mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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This is the best way I was ever given a phone number. It will soon enough be a year since we decoded and untangled this, you. It has been fun, hasn’t it? There is a fraught relationship between the people one cares for and how one writes, and between subjects and muses. At times, you may recognize that someone is overwhelmingly important to you if you cannot write well about them, only to them. On the other hand, this may merely reflect one’s creative limitations: one cannot gain literary ascendency over everything. But one shouldn’t want to: better to have such friends than to be able to write about them. Life over art, one might say.

This is the best way I was ever given a phone number. It will soon enough be a year since we decoded and untangled this, you. It has been fun, hasn’t it?

There is a fraught relationship between the people one cares for and how one writes, and between subjects and muses. At times, you may recognize that someone is overwhelmingly important to you if you cannot write well about them, only to them. On the other hand, this may merely reflect one’s creative limitations: one cannot gain literary ascendency over everything.

But one shouldn’t want to: better to have such friends than to be able to write about them. Life over art, one might say.

“[Jerry Lewis] needs the applause too much. You can hear that need in every convulsive laugh and see it in a smile that stretches across his face like an abyss. Comedy is an art of desperation, feeding on the laughter and love of the audience, and few screen comics have worn that hunger more openly than Mr. Lewis has. To watch one of his early romps, including those with his longtime partner, Dean Martin, is to witness not just the pathos of that need, but also its horror. When Jerry Lewis laughs, his rubber-band lips widen across his cheeks, creating an enormous hole, a cavern of dark. It’s as if he were simultaneously splitting himself open for our delectation and trying to swallow us whole, maybe both.”

Although a bit vicious, Manohla Dargis’ piece on Jerry Lewis and his consolation Academy Award offers some fascinating observations about comedy; although there is no manifestation of this in my writing, I am told by real-life acquaintances that I’m “funny.” What I always wish to note for them is that the degree to which I am probably reflects a lamentable attention-seeking or need for affection, the “desperation” Dargis describes above. I’ve also heard comedy described by many, including Steve Martin, as a violent struggle for control: “I killed them,” “I died up there,” etc.

But no intersection of pathos and comedy is comparable to Lewis’ eternally unseen holocaust-clown magnum opus The Day the Clown Died. If you have never read about this film -which culminates in Lewis as a clown leading doomed Jewish children in a gas chamber- you should; it (unintentionally) expresses so much: themes of egomaniacal grandiosity, artistic hubris, comic desperation, deep cultural resentment, barbaric self-centeredness, insensitivity born out of personal pain, etc.

I hope to see it someday; it very much sounds like the worst movie that could possibly be made.

Soon I’ll be home in New Orleans for Mardi Gras (all the way through Tuesday, happily). I remain as fond of it as I was when a child, and even as I was when I drank, although I’ve begun to tire more easily from the endless walking, yelling, supporting of others on shoulders, cooler-carrying, and late nights at dingy Uptown bars. Gripes of age aside, I find it more exciting every year; I think I get better at enjoying the colors, sounds, and shapes in themselves without expecting of the sorts of adventure that I pursued when I was sixteen. Above, Mardi Gras in 1908; see also these shots from Momus in 1961.

Soon I’ll be home in New Orleans for Mardi Gras (all the way through Tuesday, happily). I remain as fond of it as I was when a child, and even as I was when I drank, although I’ve begun to tire more easily from the endless walking, yelling, supporting of others on shoulders, cooler-carrying, and late nights at dingy Uptown bars. Gripes of age aside, I find it more exciting every year; I think I get better at enjoying the colors, sounds, and shapes in themselves without expecting of the sorts of adventure that I pursued when I was sixteen.

Above, Mardi Gras in 1908; see also these shots from Momus in 1961.

This is my house; there are many like it, but this one is mine. In that one’s house is an acquired thing unique in its complexity but common in its overall form, a house is like a self: I live in mine, I peer out from it on others, I reflect on how the neighborhood affects it, and sometimes I wonder if by changing it I will be happier. But I am neither my house nor my self. I rent the former and similarly inhabit the latter on a moment-to-moment basis, occasionally moving out or painting it or burning it down and moving in without someone else. Both are automatic, though: as they say, home is where the heart is. Wherever I am I begin to build a perimeter of interiority and soon a hotel becomes my house; just so with my self, which seems to exist wherever the “I” is: an observation becomes a memory I identify with; an opinion casually expressed is repeated, defended, expanded, and then a belief that defines me. I think my self is unique, but put me in a line with others and see: it is only some paint here, some ornament there, an accident of weathering and an address.

