Skammen

Right now I am watching a film directed by Ingmar Bergman, Skammen (Shame), which came out in 1968. Set in Sweden, it has overtones of World War II and is of course also a commentary on the Vietnam War, as well as on war in general. It stars Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow, and while it displays all of Bergman's characteristic genius, I can't help but see also influences from the French New Wave as well as from Italian Neorealism.

But what I want to focus on is a sparkling feature of the work that seems all too absent today: the importance of beauty, especially in the midst of disaster and as a counterforce to cruelty.

Ullmann and Von Sydow are musicians, so the icons of beauty are musical: a violin and a piano that appear at key moments, as well as references to classical works.

What came to mind while I was watching it was a trip to Baghdad. As I rode in from the airport with a German colleague, he pointed out to me how happy he was to see that many palm trees had been planted since the war had abated, at least for a brief period.

How much debt do human beings owe to plants for the beauty that they bring to the world? And how much do we take them for granted?

Shame, indeed.

Sweeping

Can humans be swept?

I ask because today I swept some blades of grass and they appeared no worse for wear. When I was in Haiti I saw humanity as I had never seen it before. A man hauling a cart as I had never seen a man do before, He taught me something new about humanity.

Can humans be swept? Plants can. And they remain intact and whole and (it seems) thriving.

In Response to David Brooks' Column in the New York Times III

If productivity itself is the problem, not distribution, radically different politics is demanded than we’re seeing today. If productivity is the problem, we need more dynamism, not less, more openness, not less, more growth-oriented policies, not more dirigiste and redistributive ones.

No, sorry. We need better distribution and less productivity. Our sweating earth and its suffering and befuddled denizens cannot take any more dynamism from homo sapiens. Enough is enough. Stop growing and start sharing, among humans and nonhumans alike. Our politics has to extend beyond our own selfish and often pathetic and ruinous human concerns.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/the-economy-isnt-broken.html?comments#permid=24086558

Gravel

Go get some. 

But don't be surprised if you go back to earth eventually. It catches your eye, and thrills your senses, because it is unusual, extracted and refined, as it is, a product of water, once again, the anti-earth? The earth other?

Sugar, white flour, cocaine . . . gravel is the same. Its tactile clacking, its strange motility. It will excite you but it will let you down, eventually, and back you will go to earth, from which both you and it came.

When Europeans first came to what are now the Americas, they described corn as having 'Small fatness'. I feel the same way about gravel. Humus it is not, and therefore not nurturing to biological life. Exciting . . . captivating, yes, but not nurturing. Unlike soil, gravel lacks a plant component.

Here is a stanza from Sappho's 'Supreme Sight on the Black Earth'

Some say cavalry and others claim
infantry or a fleet of long oars
is the supreme sight on the black earth.
I say it is the one you love

For some reason, the person who produced this translation, Scott Horton, chose to use 'black' instead of 'brown', which is how I typically see it in Italian. But fair enough, I like black. Even what might be called green olives can be 'black' in Italian, as can red wine. It makes me wonder if specificity is really so important to expression. Maybe the more general term, if I can put such a label on the color black, is the more accurate one, for its greater inclusion, for its vague boundaries.

Oops, I got that wrong, what might be called green olives can be called 'white' in Italian, but the relation is the same. After all, red wine may indeed be red, but white wine is not really white, at least not in the same way that red - or black - wine is red.

When I was a child I began watching television when all that was available was black and white (as it came to be called only after the emergence of color television). I could not understand all of the excitement. The colors that I saw were perfectly clear to me: grass was green, sky was blue, et cetera. So much of what we consider to be some kind of external and objective reality happens in our minds.