscape into sharp relief and makes for long shadows.
The hike leads up to an old cherry orchard with a single remaining tree, on the Washington side of the Gorge, a longish hour’s drive straight East from PDX. I did the whole 5-mile loop some years ago, this time managed 2/3rds of that which counts as a grand achievement given the steep inclines.
The views of the Columbia river and the basalt cliffs are spectacular, once you up there after parking at river level.
The screes are impressive, walking on the unstable stones path is another matter. Not so much dangerous as simply requiring tons of concentration that you don’t loose your footing. Much time spent with eyes on the ground when they should be scanning the surround for its stark beauty.
Should you be so lucky, you’ll see a bald eagle flying in the distance just when you look up, eventually settling in one of the dry oak trees that dot the hillsides. If you quietly approach, you might find flickers as well, perfectly camouflaged against the lichen covered rocks. And always, always, ravens.
During the breaks to catch our breath, my fellow photographer and I talked about how differently serious photographers approach the views of the landscape.
What for us is still a marvel, a breathtaking exposure to beauty no matter how much affected by human habitation and intervention, is for others a grievous example of the loss of all that was pristine.
Some long for untouched nature, while I certainly am grateful for the roads and tunnels built into the mountains so I can reach meadows that are crisscrossed by paths carved by men, and orchards built into oak tree habitats.
Which is, of course, not to say that we should not be stewards of the earth. Plenty of reminders all around – the drought is visible, even this early in the year,
the river low.
Evidence from where we looked down the promontory confirms that we continue to ravage the planet – trains carrying oil or coal that traverse the Gorge endanger us all. Coal trains pollute the air, contaminate the ground and water with coal dust, and contribute to climate change. Oil trains endanger lives and environment with their potential for accidents. In 2016 a 96-car Union Pacific train carrying highly volatile Bakken crude oil derailed near this location, setting off a massive blaze. 47,000 gallons of escaped oil, 2,960 tons of oil-drenched soil, contaminated groundwater, and $9 million in cleanup costs, cause by Union Pacific’s failure to maintain the tracks. It was a miracle that the small town of Moisier was mostly spared. (Here is the link, once more, to our documentary film that tells the whole story.)
Of course it is stunning, as always, how tenaciously nature clings on, even under challenging conditions.
I was reminded of a poem by Lucille Clifton that urges us to rethink our relationship to nature and the responsibilities we have not just for our own species but for all others as well. A perfect entry into a week where I will follow up with another hike that shows the effects of climate change in a different fashion.
generations
people who are going to be in a few years bottoms of trees bear a responsibility to something besides people if it was only you and me sharing the consequences it would be different it would be just generations of men but this business of war these war kinds of things are erasing those natural obedient generations who ignored pride stood on no hind legs begged no water stole no bread did their own things
and the generations of rice of coal of grasshoppers
from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton.(2020)s
Music today is an incredibly beautiful tune from Mongolia’s steppes – Wandering, played at about the tempo that I was walking up those cliffs. The whole album Cycle by Hugjiltu 胡格吉乐图 can be found here.
I’ve been to Paris, the proverbial city of love, three times in my life. The first visit, driving there all the way from Germany with a new crush, was supposed to be a romantic weekend – which ended up anything but, holed up in a small hotel room with a severe case of food poisoning. Love didn’t last either.
The second time I spent a week there with my youngest, then around 12 or 13, bursting with love for this young travel companion. He surprised me with unexpected flexibility, adapting to (mis)adventures, king of the Metro once he figured out the system, getting us everywhere we wanted to be. Seeing the world through the eyes of a child new to travel was revelatory.
The third time I was there for a fortnight, all by myself, grateful for the steady love of the one who sent me off. “Do what makes you happy, you need a break. I’ll hold the fort until your return.” I’ve never walked so much in my life. Two weeks spent on foot, exploring the neighborhoods until the light waned and I could no longer photograph.
Some of the exploration happened at the various cemeteries, green oases amidst the city’s bustle, and reminders that love lasts beyond a life time. At least that’s what so many of the memorials, in their detailed marble and sand stone sculptures and engraving, seem to promise. Whether we can trust that promise is another matter.
Today’s poem is an exhortation to keep it up.
