The Limits of Experimental Science

There are two main obstacles to considering one's own life from a rational or scientific point of view: it is nearly impossible to isolate the variables and there is no control group.

For example, right now, at 3:30 in the morning on Christmas Eve Eve, I may have woken up after falling asleep at 10:00 last night because I am still jet-lagged after returning from Paris 3 days ago; because I ate a whole acorn squash for dinner; because my stomach is upset (see reason #2); because I drank coffee after dinner; because I have been seeing old friends who live far away all week at an average rate of 1 friend per day, and by now their faces have collected like coins at the bottom of my dreams enriching me, as a fountain in the plaza of a foreign city, with currency I cannot use; or because my partner is moving away next fall to go back to school, and his absence fans out like a light from that future point disrupting any present, momentary darkness with images of what I might do and where I might go. Or is it some combination of these factors -- jet-lag plus nostalgia, say, or squash mixed with anxiety?

Cause and effect also seem to be unstable. Was my sleep interrupted because I'm burping (see reason #3) or am I burping because my sleep was interrupted? In other words, are we alive in order to work and eat and grieve and give or do we give and grieve and eat and work because we're alive, after all, and there isn't much else to do, especially when the weather's bad?

It's hard to say; the alternative would be to not live in the first place and then work or possibly to not live and not work at all, but no one who has taken either of these paths has anything to say about the matter, at least not to us.

There is a simple, if not easy, way of testing some of these hypotheses: I must take two weeks off from work each winter for a total of at least 6 years and each year when I arrive at my parents' house in western Massachusetts, after spending the afternoon walking near Mansfield Lake with Rachel in a scatter of raindrops that thickens to a downpour as we drive from Great Barrington to Housatonic and she points out between the swipe of her windshield wipers the vacant factories that will soon be converted to dance studios and art colonies, I must either eat squash, or drink coffee, or have a partner who is leaving in the fall, etc.

It would take another few years to test each combination of factors, but after a finite, albeit extended, amount of time I would know why exactly I am awake right now, which may or may not help me fall asleep the next night, but still wouldn't answer the question of whether it's worth it, whether a short essay is better or worse than an hour of sleep, whether anyone, including myself, will care for what I have written enough to outweigh the very good chance that I will get much less done tomorrow and in a much worse mood than I might have otherwise.

Le Couple

Des arbres froids portent des vestes de feuilles

et le couple dans la voiture discute

ce que tous les couples partout discutent :

c'est quelle route il faut prendre 

pour arriver, enfin, au but. 

A Moment's Notes

Eternity is not an experience of endless duration, it is the absence of duration and should take no endurance to bear.

Many people believe they brush up against it while altered by those special chemicals that inflame the senses until even the most mundane (fog beading on a windowpane, steam curling off a pot of water) swell and soak you up instead of the other way around. So a phrase like "the moment filled an eternity," meaning a momentary sensation absorbed me for longer than a moment, has come to seem cliché.

Although hyperexperience is pleasurable at times, pop-philosophy exhortations to "live in the moment" and "seize the day" exasperate me. These generally lazy statements don't acknowledge the debt our emotional vocabulary owes to time. Feelings may seem to be creatures of the moment, but words like nostalgia, worry, dread, anticipation, wistfulness, and hope show us the extent to which what we feel now is refracted through if and then.

I have glimpsed eternity of late while making tea at work. Every morning I pluck a light purple pocket of earl gray from the metal rack attached to the wall, drop it in my mug, open the fridge to my right, reach for a cool container of milk. As I flip the red hot water spigot and release a thin stream of steaming water, I feel the great turning disk of my day come to a halt. I imagine I hear the muffled clicking, like a lock's heartbeat, of this morning's actions falling exactly into the action of every other morning. And then I know that I am always, always here, at this counter, making one cup of tea forever that I will never drink and all the rest is a dream.

And I have been thinking of eternity in chorus where we sing music that is old -- or "early" as music written in Europe during the Renaissance and baroque periods is called -- comprising many parts that coil around each other in swift counterpoint. It is cooling, meant to be sung like a current slipping beneath a frozen stream, fine and clear. Because the multiple melodies move in different directions at once they sometimes undo each others' work, filling in the gaps that might otherwise catch a listener short. Single voices silver to the surface and then disappear back into the dense mesh of parts. Because the earlier music is more static harmonically, its expansion is spatial, opening onto wide fields of ice. And because the intervals and chords permitted are limited by what was considered consonant at that time (thirds were just becoming acceptable), because these pieces don't express emotion by varying dynamics or tempo but instead, like the mechanism of a clock, by perfectly and precisely integrating parts into a functioning whole, these songs may seem to lack the directional spine that shapes the classical and romantic music we are more familiar with. 

If a Mozart aria presents a sonic narrative that evolves, modulates, and resolves like the phases of a moon or a love affair, a Palestrina mass stretches out like the sea at night, and notes shimmer across its face, tiny quivering panels of light suggesting the immensity of the water all around.

Singing this music in the context of its creation -- the Catholic Church -- I have come to think of the qualities of early music as not merely stylistic but also symbolic choices. The world of the Church is an eternity machine, created and completed in beauty to run until it runs out. The world of the enlightenment is a work in progress; we who inhabit it burst forward at times only to be slung back again by forces beyond our control. 

The wonder is that these two worlds exist not only side by side but also within each other, that from the arcing shoreline we can look out onto a sea whose waves are always cresting and never break, and then turn around and walk back up the beach, towards the parking lot.  