This is my house; there are many like it, but this one is mine. In that one’s house is an acquired thing unique in its complexity but common in its overall form, a house is like a self: I live in mine, I peer out from it on others, I reflect on how the neighborhood affects it, and sometimes I wonder if by changing it I will be happier.

But I am neither my house nor my self. I rent the former and similarly inhabit the latter on a moment-to-moment basis, occasionally moving out or painting it or burning it down and moving in without someone else.

Both are automatic, though: as they say, home is where the heart is. Wherever I am I begin to build a perimeter of interiority and soon a hotel becomes my house; just so with my self, which seems to exist wherever the “I” is: an observation becomes a memory I identify with; an opinion casually expressed is repeated, defended, expanded, and then a belief that defines me.

I think my self is unique, but put me in a line with others and see: it is only some paint here, some ornament there, an accident of weathering and an address.

Positive and Negative Types of Awareness

There exist in our culture tropes about both positive and negative awareness: in some liberating moment we awaken and it is sublime transcendence, or in some pitched moment of stress we cannot stop thinking of the minutiae of our selves and it is catastrophic (we trip, stumble, stutter, fall).

Some classes and examples, positive and negative, of awareness:

Of the body: one slides under one’s cool, clean sheets at night and feels the muscles of one’s legs stretching out, the body uncoiling from the day’s motion as sleep approaches; though one is preparing to drift off, one’s body seems suddenly awake, announcing its sensations; every inch of skin feels, and feels good.

But at another moment one feels the heaviness of the legs and the feet failing to clear one another as one strides towards the front of a crowded room to begin speaking, the body cumbersome and obstinate in the face of attention, suddenly incapable of smooth coordination or grace; every part of the body is over-attended to, disconnected, and rebellious.

Of the mind: in a moment of the day, the mind clears and one hears the space in the music playing, spacious emptiness between the chords which one may fill with emotive resonances or which one may leave empty and open; as this happens, an undisturbed memory never-before recalled comes forward, and one has the sense that one’s mind, freed by occupancy in the present, is playing, playing with sounds and recollections and impressions; and one is happy to be alive.

Another time one feels one’s mind accelerating, speeding away into the unformed and uncontrollable future, modeling scenarios like a network news anchor interested in inflating ratings with dire, unlikely potentialities; one feels one’s efforts to reign in the mind become part of the mind, one’s response to anxiety become anxiety (or one’s rejection of depression transform into depression), and one falls helpless below the mind’s furious obsession with time that does not exist: past, future.

Variables between positive and negative awareness: Is one sensing as a subject or an object? Is one thinking of oneself or being oneself? Is one in the present or fighting beyond it?

A second in the series of photos of sunsets through my office windows, rows of reflected fluorescent lights extending into the clouds. The first is here, and was to my knowledge the most noted thing I’ve ever posted.
A second in the series of photos of sunsets through my office windows, rows of reflected fluorescent lights extending into the clouds. The first is here, and was to my knowledge the most noted thing I’ve ever posted.
“And if a soul can be imposed on so fragile a thing as flesh to make it live, on a hurtable carcass that has to have vegetable and animal matter stuffed in one end and stenchfully excreted at another, a sense-pocked sinful vessel that the years wrinkle and the winds chafe and diseases cruelly hound, and that can be sliced off in a trice from the soul it holds by the same act that stabs an onion, how much more possible for life, divine life, to be imposed by heaven upon a statue of unbleeding beauty with a faultless and immaculate body of unwrinkling marble or diseaseless gold!”
Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, discussing how the “dualism of mind and matter” caused religious idolatry to persist long after the advent of rationalism.
Incredibly, Wikipedia has an article titled “History of the world,” which is actually about the “the recorded memory of the experience, around the world, of Homo sapiens.” Its scope is amusingly reductive, and by virtue of it the article must condense humanity’s development to its most dramatic highlights. I imagine there are all sorts of academic quibbles to be had with the entry, for those inclined. Above is a graphic (which I’ve rotated) detailing the migration of humankind, color-coded by the number of millennia in the past each migration supposedly occurred. I believe another graphic on the subject has been making the rounds. Below, is Ptolemy’s ~150 CE map of the world, from the same article. I like when people say things like: “Relatively speaking, it’s not a big deal.” I want to try to speak and think relatively more often and think these maps may help. Perhaps we could keep them as cards in the wallet, or as posters on the wall. An unpleasant phone call? Well, it’s not really so significant. Financial worries? Well, crossing the Bering Strait was probably stressful, too. Etc.

