“Suburb” means “under-city,” in the shadow of the city—which in the Bronze and Iron Age meant a hill. The suburb was physically below the “real” city. It simulated the city, in the shadows. It was and remains a para-city, beside and structurally similar to, but at heart different from a real locus of social, legal, religious, and economic life.

To simulate a city, a suburb must have housing but not community, shopping but not market, praying but not spirituality… It must have the sign of the real without the thing itself.

James Howard Kunstler illustrates the problem of the suburb and the poorly designed urb in a TED talk that somehow manages to be fierce, technocratic, and progressive while never losing a humorous edge. The problems with American places—cookie-cutter homes, forgotten squares, dead malls, removed-from-the-street buildings, and isolation and waste that engender one another and prevent society rather than frame it—are so dire they elicit almost instant sad-laughter. The jokes write themselves.

[Btw, I found this talk via one of artist James Roper's many deeply engaging art-blogs. Roper has great taste in weird anatomic, sexy, psychedelic, Gothic, geometric optical matter, which is to say my kind of taste.]

Kunstler’s perhaps dangerously American-centric perspective aside, he rocks the house, offering a few solutions and noting that local living will offer or force many us to come up with more as the years march on and the hydrocarbons disappear—or appear oozingly all along the Louisiana shore, like some dread tide forecast in Revelation—whichever.

Yet for now architecture and urban planning are classical, representing spaces, streets, life, and other people as “out there,” beyond—whereas cities are naturally baroque, confusing places and bringing us together… Baroque cities go everywhere, do everything from interlinked hubs that expand up and out but fold back on themselves, never expanding without doubling purpose and quadrupling links; the baroque does not like to recognize borders, and does not start with a form, but with a content that is already too much for its form, so that the form must be refolded and repurposed (The Highline, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi), already greening (giving life to, giving commerce to) the steel and asphalt…

I would now like to complement Kunstler’s investigation of the real problems of real spaces with what I know—that being the parahelpful, the goodnaturedly impractical, and the just fucking fantastic.

Specifically, I’d like to suggest we tackle real physical problems always with one eye firmly pointed to baroque imaginary physical (and temporal) solutions. To speak in plain Amerkan: Today’s architects should be taking notes from Doctor Who.

Enter Live Journal. Yes, Gentle Reader, I too was shocked that LJ still exists and is still a hub of internet thought and counter-thought. I was also glad, for here I found, courtesy a tip from illustrator and intrepid co-author Ethan Gould, A Partial Map of Your TARDIS (Subject to Change).

Check out the Partial Map. Srsly, it’s a perfect gift from Nerd Santa Claus.

What is a/the TARDIS, I at first wondered? Gould informed me it’s a time-travel phone booth-… thing, used by the Dr.s Who (there have been several?) to do… stuff. I admit, I don’t know the show.

But that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the Map—a complex alternative geography, a topology of time, space, levels of self, relationships with other, and pun that both stuns the aesthete’s eye and pleases the futurtect’s brain, or strokes the synesthete’s eye and punches the protomodernist’s head—whichever.

As spaces and representations-of-spaces collapse—as more people buy iPhones and Droids and so enter a world made always-partially-virtual by virtue of a constant back-and-forth between eye, hand, Google, and physical reality—we will need both the type of solutions Kunstler offers (how to use the malls that pointlessly blister the skin of our nation, how to get ourselves out and happy and doin stuff, and not locked into suburban bedrooms playing Borderlands and crying into our two-liter diet Powerthirsts) as well as the type of imagination, freedom, and excitement regarding the notion of space that this Partial Map (partially) exemplifies.

What is space—what do we want from it—a cafeteria, a cathedral, a drive-in, a disco, a passport office, a warehouse…

Really, consider space. Consider this:

Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.

—Roger Cohen, “Toilets and Cellphones,” New York Times.

The question of space is deceptively simple. If we knew what we wanted out of space—how closely we wanted to be in contact with other humans, with trees, with grizzlies, with toilets, &c.—perhaps we wouldn’t have made the millions of now-uninhabited suburban dreadnoughts that sail motionlessly across America like the scattered head of a ripe drywall dandelion. Perhaps cell service would not have trumped sanitation in emerging industrial powers.

