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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Considered the first fatalities of humanity’s ascension into the skies, the deaths of Pilâtre de Rozier and Pierre Romain in 1785 are commemorated in this beautiful series of cards depicting ballooning and parachuting history.
Another early aviator, the glider-pilot Otto Lilienthal, was mortally wounded in a stall-induced crash; as he lay dying, he is said to have exclaimed: Opfer müssen gebracht werden!
Sacrifices must be made!
My first requested over-long essay; here it is, TWIB. It surely reads too much into the subject, but I defend myself with Kafka’s assertion: “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.”
As a child, I didn’t use to know if I loved anyone. I wondered whether it was possible that I had simply assigned to the extremity of fondness I felt a name which it didn’t deserve; I have always been neurotic about such things (we perhaps expect too much of love).
It is a human concern, whether some devotion or adoration rises to the level of love; so too are concerns about love’s details, dimensions, and duration. They are human because they are linguistic and self-reflective; they involve the conscious mind, a spatiotemporal metaphor-machine which came into existence perhaps ten or twenty thousand years ago, not more.
It is at that approximate time that dogs and humans became intertwined, our domestication of them morphologically splintering them from their lupine forbears and their devotion to us perhaps helping to engender the moral decency Herbert Spencer referred to when he wrote that the “behavior of men to the lower animals and their behavior to each other bear a constant relationship.” (He was not alone in thinking that our relations with animals are a barometer of our morality).
The relationship between dog and human is peerless. Malcolm Gladwell noted some expressions of the inter-species connection from researchers who have found that absolutely alone among animals, dogs instinctively believe that humans will help them accomplish tasks. They are hyper-attentive to us, more than we are to ourselves; they register minute differences in posture, breathing, pupil dilation, and tone. They are more trusting of us, more drawn to us, than primates are, even Chimpanzees.
Recent scholarship suggests that this is the result of evolutionary development. After so many millennia of shared existence, dogs now come into the world looking for us; they seek us out and, finding us, have no wish to part. Their integration into human life has structured the formation of their mental world: they are now an animal which exists for another as well as for itself.
But does it abuse the language to say that they love us or that we love them? And if it does not, how do we relate this love to other forms of love?
One easy hierarchy of affections is proposed by Roger Scruton, whom I quoted some months ago; discussing pets, he writes that
“…[We] pour out on them the pent-up store of fellow-feeling, without fear of reproach. At the same time, we are acutely aware of their moral incompetence. Their affection, if it can be won at all, is easily won, and based on nothing… It implies no moral approval and leaves the character of its object unassessed and unendorsed.”
Though this is exaggerated (as there are some men even dogs dislike), it gives us a division: the “easily won…based on nothing” affection of an animal and the affection of humans, which carries with it “moral approval,” assessment, and endorsement. Although I found this idea striking when I first read it, something about it now seems presumptive, even absurd: Scruton’s vision of human love is precisely what is least appealing about it!
Milan Kundera once observed that if his wife said she loved him because he was handsome, intelligent, or charming, it meant very little: everyone loves those qualities, and they are only part of one’s character! But when she said that she loved him despite his ugliness, stupidity, or boorishness, it meant a great deal. Love based on attributes is contingent and common; love in the face of foibles is precious.
What Scruton suggests is superior is debatably so: it is a process of assessment; assessment is judgment. It is therefore a process in which one ignorant human, with pitifully partial knowledge of the deeds, experiences, thoughts, and feelings of another, judges him morally and either endorses him or rejects him, and that judgment will be based on shared, common, social norms: it will be replicable.
We recognize that such love is of dubious value. None of us will long survive the moral interrogation of a judge! In our depths and our darkness, humans are complexly ambiguous. Thus real love is understood to be a commitment -an act, a pact, a planned, willed, decisive choice- rather than the result of feeling or “moral approval.” Indeed, it is for this reason that we have other avenues for the moral approval we cannot give each other, most notably religion. Most religions in some way address the innate human sense of moral corruption, whether by contextualizing it as natural or something to be overcome or by asserting that it is forgiven by an act of a godly love.