Incredibly, Wikipedia has an article titled “History of the world,” which is actually about the “the recorded memory of the experience, around the world, of Homo sapiens.” Its scope is amusingly reductive, and by virtue of it the article must condense humanity’s development to its most dramatic highlights. I imagine there are all sorts of academic quibbles to be had with the entry, for those inclined.

Above is a graphic (which I’ve rotated) detailing the migration of humankind, color-coded by the number of millennia in the past each migration supposedly occurred. I believe another graphic on the subject has been making the rounds.

Below, is Ptolemy’s ~150 CE map of the world, from the same article.

I like when people say things like: “Relatively speaking, it’s not a big deal.” I want to try to speak and think relatively more often and think these maps may help. Perhaps we could keep them as cards in the wallet, or as posters on the wall. An unpleasant phone call? Well, it’s not really so significant. Financial worries? Well, crossing the Bering Strait was probably stressful, too. Etc.

Cricket Fighting. I recently read Hugh Raffles’ excellent essay on cricket fighting, which for the first five pages I believed was a Swiftian parody along the lines of A Modest Proposal; it seemed incomprehensible to me that there existed a world of massive wagering, cricket trainers, performance enhancing drugs for bloodline-bred crickets, and cultural traditions surrounding contests between these insects stretching more than 1000 years into the past. It was unbelievable, but it is nevertheless real. Champion crickets are beloved and honored; the vanquished are released into nature and protected by a curse against any who would harm them. Their fights are goaded by men with small blades of grass (inspected for knives and chemicals!), and between fights crickets are trained, medically attended to, and given sexual partners for the release of their urges. Doping is such an issue that crickets at the top levels of competition are kept in “public houses,” where their trainers are supervised and they detox from any drugs given to them. Weight-manipulation is practiced, too: saunas sweat crickets down to lower weight classes (measured in zhen, a “Shanghainese cricket-specific measure now used nationally for this purpose”). Raffles discuses the thirteenth-century Book of Crickets which is the origin of much cricket lore, as well as the 72 types of cricket personality and methods of training. A local legend named Master Fang at one point demonstrates his techniques: [He] barked orders at the cricket as if at a soldier (“This way! That way!”…) and the insect, to Michael’s and my real astonishment, responded unhesitatingly, turning left, right, left, right, a routine of exercises that Master Fang explained increased the fighter’s flexibility… Of additional note is the associated wisdom offered by those whose lives are intimately connected with the bloodsport, some of which is quite beautiful; quoting (and paraphrasing) Raffles: The Five Virtues (present in ideal humans and crickets): 1. ‘When it is time to sing, he will sing. This is trustworthiness.’2. ‘On meeting an enemy, he will not hesitate to fight. This is courage.’3. ‘Even seriously wounded, he will not surrender. This is loyalty.’4. ‘When defeated he will not sing. He knows shame.’5. ‘When he becomes cold, he will return to his home. He is wise and recognizes the facts of the situation.’ The Three Reversals (present only in crickets): 1. ‘A defeated cricket will not protest the outcome of a fight; he will simply leave the arena without complaint.’2. ‘A cricket requires sex before a fight and performs better for the stimulation it provides; rather than having an enervating effect on athletic performance (as, according to this reversal, it does in men), among crickets, pre-game sex promotes physical prowess, mental focus and fighting spirit.’3. ‘Crickets have sex with the female on the male’s back’ — a position functionally impossible for people (without complicated equipment). Moreover, as the entomologist L.W. Simmons points out in what we might think of as a decisive commentary on Reversal Three: ‘Since the female must actively mount a courting male there is little if any opportunity for forced matings by males.’ Raffles’ essay is an amazing study; you might also consult the selection of cricket fighting photos in the Life archive, a video of market-fighting, or the minimal Wikipedia article.

Cricket Fighting.

I recently read Hugh Raffles’ excellent essay on cricket fighting, which for the first five pages I believed was a Swiftian parody along the lines of A Modest Proposal; it seemed incomprehensible to me that there existed a world of massive wagering, cricket trainers, performance enhancing drugs for bloodline-bred crickets, and cultural traditions surrounding contests between these insects stretching more than 1000 years into the past. It was unbelievable, but it is nevertheless real.

Champion crickets are beloved and honored; the vanquished are released into nature and protected by a curse against any who would harm them. Their fights are goaded by men with small blades of grass (inspected for knives and chemicals!), and between fights crickets are trained, medically attended to, and given sexual partners for the release of their urges.

Doping is such an issue that crickets at the top levels of competition are kept in “public houses,” where their trainers are supervised and they detox from any drugs given to them. Weight-manipulation is practiced, too: saunas sweat crickets down to lower weight classes (measured in zhen, a “Shanghainese cricket-specific measure now used nationally for this purpose”).