Best Publisher EVER

In 1989, J.B. ("Jibé") Pontalis started the imprint "L'Un et l'autre" at the French publishing house Gallimard.

It's a conceit only the French could think profitable, but, for a translation junkie and adaptation fetishist, also a thrilling enterprise: a collection of books dedicated to stories told at an angle by narrators whose subjects are famous works or famous people and whose object is to climb inside these structures worn smooth by familiarity and see the world through them instead of in them. Each story, as with any act of mediation, is the story of the story and the story of its telling, the story of the triangle made between narrator and event and reader, a triangle of eyes trained on each other, devouring each other.

At newstands these days one finds a glut of celebrity profiles, one leg of the triangle. How refreshing to tilt the viewfinder for a moment to explore the experience of the viewer instead of the viewed. To live within the effects of art instead of trying to wriggle back into the intentions behind it.

This is what L'Un et l'autre has to say about itself, on the dustjacket of Monsieur Bovary:

"Life stories, but as invented by memory, remade by imagination, brought to life by passion. Subjective accounts, a thousand miles away from traditional biography.

Someone and an Other: the author and his secret subject, the painter and her model, linked by a powerful and intimate bond. Where is the line between portrait and self-portrait?

Someones and Others: those who burst onto center stage as well as those who only perform in the theater of our minds, people and places, forgotten faces, names effaced, silhouettes misplaced."

(translated by The Bunny)

http://www.gallimard.fr/collections/fiche_unautre.htm

In Which the Bunny Rants About Why Free-Market Capitalism is Not the Answer to Everything

Exchange at a weekly meeting of libertarians, as reported by The New Yorker:

At one point, Niederhoffer interrupted him and asked, “What are the general principles?” DiLorenzo replied, “Markets work and government-run monopolies don’t.”
[...]
Don’t you agree that the government does some things well? the man asked. “No,” DiLorenzo replied. “The government has screwed up the national parks. I think capitalism would do a much better job with land.”
--http://http//www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/15/071015fa_fact_cassidy?currentPage=9

Why are some people so in love with the free market? Whence this urge to privatize everything from kindergarten to camping trips? Is it because the free market has promised to make their skin better and their ass firmer and their soulmate...appear? Perhaps. But I think they love it like cold fusion: because it is beautiful and potentially very powerful, and, because no one's proven it actually works, seems like that great discovery anyone of us could be on the verge of making. Any day now.

The apparent beauty of the system is the abstraction of currency: a dollar is an empty marker of value, a door that opens onto a different scene each time it swings. Individuals and groups collaborate to define these abstract values by balancing expended effort against experienced wants and needs, creating a de facto democracy of desire. Nothing is innately valuable, nor is value imposed by a state or religious authority. Each individual is free to define things and phenomena and even other people as being valuable, and to turn the product of their work into as near a picture of their happiness as possible. The beautiful market is a creature that thinks for itself using all of our minds.

The hidden brutality of the system is the trajectory of currency, which, unlike water, tends to flow uphill, a scum of power trailing in its wake. Since the only way to vote is by spending money, in a truly free market the poor are completely disenfranchised, and everyone but the very wealthy can only be considered to be somewhat franchised. Speak of meritocracy all you want, but there are some things no one should have to earn, including such luxuries as having enough to eat, a place to sleep, clean clothes to wear, medical care, education, public transportation, clean water, fresh air, and access to information, and these are precisely the sorts of things that people who don't have a lot to begin with lose when privatization strikes. Apparently it is not only hands but entire people who may be invisible in the eyes of the market.

And so I wonder: are those who advocate this system so seduced by the cold gleam of its elegance they fail to see how sharp is its edge?

Or do they see and just not care?

A Day at the Beach

ropes of whip kelp
dug from the sea's damp flank
lash ankle to hip to wrist,
stalk to joint, catch
the errant limb in their knotted wrack.

which way
is the other way
which turn the unbinding turn
to turn loose
such an accidental coil?

Vegetables or Sex?

Why choose, you might say? Because our choices make us who we are.

In this short scene, I play a girl in a bookstore. The bookstore will be represented by Green Apple Books on Clement Street, a haven of narrow aisles and tall shelves for the lit-addicted and cash-poor. With only $7 in her wallet, my character is torn between two novels by Emile Zola, Nana and Le Ventre de Paris.

Narrator: Nana tells the story of Anna Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class cocotte during the last three years of the French Second Empire. Nana first appears in the end of L'Assommoir (1877), another of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, in which she is portrayed as the daughter of an abusive drunk; in the end, she is living in the streets and just beginning a life of prostitution. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_%28novel%29)

Girl: What's a cocotte? Is it made with squash?

Narrator: Le Ventre de Paris (1873) is the third novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It is set in and around Les Halles, the enormous, busy central marketplace of 19th Century Paris. The plot is centred around the escaped political prisoner Florent...There are several excellent descriptive passages, the most famous of which, his description of the olfactory sensations experienced upon entering a cheese shop, has become known as the "Cheese Symphony" due to its ingenious orchestral metaphors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ventre_de_Paris)

Girl: A symphony of cheese! I wonder if there's anything about vegetables in here... [flipping pages] Ah, yes, here we are:

