As Dad waited to make the left turn, he said impatiently, "Come on gang, or that green arrow's gonna disappear." He was speaking to the car ahead of us, which was slow to accelerate.
There are words and phrases I have heard my mom and dad say all my life, and I am so used to them I hardly hear them. My dad says "run of the mill," and "land office business," old phrases so imprinted in him they do not fade away.
"Gang" is another such word, a casual word used to address other people, such as a group of friends. I think of "Our Gang," the TV show otherwise called the "Little Rascals." Dad was born in 1929. I imagine there was a time when kids said the word to each other, "Hey gang!" the way I said "Hey guys!" to my friends in the 70s and 80s.
It is a charming use for such a sinister word. Time slips by in language.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
savages
When I was little I was enthralled in stories of heroic endurance, whether of Geronimo or of Cabeza de Vaca. I did not and could not distinguish the feats of conquerors from those of the defeated.
I was browsing in R.J. Julia, an independent bookstore, when I came across a book called "Brutal Journey," and my childhood interest in de Vaca's long ordeal was relit. He was part of an expedition in the 1520s to Florida. The expedition was ruined by catastrophe after catastrophe. Finally, after being saved from starvation by aborigines near present-day Galveston, Texas, de Vaca and his men make one more attempt to launch their boat. It is sunk just off shore, with everything they possess, including their clothes.
The author makes the insightful statement that the loss of the clothing and armor was doubtless a harsh blow to men instilled with the idea that their superior civilization and civility was represented in their dress. Suddenly, they were reduced to the condition of the savages they feared and hated. They wept on the beach, naked in the chill wind, reduced in more ways than one.
The natives who had helped them returned, and upon learning of their plight (and the death of some of the men), joined the Spaniards in loud lamentation. This sympathetic act increased the misery of these superior men, convinced that they had really reached bottom.
de Vaca persuaded his comrades that their only chance of survival was to join the Indians to their village. Even at that extremity, some Spaniards resisted, convinced they would be sacrificed. Finally they did join them. But in the chill wind and their emaciation, some men could not walk. The natives carried them on their backs. They lit fires along the way to warm them.
The hold outs lived on the outskirts of the village, unable to accept the Indians as human. After several months they were discovered dead. The state of the corpses enraged the Indians, for it was evident that the Spaniards had eaten the corpses of their comrades. Only one body was whole. For a time they considered killing the Spaniards in their midst.
The Spaniards, whose sense of superiority rested in large part upon the attribution of cannibalism to the indigenous Other, had themselves sunk to cannibalism. And the "savages," blindly maligned for eating human flesh, considered punishment against the breakers of the taboo. Oh the poetic lessons of History!
I was browsing in R.J. Julia, an independent bookstore, when I came across a book called "Brutal Journey," and my childhood interest in de Vaca's long ordeal was relit. He was part of an expedition in the 1520s to Florida. The expedition was ruined by catastrophe after catastrophe. Finally, after being saved from starvation by aborigines near present-day Galveston, Texas, de Vaca and his men make one more attempt to launch their boat. It is sunk just off shore, with everything they possess, including their clothes.
The author makes the insightful statement that the loss of the clothing and armor was doubtless a harsh blow to men instilled with the idea that their superior civilization and civility was represented in their dress. Suddenly, they were reduced to the condition of the savages they feared and hated. They wept on the beach, naked in the chill wind, reduced in more ways than one.
The natives who had helped them returned, and upon learning of their plight (and the death of some of the men), joined the Spaniards in loud lamentation. This sympathetic act increased the misery of these superior men, convinced that they had really reached bottom.
de Vaca persuaded his comrades that their only chance of survival was to join the Indians to their village. Even at that extremity, some Spaniards resisted, convinced they would be sacrificed. Finally they did join them. But in the chill wind and their emaciation, some men could not walk. The natives carried them on their backs. They lit fires along the way to warm them.