This is felt to be a very profound sort of love: it is willfully blind to social judgments, to legal infractions, to filthiness and failure. It loves the soul, so to speak, and the soul is not one’s doings, one’s speech, or even one’s self; it is not the personality, the psyche, or the subconscious; it is the inimitable, unique essence of an individual beneath even his or her heart.
Of course, such a love does not recognize the parts of us we care most about: the sense of humor, the quickness with a kind word, the charity, the wounded self. Indeed, if we are all equally gifted this superhuman (or subhuman) love, what is it worth? We want to be loved both deeply and for who we are, even as that latter element is a changing and illusory quantity. We want to be loved both for the soul and for the self.
But we do not derogate this high form of love because it ignores the self. It is “extraordinary…so close…yet so remote,” as Thomas Mann said of dogs; it is a blind commitment to all humans, but we treasure it.
It may be objected that unlike the purported love of a god or a deeply affectionate relative, the blindness of a dog’s devotion is worth little because it reflects a calculus of natural selection, an evolutionary imperative. The same could be said of a mother’s love for her child, which has neither selfhood nor character and is no less loved for it. We tend to slight that which we perceive as “naturally-ordained” or automatic, as opposed to “consciously-willed.” But we are evolved creatures too, and those are impossible distinctions to clearly make.
My dogs are devoted to me and I am devoted to them, not in a way that leads me to cook for them but in a way that leads me to consider them of the utmost moral value. Indeed: for every story of a dog dying for its master there is a story of a master unwilling to part with his or her dog. A professor told me of one of his graduate students whose labrador had disappeared into the currents of the Mississippi at a treacherous point; the student dove in after the dog, and both drowned. Some people I share this with find it sad, and others ludicrous.
Perhaps devotion and love aren’t the same, but given that love as a feeling is less important than love as a willed decision, we might justly regard devotion as love’s deepest manifestation. And since we are all partly acting out our biological imperatives, we might argue that the presence of “intentionality” and “comprehension” in our affections is overemphasized.
These, too, are wasteful, idle, human questions. What is beyond them is the curious and felicitous relationship we have with this other species, which Maeterlinck described:
“We are alone, absolutely alone, on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.”
However we describe this alliance, we are as fortunate to have it as the dog is, perhaps more so: in it we can see a paradigmatic instance of non-judgmental devotion, which I maintain is not less significant for being unconscious. It is not surprising that even atheists must refer to Eden to describe dogs and their effect on us: there is something very sublime in canine affection, whatever its origin.
Bill Hicks’ “Ninja Bachelor Party.”
In light of his reintroduction to public awareness on Letterman and the fact that S. Stratodrive may ban me from attending his weekly seances should I fail to prove my enthusiasm for Bill Hicks, here is his film treating the story of Clarence Mumford, a Robitussin addict hoping to become a ninja. Produced by and starring Hicks, this movie has several lines that have become part of my ordinary conversational lexicon and probably the best soundtrack I’ve ever heard.
I first saw this on a VHS we found in a dumpster in New Orleans.
M. Langer, J. Cooke, A. N. Joiner, K. Marx, and W. Benjamin. Notes:
Since it’s already been mentioned, I will here confirm that I thought this was the epitome of excellence (and these men the very souls of tubularity). Now, if anyone has any questions about me, my affiliations with nude intellectuals and hip-hop artists, or the nascent Bookshelf War I hereby declare, I will be in my study deconstructing this image with a team of professors.
Cicero, saying “I assert nothing, I examine everything” and quoted by the ever-excellent Superfluidity. I think this ought to be one’s basic intellectual posture, and when one does assert something one should not be personally attached to it. We are not our ideas.