Alfred de Musset (1810 -1857) a French dramatist and poet from the post-Napoleonic era makes it very clear: you better remember me, I’ll haunt you just in case! He clings to the idea of eternal love, despite the fact that throughout his life time love was always a form of suffering. He had an on/off affair with George Sand during his formative years until he was dumped by her. The loss of her to other lovers inspired much of his creative writing, but also fed into his mental instability. He died young after a life of debauchery and alcohol abuse, an emergence of multiple personalities and eventually alcohol-induced dementia. Not sure how many remember him.
Remember Me
by Alfred de Musset
Remember me, when Morn with trembling light Opens her enchanted palace to the Sun; Remember me, when silver-mantled Night In silence passes like a pensive nun. Whene’er with ecstasy thy bosom heaves, Or dreams beguile thee in the summer eves, Then from the woodland lone Hear a low-whispered tone, Forget me not!
Remember me, when unrelenting Fate Hath forced us two for evermore to part, When years of exile leave me desolate, And sorrow blights this fond despairing heart; Think of my hapless love, my last farewell: Absence and time true passion cannot quell, And while the heart still beats, Each throb for thee repeats, Forget me not!
Remember me, when ‘neath the chilly tomb My weary heart is wrapt in slumber deep; Remember me, when pale blue flowerets bloom O’er the green turf that shrouds my dreamless sleep. I shall not see thee, but from realms above My soul shall watch thee with a sister’s love, And oft when none are nigh, A voice at night shall sigh, Forget me not!
from Poésies Nouvelles (1850)
Here is the spoken French version. I have no clue who did the translation into English, but note that the first and last line of each stanza use different phrases which dilutes the French original where the command “remember!” is repeated verbatim.
More importantly, if this poem strikes you as a narcissistic outcry, let’s give some love to more collectivist action. Yesterday France saw a major wave of strikes and protest against neo-liberal pension reform. The Interior Ministry said more than 1.1 million people protested, including 80,000 in Paris. Unions said more than 2 million people took part nationwide, and 400,000 in Paris. (Ref.) The unions have shown the most unity in decades, fighting against the plan to exploit workers. Here is a good summary article of the political agenda of Macron and allies, once again haunting the working class.
Musset is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where some of today’s images are from.
Music today is a French chanson about the two lovers and an old Woody Guthrie song about unions, for good measure.
I mean, the analogy writes itself like the onion in a grand conceit though we really are like two slugs in a derelict mausoleum. Google “snails are…” Dangerous. Slow. Destroying my garden. Our jobs and our women.
You, who cannot speak snail, wouldn’t understand how the shell was the gift and curse of diaspora, how our songs and laments resound in our half-remembered houses that we carry to forget, to carry on.
This poem by Elmi, a young British-Somali poet, Ph.D. candidate and musician has been on my desk for a while. I wanted to pair it with photographs I shot some time ago, but it took me ages to find them. Thus is the curse of an unorganized archive. That way, though, I had occasion to read the poem repeatedly, always reacting with a mix of admiration of the poet’s craft and sadness, the way an immigrant’s life and burden so perfectly captured in his analogies. He won the 2021 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize with this work, the annual prize for the best poem published in The Poetry Review written by a poet who doesn’t yet have a full collection.
The snail analogy is of course the Black/Brown/Muslim/Latino immigrant who destroys gardens, jobs, women – ours‘ no less. Next we are redirected to the other’s perspective, in that abrupt break between stanzas, visually mirroring the distance between “us and them.” All this while analogy itself is made a subject in the first line, disorienting the reader in some fashion, trying to figure out if it really writes itself while we are grasping for understanding. It brings us right back to the fact that there is a schism between two worlds, being strangers to each other, with xenophobia so closely related to our disgust reaction to the slimy invaders known as snails.
The snail shell serves as an echo chamber, the repository of the cultural memories of a former belonging, now half remembered, and in need of forgetting to force integration. How could we understand, the loss it implies, and the demands that will never be met to Whites’ satisfaction, we who live here with our jobs, or women and our gardens?
It is all so sparse, so economical and yet so rich in meaning.
It’s dusk. My sons are tall. And one of them became a father this week, starting a new cycle of life. I feel like my heart is encapsulated in light, radiating awe and joy in view of natality, the miracle of birth and new beginnings.