The hold outs lived on the outskirts of the village, unable to accept the Indians as human. After several months they were discovered dead. The state of the corpses enraged the Indians, for it was evident that the Spaniards had eaten the corpses of their comrades. Only one body was whole. For a time they considered killing the Spaniards in their midst.
The Spaniards, whose sense of superiority rested in large part upon the attribution of cannibalism to the indigenous Other, had themselves sunk to cannibalism. And the "savages," blindly maligned for eating human flesh, considered punishment against the breakers of the taboo. Oh the poetic lessons of History!
riding the merritt parkway
Some wag said the young Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person. The Merritt Parkway, running from Connecticut down to the New York line, is an American’s idea of Europe. Or at least my idea of Europe. Built over fifty years ago, the Parkway is a relic already crumbling in places. But one still gets whiffs of what the planners were after as one races along under a sun blinking through leafy boughs.
I felt a momentary hallucination heading north toward New Haven yesterday when I looked in the rearview mirror of my folks’ Honda Accord and saw a silvery grey torpedo on wheels coming up on me. I watched the old Jaguar pass me, an antique vision of Futurity: aeronautic shaping combined curiously with chrome spokes sparkling in a Gatsby era sun. For that moment I felt I was in that earlier time, a Manhattan ad man heading to my Stepford home in Fairfield County, pulling off my tie as I drive. In that moment I sensed another era’s – and another class’ – effort to enclose even the highway in an aura of swift, modern elegance.
Even the highway! Think of it! Now, the idea of elegance in a highway is ridiculous in the extreme. There is hardly a more barrenly efficient space in the whole of America. It is reminiscent of recent efforts by some airlines to “restore the romance” to flying. But as a trenchant observer (whose name I forget) has observed, these efforts mistake material luxury for romance. The real death blow to this so-called romance, of course, is that jet travel has become a truly mass transportation, as romantic as taking a bus. The age of romance in flying was an aura born not of slices of avocado on one’s plate or boutique lotions on one’s skin but of class privilege. The early years of jet travel were defined by an elite exclusivity. That era is over.
At least some older folks remember such a thing. But who even associates the highway with elegance and class?
Riding along the Merrritt is analogous to flying on an airline that is strangely stuck in a time warp, with stewardesses in space age pill boxes and scarves striding up and down. One rides through a brief age when commuting by car held a sense of excitement and prestige. All one has to do is drive on I-95, the interstate parallel to it, for a few miles to see how far highway travel is from either the mass romance of the road trip or the executive romance of the gliding daily commute.
As Robert Sullivan notes in the Christian Science Monitor, highway services have been taken over by corporate providers, ironing out all sense of regional difference in a wide band along both sides of every highway. In facilitating more and more highway travel, these companies – La Quinta, Pizza Hut, Boston Market and Popeyes, not to mention the massive “mini-marts” smelling of stale Snickers and Pine-Sol – have also made difference (and the road trip romance) disappear. I challenge you to find one regionally unique product in these places (in Cumberland Farms recently I found an “ice cream canolli” produced in New Jersey). One bumps and swoops along I-95 in frightening proximity to roaring 18-wheelers, cars and SUVs of all kinds, and cement barriers scarred with slip ups. Sun glares down on defeated urban landscapes of which the highway is a part. Between cities, one rolls along in a broad swath cut through faceless vegetation. Either way, one feels like an ant naked on a wide, rumbling ribbon.
On the Parkway, on the other hand, trees encroach, arching over the roadway. Suddenly one is not trapped on an endless strip under a cruel sky, but is flitting down a cool, soft corridor. This feeling is accentuated by the fact that only sections of the original plan remain in places; some massive clover leafs have replaced the cramped, if intimate, on-ramps appearing out of the forest. These places are shorn of trees. The sense of vast space is oppressive, the force of the sky mitigated by nothing. Or a long, blank bridge cuts across the horizon.