And furthermore, any act of assertion should be preceded by scrutiny: why am I asserting this? What is my goal in proselytizing this opinion, this belief, this observation? I think most assertions are more about the asserting self than about the asserted position: the ideas are secondary, the self primary.
So many assertions can be translated: me, me, me! That includes this one.
Speaking of those I admire: one of my favorite Tumblr-users -Cursive Buildings- was prominently featured on the VSL, for his work “transforming antique photographs into eye-popping three-dimensional animated GIFs.” That project, Reaching for the Out of Reach, is one of several, all linked from his site.
I suppose I mention him a lot, but he does so much good work: above is “Imitation is Flattery.”
(Note: I would have reblogged the image from him -as did the fantastic Bronze Medal- but I wanted it to appear in maximum width for Dashboard viewers).
Boy Ghost, whose photographs are wonderful, recently offered to mail his followers a print of whichever photo of his they liked, a generous gesture which I thought very cool. I chose several of my favorites and asked him to decide on which to send; he mailed the image above, which is captioned thusly: “Clouds speed over the monument and cathedral at Mount Vernon place. No Photoshop on that sky, just good ol’ slow shutter speeds.”
I wish I had the the means to send thanks to everyone here whom I appreciate; perhaps I could offer to write a some pedantic, pretentious prose on a subject of your choosing. I have a negative temperament and tend to get distracted by the discordant noise from the fact that there are so very many here whose work I admire: your writing, your photography, your humor, your commentary. Thanks to all of you.
And thanks, Boy Ghost! The print is awesome!
John Updike, describing the post-coital moments between a nearly-impotent middle-American businessman and a prostitute in “Transaction,” from Problems and Other Stories.
Many years ago, I stole this book from my father’s bookshelf. The variously sorrowful, comic, and acerbic telling of this story has stayed with me as exemplary of both Updike’s talents and his weaknesses, and I’ve always liked it. It is a masterful and unpretentious exploration of alienation, and it’s also hilarious.
At the time, I was amused that my father and I had both read something this graphic, sordid little tale. But I was more surprised when I noticed that the book was a gift to him, and on the front page was a dedication: “To R——, from Mother.” While I have no idea whether my grandmother ever read “Transaction” or the other marvelous stories in the book, it was nevertheless a reminder -as much of Updike’s writing can be for the young- that the generations previous to our own lead lives as rich in emotion, frenzy, despair, and tumult as yours.
The other morning, I had a conversation with my father by phone. Conversations with my parents are always fascinating, for various reasons: they are both sagacious, engaging, and reflective people, and have had rich lives. In addition, my father shares (or perhaps inspired) many of my interests.
Walking through an empty park, I talked with him about the dubious practicality of implementing spiritual or philosophical wisdom in one’s life, how hard it is to distinguish the meaninglessly ethereal from the actually relevant. For example: we know from the intellectual and spiritual traditions of the world that money, status, and power don’t matter, yet how hard it is to let this knowledge guide us away from our stagnant jobs, dead relationships, and fearful attachment to possessions!
My father’s comments about the tension between abstract wisdom and ordinary social pressures in his own life startled me with their frankness and made me smile: it was like hearing a secret. Our parents are not always so fully human in our eyes. Learning that our elders were once precisely like us does not merely change how we think of them, but how we think of ourselves: all that we think we believe is frangible, all that we assert is negotiable, all that we are will change.
This dynamic of continuity between generations and discontinuity within individuals fascinates me; it is the primary human concern of art, philosophy, and religion: what do all humans experience? Who do we become over time? It was to this that my mind was drawn when I read about Updike’s death. He was ten years older than my father.
This is the second example which came to me today of the literary nature of reality is, by which I mean how many elements of literature are not stylistic or formal deviations from ordinary life but instead reflect the interconnectedness of life’s themes, symbols, characterizations, and so on.
It concerns pitch phugoids and mental illness.