Heads of lettuce, escarole, chicory, still slick with earth, lay open to display their glistening hearts; bunches of spinach, bunches of sorrel, bouquets of artichokes, jumbles of string beans and peas, and bales of romaine tied with straw sang every note in the scale of green from their lacquered pods to their richly colored leaves: a scale of intensity that faded as it rose all way to the faint polka-dot pattern of celery bottoms and leeks. But the most piercing notes, the ones that rang out highest, were the vibrant splashes of carrot and the clear splashes of turnip, dispersed in prodigious quantity throughout the length of the market, illuminating the mottled canvas with their two colors. At the intersection of the rue des Halles, cabbages rose in a mountain: enormous white cabbages, hard and firm like balls of pale metal; savoy cabbages with large leaves like bronze basins; red cabbages that bloomed in the dawn light, wine-red, bruised carmine and purple. On the other end, at the intersection of the pointe Saint-Eustache, the entrance to the rue Rambuteau was blocked by a barricade of orange winter squash, splayed in two rows, thrusting out their fat bellies. And while the bronze varnish of the onions, the blood red of the tomatoes, the self-effacing yellow of the cucumbers, and the deep violet of the eggplant gleamed all around him, the black radishes, deep in their mourning cloaks, sunk dark holes in the vibrant joy of the sunrise.
(p. 44; tr. courtesy of R. Bunny)

[Sigh...]

Narrator: Hardly a choice at all.

Fin

The Boil: A Fictional Account of Worry

I have a boil. It is small -- the size of a jellybean, I told the nurse on the phone -- reddish blue, and irritated. She told me to wait it out. "It may come to a head on its own," she said.

Now I am waiting for it to come to a head. I don't know what this means, quite, or how I will know it has happened. I picture the foamy head of a beer, frothing up to but over the smooth side of a glass, or a train bearing along its head of steam. Is that how my boil will appear? Unlikely, for I doubt its capacity to either refresh or transport. If you were to enter it as a query in any search, I bet "boil" would show up near verbs like "fester" or "lance" and very far from adjectives like "bitter" or "punctual" or "roomy," although the homonymous verb might yield the more benign "tea" or "kettle."

I lie in the down-sloped grass of Duboce Park, well away from the dogs, waiting for my boil to make progress of any sort. I made my partner inspect it last night but didn't have the heart to ask him again this morning when I woke up to go swimming, even though we have been together for more than two years and his capacity to be repulsed by the vivid truths of my body -- or maybe just my fear that he will be repulsed by them -- has mostly faded away.

He views my skin's strange inventions with untroubled calm and my reaction to them with distant amusement. "You body will heal itself," he says, "if you just wait." I can't wait, I tell him, because what if it gets worse? We've had this see-saw conversation before. He believes in the power of the natural world to right itself; I believe the natural world to be a chaos habitable only by virtue of our constant intercession.

Perhaps the boil has changed since last night without my knowing. This is the risk I took in not asking him to look at it again. Perhaps there are key steps in its trajectory that I am missing, even as I lie here watching a black dog bristle over the sharp green lawn, back and forth, retrieving a tennis ball. The dog's trajectory, unlike the boil's, is easy to follow: he is happy going forth and happy going back, happy either way, happy accomplishing nothing that isn't almost immediately undone. I can't tell if I am happy or not, watching him, although my mind is also easy to follow: it hums along two tracks, pursuing only its own motion.

One track is stitched to the present, obsessively aware of the boil as it exists in this moment. A single, jellybean-sized lump of flesh fills its viewfinder, the first and the last, the earth's own bellybutton. The boil's every quiver must be monitored for any moment could be the one, at last, when it comes to a head. If enough energy is channeled towards it in the form of close, careful attention, perhaps it can even be coaxed -- willed -- to this much-desired end. I wait. It tingles a little, then stops. Then it does nothing for many minutes.

The other track denies that the boil is the cause of all things and instead searches for the cause of the boil. It must be that I have been eating too much yogurt, or else not enough, swimming more of late or sleeping less, that I do not let my towels dry completely before using them again, that the tilt or height of my office chair is off. But how can I know how much yogurt is enough and how much is too much? Enough must be however much it takes to prevent boils and no more. So I must simply go back to eating as much as I used to eat before I had the boil. Likewise regarding the towels and the chair, and the thousand other unregulated and suspect activities I engage in all week, including using the StairMaster at the gym, showering at the gym, eating several pieces of fruit every day, sitting at my desk in the office, sitting at my desk in the apartment, lying in the grass at Duboce park, and swimming at the public pool.

Why do I worry so much, some people want to know. Why does the dog chase the ball, is the answer. Because it would look stupid running back and forth with nothing hanging out of its mouth but its own tongue.

Selfless

Since it was published in 1954, Histoire d'O (Story of O), has vividly represented certain extremes of domination and submission. Through that empty vowel snake forked whips, corset lacing, and amber lashes of whiskey. No one imagined that a woman had written it until the journalist and editor Dominique Aury announced to The New Yorker, four years before her death, that she had composed the work as a series of love letters to the editor Jean Paulhan, her lover and an admirer of de Sade.

For the first half of the book, the main character, O, whose inner life is admittedly not explored in great detail, expresses no desire other than to please her lover, Rene. She waits, bathes, dresses, strips, sleeps, and submits to strange and often brutal encounters at his will and does not seem to mind, whatever that might mean in the context of their relationship. However, this undiluted desire to please him is troubled when Rene introduces a proxy between them in the form of his friend, Sir Stephen, and informs O that from now on pleasing Rene will mean pleasing Sir Stephen. In a parody of a wedding ceremony, O is asked to verbally hand herself over to this new master whom, unlike Rene, she does not love.

For the first time, she balks. The snag in this arrangement is not being asked to submit to another man's advances, but having to swear a new allegiance and, in doing so, willfully abdicating her own will. "Le plus difficile, se disait O, n'était pas d'accepter...Le plus difficile était simplement de parler" (89-90). More difficult than obeying as an object is obeying as a subject.