But then the trees cluster closer again, the breakdown lanes disappear, one is enclosed in a green tunnel, and the four lanes squeeze together to fit under a wholly unique bridge. The bridges of the Parkway are treasures of public design, a rare example of resources spent on beautifying public spaces. It is even rarer for the transient space of a highway, as opposed to a park or train station, which have long attracted architectural ambitions. The fact that such thought was lavished on a roadway intended mainly for the wealthy white collareds shows how dominant classes are able to steer the definition (and monies) of the “public” in their direction.
One memorable bridge is arched and faced with rough rocks of many hues, and then is half swallowed in ivy. One is covered in wrought iron clusters of grapes. Others are modernistic or Art Deco, with stylized wings rising above and cut in sharp, simple lines. Some feature sculptural panels one barely glimpses. What fun it is whipping along, caught for a few moments by the sight of a modest but attentively made bridge before it disappears behind one and gives way to another. Enough of the Parkway is still intact that one can catch a whiff of a suburban class romance of the road – one which did not last long. You can sense that era even if you are not lucky enough to see a Jaguar racing up on you.
I felt a momentary hallucination heading north toward New Haven yesterday when I looked in the rearview mirror of my folks’ Honda Accord and saw a silvery grey torpedo on wheels coming up on me. I watched the old Jaguar pass me, an antique vision of Futurity: aeronautic shaping combined curiously with chrome spokes sparkling in a Gatsby era sun. For that moment I felt I was in that earlier time, a Manhattan ad man heading to my Stepford home in Fairfield County, pulling off my tie as I drive. In that moment I sensed another era’s – and another class’ – effort to enclose even the highway in an aura of swift, modern elegance.
Even the highway! Think of it! Now, the idea of elegance in a highway is ridiculous in the extreme. There is hardly a more barrenly efficient space in the whole of America. It is reminiscent of recent efforts by some airlines to “restore the romance” to flying. But as a trenchant observer (whose name I forget) has observed, these efforts mistake material luxury for romance. The real death blow to this so-called romance, of course, is that jet travel has become a truly mass transportation, as romantic as taking a bus. The age of romance in flying was an aura born not of slices of avocado on one’s plate or boutique lotions on one’s skin but of class privilege. The early years of jet travel were defined by an elite exclusivity. That era is over.
At least some older folks remember such a thing. But who even associates the highway with elegance and class?
Riding along the Merrritt is analogous to flying on an airline that is strangely stuck in a time warp, with stewardesses in space age pill boxes and scarves striding up and down. One rides through a brief age when commuting by car held a sense of excitement and prestige. All one has to do is drive on I-95, the interstate parallel to it, for a few miles to see how far highway travel is from either the mass romance of the road trip or the executive romance of the gliding daily commute.
As Robert Sullivan notes in the Christian Science Monitor, highway services have been taken over by corporate providers, ironing out all sense of regional difference in a wide band along both sides of every highway. In facilitating more and more highway travel, these companies – La Quinta, Pizza Hut, Boston Market and Popeyes, not to mention the massive “mini-marts” smelling of stale Snickers and Pine-Sol – have also made difference (and the road trip romance) disappear. I challenge you to find one regionally unique product in these places (in Cumberland Farms recently I found an “ice cream canolli” produced in New Jersey). One bumps and swoops along I-95 in frightening proximity to roaring 18-wheelers, cars and SUVs of all kinds, and cement barriers scarred with slip ups. Sun glares down on defeated urban landscapes of which the highway is a part. Between cities, one rolls along in a broad swath cut through faceless vegetation. Either way, one feels like an ant naked on a wide, rumbling ribbon.
On the Parkway, on the other hand, trees encroach, arching over the roadway. Suddenly one is not trapped on an endless strip under a cruel sky, but is flitting down a cool, soft corridor. This feeling is accentuated by the fact that only sections of the original plan remain in places; some massive clover leafs have replaced the cramped, if intimate, on-ramps appearing out of the forest. These places are shorn of trees. The sense of vast space is oppressive, the force of the sky mitigated by nothing. Or a long, blank bridge cuts across the horizon.