I can’t help but think of how I have been influenced by Hannah Arendt’s writings in What is Freedom on the centrality of beginnings to human beings. In reference to Augustine’s City of God she conveys it is not just the beginning of that new life, but also the ability for each life to initiate something new.
“Man is free because he is a beginning. . . . ‘Initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo fuit.’ [So that beginnings would be, humans were created, before whom there was no one] In the birth of each man this initial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something new comes into an already existing world. . . . Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom.“
In The Human Condition” she writes: “when we speak of birth, we speak not of the beginning of something, but of somebody, who is a beginner himself.” She later describes the possibility of action in this context, and the impact on community derived from plurality. But that has to wait for another day. Right now I can only marvel at birth itself and the existence of someone who has not been in this world but five days earlier. Let’s give that new human being some time to grow before she decides if she wants to participate in the lineage of activism.
I was listening to Arun Ghosh’s new album Seclused in Light when the news of the arrival of this child reached me. (Composed during lockdown, he invented the word as a mix between recluse and secluded.) So much in this music that I wish to be true for her life to come: a clear, melodious voice (his brilliant clarinet), often playful and surprising, sometimes insisting, never shrill. A steady, measured rhythm, never frenetic. An integration of traditions, both across continents and across time, making for a truly international fusion. A mix of spirituality, humor and joy, with an explicit embrace of nature and communal action, and an occasional stoic trait. And, importantly, all written in major keys, sad minor keys making but split second appearances. (Full album – hopefully – here. Two favorite tunes below.)
A life full of light.
A life filled with beauty, variability and resilience like the hellebores that bloom in my granddaughter’s month of birth (snow, cold, rain and all!)
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that did not exist before, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, expectations and impositions; and let us see to it that we learn to tackle all that without dropping too much of what it has to bestow…”
„Und nun wollen wir glauben an ein langes Jahr, das uns gegeben ist, neu, unberührt, voll nie gewesener Dinge, voll nie getaner Arbeit, voll Aufgabe, Anspruch und Zumutung; und wollen sehen, daß wirs nehmen lernen, ohne allzuviel fallen zu lassen von dem, was es zu vergeben hat […]” – Rainer Maria Rilke Letter to Clara Rilke 1907.
Walk with me. On one of the last days of the old year, as it happened, a stroll through downtown that was a deserted place on a grey Friday morning, the quiet ruptured only by loud screams of a houseless person, the wailing echoing in the canyons between the high-rises. The few pedestrians cautiously crossed the street away from the misery, avoiding eye contact with the tent that looked wet, cold, forlorn.
Photographs today are all from a downtown PDX walk between the Portland Art Museum and Pioneer Square, going north on 10th Ave and coming back South in the park blocks.
And now 2023 already here. No New Year’s resolutions for me, since I know from long experience I won’t keep them in the first place. Although IF I would claim some, they would be echoing this British advice:
Get slightly older each day – Eat more cheese – Discard old socks – Drink the same amount of tea (ok, coffee for me) – Never run out of biscuits – Say “getting there” a lot – Muddle through.
Yet I do have a wish: to have the courage to witness (and report on) what is happening in the world, no matter how deep the darkness goes.
I want to continue to fight against the gentrification of the soul, the self, that comes with aging and privilege. It is so easy to narrow your focus when you become overwhelmed by the suffering in the world, to declare that turning away from the darkness is an act of self protection, when it is an act of choosing comfort instead.
Comfort that is not available, much less granted, to the people exposed to war, oppression, subjugation, or exploitation, by mad men in power, governments, institutions or their neighbors. If the people of Ukraine have incomparable courage to live through bombardments and invasion, the people of Iran facing gallows for desiring liberation, as do their Afghan brothers and sisters, if the Kurds have no allies in the world, nor the Palestinians any protectors, if they all summon this courage daily to live, I might at least have the courage to look. To witness, fully knowing my solidarity amounts to nothing other than emotional discomfort over the experienced helplessness.
Empty squares, with the houseless crouched in corners, and a lone city worker blowing fallen pine needles that moved in small waves and eddies.
