Years ago I knew a woman who told me a story about a Salish woman we both knew. Briefly, the Salish woman would say “track bear” when she was pointing (or referring) to a bear track. She was a Salish speaker and the underlying sense of reality that was instilled in her early years (and was recorded in the rhythms and syntax of her first language) stayed with her. She explained (to the woman I once knew) when asked, that to say “track bear” is obvious since you see the track first and then you see the bear.

Little bits of knowledge like this are like prisms. Turned this way and that they break up what we thought was a singular modality. The relationship between what our bodies receive from the world and what we perceive, and then communicate to ourselves (let alone others) is like white light. It isn’t singular.

For humans there isn’t a case where the world is either about objects and subjects or about events. Demonstrably it is about both. The decision about what to make central (either the subject/objects or the events – the space between) is a cultural decision made in the development of a group of people in space over time. What interests me is the movement a mind can make between bear track and track bear. This is the world of the liminal, the cultural translator, the mind that slips on its own (un)certainties.

I’ve been rather sick for several days. Bad, bad headache and since my daughter is also sick, it’s been frustrating. Can’t think, but still have to operate. Can’t even read much because it ratchets up the pain after not very long. Still, I did read “The Noble Rider” which is an essay by Wallace Stevens from his collection of essays called The Necessary Angel.

I mentioned this book in the August 17 post on Phenomenology, poetry and sense when I felt a connection between the “thing” and what Stevens’ thinks about poetry, imagination and reality. Mind slippage of the sort that track bear track represents is what happens (or what enables) when the certainties of event/or/subject-object are fractured. The slivers left, the “questioning” I talk about in the last thing-post is like the rainbow the prism enables us to see. It is important to remember that the prism doesn’t create it, by the way, it just makes visible to us the constituent frequencies of what normally appears as “white.”

This is why I think that the rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself (last paragraph of that Aug 17 post). White light is not unreal. Neither are the constituent frequencies the “really real” light. They are just as much a product of our visual equipment and our resultant interpretation as is white light. What seems critical to me is that our visual equipment obviously includes eyes, nerves, cerebral processing modules as well as the world of electro-magnetic frequencies and photons: what we perceive is a result of the relationship between what we have evolved to be and what we have evolved within. What I question is where does track bear track come into it? Where does this cultural imagination – the various cultures’ certainty of correct and obvious interpretation of what is seen – obtain? I suppose it must be in the “processing” that imagination has its abode.

All this has led me to question imagination. What is it? I mean there are the Romantics who are sure they know, and Stevens (and other poets/artists of course) has things to say about its relationship to reality and to the mind, as do the Philosophers and Cognitive Scientists. So that’s what I’m exploring.

For me, all of it is still tethered to the idea of “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and in my head “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and “imagination” relate, but how? No idea yet. Just a feeling. It’s a bit like a Tarot card I’m not quite sure where to place relative to others already chosen, and if you read symbols of any sort, you know that position is critical. A new card can seriously derange what one thought was (finally) understood.

I am struggling with a book by Sara Maitland called A Book of Silence. I actually quite like it and there are parts that resonate deeply with my own experience of silence. The problem I am having is that the book is so resolutely Christian.

Actually I am not sure that is the real source of the problem but it is the only thing I can think of that explains what I am experiencing when reading the book. Let me give you an example. In the chapter called “Desert Hermits” she wants to discern and then understand the difference she perceives between two forms of silence. She has come to understand the two forms as the kind of silence that allows the Self to emerge (or create Itself) and the other is the kind of silence that abnegates personal identity, emptying one out until all that is inside is the Silence. The first (silence) she exemplifies with Kafka and then the Romantics and the second (Silence) with the those (usually Christian or at least religious) who seek an emptiness that is to be filled with God (or in the case of Buddhism, the loss of illusion).

She uses two quotes as reference points.