But then the trees cluster closer again, the breakdown lanes disappear, one is enclosed in a green tunnel, and the four lanes squeeze together to fit under a wholly unique bridge. The bridges of the Parkway are treasures of public design, a rare example of resources spent on beautifying public spaces. It is even rarer for the transient space of a highway, as opposed to a park or train station, which have long attracted architectural ambitions. The fact that such thought was lavished on a roadway intended mainly for the wealthy white collareds shows how dominant classes are able to steer the definition (and monies) of the “public” in their direction.
One memorable bridge is arched and faced with rough rocks of many hues, and then is half swallowed in ivy. One is covered in wrought iron clusters of grapes. Others are modernistic or Art Deco, with stylized wings rising above and cut in sharp, simple lines. Some feature sculptural panels one barely glimpses. What fun it is whipping along, caught for a few moments by the sight of a modest but attentively made bridge before it disappears behind one and gives way to another. Enough of the Parkway is still intact that one can catch a whiff of a suburban class romance of the road – one which did not last long. You can sense that era even if you are not lucky enough to see a Jaguar racing up on you.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
America's Slippery Slope
I hate the need of some people to make monsters of others. I am a humanist. No matter what another person has done, he or she is still a person. This point may seem simple, and in little need of making, but in the noise of the present day media machine, I think it is actually easy to forget.
When I say a killer or a terrorist is nonetheless still a person, why is it assumed I am lessening or softening their offense? Not at all. Precisely because they violated the humanity of other people through killing, they are guilty of an essential betrayal.
Those who insist that Hitler or Saddam Hussein are not human – monsters – are guilty of a betrayal similar (if far smaller, of course) to the ones they carried out. Just as killers deny the humanity of others in order to carry out their killing, pseudo-moralists must deny the humanity of others in order to carry out their task. What is their task? To divide the human race between humans and “monsters.” I am not going to argue that this moral division is as serious as the bloody division of life and death perpetrated by killers.
But consider this: the beginning of killing is symbolic and moral. Hitler only succeeded in his task of killing because the prerequisite moral and symbolic segregation was accomplished. So in this present day “War on Terror” I insist on the humanity of terrorists. Why? For the simple reason that demonizing them is preparing the way for atrocities committed by us in the name of right.
In other words, we are preparing the way to follow in the de-humanizing footsteps of those we hate. We hunger to become like them. When one hungers to become a terrorist – a hunger many Americans feel – morality becomes a burden.
But I insist on this: morality is a joy and a freeing force. Morality frees me from hate and allows me to judge wrongdoing rationally, without myself becoming a wrongdoer. It worries me that so many Americans are eager to join in terrorism: first symbolic and moral, and finally actual.
In Harlem I passed a man wearing a T-shirt reading, "I support terrorist prisoner abuse." Such a statement is simply a hunger for revenge, as well as politically lazy. The very point is that without a proper procedure one does not in fact know whether people in custody are "terrorists." To simply trust the president is to believe that executive omniscience trumps facts.
What I want to point to, however, is that the slogan avoided the word "torture." Why this linguistic delicacy? I think this slight veil or censorship is the fig leaf that allows people to, on the one hand, divide the world into good and evil, and on the other, to pretend that they belong only in the former camp. We are copying the terrorists, goes the thinking, but we maintain a tiny symbolic difference that proves our superiority.
The other day I heard a typical symbolic or linguistic example of this thinking. I was listening to National Public Radio’s “On Point.” One of Tom Ashbrook’s guests was a journalist from the Philadelphia Inquirer. When asked about the situation in Pakistan, this woman said that the country was indeed home to “virulent” Muslims, and the borderlands with Afghanistan was a place where the Taliban movement is “nesting.”
I object to these descriptions because in dehumanizing those people, we participate in the logic of terror, we copy the tactics of those we fight. Could the attackers of 9-11 have carried out that act without first designating those attacked as cockroaches, less than human? Why, I ask, are Americans so eager to follow in their footsteps? While seeming to fight terrorists, these Americans – including the journalist from Philadelphia – dream of becoming them.