We don’t just have to look abroad. There are plenty of discomforting sights close to home. So easy to narrow your eyes and blink the “blight” away, turning to more uplifting views. Don’t get me wrong – I embrace the powerful offerings of nature and art, literature and science as happily as anyone to make me feel better or console me, perhaps even to bestow some hope for a more just world, as my regular readers know full well. But not at the expense of the minimal tribute I can pay by witnessing what else is going on in a nation filled with racism, inequality, culture wars and drifts towards authoritarianism, even or particularly when I have reached an age where active participation in a fight for change has become harder. Maybe my reporting can encourage others who still have energy to get engaged.
Age imposes a narrowing of our lives through the declining powers of our bodies or the restrictions of disease, all multiplied to the nth degree by living in a pandemic era. It is understandable that that narrows the heart as well, the capacity for compassion when preoccupied with your own making it through the day.
It need not narrow the mind though, as long as we are mindful of how and where we apply attention and if we make sure we stretch towards learning. American-Serb poet Charles Simic once said: “The attentive eye makes the world mysterious.” I never understood that, still don’t. For me the attentive eye is all about learning about the world, de-mystifying what we are told to believe. The Jewish tradition with its intense focus on learning has always struck me as something that provided more than just tools for professional advancement, or, more importantly, understanding. It is such a thrill when you realize there is an infinite potential for growth, both of knowledge and as a person, every day, even when the potential for your body is decidedly limited.
For 2023 that means my steady diet of junk novels and movies will continue to be supplemented with stuff that is hard to read and topics that require intense familiarization.
It is somehow fittingly ironic that the question about liberty and justice for all is raised at the Louis Vuitton store. The brand’s trade tag is “Truth. Live and love truth.” No clue why a manufacturer of luxury goods comes up with that, but I don’t exactly think they’d like to hear the truth about the effects of capitalism where the consumption of luxury items plays a large role, if only as marker of the class that can afford the luggage.
***
What I learned on the first day of 2023 came about because I wondered why the sound of human misery is so deeply afflicting when you walk by, half scared, half upset. My search found, instead, a splendid analysis on a related topic: Why do Rich People love Quiet. The Brooklyn-based author of Puerto Rican descent, Xochitl Gonzales, was just made a staff writer at The Atlantic. She describes how she and her cohort of students of color experienced their lives at an Ivy League Institution and then again when White young professionals’ arrivals started to gentrify the traditionally non-White boroughs of NYC.
“The passive-aggressive signals to wind our gatherings down were replaced by point-blank requests to make less noise, have less fun, do our living somewhere else, even though these rooms belonged to us, too. … In those moments, I felt hot with shame and anger, yet unable to articulate why. It took me years to understand that, in demanding my friends and I quiet down, these students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy. And in acquiescing, I accepted that.
For generations, immigrants and racial minorities were relegated to the outer boroughs and city fringes. Far, but free. No one else much cared about what happened there. When I went to college, it was clear to me that I was a visitor in a foreign land, and I did my best to respect its customs. But now the foreigners had come to my shores, with no intention of leaving. And they were demanding that the rest of us change to make them more comfortable.”
The essay then explores the regulation of noise from above, the various administrations, mayoral office and NYPD, through laws and by moving noisy venues like nightclubs out of gentrifying neighborhoods like Chelsea and the Lower East Side and into Brooklyn. That borough, now thoroughly gentrified itself, racked up the most noise complaints of 2019 to the city hotline, the majority of them grievances about lifestyle choices: music and parties and people talking loudly. One culture’s preferences demanding acquiescence from another.
The Apple Store is barricaded behind steel net fences, with only one entrance ramp controlled by police. Moats next? Tiffany, on the other hand, let’s you peek into the window under the watchful eyes of no fewer than three security guards for the one storefront.
Gonzales’ recent novel Olga Dies Dreaming was named a Best of 2022 by The New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR. On my ever expanding list to read. The title is taken from a stirring poem by Pedro Pietri (1944-2004), Puerto Rican Obituary, linked here because it is too long to post. Don’t want to go overboard with the first blog of the year. Read it, though, if you have the time, it expanded my narrowing view of the world, offering glimpses into a culture so close and yet so far from my experience.
The park blocks offer a strange assortment of sculpture. The museum declared itself “indigenized” – whatever that means – during an exhibition by a Native American artist, Jeffrey Gibson, who produced timelines recording important events for indigenous and non indigenous Americans alike. How will 2023 be added? Since I still do not go inside museums and galleries I cannot report on the show.
