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Outside my window

My west-facing window is divided in two. The north side slides laterally. I don’t think the panes or the frame are original, but the external setting contains some old wood indeed: it’s so weather worn it’s almost not there at all. It’s a bundle of splinters that continue to associate from habit.

The south, fixed side of the window is on the outside. The moving side is backed with a screen, and has a permanent smudge which covers over half its area in a vertically elongated diamond shape; in combination with the screen behind it makes a double distortion. At night, the center of this area glitters and the streetlights beyond grow fuzzy spring dandelion heads.

The other pane is still dirty, but clearer. I can see downtown Portland and the west hills, and Morrison Street falling away to the river. My whole building shakes whenever a bus or a large truck goes down this hill, and my windows give a faint rattle. I can’t help imagining a hollow underneath my hill.

I almost feel a little ground washing away, a hundred feet beneath me, every time I flush the toilet or unplug my bath. I get a grainy, gravelly flavor in my mouth, like a taste of the unreliable sediment down below. The thought of my perch, bricks, wood and all tumbling away beneath me, all except that which clings to a skeleton of pipes, is enough to keep me from using the water, or stirring from my seat.

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The lodger’s money

Trying something a little different here: write a story keep it at exactly 250 words. We’ll see how it goes. Just trying to keep things simple for now.

The mother and her daughter were sitting at the small table by the window in the otherwise empty kitchen. The lodger came in and sat down. The mother yanked closed the curtain on the window that looked on the road. She turned to her daughter: did she have anything to say for herself? The daughter continued to stare at the lodger. She sat curving her spine, contrary to her recent, conscious habit. Her mother repeated the question. She bent further forward, her head tilted back and her broad chin elevated. She kept her small teeth tight together. The silence acted as a goad on him, and he jerked forward in his chair.

So it is nothing to you? Is it nothing that you have ruined our relationship? You have made everything rotten. Do you have nothing to say to me? The mother looked at him out of the side of her eye. She sat for a moment, then sent the daughter out of the room.

She said, I ask myself, what have I done wrong? Does she fear me so much, she couldn’t come to me? The lodger interrupted her. But she isn’t afraid of me, I would have given it to her if she had asked. She knew that.

The mother accepted and dismissed it with a gesture: her hand, curled slightly, came in to her body, palm up; then it rotated and, flat, palm down, and went out straight to her side. She knew it, she knew it.

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Work and the otherworkly world

There was sudden rain, and the view of the north-west warehouses from the fifth-floor window was sunk in the kind of blue that I usually see only in lowlit photographs from digital cameras. Other people weren’t surprised, it was predicted. But I didn’t know about it, and hadn’t packed a lunch. I was counting on my burrito, rain or shine. I went out and did a ducking sort of run and reached the canvas cover of the burrito cart. The rain wasn’t the usual Portland rain, but sharp and swift and it came in at an angle. The cart was empty and unminded; the surface of the salsa was getting filmy, the cheese was starting to drown, and the wind was knocking the tinfoil around from one side of the counter to the other.

Where I was standing, the rain was blocked from going down my neck by the overhang, but it hit me all up and down the back of my legs, which now itch, and my feet are still wet. The cart stayed empty for several minutes. I don’t like a burrito but once a week, but when I want it I want it then, so I stayed. Several minutes of hopping from one foot to another, trying to peer around in the rain, ducking back under cover. Then I remembered I had inexplicably put a book in my pocket before coming outside. Good instinct however. I stood reading for several minutes before the strikingly green-eyed, skull-headed (hollow sockets, a vanishing nose with two long, upturned nostrils) burrito minder returned.

I read an argument that began with this premise: there are two approaches to the world, the otherworldly and the this-worldly. The this-worldly aren’t only those who don’t believe in life after death, but also those who did but thought it was like life now, only more so: with work, praise, society, and love; life, as it is, only pruned of pain or tedium. But those who think that there is no good to be found in this world and all that is good can only be the opposite of what we see, that this world is essentially valueless. I don’t know how far that goes in context, but out of it, it’s a fine was to divide everyone I know who works.

There are those who think their jobs are okay, but there are some things they’d like to change, but over all they are doing what they want to do. Then there are others, for whom all work is bad, it can’t be improved or ameliorated apart from making it vanish, and the real, true life is confined to what happens outside of working hours. Time goes on two tracks for this group, and the two don’t intersect.

But in the analogy, everyone in the second category is secretly a counter-platonist. Because the other-worldly person, according to the book, thinks of the other world as inviolate and separate and not dependant on this world. This world is a nothing, an illusion, or an offense. Even the adoration of the other world which he practices is a defilement, and unworthy of that world. There can be no connection. It is the platonist other world, which is purity, truth and reality itself.