Hate is not essentially immoral. Hate is an important moral force. What is deeply immoral is to dehumanize. Dehumanization is a betrayal.
When I say a killer or a terrorist is nonetheless still a person, why is it assumed I am lessening or softening their offense? Not at all. Precisely because they violated the humanity of other people through killing, they are guilty of an essential betrayal.
Those who insist that Hitler or Saddam Hussein are not human – monsters – are guilty of a betrayal similar (if far smaller, of course) to the ones they carried out. Just as killers deny the humanity of others in order to carry out their killing, pseudo-moralists must deny the humanity of others in order to carry out their task. What is their task? To divide the human race between humans and “monsters.” I am not going to argue that this moral division is as serious as the bloody division of life and death perpetrated by killers.
But consider this: the beginning of killing is symbolic and moral. Hitler only succeeded in his task of killing because the prerequisite moral and symbolic segregation was accomplished. So in this present day “War on Terror” I insist on the humanity of terrorists. Why? For the simple reason that demonizing them is preparing the way for atrocities committed by us in the name of right.
In other words, we are preparing the way to follow in the de-humanizing footsteps of those we hate. We hunger to become like them. When one hungers to become a terrorist – a hunger many Americans feel – morality becomes a burden.
But I insist on this: morality is a joy and a freeing force. Morality frees me from hate and allows me to judge wrongdoing rationally, without myself becoming a wrongdoer. It worries me that so many Americans are eager to join in terrorism: first symbolic and moral, and finally actual.
In Harlem I passed a man wearing a T-shirt reading, "I support terrorist prisoner abuse." Such a statement is simply a hunger for revenge, as well as politically lazy. The very point is that without a proper procedure one does not in fact know whether people in custody are "terrorists." To simply trust the president is to believe that executive omniscience trumps facts.
What I want to point to, however, is that the slogan avoided the word "torture." Why this linguistic delicacy? I think this slight veil or censorship is the fig leaf that allows people to, on the one hand, divide the world into good and evil, and on the other, to pretend that they belong only in the former camp. We are copying the terrorists, goes the thinking, but we maintain a tiny symbolic difference that proves our superiority.
The other day I heard a typical symbolic or linguistic example of this thinking. I was listening to National Public Radio’s “On Point.” One of Tom Ashbrook’s guests was a journalist from the Philadelphia Inquirer. When asked about the situation in Pakistan, this woman said that the country was indeed home to “virulent” Muslims, and the borderlands with Afghanistan was a place where the Taliban movement is “nesting.”
I object to these descriptions because in dehumanizing those people, we participate in the logic of terror, we copy the tactics of those we fight. Could the attackers of 9-11 have carried out that act without first designating those attacked as cockroaches, less than human? Why, I ask, are Americans so eager to follow in their footsteps? While seeming to fight terrorists, these Americans – including the journalist from Philadelphia – dream of becoming them.
Hate is not essentially immoral. Hate is an important moral force. What is deeply immoral is to dehumanize. Dehumanization is a betrayal.
how suburbs are like movies
Suburbs are like movies in a certain way. They are beautiful things, artistic representations whose beauty depends on something ugly. Their delicate rustic flavor relies on an industrial apparatus which remains as hidden as possible. If you were to stand on the patio of my parents’ home facing back toward the neighbor’s big green yard, you would know what I mean. You could feel both aspects mingling: the bucolic ease of the tree-rimmed yards in your sight, and a hard, relentless hum and roar in your hearing. What is that roar? The highway. It is out of sight, but its noise cannot be masked.
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno symbolized the utter split between the movie’s delicate representation of nature and its technological production as an “orchid in the land of technology,” a flower blooming unnaturally out of cameras and recording equipment. The suburb relies too on this chasm between representation and production.
