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.

EXCERPT: Davos (10)

It was good to sit down. As much as Franco liked walking, there was a time to walk and a time to stop walking, and this was it. Cool summer mountain air, green fresh grass, the concrete fountain made as if it had been made by a fourteen-year-old, whatever that meant. The mountain and the fountain were pals at this point, and perhaps nothing else gave Franco a sense of wellbeing than that. It made the idea of what lie ahead for him at Davos suddenly relaxed, exciting and attractive, all at the same time. ‘We have to do it. Don’t you see?,’ Franco thought. The friendly concrete, solid and stable, mixed happily with the water and the metal, the metal rusting in a gesture of humility and generosity that so filled Franco with pride and hope that he could barely contain the feeling within him. ‘Yes, Davos, do you understand now?,’ Franco asked of no one in particular, of everyone in general, and most of all in his own mind.

Enrollment Denied

As I was watering my dymondia yesterday, it occurred to me how little my engagement with them is enhanced by their name. While I like the word dymondia, and especially the full name of the plant, dymondia margaretae, it is not really present in my mind as I look at them, water them and weed around them. It is this refusal to become enrolled in human culture, at least in some respects, that lies at the heart of plant charm. A plant will not come when you call its name. It will never be your pet.

Yes, we pot plants, and perhaps even name them, although I think the practice is rare, but they are never fully domesticated. Ontologically, they are just too strange to become complacent participants in our pathetic dramas. It is their cool distance, their seeming indifference, that makes them so appealing.

Yi Fu Tuan observed how humans make pets even out of inanimate entities; water, for instance, by training it to leap in a fountain. And Michael Pollan gave us the remarkable image of plants as, not pets exactly, but as exploiters, seducing us to do their bidding in the evolutionary game of reproduction, by intoxicating us or nurturing us in exchange for aiding their proliferation and distribution.

Those arguments not withstanding, I suppose my thesis here connects to my thinking about the poverty of ideation. When I look at a poppy, my experience is far richer if I forget, momentarily, that in English the name of that flower is 'poppy'. It is this pre- or ex-lingual state of relations that I value because it renders the engagement with a thing, any thing, much more complex and whole than it would otherwise be as mediated through language. Words, as the saying goes, just get in the way.

This post has been difficult to write. Usually I just tap them out and then go back a day or two later to clean up the typos, misspellings and grammatical errors. I see this as a hopeful sign because it signals to me that I am writing from wordless experience, and so I struggle to find the words that fit. Far too often I am far too glib, with one word creating another, immersed as I am in a wordy world.

But what I am finding is that the wordless world is much more appealing, and that I must develop this ability to represent the world, without using words. But that too might have its own traps.

EXCERPT: Davos (9)

The camp at the end of the tube always left Franco stunned by beauty. Why was being here so important, and why did the water from the fountain not taste as good as the water from the tube? Surely it must taste better at the source, or at least it should. Franco thought that the problem was in the should; that is, the problem was not ontological but epistemological. ‘Might as well throw myself back into the word game,’ Franco thought, the scene at Davos clearly in his mind. It was a scene that was marked, for the most part, by that thin veneer of adhesive on the back of the adherent name tags that everyone was expected to wear. He despaired over what happened to the wool fibers of his jacket when they became coated by it. Arriving at every check-in table, he always tried to find a way to tuck the tag into his breast pocket so that he would not have to peel of the backing to expose the noxious adhesive. He flipped through a book on origami to see if one of the folded forms would help him, maybe by causing a hook to pop out the back so that he could just hang the tag on his pocket. Sometimes the tags were plastic sleeves with metal safety pins on the back that could be opened and threaded through the material of his coat, but even that method, although much better than the chemical warfare promised by the adhesive, caused worry. Would the metal pin separate two fibers who had clung to each other through all that was required to make the jacket, through the shearing and carding and threading and weaving and dying and cutting and sewing and shaping and ironing? What if it actually pierced one of them?