But Plato himself, this is the beginning of the story, made a strange reversal, just at the point where he had developed the idea of the involate other world. At this point he turns and incorporates a strange version of this-worldism; the world that we live in turns out to be the product of the other world, what is good in it comes from that other world and so does what is bad, which is a corrupted version of the otherworldly good. Further reasoning along this line concludes that not only is the self-sufficient world the source of this world, it is also dependant on this world, its own characteristics are imperfectly expressed if it cannot be creative. In order to be the pure, good, true and real thing it is, it needs ot be the source of the less true and the imperfect thing that it creates. The blinding light creates and needs to create shadows and half-light. The shadows and the half-light, their imperfection, is part of the overall perfection, and they are themselves thus good.

But for the other-workly person, the real work, the real life, is enabled by the bad in this life, the pain in here and now is the foundation for the true glory yet to come. In order for the real life to exist at all, the work and the drudgery must be gone through, the real work or the real life wouldn’t be possible otherwise. And in the complementary turn to Plato’s, the real work is what gives this work its meaning, it is what makes it bearable. This work, as it is, is good; since it enables the other.

The burrito maker returned. I asked whether on days like this she really appreciated her job. Yes, she said, she’d been standing there, alone, watching the rain this morning, not attracting a line, and thought now why didn’t I bring a book? Reminds me what a good job this is. I said it was like camping, sitting in a tent. She said yes, or a boat. The canvas was flapping, and we were wet. I got extra sour cream and cheese on my burrito, and nearly fell asleep at my desk afterlunch, sitting in my wet things with an over-full belly.

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Emergent ignorance

Looking around, most people in my office spend most of their time avoiding the work, or trying to slough it off or reduce it. Little attention is spent on their duties or the overall performance of the work. They chat, they space out, they steal office supplies, or spend time on their personal business or recreation, there’s a general tendency to avoid resopnsibility. Many people don’t know some of the basic procedures, aren’t interested to know, want to keep employed and get occasional praise but not much beyond that. And then there’s this as well, there are others who are struggling for power, or trying to shame others or to take work away or spending time attempting to appear better to those in power, and to keep others from that same attention. But it’s the mystery of emergence. But somehow, out of all the chaos and competition and contradiction and difficulty and waste, inefficiency, and couterproduction, the overall work done by the department is good, is reliable, is fast; it’s expanding its scope and doing better by all measures all the time.

I heard on the radio part of an interview with someone studying ant hills. She said that individual ants are stupid, inefficient, and blind. They don’t take the shortest path anywhere, they move at random, they work against their fellows. She observed a pair of ants, each trying to take a twig different ways, standing on opposite ends of the twig, standing and playing tug-of-war for days on end, neither of them moving from the spot. And yet the ant colony as a whole is an extremely efficient organization, and ants are a very successful species. The individual, inefficient, short-sighted ant, trying to make its own life better and responding to its own imperatives, makes an effective part of the emergent whole nonetheless.

But the colony isn’t like the office, the ant isn’t intelligent, it operates on instinct and can’t see its colony’s goals, any organization built on ants has to be emergent, because the ant can’t hold the whole picture in its mind. However the analogy is closer: The workers on my floor don’t see the overall picture. Each of them knows their task well, knows the tasks of some of their neighbors less well, and has no idea what people on the other side of the room are doing. And the management perspective is incomprehensible to them as well. When, rarely, they are able to see the decision-making on higher levels, they find it abstract, incomprehensible, or both. And management on its side has little to no idea what happens on our level, what our work procedures are, how they are implemented and what they mean for the worker or the work. Their ignorance is hard to keep hidden, and it never fails to be mocked when it appears. The people who design the systems don’t know how we use them.

If there is any knowledge of what goes on, it isn’t in any one person’s head. In fact, when something needs to be known about the work, outside analysts are required, who definitively know even less than the people here who know little or nothing, and have to invent or modify their own tools to do learn what we do, and they only learn in relation to the questions that are asked of them, and then their answers have to be interpreted to be understood. There is no one who has the perspective able to account for everything, or any one thing’s place in the scheme. Management sends down orders, goals, procedures, but the workers, in the process of enacting them, each interpret them differently and no two people do the same thing in the same way. They are surprised by details in the other’s work every time they consult with one another. Workers send up results but have no idea how these are used in intra-management discussions or how those discussions influence them or why, in the course of which the results are interpreted away and replaced with something unrecognizable. The emergent structure isn’t controlled by anyone, it isn’t designed by anyone, and nobody knows what it looks like or what it does in any detail.