The suburb retains the outer shell or husk of the agricultural past while injecting it cleverly with technological networks that allow a much higher density of occupation than in the days of the farmers. The shell of the farm is retained while the economic base is transformed. Places that were once remote and lonely, requiring a day or more of travel in a wagon from the nearest town, are transformed into cozy nooks for those with salaries and cars. Every corner is steadily filled up. In Madison, the Milano Corporation identifies still-remaining chunks of nature for destruction and transformation into bucolic scenes.
These productions, for efficiency, are not particularly convincing even from the standards of the suburb. As representations they are too hard, with all the trees razed, replaced by a flat green carpet. Huge houses dominate these empty spaces. It will be decades, if at all, before such developments approximate the successful suburban representation: houses nearly overwhelmed by trees on three or four sides.
Just because I do not like the essential falsity and hiding on which suburbs are based does not mean I cannot judge them on their own standards of beauty, just like movies that “work” or do not. Milano’s developments do not work because the house dominates the scene too much. You are aware of a mighty force that erased nature and dropped from the sky multiple mansions. In their brutal overpowering and ironing out of nature they are like movies that overpower spectators with technological might. A more gentle wooing – of nature or of spectators – works best, through sensitivity to the contours of the land on one hand, and through sensitivity to the charms of story, on the other.
In these shoreline towns those streets whose houses were built one at a time, by different builders, are inevitably more beautiful than those built by a single developer. This is not to say that developers cannot make beautiful houses. Not at all. My point is that the overall effect is off due to their forceful unification of the whole space under one producing hand. In more concrete terms, I mean that all the trees are cut down, for efficiency of production no doubt, and emphasis given to big empty lawns and big blank houses. Nature is utterly defeated.
If one travels along River Road in Clinton, modest houses emerge from enchanting veils of trees. One house in particular is blessed with a natural landscape that was not eradicated by the builder. As I bike past this house, I round a small hillock covered with leafy trees. As this hillock subsides, the house is revealed behind it. The driveway curves around the hill, emphasizing the topographical uniqueness of the place. As I move past the house, there is a graceful visual movement, a curving, a revealing, a subsiding – all shaded by numerous trees.
While I bike the margins of Madison, Clinton and Killingworth, I notice something too about lawns. Many homeowners feel uncomfortable with thick tree cover in front of the house, so they thin them out. But this results in a worse effect that is neither the flat shady floor of forest nor the gentle green carpet of grass. Because the shade of the trees is reduced, an opportunity is given to smaller plants which struggle for the light and space opened up. What results is a scruffy effect, of graceful trees amid a chopped and clipped space of weeds and saplings. If they had simply left the thick tree cover, been happy with the shady peace prevailing, the house could be seen between the many trunks. What they have, however, is a messy and ongoing insurgency of plants versus clipper. The owners do not have the energy to completely pacify these rebel plants under the occupation of a lawn. They were better off letting sleeping dogs lie. (Yes, I am straying egregiously here).
But whether the representation is successful or forced, however, all suburban homes depend equally on the fiction of removal from the city. All suburban domestic dreamworlds are plugged in to the same power cable: that howling waste of the highway. Only by plunging these great knives into the breast of the land could these pretty pictures of houses-in-nature be produced. No matter how pretty the picture, it is this essential dishonesty I dislike. Not to mention the illogic of violence done to nature in order to pay homage to that same nature.
7/21/07
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno symbolized the utter split between the movie’s delicate representation of nature and its technological production as an “orchid in the land of technology,” a flower blooming unnaturally out of cameras and recording equipment. The suburb relies too on this chasm between representation and production.
The suburb retains the outer shell or husk of the agricultural past while injecting it cleverly with technological networks that allow a much higher density of occupation than in the days of the farmers. The shell of the farm is retained while the economic base is transformed. Places that were once remote and lonely, requiring a day or more of travel in a wagon from the nearest town, are transformed into cozy nooks for those with salaries and cars. Every corner is steadily filled up. In Madison, the Milano Corporation identifies still-remaining chunks of nature for destruction and transformation into bucolic scenes.