You said once that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess, that utmost of self revelation and surrender…that is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why can there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. (Kafka, Letters to Felice)

We must cross the desert and spend some time in it to receive the grace of God as we should. It is there that one empties oneself, that one drives away from oneself everything that is not God and that one empties completely the small house of one’s soul so as to leave all the room free for God alone…it is indispensable: the soul needs the silence of it, the inward retirement, this oblivion of all created things. (Charles de Foucauld, from Ann Freemantle’s book Desert Calling)

Of course I can feel the difference between the way Kafka and de Foucauld sought – and the difference between what it is they sought. This sense of becoming empty (whether to release Self or destroy self) is one all essentially quiet people can intuitively grasp, even one like me who does not require a god to explain the sense of unbearable intimacy that comes from being overwhelmed by that which is infinitely large. And the thing is that both the Self and the Silence are that – infinitely large.

The fact that I can identify either way is part of the problem I have with Maitland’s silence/Silence. I do know what “both” feel like.  I know Kafka’s need as well as I do de Foucauld’s and they are not different, not really. They are both about the loss of the sense of separation. That which Maitland calls solitude/silence (evoking the Romantics) approaches the identity of self and universe by expanding self until it explodes in a kind of ecstatic sense of enfolding of the universe – not humanizing reality but including more and more into what it is to be “human,” so that “to be human” becomes ultimately meaningless — there is nothing that isn’t “to be human.”  This is what Robinson Jeffers was going for in his inhumanism (or should have been if he wasn’t so pissed off at our inveterate stupidity).  The Silence that the hermits sought, that is also achieved through making “to be human” meaningless. It is found by eliminating elements of what “to be human” means until one’s self/identity implodes — and that black hole of the Void (longed for by Simone Weil) is finally found to be at the center of the universe — where one’s self used to be.

Both paths lead to the same experience/event. There one finds a singular identity. It is universally encompassing and inexpressibly minute; monolithic and multitudinous, and our normal sense of isolation, incompleteness, finitude and threatened meaninglessness is utterly vanquished.

I suspect that my problem with what feels like an artificial division in Maitland’s book is compounded by the fact that even with her quotes she can’t seem to hold up the division. Near the end of this same chapter she gives us the words of an Egyptian hermit.

“What is there to love about the desert?
“We love the peace, the silence…You can pray anywhere. After all God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.” He gestured to the darkening and dunes outside. “But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. (Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain)

This last is supposed to be an example of the second kind of seeker and yet, what the Silence provides is nevertheless the Self.

It is not, I think, the the goal of the querent that decides between the “exploder” or “imploder” as Maitland’s book implies, but something to do with cultural expectations and probably basic personality. A bit like solace sought…an extrovert will seek it in the company of others; an extrovert, no. Yet it is still solace that is sought, and found. It is these implications that bug me about the book and, to be honest, I associate this kind of rhetoric with the proselytizing tendencies of religious folk. Not fair perhaps, but there you are.

Does Maitland’s division matter?  I think it does. For the same reason that it is important to realize that ecstatic experiences are artifacts of the human brain and body and not artifacts of mythological beings (i.e. we have some power in the situation), the false division of silence and Silence obscures — and the whole point of seeking is to actually find.

In part 2 I asked this question. “So what is outside the concept of subject/object and can we understand it?”

The only way I can understand this idea is to acknowledge the world that we cannot grasp through language. But this is unclear. Is there a world we language users can grasp without language? Thought about another way, experience of the world is profoundly changed by language concepts and structures. Still unclear. While probably true, this says nothing about what impacts language concepts and structures. What if those structures are reflections of the pre-linguistic world?

Let me try this:

1. Our species experienced things prior to its acquisition of language.

2. Species without language communicate.

3. Recent research in embodied cognition suggests that intelligence, reason and language are physically grounded.

4. Evolution tends to work by using existing structures and patterns of organization (whether physical or behavioural) and finding new and useful ways to use them.

5. The world is all that is the case. But contra Wittgenstein, I also think that the physical world is enough to explain the language world.

Things get sticky after this.