Raffles discuses the thirteenth-century Book of Crickets which is the origin of much cricket lore, as well as the 72 types of cricket personality and methods of training. A local legend named Master Fang at one point demonstrates his techniques:

[He] barked orders at the cricket as if at a soldier (“This way! That way!”…) and the insect, to Michael’s and my real astonishment, responded unhesitatingly, turning left, right, left, right, a routine of exercises that Master Fang explained increased the fighter’s flexibility…

Of additional note is the associated wisdom offered by those whose lives are intimately connected with the bloodsport, some of which is quite beautiful; quoting (and paraphrasing) Raffles:

The Five Virtues (present in ideal humans and crickets):

1. ‘When it is time to sing, he will sing. This is trustworthiness.’
2. ‘On meeting an enemy, he will not hesitate to fight. This is courage.’
3. ‘Even seriously wounded, he will not surrender. This is loyalty.’
4. ‘When defeated he will not sing. He knows shame.’
5. ‘When he becomes cold, he will return to his home. He is wise and recognizes the facts of the situation.’

The Three Reversals (present only in crickets):

1. ‘A defeated cricket will not protest the outcome of a fight; he will simply leave the arena without complaint.’
2. ‘A cricket requires sex before a fight and performs better for the stimulation it provides; rather than having an enervating effect on athletic performance (as, according to this reversal, it does in men), among crickets, pre-game sex promotes physical prowess, mental focus and fighting spirit.’
3. ‘Crickets have sex with the female on the male’s back’ — a position functionally impossible for people (without complicated equipment). Moreover, as the entomologist L.W. Simmons points out in what we might think of as a decisive commentary on Reversal Three: ‘Since the female must actively mount a courting male there is little if any opportunity for forced matings by males.’

Raffles’ essay is an amazing study; you might also consult the selection of cricket fighting photos in the Life archive, a video of market-fighting, or the minimal Wikipedia article.

Apollo XVIII Rooftop Mission. Despite it all, it is the nature of life not only to persist but to expand its reach.
Apollo XVIII Rooftop Mission. Despite it all, it is the nature of life not only to persist but to expand its reach.

Dust

“…it is estimated that the entire outer layer of skin is shed every day or two at a rate of 7 million skin flakes per minute, which corresponds to a mass emission rate of about 20 mg/minute.”

The rain of dust which falls like light snow: so much of it is the skin of you and your loved ones. You breathe this in and out, day after day: in your lifetime pounds of those you care about (and complete strangers and mortal enemies and repairmen and shopwomen) will pass cloud-like into your lungs. We are not substantial enough to cause one another more than a sneeze. We slough off into dust as we live and decompose into dust when we die; but the dust in our house, on our books and our shelves, tells us that we’re dying already, forming a thin layer over everything we own.

When that dust accumulates on the television screen and our family is watching their show, they are watching it through us, through the detritus of our expiring skin. Our children will see everything through us, even after we are gone. But so will many: we will then be the dust in the air and the dirt in the ground, the carbon in the grass and the nitrogen in the sky. It is in dust that you can see where you’ll be, and what it means to precede others through life: it means to fall like ash over the shapes they’ll recognize, the thin, soft layer over the hard contours of their experiences: a sheet over a sleeping body, a fog over an slumbering city.

Nudawn and S. Stratodrive are my heroes; their excellent and comprehensive and amusing and illuminating responses to this remind me that conversation is preferable to monologue, especially if you happen to have access to people like them. I recommend hers and his highly if you like to create things. Regarding that: I enjoyed making this with Five; the full, widescreen version is here.

Nudawn and S. Stratodrive are my heroes; their excellent and comprehensive and amusing and illuminating responses to this remind me that conversation is preferable to monologue, especially if you happen to have access to people like them. I recommend hers and his highly if you like to create things.

Regarding that: I enjoyed making this with Five; the full, widescreen version is here.

Seeking the Interesting

We say: “I want to be a writer,” or “I want to be a photographer”; or we say: “I want to take interesting photographs,” or “I want to write interestingly,” or “I want to be interesting.” This is itself interesting. What do we really want when we want such things?

I am trying to learn to take interesting or beautiful or otherwise worthwhile photographs (worthwhile meaning to me that they contribute to someone’s sense of reality or life, at any scale: the trivial, the profound, in between; they might be worthwhile in subject, in composition, in meaning, or in some technical aspect).