The classical problem of taxonomizing (classifying, boxing) spaces—and creating more and more iterations of each class—has trumped the question of use of spaces, enjoyment of others. The neatly virtual-classical has tried to remake itself over and obscuring the messily real-baroque.

In suburban America, humans have boxed ourselves away from one another, creating Byzantine cities, castle-towns dying as suspicious barons ward off trade and innovation, unlinked by rail, unwelcoming, never-congealing, without history, and so without future.

We may never be able to build a time-defying/space-expanding machine like the TARDIS (which serves ants, by the way, in the cafeteria) or inhabit lands like those pictured in the Codex Seraphinianus. But I think it’s good to jump-shark over the preconceptions of our reality—which we have more control over than Brutalism and the plague of big-box stores would make us think—and of our era—which is always already transforming into the next, a werewolf caught between man and beast.

Imagining impossible, baroque (constantly merging-with) geographies lets us place our consciousnesses into weird towns without those towns having to exist first. We show ourselves possibilities and discard rigidity.

Producing the new reality—fixing the problem—is another skill and far beyond the scope of my rambling. Perhaps post-World War II design has been too caught up, however, in the problem-fixin and left too far behind the emergent chaos of older cities, not to mention the wonder of the unreal.

I love bizarre groups of old things. So does, I take it, Joanna Ebenstein, who’s just launched a site for The Secret Museum, her “exhibition of photographs exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched, and curious collections from around the world.”

Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy, Astropop Productions) has an eye for the macabre-elegant and the hideous-awesome. Her blog and the events she puts together have several times blown my mind, and the Secret Museum is no exception. I especially give her props for aiming to capture the mystery and wonder of “liminal spaces.” (What is science, what art? What spectacle, what education? What grotesque, what natural, &c.)

The Secret Museum is on view free of charge, IRL, at Observatory Room in south Brooklyn through Sunday, June 6.

History never effaces what it buries; it always keeps within itself the secret of whatever it encrypts, the secret of its secret. This is a secret history of kept secrets.

—Derrida.

For today, even as he finds “a lot to admire” in the Tea Party (his words, re: their pugnacious tenacity, or tenacious pugilistic rhetoric, or amiable backwardness, or something I don’t admire), conservative columnist and personal lit-nemesis Douthat admits that its most recent star has lost significant shine. Sayeth Douthat:

…it shouldn’t come as a shock that [Kentucky Republican and Tea Party boy-wonder Rand Paul] found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.

Rand Paul, son of Ron “Ross Perot Redux” Paul, is looking to win the Party of Chai’s first Senate seat. But now he’s waffled on civil rights. Would he have voted to desegregate America? He didn’t seem sure, fearing government intervention in private practices such as excluding minorities from business, until those biased scoundrels—the Media—pressured him into clarifying his position as a bona fide 9/10ths supporter of the O.G. Civil Rights Act.

Boo, hiss, Mr. Paul. Waffling on a complicated budget bill? Take your time, read the fine lines. Waffling on waffles? Sure, consider pancakes. But waffling on civil rights? That’s so… old school. And not in the good way.

Hilariously, Douthat also points us to Paul’s record of paranoia regarding government projects which patently do not exist.

Now, I’m just as terrified as the next man of the secret alien commune in the Mojave where the Liberal Illuminati force Elvis to play badminton with Walt Disney’s headless body for their own amusement, but… A NAFTA superhighway “the width of several football fields” running straight from Mexico to Canada, cutting America in half like a government-cheese sandwich? That’s just crazy-talk.

(Plus, everyone knows a NAFTA superhighway would have to divert through the Babyhating Blue-State Coasts, forming a hateful wishbone that could eventually cross both oceans and be connected, on the Commie side, to Tokyo, and, on the Frog side, to Space Paris, from which we liberals receive our command-signals.)

[Double-plus, we don't have nearly enough oil to support the super-massive car-traffic of a highway "several football fields" wide. Unless Paul fears an army of Mexican, Central American, and South American immigrants bicycling furiously toward Texas, ready to take his job from him.]

Rand Paul does have some positive visions of the future, however: “I guarantee you it’s one of their long term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent.”

Hell yeah, Amero-Pangaea! Lookin good.