Music today offers some classic Puerto Rican Salsa by Héctor Lavoe and, if you want to stretch yourself, the song Titi me preguntó, by Black Bunny, Billboard’s Artist of the Year. “Titi” is Time Magazine’s best song of 2022 pick, the voice of someone who acknowledges and tries to break with his toxic masculinity. The rapper’s music is ubiquitous in NYC right now.
No Black Bunny, but a bronze sculpture of an English bulldog, ridiculously dressed like the doormen of the Heathman Hotel where she resides outside, flagging the pet friendly policies of the establishment.
Capturing once more the beauty that surrounds us and respond with loosely (if at all) related musings? Let’s try.
If you are lucky enough to be present when a flock of snow geese gets spooked and you look at them through the very circumscribed lens of your camera, you sometimes experience something strange. Some of the geese are still ascending while others are descending already. If you loose track of who is who – easy to do from far away in the chaos – you perceive a strange undulation – as if the same thing is obliquely going up and down simultaneously, the laws of physics abandoned. For a split second you question the reality that surrounds you, fooled by a perceptual illusion.
A related question has been debated since times immemorial: what is reality and how can we be certain we perceive it correctly? It is on my mind because of the current glut of suggestions in both the cultural scene and computer science, that maybe we are mistaken about the reality we experience. Maybe, just maybe, we all live in a simulation, a computer game if you will, in which we are just puppets playing within the structures set by code, installed by some advanced beings somewhere in the universe. Frown all you want (as I do) but there are some serious, smart philosophers out there thinking through this possibility.
Honestly, watch Netflix, and there is the simulation hypothesis, if you click on 1899, a German series that is even darker and less comprehensible than its predecessor, Dark. (Actually, don’t, not worth it.) Or turn to the bestseller lists. The NYT raved about “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel, the simulation hypothesis was the basis of the plot. (Again, don’t, I thought it infuriatingly superficial, never getting to the interesting question, much less providing answers about the concept of living in a simulation. An alternative would be a book on the same topic, The Anomaly, that I found more clever by far earlier this year.)
More seriously you find even respectable thinkers and philosophers captivated by the idea, frequently debated in academia and tech/computer science circles. (Link below gives a graspable overview.)
So why this sudden preoccupation with it, decades after The Matrix offered the proposal that we are all dreaming our existence while stuffed into electronic boxes, our bodies mined for whatever the advanced evil civilization that is holding all of humanity captive, needs for their purposes? Why this emergence of Longtermism, whose prominent adherents often subscribe to the simulation hypothesis?
Why seriously engage with a hypothesis when it cannot be tested and so far there has been zero evidence to support it? If we live in a perfect simulation there is no way to get outside of the game (that is one of the problems that all these movies and books simply ignore.) Only from the outside could you judge if something is real or not. This is already the trap Descartes, wondering about our perception of reality, was caught in. His way out was to postulate that innate feelings and thoughts are pre-determined by God, and as a result, an individual’s perception of reality is in fact defined by God. Therefore, it cannot be the wrong one.
Instead of (a) God/ess who preordained everything, now we have some advanced civilization taking that place? Calvinism 2.0? Why would such a civilization waste computational superpowers on creating a simulation? What would the simulation be for? Why does it simulate consciousness, why stay within certain parameters, like the laws of evolution? Why create a place of misery and harm? And how do you deal with the problem of infinite regression, where every simulated world has potentially one above it, equally simulated into perpetuity – where is the endpoint? Back to a God/ess?
What does it buy us to engage with such a concept? Escapist fantasy? The hope that future life-forms are interested in us, some form of ancestor worship? Release from moral imperatives – if I have no free will, just like a character in Grand Theft Auto the umpteenth or Minecraft, why not engage in immoral, unethical or violent behavior without pangs of conscience? Giving in to ennui and lack of initiative because nothing can be changed, unless the puppeteers permit? Being so bored with your life that you do everything to find a glitch in the matrix as evidence that your life is not “real”? Having lost or given up on one religion, turning to the next one in disguise?
Let me know if you have the answers. Clearly the question of reality perception has been around for a long time.
Wishing you all a healthy 2023 with a grip on reality and dreams that are not turning into nightmares.