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)

As a poet and person with a whole raft of unusual perceptual experiences under her belt I find it almost impossible not to experience language as a entity distinct from me. I also find it impossible not to experience the world as a thinking being. I can do it but by dint of mental brute force but I cannot maintain it. Does this mean I believe these things? No. Not without evidence other than my experience of it.

I had a dream some years ago in which my synesthesia played a crucial role. In the dream I come to consciousness inside the head of a bear. That is, I am aware that I am dreaming and I am neurologically tied into the bear’s head. I still maintain my own human circuitry so there are limitations to what each sense can experience but what senses I do have can be reconfigured for the duration of the “ride.” For example, if I was in the head of a hummingbird, I wouldn’t be able to see ultraviolet as the hummingbird can because, as a human being, I simply don’t have those receptors. However, I would be able to use some sense to pick up on those frequencies – perhaps it would come in as a particular tonal group.

In the dream about the bear I smell the world with the bear but what I perceive comes in visually. I see the scent trails as coloured ribbons. The dream allows me to understand that the bear’s relationship to time is different from mine because it can smell time as scent potency. In other words, the bear’s physical (sensory and cognitive) structures organize and limit basic concepts such as time. The same organizational potential must be true for us since we evolved with the same basic environmental forces in place. Some things are important for us to know about and some are not and since no one species can sense all of it, each species has a limited, but viable, range of sensory input available to it. Perceiving too much would not promote longevity. You’d never be able to sort through it fast enough to deal with sudden danger.

So now I have an experience that I think of as a bear’s. My knowledge of bear anatomy almost certainly had something to do with how my mind came to understand the effect of sensory organization on conceptual foundations but has that really anything to do with an actual bear’s experience? And does it matter?

For me the real question is: Does language conscribe reality any more or less than the organization of our senses? I suspect not but since I also suspect that language is a development grounded in sensory structures, I think the question of what’s outside subject and object might be a misdirection at its heart.

Still, we think of memes as operating on people – that memes use people to propogate themselves as genes do. Having said that, there is no way in which human genes or human memes can exist without people. They have no intentions in the reasoned sense of the word. As an example: There are cultural ideas that work poorly in current situated human activities and there are ones that work to foster human feelings of success. The cultural ideas that promote desirable feelings are going to be repeated, i.e. be replicated or spread. There is no need for the idea to have a mind of its own.

I can think of the Phenomenological “thing” like this. Using the gene analogy, words are the bases but perhaps the 5-carbon sugar and the phosphate group are sensory structures and embodied experience and the “thing” that results – the particular gene of this analogy – is independent of us only in the sense that it is first an echo and product of us and our history.

The last two days in the archives have furnished me with several treasures. One of them is a book published in 1930 called Red Heroines of the Northwest by Byron Defenbach. The second of three parts is dedicated to “The Dorion Woman.” Otherwise known as Marie Dorion, she was a 25 year old woman that traveled with 2 children from Oklahoma  to Missouri to northern Wyoming all the way to the Pacific. Along the way she had another child – he died 2 days into his life. Madame Dorion ended up near Salem Oregon where she died in 1850 at the age of about 67.

If you read about this woman on the net and in the texts produced about her, what you get is often the bones of the Astoria trek to the mouth of the Columbia, and a lot about her apparently abusive husband, and the stuff about her bearing her third son on the trail, but mostly what you get is the author’s view of what all this means. “Marie” makes a perfect canvas for our views about women and the qualities we assign them because so little is known about who she, in fact, was. I mean we don’t even know her actual name. She is called Dorion Woman because her husband’s paternal name was “Dorion” and she was his woman.

We know this, at least in part, because of Washington Irving and his “Tragical Story Told by the Squaw of Pierre Dorion.” Much emphasis is given in Irving’s account to her “presence of mind and force of character” and certainly her survival seems, from the story, due in part to her attention to her household duties. This is why, for example, she had all the supplies that she would need in the near future if she and her children were to survive the winter. The story she tells, and that Irving would relay, about the fate of the Astoria party is what made her memorable to the public but no one, it seems, thought to ask her name.