I have long been obsessed with plane crashes; I read, write, and dream about them often. Without question, the most affecting story I’ve encountered is that of United Flight 232, told by Denny Fitch in Errol Morris’ First Person series. Greg Brown posted the video of it; if you have time and can watch the entire program, you will never forget it.
Without recapitulating the heroic and tragic story, I will say just this: after an explosion rendered the plane basically uncontrollable -without flight surfaces under the crew’s command- it began what is called a phugoid.
In a phugoid, a plane’s natural inclination towards aerodynamic equilibrium sends it on a sine-wave roller-coaster: it oscillates up and down, up and down, up and down, attempting to find a stable speed (which it cannot), and with each oscillation there is a net loss of altitude. Rising and falling, but each time falling further, it proceeds towards an inevitable end. Fitch, who helped fly the plane to its eventual crash landing, referred to it in its phugoid state as a “missile.”
Many years before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I commonly saw an image in my mind, an analogical image for what I felt: a cruise missile whose circuitry had malfunctioned, sending it spiraling frenetically and purposelessly around in the sky, awaiting either a self-destruct command or a lethal, ruinous collision with an innocent target.
To anyone familiar with the oscillations of mania and depression, there is an immediately familiar quality to the phugoid: rising and falling, a machine out of control, blindly struggling for an impossible balanced peace, descending further and further with each cycle. Indeed, there is even a rather poetic resemblance between a phugoid state and fugue state.
I have always uncritically assumed that my interest in plane crashes was spontaneous, casual, free from any deeper significance. I assumed that when I tell people that Fitch is one of my only heroes I am saying so only because his calm bravery and skill impress me as the precise opposite of my immaturity. This is an unexamined life.
But as in a novel, my own characterization was suddenly laid bare before me the other day, when I read a doctor describing our bodies as having systems “of significant redundancy which prevent sudden failure” and recognized Fitch’s words for the systems of an airplane. The metaphor coalesced and I saw at once why crashes transfix me:
Here are men and women guiding the unstable through the air through resolute focus and the overcoming of fear. And here are those who through their rashness and incompetence destroy themselves and those who depend on them.
I admire the former so much but dread that I am one of the latter, and thus come the dreams, the stories, the fixation.
We misunderstand literature if we consider the construction of plot, the elaboration of thematic interplay, variations on motifs, and persistent symbolism to be literary devices. To so call them is to suggest that they are elements of form, when in fact they are elements of the natural universe as constant as the laws of physics; indeed, the remarkable connectedness of the themes of our lives is the source of literary devices: they reflect, rather than obscure, reality.
Two examples of this occurred to me today; here is the first.
In his book Awareness, the Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello tangentially mentions an old joke:
I remember hearing about a man who asks his friend, “Are you planning to vote Republican?” The friend says, “No, I’m planning to vote Democratic. My father was a Democrat, my grandfather was a Democrat, and my great-grandfather was a Democrat.” The man says, “That is crazy logic. I mean, if your father was a horse thief, your grandfather was a horse thief, and your great-grandfather was a horse thief, what would you be?” “Ah,” the friend answered, “then I’d be a Republican.”
You may recall that I previously linked to and discussed the remarkable articles on George W. Bush’s Oval Office painting, which he thought depicted a brave Methodist missionary but which in fact depicted a horse thief. In that post, I commented that “…if Bush’s presidency were the fiction of a novelist and he included such an overt illustration of its nature, we’d criticize him for being too neat, too heavy-handed.”
At the time, I’d never heard the joke quoted above; how much more thematically rich it now seems! Indeed, Anthony de Mello uttered it before his death in 1987, and I’ve now found references to this joke from as early as 1955, meaning that for almost fifty years the theme of the Republicans and horse-thieves has been lying in wait for Bush!