I am learning very slowly, despite kind advice from many talented acquaintances and substantial family history in photography. Today I drove around looking for things to shoot and, being what S. Stratodrive calls a ‘new jack,’ had as a discretionary mechanism only (1) what has seemed interesting in other, already-taken photographs and (2) the mildest and most banal internal sensibilities.

The immediate question: why am I trying to do this? If I do not already have something interesting to offer, why am I trying to learn how to offer something interesting? Am I not leading the horse with the cart, so to speak? The beginning of creative efforts is always strange in this way: before we can express something, we must sense that there is something we should express, something not otherwise explored; or is this too serious? Might we not simply have fun?

I am reminded of trying to write while in high school: perhaps I didn’t feel a compulsory or innate urge to say things; perhaps I merely wanted to write (to “be a writer”!) and selected things for the purpose; it is inevitable in such circumstances that one’s writing will be contrived, phony, pretentious (of course, mine remains so, but for other reasons now).

As a novice photographer I resort to the cheaper tricks of the form: massive Photoshop edits for color and composition, the exploitation of my subjects for the sake of the pictures, and so on. This seems comparable to me to the use of a thesaurus or the insistence on writing about the themes that automatically resonate with everyone whether or not your treatment is any good.

It is worth wondering what motivates one’s creativity, as the decision to pursue creativity professionally likely entails substantial material privation: if it is not compulsion but desire, not need but want, it is perhaps preferable to secure an ordinary job and make a hobby of your efforts. It worked for Kafka, after all.

I had a musicology professor who said that when he didn’t play the cello for a few hours each day, he felt unwashed; short of that sort of need, what will sustain you when you are hungry and no one wishes to date you in your dull poverty? When I heard him describe his addiction, I realized that dilettantism is preferable to falsified compulsion for me. Indeed, I wish we were more comfortable with the idea of craft rather than art, that there was a cultural sphere for semi-serious art. Is that the Internet?

It is more fun, more amusing, when one accepts the inauthenticity of oneself: a phony photographer trying to be interesting without any damn reason is more tolerable when he can laugh at himself, I hope; and the same should be true for a phony writer. It is all play, after all; perhaps, then, a disclaimer is in order: please know that the author of this site is comfortable with laughter.

“He told himself there would be no harm in taking a brief pause in his relations with women. Until next time, as they say. But this pause kept getting longer week by week, month by month. One day he realized there would be no ‘next time.’” Milan Kundera, Immortality.

“He told himself there would be no harm in taking a brief pause in his relations with women. Until next time, as they say. But this pause kept getting longer week by week, month by month. One day he realized there would be no ‘next time.’”

Milan Kundera, Immortality.

For Valentine’s Day, I went to the parking lot of my office building and photographed a new mother duck with her ducklings. The criticism of a human won’t disturb her, so I’ll note that I thought it was poor parenting to ask her offspring -so young they fell more than they walked- to follow her over such a high curb. But they made it! The flung themselves up, gracelessly; they fell back two or three times before their extended legs propelled them forward, like vaulters whose poles were made of taffy. Those photos are below. But these two were left behind; the second-to-last photo shows one of the successful jumpers chirping at them, which he did for almost a minute before turning around and racing to catch up with the rest. Mother and children. Vaulters. Encouragement. Stuck. As our presence was likely preventing the mother from returning, we left shortly after this; the ducklings were really extraordinary to see, although one’s mind naturally turns towards anxious contemplation of what might lie in wait for them. Fear of the sort that involves futurity is something only humans experience, and it is an old moralist trope that fear is the source of all evil. The ducks did seem cold, though. I’m sure their mother returned; I’m sure because I checked.

For Valentine’s Day, I went to the parking lot of my office building and photographed a new mother duck with her ducklings. The criticism of a human won’t disturb her, so I’ll note that I thought it was poor parenting to ask her offspring -so young they fell more than they walked- to follow her over such a high curb.

But they made it! The flung themselves up, gracelessly; they fell back two or three times before their extended legs propelled them forward, like vaulters whose poles were made of taffy. Those photos are below.

But these two were left behind; the second-to-last photo shows one of the successful jumpers chirping at them, which he did for almost a minute before turning around and racing to catch up with the rest.

Mother and children.

Vaulters.

Encouragement.

Stuck.

As our presence was likely preventing the mother from returning, we left shortly after this; the ducklings were really extraordinary to see, although one’s mind naturally turns towards anxious contemplation of what might lie in wait for them. Fear of the sort that involves futurity is something only humans experience, and it is an old moralist trope that fear is the source of all evil.

The ducks did seem cold, though. I’m sure their mother returned; I’m sure because I checked.