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Turnaround two-step

A: A friend of mine asked me a question the other day. I think he wanted to know: was I happy? but for me, he put things in an interesting light. He said, I thought travel was the thing you loved most of everything. I thought you couldn’t live without it. And yet you’ve stayed here, in the same town, hardly leaving, for four years. You’ve made two cross-town moves but you live in basically the same way. And he was right in a way I don’t think he understood. Because what I love is the regular day-to-day. It’s the regular habits and routine I fall into, that is where my heart is, no matter how simple or homely it is. What I call travel, and I do love it, is just another way of enjoying a routine. It’s the same regularity and familiarity and warmth, renewed and refreshed by exposure to different places and different pressures. It’s a small kind of variety, but it’s the sort that suits me. I wouldn’t like the life on the road and the kind of life that would never show the same face twice, the life of the visitor on the surface. It’s the life of a resident for me.

B: My taste is different. I can’t stand to be still. I have to be going somewhere, on the road to something. I can’t abide the thought that tomorrow will be another today. Only I don’t have to change very much to make that so. I take a new route for a week between the same two points, and I watch the progress of the days across that route in their light and shadow, and in the change my week feels as long as a month. Or I make a change in my diet, and I feel the ripples of the change go up and down and across my body, stretched out laterally in time. The same city is endlessly different, even after its general shape is familiar, a slight shift in attention in a detail can make a total revaluation of the whole.

A: So fundamentally, we agree.

B: Absolutely not, I couldn’t imagine two people holding more different points of view! Given, that is, that they believe the same thing, as we do.

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Rereading and rejudging

I had read W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo in a copy that was missing four or six pages, in the first part of it, about Stendhal. The hole was in one of the most interesting parts of the whole book, and I was curious to know what I had lost. Today I got another copy out of the library, and it had all its pages, and I reread the Stendhal section, and was surprised to find that I seemed to recognize all of it. I couldn’t tell what was missing. Everything I saw I seemed to have seen before. I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe: Sebald is a continuous, viscous substance, that reforms itself over any gaps that appear in him? Is there such a thing as counter-vertigo, the sensation of not changing position, while things about you are objectively moving? It was uncanny.

There are three, maybe more, but at least three, kinds of rereading: I read something at two different times in life, both times leaving myself open to what the thing has to tell me. I learn how I have changed, I learn how the thing is layered, I learn how the times have changed, or pressures formerly on me are missing. I reread something to see what I have missed, as in the case of Vertigo, something doesn’t add up, I look to fill in a gap or make up for something. And also I reread because I am looking for a specific thing or trying to answer a specific question, and then my question changes, and I go back with something else in mind and change the weight I throw on the parts of the thing I see. It is a question of angles, the different ways of seeing the one object, that somehow don’t interfere with each other, or exist on separate planes.

When I was in college, I really enjoyed reading Nietzsche, and then I read him again in the years afterwards, and then just the last couple months I have tried rereading him again. Only now, I have to question what it was I saw in him before. Whatever it was, it seems to me, it is pretty far buried, beneath the pseudo-science, the quick reductionism, the sloppy, authority-based thinking, and the disrespect for the reader. I’m still plugging away at him, and I’m now reading Zarathustra, which I am finding more palatable, sort of a self-help dressed up in opera costume. There’s an interpretation of it I can swallow, though it doesn’t preserve much of his self-importance, or the importance others found in him – these being the two perspectives I think that I fell most in line with, on readings one and two.

Somehow in the relaxation of my standards, I have rediscovered, or allowed myself to remember, what I found or put there, the first time I visited. At a certain point in my life, early in the history of my independent mind, I had realized I couldn’t believe in the god of my father; but I was afraid of causing trouble for myself, and I put aside my failure to believe. I had a number of methods for doing this, none of them fully efficacious. I had to alternate between them, and work at the subject of god from many different angles, to lay it to rest each time I was forced to confront it.

And that multiplicity complicated my thinking and left me alienated from the truth as I saw it and tried not to see it. And it made me dishonest and hypersensitive, and intolerant of fundamental disagreement or dispute, I couldn’t allow that people weren’t victims of a mutual understanding, that there was something they could believe together. And on some level, I saw in Nietzsche a kind of honesty and fearlessness, more important a trust in his own thoughts, thoughts and wild chains of thought that I had had and not let myself possess, that I found very freeing; and then the parts of his thinking I was finding so disagreeable now, those parts I could use my customary self-hypnosis and dishonesty on those to make myself the real object of criticism, for not giving him that space where he could differ with me. Something like being afraid to render a judgment. The fear of being wrong, or of being unable to convince another, keeps you from ever being right, or having your own conviction. The world may be fundamentally multiple, or it might not, but even if it is, the multiplicity fundamentally depends on each part of the multiple being itself what it is, and no other.