And what an implementation of the theme! Not only does this symbolize what his critics feel are the mistakes Bush made –confusing democratic missionary zeal with basic international criminality, for example- it even refers to previously-extant and popular memes! This is quite a good novel, one which may require a companion piece: a professor will pedantically explain (as I do now!) that “The character of President Bush is based on several humous themes that would have been intelligible to contemporary readers, etc.”
But again: it is not just that Bush comically mistook a horse thief for a missionary: it is that in doing so he reminds us of misunderstanding war for the promotion of peace, misunderstanding arrogance for “strength of conviction,” misunderstanding cronyism for loyalty; he reminds us of how error corrodes intentionality and transforms sincere morality into so much dross on the dead.
In other words: in this painting was a comic metaphor for the tragic confusion of the ethical with its antithesis; the whole affair seems to encapsulate Bush’s story in such a literary way that it almost seems impossible, constructed, authored.
When we say of an event that it was “just like in the movies,” we usually mean that it was unrealistic and had a saccharine, unlikely outcome. When we say that a story seems almost literary, on the other hand, we mean that it seems to weave into itself reflections of its own narrative, variations on its ideas, referential imagery, and so on.
But we are wrong to place such stories in opposition to reality; good literature is simply more realistic than our understanding of reality. It surprises us with thematic connections and resonances which we miss in our own lives.
(Please understand that I offer here only a reading; I do not intend it as a political statement. By which I mean: this is one novel; another could be written and read).
A shadow waves goodbye.
Errol Morris, an artist whose talents and moral vision I admire beyond words, asked the head photo editors of three news wire agencies (AFP, AP, and Reuters) to choose the photos of George Bush they considered most significant or reflective of his presidency and personality and interviewed them about their selections. It appeared on his NYT Zoom blog.
It is truly fascinating, both its commentary on the iconic images of the departed administration and its inclusion of some photos I’d never seen before. I am inclined to note the deep morality of Morris’ persistent interest in the humanity of his subjects, but I don’t want to color the discussion; it will need to suffice for me to say that I consider it essential that we seek out the personal amidst the historical, the individual amidst the political, always, even if only to discomfit ourselves.
S. Stratodrive and I in his “Debating Darkroom,” illuminated by audience flashbulbs moments after he scored the winning point in our argument over whether magneplanars are better than electrostatics.
In honor of RRS’ Mustache Saturday, Fat Manatee’s policeman’s mustache, and Cameronr, I thought I’d link to the strange and amusing essay Rich Cohen wrote on Hitler’s mustache for Vanity Fair, recently included in The Best American Essays 2008.
Called “Becoming Adolf,” the essay includes considerable historical reflection on the evolution of facial hair in politics and the genesis of the “toothbrush mustache” made ruined by Hitler, as well as some notes on Cohen’s experiences wearing the mustache for a week.
You could not wear a Toothbrush mustache after World War II, obviously. Because if you did, you were Hitler. In fact, you could not wear any kind of mustache after the war, because, running from Hitler, you might run into Stalin. Hitler plus Stalin ended the career of the mustache in Western political life. Before the war, all kinds of American presidents wore a mustache and/or beard. You had John Quincy Adams, with his muttonchops. You had Abe Lincoln, whose facial hair, like his politics, was the opposite of Hitler’s: beard full, lip bare. You had James Garfield, who had the sort of vast rabbinical beard into which whole pages of legislation could vanish. You had Rutherford B. Hayes, Grover Cleveland, and Teddy Roosevelt, whose asthma and elephant gun were just a frame for his mustache. You had William Howard Taft—the man wore a Walrus!
The entire essay is worth reading, particularly if you have or are interested in facial hair (and who isn’t?). He includes what he calls (and I note this mainly for Langer and J. Brissenden) a “a theory—my only stab at a Tom Friedman–like, one-phrase-tells-all formulation—which I call “¿Quien es mas macho?”“:
According to this theory, a country led by a man with a mustache is more likely to start a war, and more likely to lose it. Because such a country is certain to value machismo over the nerdy qualities that actually win wars. A macho leader will counter a tank division with a cavalry charge—or promise, on the eve of battle, to drive his enemies into the sea. Such a leader will make some of the same mistakes as Hitler: he will overvalue physical courage; he will call on supernatural forces; he will consider even the smallest skirmish a “test of wills”; worst of all, he will answer the question “How will we win?” with the question “¿Quien es mas macho?”