This is the first incarnation of the paradox we are here to discuss and it is erotic.

The second is religious, articulated by Marguerite de Porete, a 14th-century Christian mystic, and paraphrased by Anne Carson in her recent work Decreation: "...she understands the essence of her human self to be in her free will and she decides that free will has been placed in her by God in order that she may give it back. She therefore causes her will to depart from its own will and render itself back to God with nothing left over," (163) is how Carson explains de Porete's version of faith. What might be left over? The pride of the self-righteous, the glory of the saved: none of this residue is allowed the true saint.

How is de Porete like O? Not in aspect, but in gesture, in the figure they cut. Both women define the self through its abandonment.

The third face of this shape is rational and it comes to us via the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. He describes God as infinite consciousness, a vast mind comprising the natural world, its physical laws, and its every being, and maps out a route to salvation along which ever expanding knowledge lifts the seeker out of themself and brings them ever closer to the point of perfect -- and divine -- objectivity. There is a truth in this philosophy and it is singular, accessible to all, and utterly lacking in perspective: a view without viewpoint.

According to his biographer Rebecca Goldstein, Spinoza came to this vision of the Almighty in response to an excess of identity. A Portguese Jew living in Holland, he was surrounded by the violence, both internal and societal, that excessive adherence to identity can spark and so aspired to shed his individuality and exist in a realm beyond the particular, filled only with the static harmony of reason.

And so it is that these three characters -- the lover, the prophet, and the philosopher -- align in their need to exercise this paradox. Their compulsion to trace the same shape suggests that the limit of erotic, religious, and intellectual realization can only be reached in the eradication of that troublesome and unruly thing: the self.

Selves are problematic in many ways. Selves conflict. They fear, often for the preservation of their selfhood, and so they jealously guard their own security. They long for things they can only have at the expense of other selves. They suffer loss, they fade away, and are forgotten. They are limited in their knowledge and often stubborn in their beliefs. Most damning of all, perhaps, is that selves can only communicate with one another in limited ways: by talking, for example, or singing, or making faces. It is hard to build a coherent philosophy or radiant image of divinity, hard even to conceive of the completeness love, when dealing with such rough-edged and uncooperative materials. So our visionaries invite us to give up our troublesome selves in exchange for something greater.

And after all, isn't this something we all long for, sometimes? To melt into someone else, to evaporate out of our own skin clear into the silent thicket of other people's thoughts? Understanding seems always to bump against the gate of consciousness, desperately passing words back and forth through the bars, hoping that one phrase or another will smuggle in a key to set it loose...so we read: medieval manuscripts, enlightenment tracts, dirty novels. We read and we comb the skies and everyday sink a little bit deeper into ourselves.

Extinguished Languages

Globalization and Language
In addition to animals, plants, ecosystems, clean water, clean air, and fossil fuels, globalization and industrialization threaten languages. Linguists and anthropologists predict that between 50% and 90% of the world’s ~6000 languages will be extinct by the end of this century. Not surprisingly, it is the marginal that are most in danger—languages spoken by small numbers of relatively poor people. There has been some outcry, mostly on the part of academics and missionaries, about the infinite value of what we stand to lose: any and all record of thousands of societies, whose myths, origins, histories, practices, relationships, beliefs, songs, and poems are the winding paths of entire cities on the grand map we are trying to transcribe of the Mind.

Mass production, mass communication, and mass transit, offering so much opportunity for travel and so much information about the places we cannot travel to, bring us together by collapsing differences along with distances. The benefits of grapes in winter, cheap flights all over Europe, and hand-held access to virtually any imaginable piece of data are checked by the narrowing of our escape routes from the known to the far-flung. Every fall we harvest a greater amount of a decreasing variety. The forces of mass tolerate only the most familiar of crops, and so cultivate conformity.

The View from the Other Side
The articles mourning the loss of all these languages generally consider the situation from the majority standpoint, trying to project impact on linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, sociology, history, and on the vast abstraction of the global community we all belong to. However, few really explore the view from the other side, that of the native speaker and the finite reality of their local community.

Consider being a member of a language community of 30—the size of a grade-school class. Or 11, enough for a soccer team. Or 3, the barest love triangle. Or 2, an endless dialog. Imagine being one of the few guardians of something as intricate as a language, how stunning would seem its fragility. If the broad idea of cultural history is too vague to elicit much empathy, think of losing your personal language, the one you swear in, the one you swear love in, the one you dream in, the one that fills in the melodies you sing absentmindedly to yourself while running errands or folding laundry with words. Feel the breeze as your way of seeing and being in the world rises off your skin like cool water and loses itself in the air.

Then appreciate for an instant the expansive—the practically speaking infinite—body of documents and recordings in the ten languages that together are native to approximately 3 billion people: Mandarin, English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French. All the thought, all the thriving and struggling that takes place in these tongues in the space of a single day would take several lifetimes to conceive of. These languages are institutions; they are monuments.

Paris Nightmare
Long ago, on a Paris metro, I nightmared falling out of who I was. A few feet away from me, a couple sat speaking English of which I could not understand a word. Waves poured in around the sandbar of French I had found to stand on, separating me from understanding’s soft shore. Like sand, I thought, fluency seems stable but is not. I spent several minutes in a state of semi-panic before realizing the couple was speaking Dutch; the tides receded.