These productions, for efficiency, are not particularly convincing even from the standards of the suburb. As representations they are too hard, with all the trees razed, replaced by a flat green carpet. Huge houses dominate these empty spaces. It will be decades, if at all, before such developments approximate the successful suburban representation: houses nearly overwhelmed by trees on three or four sides.
Just because I do not like the essential falsity and hiding on which suburbs are based does not mean I cannot judge them on their own standards of beauty, just like movies that “work” or do not. Milano’s developments do not work because the house dominates the scene too much. You are aware of a mighty force that erased nature and dropped from the sky multiple mansions. In their brutal overpowering and ironing out of nature they are like movies that overpower spectators with technological might. A more gentle wooing – of nature or of spectators – works best, through sensitivity to the contours of the land on one hand, and through sensitivity to the charms of story, on the other.
In these shoreline towns those streets whose houses were built one at a time, by different builders, are inevitably more beautiful than those built by a single developer. This is not to say that developers cannot make beautiful houses. Not at all. My point is that the overall effect is off due to their forceful unification of the whole space under one producing hand. In more concrete terms, I mean that all the trees are cut down, for efficiency of production no doubt, and emphasis given to big empty lawns and big blank houses. Nature is utterly defeated.
If one travels along River Road in Clinton, modest houses emerge from enchanting veils of trees. One house in particular is blessed with a natural landscape that was not eradicated by the builder. As I bike past this house, I round a small hillock covered with leafy trees. As this hillock subsides, the house is revealed behind it. The driveway curves around the hill, emphasizing the topographical uniqueness of the place. As I move past the house, there is a graceful visual movement, a curving, a revealing, a subsiding – all shaded by numerous trees.
While I bike the margins of Madison, Clinton and Killingworth, I notice something too about lawns. Many homeowners feel uncomfortable with thick tree cover in front of the house, so they thin them out. But this results in a worse effect that is neither the flat shady floor of forest nor the gentle green carpet of grass. Because the shade of the trees is reduced, an opportunity is given to smaller plants which struggle for the light and space opened up. What results is a scruffy effect, of graceful trees amid a chopped and clipped space of weeds and saplings. If they had simply left the thick tree cover, been happy with the shady peace prevailing, the house could be seen between the many trunks. What they have, however, is a messy and ongoing insurgency of plants versus clipper. The owners do not have the energy to completely pacify these rebel plants under the occupation of a lawn. They were better off letting sleeping dogs lie. (Yes, I am straying egregiously here).
But whether the representation is successful or forced, however, all suburban homes depend equally on the fiction of removal from the city. All suburban domestic dreamworlds are plugged in to the same power cable: that howling waste of the highway. Only by plunging these great knives into the breast of the land could these pretty pictures of houses-in-nature be produced. No matter how pretty the picture, it is this essential dishonesty I dislike. Not to mention the illogic of violence done to nature in order to pay homage to that same nature.
7/21/07
Thursday, July 19, 2007
in the road
Riding my bike down the middle of Island Avenue, swerving from one side to the other across the yellow line, was an unequalled joy. The road was completely empty, and nearly sunk in the blackness of massive maples reaching across it, blotting out the evening sky and muffling the street lamps.
To be master of a road is to race down it in a Chevy Chevette, burly sound billowing into the wind. To be master of the road means submitting to its logic and its power, which is: straightness. And speed. Cutting like a knife through space.
To swing across the yellow line side to side on a bike is to change the road into something else. A place for swooping in the dark like a swallow. A swallow with hairy legs and a bike. Not a master of the road, but a fool toying with it in the absence of other users.
To be a fool is to ignore the rules -- but only as long as the road is unoccupied. To be a fool does not mean to be so thick skinned one ignores the demands of the efficient machine (see "the awkwardness of intersections") and its functioning. It only means to long for cessation, for a breathing out, for a break in a power that does not know how to stop.