In the rhetorical war between me and S. Stratodrive, I can only note that the more macho prevailed, and I had to buy his tobacco -a rare blend imported by a man who lives on a boat on the Hudson and speaks no English- for a month.
Mao, Roy Lichtenstein (1971)
I am partly persuaded that postmodern ‘playfulness’ is a very good thing, that by desacralizing images, words, and concepts we can more exhaustively interrogate them, sorting out what matters and why and developing our understanding of the world. This has been my first -but not only- line of defense on behalf of works of art that violate whatever boundaries of taste, sensitivity, or custom, and I extend the defense to utterances among friends (as do most of us, I think).
But it is always arresting to remember that some images have correspondences in the world of human experience that seem beyond “play.” I wrote previously of the associations one cannot avoid between the wonderful work by the amazing Cursive Buildings below and September 11th, associations which first forced their way into my awareness when rewatching Brazil after the attacks:
The image of Mao above, and those many Maos fashioned by Warhol below, reminds me of this. Mao was as evil as any human being has ever been, as evil as any can be; that he was ostensibly driven by ideology to pursue, acquire, and deploy maximum individuated power in no way absolves him. Several tens of millions of people died because of Mao, many at his direct instruction; many were tortured to death.
In some senses we are all their kin, but of course those victims must have living relatives, too. One wonders how they feel about images like the Warhol below: do they find them an interesting reclamation of signifier and symbol, or a kaleidoscopic horror? How would you imagine it if the face were Hitler’s, or Pol Pot’s?
And indeed, how do you feel about the Dead Kennedys’ song “Holiday in Cambodia”? Or about this Stalin / Colonel Sanders KFC / KGB brand mashup? Is it as funny when one thinks of the weeping, begging sisters and brothers marched through the Lubyanka to be shot in the back of the head in the middle of the night?
The older one gets -the more one knows about the lives of others- the greater the number of images, symbols, narratives, histories, and jokes one can no longer take lightly. One knows someone who lost a child; the “dead baby” meme loses its luster in light of her tears. One knows of a city that washed away and someone whose life was wrecked: you change the station if “When the Levee Breaks” comes on. And so on.
It doesn’t mean terribly much about the things in themselves, as philosophers say, but it means something about the things in oneself, the widening sense one has of the seriousness of tragedy, the importance of history, the fragility of life. And year by year, I worry that “play” gets harder.
(None of which is to say I can’t take a joke; I still laugh at many of these things, but now with some slight concern that wasn’t always there).
Stanley Fish, on Barack Obama’s inaugural speech (which he characterizes as paratactic); elaborating on that definition, he writes:
One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you.
This is the first I’ve heard of these words -parataxis and hypotaxis- and I’m extremely glad to have learned them; they each describe a sort of writing (or argumentation) which in some instances I love and in others I find wanting.
Fish adds that in being paratactic the speech was reminiscent of “the prose of the Bible with its long lists and serial “ands.” The style is incantatory rather than progressive; the cadences ask for assent to each proposition (‘That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood’) rather than to a developing argument.”
I think that might apply to some of what I’ve written (I do not mean here to compare myself to Obama’s speechwriter, for dozens or perhaps hundreds of reasons!), and might also suggest why I am often so impressed with the hypotactic prose of several other writers on Tumblr, regardless of their politics: I respect the cogency of formally developed arguments, and as an impressionistic and occasionally sloppily paratactic writer I envy the capacity to build structured theses.
Nevertheless, I think each style has its uses, and the aesthetic appeal and emotional resonance of parataxis are substantial.