According to this article in the New York Times by Diane Cardwell, we’re taking the best of (our version of) Old New York and mapping it over the current city (New New York?), creating a simulation city: New-York-That-Never-Was-But-Should-Have-Been.

Cardwell focuses on the zombie-resurrection of chic West Village eateries. Other writers have undoubtedly examined various facets of this phenomenon: the olding of the new city, the creation of the New-Old New York.

Simulation and city-simulating fascinate me. First, I consider at work the ideal of New York (and, by extension, all of America) as eternally new, always remaking itself, changing, accepting new populations and growing and shrinking along unexpected vectors, so that once-chic neighborhoods become hoods, and hoods become chic, and populations at odds with one another are mapped asymmetrically onto one another, creating new generations of populations with new beefs and new-old traditions: “In Little [Origin Place], we’re going to do it how we did it back in [Origin Place].” (Or picture hipsters dressing “just like” Victorians.)

Simulation adds another level of complexity to this play, because it lets Evil Developer Guy or Artsy Small Business Dude simulate an “authentic to neighborhood X circa year Y” experience, and this new simulated experience continues to influence the “not-simulated” experiences surrounding it.

The trick is that every experience was, at one point, simulated. When populations moved into the City, they simulated the cities they came from. Russians brought Moscow; Cubans, Havana; &c. This is old hat, but worth repeating.

Simulation on a shorter wavelength (simulating one place in the same place—the Village in the Village—in 1960, a relatively short time ago) only changes the nature of what you’re simulating, why it’s appealing, and how you market it. Instead of harkening back to some eternal value or tradition, you’re exposing your process for your audience: “Come here because we’re just as new as they were, back then…”

To be “modern” (or Modernist), you must always be new against whatever is perceived as “old.” With our high old-new turnover, the “old” now ranges from the 1960s, for Baby Boomers, to the 90s of Tupac and Biggie, for students who were raised on Jay and Nas and have already forgotten even the Bush years and moved on to Weezy.

Metaphor-conjecture: City-simulating is the “reblogging” of old buildings, earlier styles, and bygone services in new social and physical contexts. You take a boring-”old” building (not old, yet not modern) and make it new by making it traditionally-old. You re-post a classic iteration of a classic meme, and the context around it makes it new, and it makes new the context.

Another ideal to consider: “Simulation makes it better.” Said in plain Amerkan: “Do ‘er over agin, boys. Second time’s a lucky charm.”

Look at Disney. Is your Land-That-Simulates-America-Better-Than-America-Actually-Is not grand enough for you, Walt? Simulate the Land. Make a World. Because every time you play God—as an artist, a CEO, a scientist—you might as well play God bigger and better than the last time.

From Cardwell’s article, emphasis mine:

“There’s so much that’s Vegas-y and Houston-y and random that you want a place that feels sort of timeless New York in a not-kitschy way,” said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant who worked on the latest revival, in 2009, of the Monkey Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “And of course you would want to re-create it in the current notion of what it ought to have been.”

Now a caveat: Humans have always done this. We’ve always gone back to tradition and built it over innovation, “exactly as it once was,” and it has never been “exactly as it was.” It’s always been innovation in “traditional-and-therefore-trustworthy” sheep’s clothing. To gives just one multi-example:

Rome made itself Greek; Constantine made Greek Byzantium into the New Rome; the so-called Founding Fathers made New York the (New) New Rome; New York makes itself the asphalt-and-steel-bound rod of splinters from every city; every city comes here to take back crap signifying “New York;” I can go to Tokyo and buy real New York crap that signifies the New Rome, which signifies Greece, which was a brutal Bronze Age seaside waste that the Greeks desperately fought to leave… Simulation implies a want, a want to make new, even if by making old. To harken-back-to, to legitimize.

Simulation is gimmickry, but it’s perfectly natural. We’re a species of charlatans. Drunken monkeys with the cleverness to build skyscrapers.

But again—old hat. Finishing off, from Cardwell:

During the Depression, [social historian Jan Whitaker] added, New Yorkers preferred old-fashioned fake-Colonial dining rooms to the sleek Moderne-style establishments that opened after the repeal of Prohibition.

And are the Japanese Jewish?—asks this great Pink Tentacle post, from a series on Japanese urban legends. Even with the urban-legend disclaimer, the wording of the post repeatedly assumes that there really is (or was) an Ark of the Covenant.