Oh, bike and road, swerve and dark. May you be so until the end of the world!
To be master of a road is to race down it in a Chevy Chevette, burly sound billowing into the wind. To be master of the road means submitting to its logic and its power, which is: straightness. And speed. Cutting like a knife through space.
To swing across the yellow line side to side on a bike is to change the road into something else. A place for swooping in the dark like a swallow. A swallow with hairy legs and a bike. Not a master of the road, but a fool toying with it in the absence of other users.
To be a fool is to ignore the rules -- but only as long as the road is unoccupied. To be a fool does not mean to be so thick skinned one ignores the demands of the efficient machine (see "the awkwardness of intersections") and its functioning. It only means to long for cessation, for a breathing out, for a break in a power that does not know how to stop.
Oh, bike and road, swerve and dark. May you be so until the end of the world!
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
oddities
The first oddity is "to garnish one's wages." When I think of garnishing, "adding something" comes to mind. How did such an absurd wording come to be? Was it a euphemism? To "append a removal"? To "decorate with a defacement"? To "promote with a firing"? A salary can also be so garnished, I think.
Or is the point to diminish the force of the act with diminution? For any garnish is always a measly little olive, or sprig of parsley. One never eats it or pays it any mind: it is there to throw to the side as one gets to the (meaty) heart of the matter. Was the word "garnish" chosen for this administrative cruelty to diminish it? Like adding a stalk of celery or slivers of carrot to one's paycheck? A teeny-tiny adornment, in the form of a little-wittle deduction?
The second oddity is "butterfly." For a long time I have been sure that this word was a mutation of history. Switch the "b" and the "fl" and one has a perfect description of what this insect does: it flutters by. I have not looked into the Oxford English Dictionary for confirmation. Perhaps I do not want to be disappointed to find that this perfect little eddy in time does not actually exist.
But lately I have made peace with "butterfly." There is something poetic in the associations. I see a butterfly opening and closing its wings on a windowsill, sipping at a saucer of melting butter, bathed in buttery sunlight. There is a peacefulness in the word, a domestic warmth, to thinking of this beautiful creature naturally drawn to human kitchens. And now that butter is less used, and is no longer made at home, there is a tint of the past in the image, as if the butterfly itself signified a rustic past of Heidi-like simplicity, of a time when butterflies fluttered by one's doorstep, drawn by the scent of the butter in the churn.
Still, "fly" makes me pause. It does not fit that insect. There is dragon fly, of course. But it has clear wings at least. "Bug" makes more sense: butterbug.
Or is the point to diminish the force of the act with diminution? For any garnish is always a measly little olive, or sprig of parsley. One never eats it or pays it any mind: it is there to throw to the side as one gets to the (meaty) heart of the matter. Was the word "garnish" chosen for this administrative cruelty to diminish it? Like adding a stalk of celery or slivers of carrot to one's paycheck? A teeny-tiny adornment, in the form of a little-wittle deduction?
The second oddity is "butterfly." For a long time I have been sure that this word was a mutation of history. Switch the "b" and the "fl" and one has a perfect description of what this insect does: it flutters by. I have not looked into the Oxford English Dictionary for confirmation. Perhaps I do not want to be disappointed to find that this perfect little eddy in time does not actually exist.
But lately I have made peace with "butterfly." There is something poetic in the associations. I see a butterfly opening and closing its wings on a windowsill, sipping at a saucer of melting butter, bathed in buttery sunlight. There is a peacefulness in the word, a domestic warmth, to thinking of this beautiful creature naturally drawn to human kitchens. And now that butter is less used, and is no longer made at home, there is a tint of the past in the image, as if the butterfly itself signified a rustic past of Heidi-like simplicity, of a time when butterflies fluttered by one's doorstep, drawn by the scent of the butter in the churn.
Still, "fly" makes me pause. It does not fit that insect. There is dragon fly, of course. But it has clear wings at least. "Bug" makes more sense: butterbug.
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