For a long time, I considered this vision to be a raucous fantasy, a dark flirtation with the impossible. How could you lose your native tongue? Even if your actual tongue fell right out of your mouth, don’t you practice every minute of every day by unwinding an internal monologue that, laid end to end, would reach the moon? And then I read this, from an article by Daniel Everett, a professor of linguistics at Illinois State University. It describes the Oro Win, a people from the Brazilian Amazon enslaved by Portuguese rubber traders until a half-century ago when the several dozen survivors escaped and went to live with another Amazonian people, the Wari’, who speak a different but related language.

“I also noticed that the Oro Win had forgotten much of their language, since their circumstances over the years had forced them to rely on Portuguese and Wari', rather than Oro Win, in order to survive. Yet they speak neither of these foreign languages well. The five remaining speakers of Oro Win now find that they are not only unable to fully recall their own language, they are unable to speak any other language as native speakers.”

One aspect of the definition of an endangered language (in addition to the number of speakers, their average age, and the percentage of youth who learn the language) is that there are no more monolingual speakers, i.e., no one who speaks only Oro-Win. It would be practically impossible for most people to survive unable to communicate with the larger dominant community—one of the reasons why some languages disappear is that they cease to be useful tools in things like finding employment or engaging in trade (sometimes minority languages are banned by a more powerful majority; that is another matter entirely). However, just because you can communicate in another language doesn’t mean you are fluent, and for the Oro Win, it’s not the nightmare of falling through the looking glass but that of getting trapped between the mirror and its silver backing that has become a reality.

For more on this topic, as well as recordings from the 1930s of now extinct Khoisan languages, see: http://www.yourdictionary.com/elr/whatis.html.

Prepositions: Excerpt from a Personal Dictionary

Marion: prep.;

1. the shape one word takes when it approaches another

2. a character in "The Wings of Desire" by Wim Wenders

3. a trapeze artist who loses her job when the circus closes and falls in love with an angel who has become a man

4. narrative arcing over the heads of the crowd

5. the rung seized

6. the hand that seizes the rung

7. a French woman living in a German city

8. a nasty fall taken between languages

9. a weightless thing

10. flung up

Etymology: When I moved out to San Francisco, fall started and I decided to learn German. I could never remember where to put each word. It was always windy on the way to class and I used to warm up my brain by thinking in French, hoping this would help with the German. It never did, except for words like "restaurant" and "parfum" that they share. Most borrowed nouns are neuter in German, but looking for meaning in the gender of a word is like trying to climb a Jacob's ladder. It was around this time I became fascinated by the figure of Marion.

Preposition: n.;

1. a weightless thing

2. concrete

3. a hinge between the moving and the still

4. a way of traveling

5. the shape one word takes when evading another; the slither of a word in retreat

6. something that cannot be touched

7. something necessary to the touch

Etymology: I struggled most with prepositions. Misled by the false cognates between English and German, I expected them to be straightforward. I thought the relationships they describe -- in time, in space -- would be the same in any language: how much disagreement can there be that the cat is on the mat? But soon they came to represent for me everything irreducibly different in the different ways there are to view the world and, more than that, my own dislocation as I moved between them.

Concrete: adj.; a metaphorical way of describing that which is solid, real, and can be touched or walked upon

Auf: prep.; German

1. at, as in " at your own risk"

2. in, as in "in German"

3. on, as in "to be bent on something"

4. to, as in "to nail something down to something else"

5. up, as in "to be up to something"

Etymology: This is an example of a German preposition. As you can see, it maps onto many different English prepositions, depending on the situation. Some of this must be the fault of our own overlapping prepositions, but not all of it.

At: prep.; English

1. am

2. an

3. auf

4. bei

5. im

6. uber

7. um

8. zu

Etymology: It's just as bad in the other direction.

Jacob's Ladder: noun;

1. a ladder that Jacob dreamed connecting heaven to Earth

2. a toy made of wooden squares connected with ribbon

3. a metaphor for Jesus

4. a figure of string looped around the fingers

5. a ladder that is difficult or impossible to climb, that slips and sways when stepped on; an unstable ladder

6. in nautical usage, a ladder whose outside edges are rope

7. a plant of the Polemonium family with variegated leaves

8. the path that moonlight weeps onto the ocean

Etymology: Approaching the world is difficult; it shies, it slips. Prepositions remind us of our separation from the world: Marion becomes the path we follow towards it. She is both the flinger and the flung, the hand and the rung. Climbing up she carves out a way between languages, between a preposition and its object, between a speaker and her tongue.

Performing

"Performance" is a word at odds with itself.

This word and its inner out-of-joint-ness became tangible for me when, a month ago, I started singing with a Catholic choir. I have sung in choruses for years and years and years, and thought I was completely used to the routine of rehearsals and concerts and, especially, perfectly comfortable singing religious music in churches, even though I am not religious. But I soon realized that what I was used to was singing Christian hymns and masses during secular performances and that singing at mass is not the same thing as giving a concert. It is singing religious music "for real," and the disjunction between what the Catholic mass has to say -- and what I now say along with it -- and what I think is acute.

In looking for a way to understand and accept what it means to be singing religious music "for real," I was reminded of an idea that started with J.L. Austin and was developed further by Derrida, at the center of which sits a similar word echoing the same dissonance: "performative." Performative is an adjective and a theory used to describe utterances that perform an action or accomplish a change in the world (other than the action of speaking) simply in being spoken. There are a few examples and they are, as we will see, necessarily limited. These include things like a priest saying "I now pronounce you man and wife" at a wedding; a celebrity breaking a bottle of champagne over a bow and saying "I christen this ship the Good Ship Wet;" an explorer stumping up a hill and jabbing a flag into the soft earth, declaring "I claim this land in the name of England;" a particularly hip Queen gazing down at the man kneeling before her and uttering "I dub thee Sir Mix-a-Lot."