I wonder why we feel the need even to speculate about “lost artifacts” and apocryphal heroes. Do we find it cathartic to imagine that there was a Seal of Sulayman, a Rod of Aaron, a Sword of Roland—at some point—and we’ve merely degenerated, been scattered in an ur-diaspora (courtesy Babel, the Deluge), losing our physical links back to the Divine?

That any one of us could find tomorrow our own Lost Tablet or Holy Horseshoe and so become the future Sulayman, Frodo, or Per-Ce-Val—”Through the Veil,” the vale of the shadow of mortality, through all the way to the gnostic-mysterious Origin of our very Being?

The Japanese talkshow clip is pure entertainment, of course, as is the first Indiana Jones. The whole Pink Tentacle post is entertainment. But the comments reveal how seriously and variously we take questions of national identity and religious ipseity.

For me, the convergence of entertainment and serious give-a-shit-ness is where fiction comes in. These “fabled lost somethingerother of Ancientplace!” para-connections between remote peoples and times make for great fiction, unless Dan Brown hears about them. (My favorite consequence of the search for the [Japanese] Ark: The government named the supposed Ark-locus “Tsurugi-san Quasi-National Park.”)

And, yes, if some lost Middle Eastern influence did end up all the way on the remote slopes of Tsurugi-san in Shikoku—if the Ark did indeed cometh out of Israel or Babylon, then somehow into Japan—I would want to know more, as a historian—a conscientious fabulist, playing around with a limited set of signs-of-things-that-supposedly-happened, drawn from certain sets of texts.

But I wonder just how many other schizoid theories there are out there—of the secret still-attainable flat earth/lost tribe/Dead Sea Powerscroll/ancient biblical ninja powersword/lost Powerthirst flavor (Ark Lite), and so on—floating around, begging to be entertained, like Tourette’s-afflicted children, in Japan and here in New York—and especially on the internet. The number must be staggering.

Eventually, we must all be the “lost tribe” of some other tribe, one not lost to itself.

Hilarious. My man Kool Keith—AKA Doctor Octagon AKA Master of Robots AKA a host of other names I elide here due to both space and mental health concerns—schools us all on how to rock the perfect fridge. The answer? Seltzer water. What the…

The foodstuffs Mr. Keith suggests we stock up on comprise a list that is not mad and is not an example of a Chinese Encyclopedia; the list makes perfect sense; it includes healthy shit and excludes sugary shit with mass appeal.

The madness of this list comes from Mr. Keith’s simulation of a preference for healthy food. Mr. Keith suggests that the only reason he likes healthy shit is a pragmatic fridge-protecting function. He has simulated himself a sort of Great Wall of China for his fridge, by which it cannot be effectively looted by his sugary-shit craving homeboys. He does not, “in reality,” like healthy shit, and yet he likes it in effect, pragmatically.

One day, I will co-teach a course on Kool Keith and simulation (with the ghost of Gilles Deleuze, who wears a backwards hat made from other hats, each of which is facing forwards).

What an alien-sounding sentence. Yet it’s true, according to this random site I found on the internet. I love all the names of “groups of critters.” Here’s my all-time Excellent Eight:

1. A group of turtledoves is called a pitying.
2. A group of ferrets is called a business.
3. A group of magpies is called a tiding.
4. A group of mallards is called a sord. (Ducks have their own term.)
5. A group of snipes is called a wisp.
6. A group of starlings is called a murmuration. (Say word!)
7. A group of toads is called a knot.
8. A group of trout is called a hover.

Even more awesome—if this list of olden-schoole names of groups of animals can get more awesome, which it can’t—these are terms from venery, meaning the hunting of game animals. Venery was what rich dudes did in olden times. (The poor just scraped coach-flattened squirrel off the country lanes and begged the nearest squire for enough dough and suet to make squirrelmince pie.)

Venery also means sexual pleasure, indulgence, the pursuit of desire—the human hunt. These minor semiotic synchronies, homologies, and sly metaphors (paradefinitions, slang-making grunts of extra-meaning) cheer the dude up almost as much as the names of groups of critters—which are, inf act, paradefinitional.  Ferrets must have struck some olden dude as looking business-y at some point.  And a group of toads, bumpy and knuckling everywhere over itself, calls to mind a knot.

