mills

Untitled, from Unburying the Lead’s Flickrstream.

GPOYW: Instantiation Edition with Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe. (First | Second)

I am always grateful to those who do more with this name than I do; I hope that, in decisive interactions, the cultural aura that surrounds it has been sufficiently enhanced by Haley Mills, C. Wright Mills, the Quasi-Honorable Semi-Judge Mills Lane, Sam Mills, military hero Gen. Mills, and others that otherwise suspicious interlocutors will give me the benefit of the doubt. A positive association with the original Parent Trap, for instance, could incline a policeman to overlook my poor driving.

I was pleased, then, to read about Wilbur Mills, a powerful Southern congressman, here photographed behind a plate that reads as I am addressed by a friend’s children: “Mr. Mills.”

Mills served in Congress from 1939 to 1977 and for eighteen years (1957-1975) was the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, a post he held longer than any other person in U.S. history. Mills was often termed “the most powerful man in Washington” during his tenure… His accomplishments in Congress included playing a large role in the creation of the Medicare program. Mills initially had reservations about the program because he was worried about the eventual cost, but eventually shepherded it through Congress and had a large hand in shaping its program. Mills was also acknowledged as the primary tax expert in the Congress and the leading architect of the Tax Reform Act of 1969. Mills favored a conservative fiscal approach, adequate tax revenue to fund government programs, a balanced budget, and also supported various social programs, especially Social Security Disability, adding farmers to Social Security, unemployment compensation, and national health insurance.

I hope there is something in there to satisfy readers of virtually all political inclinations. I felt proud to have an utterly incidental connection to this obvious hero of fiscal restraint, political compassion, and power-mongering ambition, until I came to this:

Mills was involved in a traffic incident in Washington, DC at 2 a.m. on October 9, 1974. His car was stopped by U.S. Park Police late at night because the driver had not turned on the lights. Mills was intoxicated, and his face was cut from a scuffle with Annabelle Battistella, better known as Fanne Foxe, a stripper from Argentina. When police approached the car, Foxe leapt from the car and jumped into the nearby Tidal Basin in an attempt to escape… On November 30, 1974, Mills, seemingly drunk, was accompanied by Fanne Foxe’s husband onstage at The Pilgrim Theatre in Boston, a burlesque house where Foxe was performing. He held a press conferencefrom Foxe’s dressing room. Soon after this second public incident, Mills stepped down from his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged his alcoholism, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and checked himself into Palm Beach Institute at West Palm Beach.

This article is even better: black eyes, lies, obvious lunacy! I suppose that qualifies as additional context for the question of how much our names govern our lives, how much of an effect an idiosyncratic name can have on our development. I now consider myself, and Wilbur, mere victims of a name that wrought debauchery through us quite without our consent. Pity us!

(From Little Potato: moss, diagrams, letters, colors, quincunx, more).

After a bad day, I came home to a small, meticulously-bundled world on my doorstep; it took me out of the large, carelessly-arranged world in which my day had spilled out earlier, and I liked it so much I didn’t know what to do.

That’s when cigarettes come in handy. I smoked one and read the enclosed essay, letters, and poetic fragments before silently thanking its creator, who is at once meticulous and accident-prone, such that this sublime world had both precise details almost too fragile to believe and an unintentional overwash of Orangina smudging many of its pages. That, of course, made it even better.

Fireworks tonight in Baton Rouge with Will, Paul & Heather, and Spencer & Lauren. (More and better on Photophobia).

I regretted not being able to see any JMW Turner while in London, particularly as I tried to imagine the Houses of Lords and Commons burning, as it is in his painting above. To conjure the image was difficult, for two reasons. First, the facade of the buildings strikes me as almost perfectly beautiful and suitably stately, and secondly it has, through reproduction over the years, become as iconic a symbol of immutable governance as any structure outside of Greece. To an American, the depth of European history seems almost eternal in comparison to our own brief efforts.

The effect such scale has on one is interesting, and reminds me of what Distorte’s post on Turner called to mind some time ago: the relationship between scale, perception, and cognition. While in London, I spoke briefly with the groom of the wedding about the problem of cyan and noted that in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, one never encounters the color blue; it is as though the Greeks simply didn’t see it, describing the sea as “wine dark” and focusing their descriptions on “rosy-fingered dawn,” for example. Blue, I have read, is one of the last colors we have come to differentiate mentally, while red, black, and yellow were among the first.

The groom, a classicist among other specialties, mentioned too that hues are never the focus of ancient texts; intensity is, so that darkness and lightness are described without reference to actual color. Of course, it is not biological change that has altered our perception but the development of our cognition: an amazing thing to consider.

One often hears that dogs “see in black and white,” which is of course nonsensical: dogs’ eyes do not perform the rather artificial conversion of the visible light spectrum to grayscale; only recent inventions like chemical photography, television, and digital processing do. Instead, their eyes take in the same wavelengths that ours do but their brains do not seem to differentiate between them: just as your mind effortlessly fills in the gap left by true cyan on your monitor, theirs papers over the various hues and focuses on intensity (and other sense perceptions).

The processing of sensory data, itself raw and natural, in the brain is driven less by biology than by something else, but it is hard to say just what: why did humanity become attentive to blue some thousands of years ago? Why were we previously not? It is as though the sky and sea in their infinity were too dull to differentiate: better to focus on the colors of the Earth.

It is worth considering how visual art both reflects and alters the development of our perceptual capacities. Reading how people of the past related to their painting is astonishing: what to us seems flat and mannered and false to them seemed as real as a film; without a doubt, people after us will regard the succession of thirty still images each second, flashed two-dimensionally, as an absurdly unconvincing depiction of reality. What is impossible to imagine is what else, if anything, there is to see, what other gaps remain in our sense cognition, what colors remain perceived but unseen, taken into the eye but unassembled into the synthetic idea we experience as color.

At the British Museum, there is a wonderful exhibit of clocks from various periods in history, some older than I thought possible; the mechanical brilliance of their construction attenuated, to a degree, notions of our contemporary technological supremacy.

They also brought to mind one of my favorite metaphors: Karl Popper’s description of “clouds and clocks,” the two representations of determinacy and indeterminacy, which he uses to illustrate how those concepts interrelate in forms other than pure contradiction.

I used to quote Popper often, and probably should get back to his work. Some of his assertions rank among the most important ideas I’ve encountered: simple, subtle, profound, and never in need of obscuring lexical complexity.

GPOYW. It emerges that it is not, in fact, an international tradition to wear light, summer suits to country weddings in June. Additionally, the men above and the women also present were among the most impressive people I’ve met: astonishingly accomplished academics and entrepreneurs and artists, warm and engaging and thoughtful, easygoing but capable of casually assembling a beautiful wedding, kind, witty, charming, and never dull.

Ordinarily, around manifestly superior people I flush with awareness of my own disastrous flaws, but they were so friendly that they succeeded in temporarily tricking me into feeling comfortable around them.

More photos to come.