Underlying and enabling all of these statements is some sort of social code -- most often, a legal or political code -- and a group of people who adhere to this code, such that if the right person says the right thing at the right time then something happens. If it sounds like magic it's because performative speech is not improvised but strictly scripted -- just like a magic spell. And although these scripts can have indirect material effects (a couple pays less taxes, a boat has its name painted on its hull, a baby is called by its name), their effects are never directly material. They work entirely in the realm of the linguistic: that is what makes them such tempting nuggets for a philosopher of language. And yet it is all the more frustrating to find that these linguistic events are contingent upon so many non-linguistic variables.

This is where Austin's theory of performative speech acts starts to digest itself. Austin seeks to distinguish between "serious" speech acts, in which all the external conditions for action are met, and "non-serious" speech acts, in which the script is followed but is, for whatever reason, void. The example he uses is a real wedding between two people intending to marry each other led by a real priest vs. a wedding scene in a play. The problem is that, from a linguistic point of view, there is no way to differentiate between these episodes. The real priest and the actor may very well speak the same lines, and likewise the couples. At the end of one ceremony a couple will be married and at the end of the other a lot of people will wash off their make-up and go home, and attributing this key difference to context, as Austin is forced to do, is deadly, for resorting to context is the linguistic equivalent of saying "I can't define it but I know it when I see it."

Derrida is the one who untangles this knot and he does so by splitting the word performance along its own natural fault line. Austin is preoccupied with the action sense of performance, as in performing a deed -- taking action, enacting, doing. But Derrida turns our attention to the other side of the word: performance as drama or art, acting instead of action. All of a sudden, the contradiction jumps out, like a sailboat in a magic eye poster: performing is both actually doing something (as opposed to sitting back and reflecting) and pretending to do something (putting on a show).

Derrida's insight occurs in two movements: first, he slices performance open to reveal its two opposing halves. So strange, we remark -- how did these two ever fit together in the first place? And then he shows us the seam that joins them. Performative speech requires a code of some sort, a script. In the right context, this script will take effect. However, the nature of a script is that it can be repeated by anyone, anytime, unlike spontaneous speech originating within a single consciousness. Performative speech is accessible to anyone even if it won't work for everyone in every situation. And if it couldn't be repeated by anyone then it wouldn't be part of a pre-established code and it wouldn't work for anyone -- if a priest gets up and says: "Now, um, you guys can move in together, I guess," no one would recognize that as an action. Performative speech acts depend on their own iterability and the foundation of the ability to actually do something with words is the ability to pretend to do something with words. Performing an action depends on being able to stage an acted performance.

Today is Palm Sunday. As we enter Holy Week, I am feeling more and more comfortable in my new robes, my new role. This comfort does not come from the fact that I have started to accept the teachings of the Church, but rather that I have realized my ability to go through certain motions without being implicated in them. There is no reason why a mass has to be different from a concert, for me, the performer. These chants and motets are available to me and I am free to intone them and not mean them without degrading either them or myself for they are, in a very important sense, empty: unlike other kinds of speech they lack the force of deriving from and expressing an individual's mind. They are empty and waiting to be filled with intention, without which they may ring and ring like so many open-mouthed bells, in beautiful, meaningless harmony.

A language, most will agree, is not just a static body of abstract relationships between concepts and signs, but also a manifestation, a realization, of a given culture. Within that culture, it functions as both map and city. To speak two languages, well, means being able to navigate (at least) two cultures at will. Translating or interpreting necessitates doing so at the same time. In most contexts, this ability is enviable, sought after, revered.

But in times of war, when cultures meet each other in conflict and the danger of trusting the wrong person deepens and darkens people's sense of cultural identity and identification, this ability, in higher demand than ever, can prove deadly. The intermediary is capable of the unthinkable: discoursing with the enemy without actually becoming the enemy and so they are doubly Other, inhabitants of a realm beyond the binary of the conflict, practitioners of an impossible, an untenable, third way. Instead of being viewed as symbols of the hope they embody, they are often shunned, and their disillusionment becomes the sharpest indictment of our failure to get along.

I urge all of you to read the excellent article by George Packer on Iraqi interpreters published in this week's New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/26/070326fa_fact_packer before they take it off-line.

Tragedy and Pathology

One of the central questions posed by scholars of tragedy is whether or not one can write a modern tragedy. Is it a living genre that could nourish itself on our current crises of war, nationalism, and inequality, and could in turn sustain us with its inescapable, compelling contradictions? Or is it fixed, like a photograph of someone turning away from us: an image we can return to again and again but that will never again return our gaze?

Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres (1991: Knopf), an adaptation of or response to King Lear set on a 1970s mid-Western farm, uses the tools of contemporary narrative to pose that question. For anyone who has read the Shakespeare play, spotting the dozens of superficial points of intersection between the two works is an enjoyable diversion. Lear here is renamed Larry, or Laurence, Cook and he is the proud and powerful owner of 1000 acres of land -- by far the largest plot owned by a single farmer anywhere in the area. His daughters, Ginny and Rose, have been raised to fear and obey him; only his youngest daughter, Caroline, feels she can empathize with him, although in the end it seems she doesn't know him very well at all. The action begins when he decides to incorporate his farm and divide it up between his children, even though he is still in good health, and doesn't end until every character has died or lost all recognizable pieces of their former identity. There is a storm, a fool, a blinded man. There is incest, abuse, and poison.