I just don’t get how a confederation of trouts is supposed to hover…

Or aqueducts. Whatever. Check it out! Wonders from history. Booyakah.

Of the Literary variety. Danger! Adventure! Perhaps misadventure! Check it out: Literary Death Match. Thursday, May 20, at Bowery Poetry Club.

If you want to see me win this DEATH MATCH… buy some cheap tickets.

Here’s the party line:

Not for the faint of heart, LDM NYC’s 26th episode promises to tantalize and titillate your most sensitive literary bits. We’ve assembled an army of brilliant judges — literary renegade Richard Nash, subversive comedian Jena Friedman and blogger/author/goddess Paulina Porizkova — to hold sway over the unruly proceedings.

A hodgepodge of lovable deviants will battle it out on the Bowery Poetry Club stage, including Melissa Febos, author of WHIP SMART, King of Counterculture Mike Edison (High Times, Screw), devilish storyteller Wythe Marschall (representing Electric Literature), and laconic absurdist-or-is-he Mike Topp, author of Shorts are Wrong and Happy Ending.

And—holy shit—it’s a Culture Mob article about the show.

If you live in New York, perhaps you really should come and see me win, on behalf of my friends’ stellar journal, Electric Literature. I will be winning via a story about a cowboy. I have many of them. Devil I am. Words I pitch, via fork, into flames. Pass the flask. All I read is words. If I had a car or a chuck wagon, all I would do is ride around shining:

Some people are funny intentionally, some accidentally, and some somnambulantly, totally without “getting it.” The Room, for example, is today billed as a “dark comedy,” thought it was obviously a very serious investigation of romance (I guess?) and, uh, cancer (?) when it first sloughed dreadfully out of the mental womb of its creator, auteur Tommy Wiseau.

Likewise, I thought, I thought—Insane Clown Posse must be an in-joke that has no out. How can they possibly “get it,” I asked, and still be or do “it,” whatever it is?

The answer finally came when ICP’s hilarious new video about miracles crossed that invisible, difficult-to-pinpoint memetic threshhold and became a megahit on the internet, which is to say, a true megahit, not one manufactured by advertising. (Remember Chinese Democracy, anyone? I don’t.)

ICP had to face up to their essential paradox: A. Are they so counter-culture and, well, insane that they deny that “it” (their steez) is all some bizarre joke? B. Or are they aware of the joke—in on the joke? C. Or can they have it both ways?

This Dave Itzkoff article in the New York Times pretty much answers this in favor of C. I never paid much attention to ICP (I’m not a big goofy clown rap enthusiast, personally), but damn, I do like magnets and giraffes… (My emphasis.)

SHAGGY 2 DOPE, INSANE CLOWN POSSE: In 1999 we made a movie called “Big Money Hu$tla$,” and that went over great. Then we started kicking around the idea we should make a prequel: “Big Money Rustlas.” It’s the main characters’ ancestors in the Wild West. It’s a satire.

VIOLENT J, INSANE CLOWN POSSE: When we’re talking to the Juggalos, it’s not always about chop-chop, kill-’em-up, you know? I guess some of it might come from having kids over the last five years, looking at everything from that perspective. I mean, a rainbow can be explained. But who doesn’t say, “Wow, look at the rainbow?”

SHAGGY 2 DOPE: If Celine Dion would have come out with that song, people would have been, like, “Oh, that’s a beautiful song.” But because it’s coming out of our mouths, all of a sudden, we’re retards.

VIOLENT: J I think we might have misused the word miracle. These things we mentioned in the song, they can all be explained. But what we’re doing is appreciating them. Even the infamous line “Magnets, how do they work?” I mean, yeah, we know how magnets work. But they’re still incredible. You can push something across the table without touching it.

SHAGGY 2 DOPE: Come on, man. The North and South Pole makes a rock magnetic, and if you touch a piece of metal with it, that becomes magnetic? That’s crazy.

VIOLENT J: I grew up in Detroit. We don’t have pelicans on every corner. We don’t have giraffes walking down the street. I’d rather be the dumbed-down guy appreciating everything than the guy who knows everything and doesn’t appreciate [anything].

[But...]

VIOLENT J: Two clowns floating around in space, swearing, rapping about wonderful things. I get that that’s funny to an outsider.