Time tells much about women’s interpretors. Irving published his story in 1836. Defenbach published his in 1929 0r 30.  Both accounts pay attention to Pierre Dorion, Irving calling him the “hybrid interpretor” as a way of describing his bi-racial heritage. Irving doesn’t mention the drunkenness as far as I know. There is a section when he is describing the French boatmen and how they lift their flagging spirits – by song, nary a drop of spirit is mentioned. But at that time alcohol might have been seen as a problem with respect to trading with Indians (their abode being the destination of the boatmen, trade goods being the cargo) and granted as a necessity to those water-haulers whose spirits needed lifting, but no one had come up with the idea of denying it to civilized white folk yet.

But by Defenbach’s time prohibition and its ideas had taken its toll on the interpretive mind of writers. In his story much attention is paid to Pierre Dorion’s use of alcohol.  However, there is still a touch of admiration: “When sober,” Defenbach says “the stalwart young half-breed was a fellow of recognized ability as a trapper and trader. He had worked for Choteau and other Americans who were beginning to resist the monopoly of the fur trade by the Hudson’s Bay and other British concerns.”  A drunk, yes, but he could hunt, trap, shoot and, on top of that, was on the right side politically. But when it comes to Marie…

(Pierre’s) proved himself faithful and serviceable. His occupation called for almost constant travel up and down the Big River, and in these journeyings he usually dragged the squaw with him. Nor was this his only encumbrance. The couple’s first son, the sturdy Baptiste, was born in 1806, and two or thee years later another lad arrived at the tepee. This latter was a frailer type of boy, with snake-like eyes and a mouth that extended from ear to ear; they named him “Paul.”

To these two children the Woman clung with the savage devotion of a mother-wolf, bringing them up after the Indian fashion. There was no discipline, the few instructions given having to do only with the children’s physical requirements. The only virtues inculcated were those of fortitude and courage, and even these traits were warped into ferocity and thirst for blood. Such ideals as those of morality, gratitude, truthfulness, unselfishness and honesty were not sought to be conveyed by the Woman to her children, primarily because she had no such ideals herself or any conception of them. The first precepts she instilled into those young hearts were those of cruelty, murder, and rapine.

Jeez.

Shortly after this little exploration of the Woman’s character and moral rectitude (compare Irving’s and Defenbach’s ideas about the ideal woman), he talks about Pierre’s accidnetal fall into the trip to the Pacific, which he would not survive but his wife and children would. This fall, the story leads us to believe, came because of alcohol.

The processes of evolution have never produced anything more averse to solitude than is whiskey, even a quart of it…Pierre found himself surrounded by, or perhaps one might better say surrounding, a whole flock of quarts. He passed through alternating stages of hilarity, amiability, deep melancholy, and extreme irritability. Several days and nights passed in the enjoyment or suffering of these various emotions.

(Aside: the use of the word “evolution” adds a nice little sparkle from the conceptual bounty that is Social Darwinism – also something alive and well during Defenbach’s time. I wonder if he was a eugenicist?)

What follows is a rendition of what Defenbach thinks happened when a drunk, angry and now without the salary due him by the Spaniard, Manuel Lisa, and includes an almost jovial boxing match between husband and wife. The outcome is that Pierre Dorion finds himself working for Lisa and having to cart his wife and two sons along for the ride.

Ultimately, Defenbach (nor Irving for that matter) doesn’t say much about Marie Dorion but what he inadvertently says about how he sees the world is enormous. Apart from the idea of what women are, there is the purchase place for blame. It’s not surprising that in the late 1920s when Defenbach was probably writing this text, that alcohol got much of it. Poor old Pierre, a noble sort with his rustic trade, but reduced to dragging his baggage around, getting hobbled by a treacherous Spaniard, a snake-eyed son and by that morally bankrupt Woman. Think what he could have made of himself if wasn’t for that demon rum!

meh

Would that there was someone who would haunt Oregon’s historical archives for a more accurate view of the woman. I haven’t had time for that yet, so perhaps it already exists. I’ll have to check into it.