But the book is not just a transposition in which the elements of a well-known plot are renamed and relocated. It is a gaping mouth, an unfurled question mark beckoning to us to put aside our pat understanding of human consciousness and face a darkness filled with everything we don't know and can't control about each other, for nowadays we tend to pathologize difference and so distance ourselves from suffering and loss. Viewing tragic dilemmas as symptoms of a treatable pathology means neutralizing the tragedy, refusing to face it, and instead replacing it with a bland moral.

In A Thousand Acres, the characters grapple with formidable issues. For example, following a church supper in which Larry's friend Harold (Gloucester) publicly denounces and humiliates Ginny and Rose, the two girls discuss what is happening to their father whose behavior has become increasingly erratic of late:

"Listen, I can't tell you how it makes me feel that Daddy's taking some sort of refuge in being crazy now. You know who they blame, don't you? But it isn't even that."
"What is it?"
"Now there isn't even a chance that I'll look him in the eye, and see that he knows what he did and what it means. As long as he acts crazy, then he gets off scot-free."

In this scene, and throughout the book, Rose (the first speaker here) is the angry one, self-righteous and demanding of justice, while Ginny, the narrator, attempts to accept her lot and avoid conflict. Both of them try, in their own way, to incorporate their father's behavior into a narrative framework they can make sense of and they suffer when those narratives don't fit together.

In Shakespeare's play, Lear goes mad. That's not a term we use anymore: we say, sick, ill, disabled, altered. Mental illness belongs to the realm of things we don't understand and can't control, but because of that it is often closed off to us in popular discourse. A diagnosis, whether mental or physical, is, in many stories, an answer. But in Lear, as in A Thousand Acres, there are no words to hide people behind. Larry's madness is a question for his daughters and for the reader, another inscrutable part of his character, just like his aggression, his stubbornness, and, in the fictional past that precedes the narrative's start, his predictability.

Likewise, the law plays a large role in the novel. When the farm is incorporated, papers are signed, lawyers are consulted. And when the family starts to fall apart, again there is a trial in which Larry tries to win back what he gave away. In the original play, too, there is a trial: it is in a barn during a rainstorm and a footstool is one of the main participants. The Acres trial takes place in a real courtroom and seems like it should be more definitive, more meaningful, than the mock version it is based on, but it is not clear that it really settles anything.

Ultimately, these questions -- who is right and who is wrong, who owns what and for how long, what it means to be sane and how that definition shapes human interaction, what a family is and what holds it together -- are questions that inhabit us. They fill people's lives. Ideas of justice and reason, truth and meaning, are the ghosts we try to net in tomes and textbooks, decisions and diagnoses. Medical and legal code can help us negotiate these questions as a society, they can help people heal and can preserve order to a certain extent. Pathologizing is far better than it's predecessor, demonizing, but not the same as empathizing, or trying to. A jury's verdict, a doctor's prescription, is the beginning of a journey not the end of one. If we are to use these tools to their fullest then we can't treat words like fences to separate ourselves from misery's plot of land: they must be bridges, gateways that open always onto further discussion.

Smiley's book ends with Ginny pondering her inheritance:

"I can't say that I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he probably chose never to remember -- the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness. This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all others."

At the end of it all, all she can do, all we can do, is continue our impossible struggle to relate.

A Horse to Water Part II

This is the second part of a two-part entry.

I wrote the first part at Christmas-time, before I went to visit my father's family in France. The night before I wrote it, I was sitting outside the coffee shop next door to my apartment reading Alessandro Baricco's "An Iliad" and waiting for some friends to pick me up to go to a party when an old man asked me for some change. He had a pinched face, his features loose and dry, like a lemon squeezed of all its juice. Gray stubble covered his cheeks and chin. He was thin, with longish hair, and wore a sweatshirt and a knit cap. He looked old, but could have been anywhere from 45 to 75. I gave him a dollar; it was Christmas Eve. He walked away and I continued reading. It was dark out but not cold. Greek soldiers fell to their glorious deaths across the pages in front of me.

A few minutes later, the man came back and sat down at my table. He was now holding a large paper cup full of orange soda. He started to tell me about his life: in and out of rehab, getting by on the streets, adding whiskey to his soda to keep from shaking too much, the disability checks he survived on. I nodded and asked a few questions every now and then when he went silent. I wasn't the one of us who needed to talk.

Much of what he said, I couldn't understand or even hear. The irony of someone opening up only for their words to get lost in the brisk air pained me. I wondered if there were a placebo effect that would make up for it, a release that came just from talking and not necessarily from being heard, as well.

Eventually my friends arrived and I left, wishing him a Merry Christmas.

What distances can be bridged by conversation? The liberal humanist answer is that, given patience, openness, and warmth, any. We are all humans and humans converse, discourse, reach out to and reach each other through words. But what must be in place for such an exchange to function?

When I sat down to write the next day, it was not just Baricco's text that had me occupied with questions of translation, but also the experience of sitting next to someone and not being sure if anything either of us said ever made it across.

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The Bodies of Words

How do we interact with the tangible bodies of words? Most often, it's on a page of some sort, be it a handwritten entry in a diary, a greasy swath of newsprint, or the infinitely malleable page of a Microsoft Word document. Rhetorically, these pages blur into a single one and we often speak of the proverbial page, a plane with no depth, a surface that cannot be penetrated for behind it, beyond it, all is void. A painting may have perspective, but a sheet of text is subject to only two dimensions. What beings could inhabit such a desolate landscape? All species of letters, from the spiny and rigid to the flowery and fluid, thrive on the page as if two dimensions were all they ever dreamed of, and so we come to think of words, too, as being flat and essentially without mass.