VIOLENT J: I know this sounds crazy, but I’m being as honest as I can: We planned all this out. Our tour starts in May. And then we have our nuclear weapon, which is the movie “Big Money Rustlas.” That comes out in August. This is all happening so perfectly for us.

As a friend of mine pointed out, they are funny not because they are stupid, but because their list of miracles is incongruous. Magnets are cool. But how do you filter your list of miracles down to a few aspects of science and some animals uncommon to Detroit? I love this song because it spins the miraculous in a totally unexpected direction. Miracles are now neither religious nor scientific, human nor divine. They’re… insane.

So how does this miraculous incongruity work, literarily? ICP’s list of wonders is what Borges terms a Chinese encyclopedia—a list that cannot ever be coordinated, made sense of, or indexed, as a totality, even if each component makes total sense. So, yes, those things are all dope as fuck. Magnets, seabirds, long-necked mammals, optical effects, a pet cat (?), etc. But they can never really live on the same plane, in our minds. Hence hilarity.

The song is also an ultra-dope example of systrophe, or indirect definition, such as definition by an exhaustive list rather than by… a definition. This technique works, every time. People don’t respond as well to logical definitions (such as I just gave of 2 literary terms); people like examples, especially hilarious, exhaustive examples given to them by clowns with mental health concerns.

A miracle. Photograph by Keven Law.

I will now be publishing quotations to a tumblr blog (they didn’t have the venture capital for an E?), florillegium. The metaplasmus (intentional misspellingg) of the title = ill + florilegium. (So it matches ill-luminations.) [Plus the one-L domain was taken. Dang.] A florilegium is a book of ill shit you found out there, such as quotations, flower petals, doodles, whathaveyou: a Renaissance blog…

Time passes even in the past—things seem to become more obvious and understandable than they were in the present…

—Andrei Bitov, Pushkin House.

It’s bizarro-spring, here in New York. Cold crud weather, and almost May. I wonder. What is it about the darkness of a cloudy sky that terrifies us?

What is it about the ecotones between darkness and light—the syzygy of light bursting into darkness, of darkness sliming down over light—that can be both beautiful (awe-full) and absolutely dread?

We can see a frightful ecotone in every cloud (fluffy and light, but shadowing out the sun), and writers have for a long time captured different moments of cloud-dread.

Art critic and endearing madman John Ruskin was the most famous cumulophobic. He thought a mysterious “plague wind” was a sure sign that humanity is doomed:

For the sky is covered with gray cloud;—not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunderstorm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind.

—John Ruskin, “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.”

More on Ruskin’s plaguesome clouds from Joel Segal.

From Cabinet.

Other great writers are more or less blunt about the doom, melancholy, and generally emo nature of clouds—all generally in contrast to the storybook associations of clouds with purity, innocence, and lightness.

Lampedusa mentions clouds after a long, bizarre scene of political discourse. The clouds block the sun. Obscuring God, future. Progress, metaphorically, is on hold—a mere trickle forward:

Day had just dawned: the little light that managed to pass through quilted clouds was held up once more by the immemorial filth on the windows.

—Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), 1958.

Woolf uses clouds as a gate into dream—positive, progressive dream. But this passage comes during World War I, during the death of the protagonist, the agony of the family. The dream is a temporary respite, an illusion. The reality is the obverse of the cloud-shadow, the disturbance (frog, pebble) ever-ready to splash into the pool, shatter the mirror (the mind):

In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote form the known domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure.

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

And, extending cloud to air, we have the earlier notion of limitless freedom (a fluffy, unending march of clouds, a cloudless sunny day of unforgivably honest blue) as a trap, a plane on which to always be in-view, to always be caged, forever under the moon’s eye, without ground, falling:

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Air above, air below. And the moon and immortality…

—Virginia Woolf, “An Unfinished Novel.”

Gass is more blunt:

…the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty…

—William Gass, On Being Blue, from that famous thundering-magnificent opening litany of blues—azures, royals, sadnesses, seedies, stockings, Prussians, Russians, bruises, forgettings, and, as here, absentness, emptiness, the Modern.