I still have trouble reconciling multiple points of view. There’s something that still makes my head spin, only I have the powerful desire not to learn where I think the ground might be. I watched the movie Judgment at Nuremberg this afternoon. I’ve read three books over the last year having to do with Nazi trials: Rebecca West’s Train of Powder, literary-journalistic pieces about the trials together with accounts of other trials in England and the United States; a historical book about the origin of the War Crimes Tribunal in negotiations between and within the great powers and governments in exile and how they came to be in the form and with the aims and under the jurisdictions that they did and had; and then Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which covers a similar trial with constant reference to the Nuremberg trials.

All in all the cumulative effect on me has been to make me feel that I know something of what happened even though I can recall very few details of any single account. It’s like I triangulated a location by looking at a map, out my window, and at a reflection in a sheet of glass, with months between the sightings. But yet I have a feeling of familiarity, I feel ready to judge these works against one another and against reality without having any idea what the reality was. And with that confidence, I can somehow see the characteristics of each of these works more clearly than I did when each was before me, one at a time, separately, in their place in the pile of things I have read and watched in the last year; yet somehow a documented, scholarly account and an impressionistic-journalistic one and a philosophical-polemical one are all on the same level with the dramatized, schematized film version, which seems to me to be as reliable and thought-provoking and fair as any of them, although none of them are even quite about the same thing.

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Some reconsiderations

Well, that’s frustrating. I was going to write a post about the Kalevala poetic meter and illustrate its rules with samples of traditional songs performed by the Finnish folk group Värttinä, but I’ve just spent a couple hours looking, and I can’t seem to find a single stanza of theirs that doesn’t violate at least one of its rules. It must be said that the rules of the meter are really complicated, and in general, Värttinä’s songs do appear similar – accentual trochaic tetrameter, longer words tending towards the end of the line, no splitting four-syllable words across the caesura, end the line with a short vowel – until you look in detail. If you enjoy poetic meters, you can read about it here.

But that’s the truth about inspection and consideration. You go in with an idea of what you’ll find, it looks like what it looks like from a distance, and sometimes your idea is changed, and sometimes you have to drop your idea entirely; it looks different from close up. I thought of even writing a post illustrating the rules of the meter by Värttinä’s songs’ departures from it. But that seems inappropriate or even ungrateful, and happily, there are other things to talk about. I was thinking last night about a novelist, I haven’t read too many of her books, and haven’t re-read any of the ones I have read, but she’s made a distinct impression on me, and there is a certain fundamental pattern that persists unchanged from book to book. I said: she is like a Dostoevsky or a Shakespeare crossed with a choreographer.

I think what I meant was: her characters, like theirs, are stuffed too full, there seems to be almost too much of them to fit in themselves, and they almost seem to burst the sides of the story, like an over stuffed doll whose head bursts and breaks the plane of the diorama. Shakespeare or Dostoevsky’s characters are unruly, and narrow, a collection of forces governed by a single idea or passion which contradicts the rest. They elbow one another aside and get more attention for themselves, at the expense of other characters who tend to remain somewhat peripheral or off in a shadowed corner.

Whereas her characters seem to move on and off stage in an orderly, almost mechanical way, and give space and breathing room just when it is needed to allow another character to fully emerge and absorb the reader’s attention. And her plots, the sequence of her scandal scenes comes to seem stereotyped, mathematical and brittle, when you look at their pattern, they build and build and release, then reform and build and build, unlike Dostoevsky’s who seems desperate for energy and can only get it by throwing his greedy, egoistical characters together and riding on the discharged energy that bursts out of them, they are plots by brute force.

In the next day’s light, I’m not sure that this is accurate; so I’m leaving out the author’s name. But the impression is very different from a distance than close up. In the case of this author, the impression close up is not of arbitrary, forced conflicts or rigid plots, but viewed from a distance, the rhythm of tension and scandal, the alternation of focus, the repeated or recreated pattern over different books, gives a totally different impression. It’s something like the movements of a dance which seem to be, taken one after another, controlled expressions of passion, but on reconsideration in context are rehearsed and orchestrated to match a predetermined score and the motions of dozens of other dancers in a wide spectacle.