When I cook eggs for breakfast generally I prefer them coddled. That is, cooked without their shell in water just below boiling point. Where I live most people call this type of egg “poached.” Although I am sure both words can (and are) used interchangeably, I think they really carry different instructions. When I poach fish, for example, the water actually reaches a very slow boil or what this woman calls a slow simmer.

When I coddle eggs I don’t use a pipkin or a coddler, I just gently pour out the egg onto a shallow saucer and then when the water is the right temperature slide the egg into the hot water where the water meets the side of the pan. This way the egg stays together and doesn’t shred into the water making it all cloudy and the egg inedible.

I prefer the word “coddle” to “poach.” It has something to do with the sound itself, but also the words are resonant with meaning.  They go off in my head in ways that create different sensations.  ”Coddle” is something that evokes warm-bliss-raisin-toast-and-butter feelings.  ”Poached” is a too-long-at-the-beach-tight-face sort of word for me. I mean, really, how do you think the salmon feels?

So with my toast and tea I am having coddled eggs. It makes me feel better, even if while writing this I have forgotten to check the water and my egg is just a touch ragged.

I have little acquaintance with Charles Lamb and until I purchased The Essays of Elia I had only read one of his poems and that assigned in an English class somewhere, at some time. The Old Familiar Faces is a bit sentimental for my tastes and so though his name (and that of his sister Mary) had floated around in the discussions of Wordsworth and Coleridge, I had read nothing of him that made me understand the felt equivalence of the authors.

And then I found – in probably my favourite tiny used bookstore in Vancouver – a delightful burgundy bound small volume of Elia’s essays published and printed by Collins’ Clear-Type Press sometime around 1905. Some $19 later, I carried the little book up the street to the coffee shop, ordered my latte and started reading. I read “The South-Sea House” first and was delighted by the whimsicality of the characters but there was something else, like a deep current under the words. I couldn’t stop there and glanced through the table of contents and came upon “Witches and Other Night Fears.” Given my fascination for the use of female power images in other writers, that was were I went next.

He seems to me a very careful writer. That is, I sincerely doubt whether his juxtapositions were not carefully considered. He seems an author that delights in the subtle indicator, the quiet joke to make palatable a difficult truth. So when he begins the essay with a discussion about the “creed of witchcraft” and the problem of interpretation (taking our ancestors to be fools for belief) only to follow it closely with a child’s interpretation of Stackhouse’s biblical explication (and his “brief, modest and satisfactory” solutions to numerous apparent biblical contradictions), it seems unlikely that such a juxtaposition was not intended to order our experience and create meaning.

For me the moment of deepest, although quiet, hilarity in that essay is the scene where the young Elia is exposed in his dedication to Stackhouse’s book. The pictures, it seems, had his devotion.

In my father’s book-closet, the “History of the Bible,” by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station.  The pictures with which it abounds–one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon’s temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot–attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf.

Sitting in the coffee shop, I had to place the little red-ribbon book marker, place the book upon the table and simply grin.

That child, straining for a book probably placed on a high shelf just so he wouldn’t see it, just as parents in the ’70s hid their copy of The Joy of Sex from their children, this is Lamb for me, this quiet teaching, this delight in the whimsical, the deep respect for what is real about how people go about things.

It made me want to find a digital copy of Stackhouse just so I could see the Witch. So I did, and after a diligent search (which made me late for work), I found a copy of the volumes and a copy of the Witch. Here she is. Can you make her out?

More on Lamb later. The dude is my hero.

One of the things I enjoy most about used books are the scribblings prior owners leave behind. Sometimes they are bland little comments and all that is sparked is the sense that here was a mind that, while moved to write, the nudge was only just enough to move the pencil and not enough to perturb, and others, well, that’s what this post is about.