I’ve quoted Gass at greater length before; this passage is such an unreal mixture of precision (clouds do have shaded slopes) and surprising, breath-robbing melancholy. The increasing absentness. Of God. The empty silver throne. (”Emptiness has such a warm subtle sting… Heaven ain’t something someone else can give.” —Eyedea & Abilities, “Paradise.”)

So clouds block us from the Creator, remove us from the natural play of planets and suns. They are a kind of white-gray chaos, a litter of un-form across a plane we feel should be whole and formal, complete.:

And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all around an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood—the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth: and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos.

—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre.

Of course, writing chaos is not a chaotic process. Expression of un-form requires immaculate form. There is no one better than Aira, whom I’ve also quoted before, before the clouds. The “clouds” sound out a one-two dance-step hoof-hoof cadencing. They track chaos through chaos, and a pattern emerges. Form from un-form. A midnight pattern, obscuring a high noon. Or a streak of off-white on a sliver-moon night. Syzygy and ecotone, imperfect and thus more fascinating to have the clouds there but not completely of one type. Even better to take the patterns of clouds and remove them from the sky:

Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once. Jagged lines, impossible angles, trees growing downwards from ceilings of rock, sheer slopes plunging into mantles of snow under a scorching sun. And shafts of rain thrust into little yellow clouds, agates enveloped in moss, pink hawthorn.

—César Aira, An Incident In The Life Of A Landscape Painter.

Finally we arrive at the simple-lush prose of rancher-writer Verlyn Klinkenborg. He gets a dang Honourable Badge Of Merit because he writes boldly and artfully and simply and naturally. His cows come alive. (They were never not alive. I just didn’t feel much about cows until I read Verlyn Klinkenborg—and then Lydia Davis, in Electric.) Cloudy Klinkenwords, translating the pattern of the clouds into/onto birds:

What I see from the train should really be called a heronry, a village of well-built heron nests high in the trees. In winter, they stand out against the sky like dense clouds or puffs of dark smoke caught in the uppermost branches.

—Verilyn Klinkenborg, “Heronry,” The New York Times, 5 January, 2009.

And finally-finally—eliding the clouds themselves, because in his Wyoming the plains have stolen the clouds’ job, have skinned the clouds and wear their patterned drabness, setting out from the horizon; turning the birds back into darkness; the cows into symbolic darkness (here the light that stands out against mere “gloom,” ecotone); giving color heaviness and momentum; capturing this tectonic intermediate-ness of dawn, the beauty of that lack of grounding, lack of depth-of-field—the spark of my investigation, Klinkenborg’s “Out of Darkness,” from a recent Times:

When the sun finally rises, this will be a gray day, a great slab of flint laid across the plains. But the sun is still an hour off, and the snow is salting down just east of Riverton, Wyo. My eyes are straining for sight in the void out there, looking to see what emerges first from the darkness. The answer is the blackest objects — the old tires that ranchers sometimes place beside their cattle guards and the cattle themselves, black Angus stirring in a creek bottom. The cattle look as though they were bred black just so humans could find them easily in the gloom.

But mostly there are ravens, moving in singles and mated pairs, not so much gliding as fighting off the stiff north wind. They know the lights of this highway well, and I see them hopping into the ditches or flaring upward on the wind just out of my path as I hurtle by. To say the light is rising is to overspeak. I can just discern the seam between earth and sky…

The gray ahead broadens and seems to grow heavier, as if there could be no getting out from under it. And slowly color begins to emerge, what color there is… Out here on the plains, pressed beneath the sky, they seem to be blushing furiously but only by contrast with the immensity of the drabness that surrounds them. It is a mood, I know, the wan hour of morning that makes their beauty feel so hidden, so lost.

A friend at work sent me the Sam Harris talk, and I sent it to a friend I used to live with by the name of Luke Rodgers. Luke is a philosopher, and if you enjoy his thoughts on Harris, I encourage you to explore his blog, everything flows.

I sent Harris’s talk to Luke in part because I wanted to confirm my own biases: I agree with some of Harris’s thoughts, yet others annoy me. Luke’s reply is as thought-provoking as Harris’s lecture. Check out this off-the-cuff philosophizing:

First, the fact/value distinction is old, but also has been under attack at least since 1805 (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit). There are many good reasons for believing that this distinction is not rigid, but there are also good reasons for, in some cases, not abolishing it altogether, I think.