We speak of long stretches or large collections of texts as bodies -- we refer to a body of work, a corpus of many documents. But the body of an individual word? Words are more often figured as tokens: objects of fixed value that can be redeemed at any dictionary for their full worth; using a single word instead of the entire sentence that would summarize its meaning is a matter of phonemic frugality. According to this logic, a word with several meanings is actually a collection of separate tokens, each with a different value, that just happen to be printed with the same design. As with other kinds of currency, words are flat. The only information they carry is on their surface, for surface is all there is.

The other night, while visiting a friend in a chic Twin Peaks apartment, looking out over a San Francisco whose net of lights appeared like a pool of reflected stars, I was introduced to the game Password. Something like reverse Taboo, the game is played by several teams, one of whose players tries to guess the word printed on the card the first player has drawn from the deck. The catch is that the first player may only provide the second player with one word per round to guide them; the word may not even be hyphenated. So, player 1 offers a clue, player 2 guesses. If player 2 does not get the word, the word is passed to the next team, where player 3 offers a second clue, and player 4 guesses, and so on. As the word continues through round after round, clues accumulate and guessing becomes easier, until finally someone figures it out. We didn't keep score, but if you do, then fewer and fewer points are awarded the more clues you have by the time you figure it out.

Here's an example:
Luke said plug; I guessed drain.
Heather said market; Kristen guessed traffic jam. (She was thinking of Market St. in San Francisco.)
David said publicize; Matt guessed advertise, and was right.

I said facade.
Matt said offensive.
Kristen said fake.
I said forward.
Matt said door.
Kristen said first.

The word was front.

Although I have no experience in geography, I imagine this is what it feels like to stomp off into the mountains with a measuring tape, a set of binoculars, and a calculator and figure out how the hell high up you are, to gather data in the form of several known points or distances and use those to locate another point or distance: to triangulate.

A single word, like a single point, provides very little information because it points in so many directions. A hair plug? An electric plug? A tobacco plug? At the same time, we must guess at the relationship between plug and the secret word. Are they synonyms? Antonyms? Do they fit together somehow? Do they appear side by side in a familiar expression?

But adding just one more word to the equation is like adding a whole new dimension, and so the questions becomes: what line leads from plug to market? Sometimes, even two points are not enough for us to know where we are, and it is only the third or the fourth or the fifth that sets us on our feet. The process of triangulating a word based on its relationship to other words forces us to see the word as a many faceted object. Often, words have faces of similar shapes, like those of plug, all of which refer to a thing that fills a hole, whether the prong of an electric plug that fills a socket or the thatch of hair that fills a follicle. Seeing all the faces at once, as side by side in a dictionary, can be like looking at a cubist painting that flattens an object while preserving its various surfaces by slitting it up the back and spreading it out on the canvas in a Mercator projection of a person or a bowl of fruit.

Regardless of the relationship of a word's many faces to each other, Password confronts us with the relationship of each face to the word as a whole and we begin to see that each word is a landscape of peaks and planes, cliffs and hollows, a body that casts shadows, a body not just representative of but full of, full with, meaning, a round, spinning world unto itself.

En Masse

Somehow, the sight of many people doing the same thing at once -- whether dancing, singing, rising to their feet, falling to their knees, filling the squares in front of balconies in old cities, joining in shouts of protest or cries of celebration, leaping up in applause, cheering for athletes or comedians, or just holding their ground -- brings tears to my eyes. The idea of all those minds and bodies bent to the same purpose at the same time is at once exhilarating and terrifying, and deeply compelling. I cannot help but respond with my physical being; what sets the masses in motion moves me, too.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, (www.etymonline.com/index.php) the English word "mass," as in "lump, quality, or size" comes from the Latin "massa 'kneaded dough, lump, that which adheres together like dough,' from Gk. maza 'barley cake, lump, mass, ball,' related to massein 'to knead.'" It goes on to say that the meaning was "extended 1585 to 'a large quantity, amount, or number'" and that "The masses 'people of the lower class' is from 1837." In Spanish, this word is "masa," in Italian, "massa," and in French, "masse."

However "mass" in English is also used to mean the Catholic Eucharist service. This homonym of the word above is derived from the Late Latin "missa," the feminine past participle of "mittere" meaning "to let go" or "send," because the Latin service ends with the phrase "Ite, missa, est," "Go, (the prayer) has been sent" or "Go, the dismissal has been made." In Spanish, this word is "misa," in Italian, "Mass," and in French, "messe."

Only in English are the two words the same; there is no historical connection between the word denoting a great gathering of people and the formal name of the religious ceremony.

The homophony of "mass" can, apparently, be considered as one of sound's mere accidents, but what an accident it is, housing two such disparate concepts within one string of letters. On the one hand, we have the mass of the physicists, one of the fundamental properties of matter, a word grounded in the material, in the solid, corporeal stuff of the earth. On the other, the mass of the angels, denying the priority of the tangible world, seeking to rise above all that can be measured and quantified. This second sense is particularly curious: who would name something after its own end? The Catholic "mass" is the part (of the mass) that gives you permission to take leave of its whole. The difference between the two meanings of this one word can be crystallized in terms of the different ways they approach bread: it is either the globs of dough that will become actual human flesh or a divine instantiation of the flesh of the spirit.

I do wonder, though, whether the power of a crowd moving in unison might be related to the strange power of the word "mass" itself, a word that unites the crowds of bodies too numerous to count with the breadth of the soul, a distance beyond measure.