I bought a school edition of Selected Poems and Letter by John Keats that some student of long ago (published in 1959) used in a term of reading John Keats – although I doubt the student was in class as long ago as 1960. (Some of the notations and comments suggest a more recent youth in class with a used text.) The book is marked by both pen and pencil, a woman I think because of the curvature of the script. I can tell what readings she was assigned by what poems and letters are marked. Read, for example, were “The Eve of St Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” “Endymion” of course, or at least parts of it. (Parts of that poem are suspiciously empty of notation.  It is rather long, I suppose.) “To Homer” “Ode to Psyche”  to Nightingale, Grecian Urn and Melancholy and lastly “To Autumn.” But not “Bright Star.” Imagine that, but I suppose the class was long pre-movie.

It is the odes that come in for the most attention. There is hardly a line that has not been noted, commented upon. Some of those comments are quite revealing. There is a comment, for example, against “Ode to Psyche” that says “Psyche: winged creature, moth, butterfly.”

I imagine this young woman looked her up or perhaps more likely, was shown a picture as part of the class and was told the story of Psyche and Eros.  There she was, this student, who was being fed the cultural background necessary to roll inside Keats’ poems, to feel the empyrean pull, the net of connotations that Psyche weaves in someone who reads widely. Yet her comment, “winged creature, moth, butterfly” tells me that irrevocably her mind fell instead into channels built in her own life – a life of imagined earthly transformations, of animal metaphor, of compound eyes and multi-faceted truths, of a world based profoundly in the post-Romantic.

This is the thing about students, they are of their own time. When Keats wrote to Bailey that

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty – in a Word, you may know my favorite Speculation by my first Book and the little song I sent in my last – which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these Matters – The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.

he meant it literally. Truth is sought in the imagination, in the sensation Keats understood as Beauty, as the sublime. Not for us this. Truth is grounded at the moment. When we seek to understand we do not follow the pull of connotation into airy realms with earthly mirrors as Keats did. We link along more corporeal lines – Psyche – winged creatures – moths – butterflies.

Keats, his mind flew out to Milton  and the idea of the world he helped shape. The Imagination that is comparable to Adam’s dream is a reference to Book VIII of Paradise Lost, the stanza starting at line 452. “As with an object that excels the sense, / Dazzled and spent, sunk down, and sought repair / Of sleep, which instantly fell on me…” There I imagine Keats being pulled by the idea of overwhelmed senses, understanding as he did the intensity of feeling, of sensation, as the gateway to Truth. Not that I agree (nor would Milton have gone there with Keats either, I suspect), but regardless, I am not from either Milton’s or Keats’ time but from mine and so I think that truth is more usefully thought of as a multifaceted eye.

And then in Milton there is the dream itself and what Adam perceives while sleeping at god’s behest. Adam knows what goes on: he sees the wound in his side that presages Jesus’ own, Adam saw Eve grow from the rib, shaped by god’s hand. This ability, to perceive true in the divine sleep (imagination and/or death?) – Keats took this as reality. That is, there is another reality, a spiritual one if you like, in which truth is still perceived, still sensed but with less tempest. When he says (from the same letter to Bailey) that

we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tome and so repeated – And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation rather than hunger as you do after Truth – Adam’s dream will do here and seems to be a conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human Life and its spiritual repetition.

he means it.

I see no evidence that the student who had this book before me understood that. It is clear from what she underlined that she was learning the rudiments of the Romantic Imagination but did she understand it enough to (temporarily) swim with Keats along his imaginative connections? I doubt it.

To be fair, I am much more likely to follow the winged creature-butterfly road myself. I am of now, just as the woman was who marked up the book with the sign posts of her mind. And to be even more genteel of spirit, I have to say that I am likely much older than the woman was when she studied Keats. This means, of course, that I have had more time to read, to think, to imagine the world as Keats knew it. I wonder if she still lives, and if she does whether she still reads Keats? And (my mean side rearing) does she know anything more about real winged creatures than she does about Keats? (I mean if you are going to base your connotative and metaphorical life (that is “meaning”) on something, it might be good to actually know something about that “something.”)