Harris claimed that the moral core of every religion is ultimately about conscious experience. I think this may be deeply wrong, and that the opposite is probably true. Certainly Kant’s philosophy specifically eschews this approach, and it seems to me that Judeo-Christian morality, conceived of as a law issuing from without, is also exactly contrary to Harris’ conception.

The question of suffering may be a good one, and some philosophers in the 20th century sought to locate this question at or near the centre of ethics (Derrida does something like this in some places). There does seem to be a “fact of the matter” here, so I think Harris is at least partially right that science can contribute to this debate.

Even though he went out of his way to try to avoid coming across as racist/imperialist, the contention that “conferences like this” are only conceivable in certain parts of the world, as though that is evidence of some moral or developmental superiority, is utterly hypocritical and arrogant, insofar as conferences like TED are, at least within the parameters of the current global economic system, only conceivable on the basis of incredible inequality and suffering in other worlds. That is to say, it can only exist in the USA because it cannot exist in so many other countries.

The overall reductionism, this century to the brain, last century to psychology/genetics, the previous century to phrenology, is a stupidity that many Western philosophers and scientists have been trading in since the early modern period. I doubt we will stop making it any time soon, though anyone who is acquainted with the history of modern philosophy (as Harris obviously is not) would be less likely to make this blunder. Harris reveals the ultimate contradiction himself when, in the Q&A period he admits that brain states cannot be reliably interpreted without reference to the larger context. That is to say, things are not reducible to the brain, that is to say his basic thesis is inherently misguided.

The question of “how humans flourish” is totally abstract, and cannot be determined outside of particular contexts. It is incapable of a universal answer. Harris’ talk about “valleys and peaks” on the moral landscape, while not absurd, here functions merely as a screen for his actual thesis of convergence which, along with the utopian idea that borders between nation-states are already disappearing (plausible) and will eventually vanish (incredible), is an old liberal myth.

The notion that “certain opinions [on morality] must be excluded” and that an objective domain of expertise on how to achieve human flourishing will emerge strikes me not only as vastly improbable, but also extremely dystopian and proto-totalitarian.

So, in sum, “yes” to weakening the fact/value dichotomy and being open the possibility that science will *inform* moral debates, but a resounding “no” to the notion that moral debates will constitute a domain of experimental science, and also “no” to the naive brain reductionism.

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With regard to the veiling and honour-killing &c., yes, I agree. In that sense, I am ethnocentric in the sense argued by Richard Rorty (one of my favourite pragmatist philosophers), which I see as the least contradictory and most sophisticated way of avoiding the pitfalls of relativism and absolutism. I believe (though perhaps in a less jingoistic way than Rorty did) in the superiority of democracy and (certain aspects of) the individualist/liberal and secular traditions, though I also believe that I have no ultimately foundational, or non-question-begging ways of supporting those beliefs (i.e. I don’t think it’s grounded in objective reason, or anything like that).

As to brain science, yes it is indeed gaining serious weight, and it’s hard to see what will replace it and supersede it, though something probably will in the next 100 years, at least in terms of what we consider to be the science best suited for understanding human nature. On the other hand, it is still seriously deficient in many ways (deficiencies which, I think, scientists are sometimes better able to recognize than the breathless philosopher sycophants), e.g., it’s explanatory language is still at a very early stage and relatively crude, it has basically no idea how many anti-depressants work, etc.

If you can find the essay by Alisdair MacIntyre called “Hegel on Faces and Skulls” it’s a good read on this topic

Also, with regard to genetics, I expect there are still some huge surprises in store for us which are potentially game-changing. For example, until recently we thought that a large amount of DNA was “junk,” i.e., didn’t code for any proteins, and I think we’re just now beginning to figure out what that junk DNA is for.

There is some research going on right now that shows how Lamarck was right in certain ways, that is to say that sometimes a genotype can actually be modified on the fly in response to certain environmental conditions in a way that makes the change heritable.

But yes, genetics may be approaching a level of maturity comparable to physics; i.e., we may find that in 100, 200 years, certain beliefs we have now about genetics are still held true—a situation I would say is fairly plausible, barring societal collapse.

An interesting book on this topic is The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking, in which he develops a sophisticated way of looking at the extent to which different things may be considered “socially constructed.”