That’s the problem with now, I think. Most of us have lost the old links that allow Milton to speak about dreaming in our minds when we read Keats, but as of yet, we have not taken the material world seriously enough to understand reality as it appears from the compound eye of a winged insect. So we are adrift in life (as was Keats), but most of us (unlike Keats) are without a mental umbilical cord developed enough to keep us from drowning in such pools as existential nihilism. To be honest, most of me is really glad I no longer teach. I am no lifeguard and I strongly suspect one must first understand the “now” (for us that is the compound eye) in order to step off into the “then” with any chance of actual understanding. So what hope do young students of today have of understanding the ferocious richness of the past when they can’t even see the ground upon which they are standing?

Miserable old coot aren’t I?

I read an article in The National Interest about Germany. It struck me a a bit odd and so I forwarded it to my German daughter-in-law for her take.  To put a kind face on it, we agreed that it was all about point of view. Then a few days later she sent me this map. Oh yes, this is exactly the situation.

To say that The National Interest is a conservative news source is a bit of an understatement. It was founded by Irving Kristol after all. The writer of this particular article, Jacob Heilbrunn, has a blog at The Huffington Post, that favourite of Pharyngula.

Here’s a quote from Heilbrunn’s article.

In other words, Vauban, for the most part, epitomizes how Germany would like to be seen abroad—enlightened, progressive, reflective, pleasant and virtuous. And, in many ways, it reflects the tamed and docile West Germany that England, France and America hoped would emerge after World War II.

Rather a nice example of textual inversion (perhaps textual subversion? textural inversion?). What is not said here is far more important that what is. The two sentences at once remind us of Germany’s ferocious past and its danger to us and at the same time suggest its emasculation. They “would like to be seen” next to “tamed and docile.” Nice. It generates a nest of common (but not very mature or reasonable) feelings, an emotional texture, which like the map, says south is the new north.

Here’s another gem:

Gregor Gysi, who has just stepped down as one of the chairmen of The Left, managed the party’s reinvention by grabbing hold of economic and foreign-policy issues. A clever and sinuous rhetorician, as an attorney he represented clients requesting an exit visa from the national prison known as East Germany.

A “clever and sinuous rhetorician?” Lovely. Bring in the snake and every right-thinking American knows exactly who Gysi claims as “Father” for the Fatherland. And the “national prison known as East Germany” – well, not as subtle as the snake reference but I don’t think subtle was the point.

Here’s a quote about Germany from a US government site (Department of State).

Despite persistence of some structural rigidities in the labor market and extensive government regulation, the economy remains strong and internationally competitive. Although production costs are very high, Germany is still an export powerhouse, and unit labor costs have decreased in the last decade. Additionally, Germany is strategically placed to take advantage of the rapidly growing central European countries. The current government has addressed some of the country’s structural problems, with important tax, social security, and financial sector reforms.

“Despite”? Perhaps it is an “export powerhouse” because of the social security net provided the citizens? Perhaps the economic debacle in the US might be partly blamed upon the social unrest within its borders? Could we call the US an “import powerhouse?”

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the CIA files. German unemployment is said to be at 8.20% for 2009. The United States is said to be at 9.4%. Hmmmmm.

And the percentage of the population below the poverty line? Germany 11% the US 12%.

(If you’re interested in German economic stats try here.)

So, I’m losing my cool. Let me just backstep for a moment and say this is about point of view. We need to be careful reading things, thinking things through. We all have a history which guides us in our interpretations. Germany 11% – US 12%. What this really seems to say is that despite rather large ideological differences between Merkel and Heilbrunn, and the represented National policies, the outcome is pretty much the same. The big difference is how the people feel about it and what happens to those human beings when they lose their jobs. In Germany the government steps up to help. In the US this is not something one can take for granted – there really are people who get told “sorry, you’re on your own”.

I am going to close with another quote from Heilbrunn.

Instead of resembling the martial country of yore, then, Germany has begun to reach even further back into its history, mirroring the provincial and musty duchies of the eighteenth century that vexed the German romantics who preached unification and national greatness. It has achieved the first, but it’s no longer interested in the latter for itself or, indeed, for Europe.

So if we are going to back in history for a national snapshot of contemporary intent, what is Heilbrunn advocating? A return to the policies (human and economic) that led to the American civil war? In that case “unification and greatness” came because the powerhouse of the conservative was beaten in war. I suspect this wasn’t what Heilbrunn was thinking of when he brought up the return to history spiel.

Some Americans have a oddly romantic attachment to the slave-states (and their economic and social policies) and with that romanticism, a rather inverted perspective. I mean, there are still people who think slavery a good worker procurement program, but Heilbrunn? Surely not.

Those beaten southern states wanted to control the destiny of the Nation and it seems to me a good thing that they didn’t get the chance to take plantation economics to the world stage. Surely Heilbrunn doesn’t intend Dixie to win this time? Can you imagine the results?

I was browsing videos at wimp.com and came across the one about Mayor McCallion. As videos go it’s funny and fun to watch, but given the size of the woman’s achievement, it seems ever so slightly patronizing.  Sort of like palling around with Stephen Hawking and casually mentioning (while patting him on the back) that he’s said some interesting things about the skies.

I don’t know if it’s the Mayor’s age and gender, her general demeanor or what but anyone who has gotten herself elected to such a normally contentious position repeatedly and without break since 1978 probably deserves a bit more of an in depth look and a little less of the cutsey hockey photo ops. For example, they could have mentioned the whole “transparency” issue with respect to city finances along with the city’s debt free position and how this might be a model for other government bodies. It might also have mentioned that Mississauga tends to have a strong immigrant population (11.4%) compared to the City of Brampton in the same region (9.93%) and interestingly Mississauga sits at 5.78% versus the City of Brampton at 8.73% when comparing the members of the population 25 and more years of age with less than a grade 9 education. It’s interesting that the city and region are more or less comparable with the unemployment rate at 6.5% for Mississauga and Brampton at 6.6% and the entire region (Peel) at 6.4%. (Stats here.) The national unemployment rate, for comparison purposes, is at 8.3%. In Vancouver, whose mayoral history is not so stable or so uncontested, the unemployment rate is predicted to be 8.0% for the period between February 7 and March 13 2010.

Mayor McCallion has not incurred  debt, has kept her city on par with others in her region and has demonstrated a concern for future growth and development consistent with the needs of a energy troubled planet and urban areas with increasing population numbers and needs. It seems to me that this level of achievement requires a bit more sober attention. To be fair, I suppose since the Mercer video has reached 2 million hits perhaps some political writer out there will have been caught by its unaddressed implications and look into it. I would really like to know what kind of power she exerts to have been able to achieve such tremendous victories, and that is what they are.

But really, the pat-on-the-head tone, do you think that was deliberate or just possible because of her age and gender? Am I the only one annoyed by the vid?

(Thanks Shannon for the pic.)

This seems to have come from engrish and if you have a peek over there you will find some howlers. Many of them have a sexual component almost certainly not intended by the product’s or service’s advertiser.  It makes me wonder what those fortune cookies really say. But really, isn’t that the real power of language and its relationship to meaning construction. All of a sudden what is visible are some of the deep webs which bind words together with the fine thread of categorical relationships and it makes you look around for other previously invisible things. If you think about the words “poisonous” and “rubbish” you can see how they really do fit together and if you work at it even a little you can stagger backwards into meaning-folds of the original language and take a guess at how “poisonous” is used more generally.  In other words, it gives us a glimpse of the connotations of “poisonous” in another’s context and by doing that, it makes temporarily visible our own contexts. It’s the difference, the dissonance, between the two that makes this funny.

Now that I find interesting.