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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From this frenzy nothing is being kept; from these cascading thoughts nothing will be recorded, nothing archived, nothing photographed, nothing broadcast. It is not a question of choice but of forms of forgetting: One might forget by permitting blankness to spread like a chemical through canvas, bleaching the fibers of their paint and leaving a vacant whiteness that is only a vacuum of what you experienced but is itself a sort of fullness, a density of nullity. Or one might forget by detailing it all in small strokes, page after page, in tiny glyphs, margins overflowing with notes and annotations, diagrams and drawings: this forgetting will happen as a corrosion from within, the years eating away at the fat under the skin, as slowly what was stuffed becomes thin: a skeleton left where once one had flesh. Over time, what was left out subsumes what was put in. Or one might forget with falsity: the memory shifting like a bored teen, long-limbed and contriving each posture, projecting from his spine affectations one knows well but from which one will never be free. Now you recall being in love; but now it seems you hated him from the start; or now you think, she was right for me; but now you think: no one was ever right for me. Your memory is your marketer: what lie must it use to sell you the newest products of the personality? Or one might forget by turning again to the present, where all that one remembers continues to happen again and again, as though memory is like imagination: a modest metaphorical apparatus for variations on the themes we already know. Whatever we do, we will not record these moments no matter how fiercely we seek to inscribe them, frantically etching them in our flesh like officer of Kafka’s penal colony, coordinating Designer and Harrow to cut deep into the body the judgments and lessons we yearn to experience serenely and purely before our bodies are cast off and present, past, and future cease utterly.

From this frenzy nothing is being kept; from these cascading thoughts nothing will be recorded, nothing archived, nothing photographed, nothing broadcast. It is not a question of choice but of forms of forgetting:

One might forget by permitting blankness to spread like a chemical through canvas, bleaching the fibers of their paint and leaving a vacant whiteness that is only a vacuum of what you experienced but is itself a sort of fullness, a density of nullity.

Or one might forget by detailing it all in small strokes, page after page, in tiny glyphs, margins overflowing with notes and annotations, diagrams and drawings: this forgetting will happen as a corrosion from within, the years eating away at the fat under the skin, as slowly what was stuffed becomes thin: a skeleton left where once one had flesh. Over time, what was left out subsumes what was put in.

Or one might forget with falsity: the memory shifting like a bored teen, long-limbed and contriving each posture, projecting from his spine affectations one knows well but from which one will never be free. Now you recall being in love; but now it seems you hated him from the start; or now you think, she was right for me; but now you think: no one was ever right for me. Your memory is your marketer: what lie must it use to sell you the newest products of the personality?

Or one might forget by turning again to the present, where all that one remembers continues to happen again and again, as though memory is like imagination: a modest metaphorical apparatus for variations on the themes we already know.

Whatever we do, we will not record these moments no matter how fiercely we seek to inscribe them, frantically etching them in our flesh like officer of Kafka’s penal colony, coordinating Designer and Harrow to cut deep into the body the judgments and lessons we yearn to experience serenely and purely before our bodies are cast off and present, past, and future cease utterly.

As I’ve mentioned, I take requests when possible. It is an instance of odd serendipity that the two requests I’ve received have both concerned dogs: first, how much we love them and second, now, what it’s like eating them. Yumwatch, for reasons both culinary and ethical, has asked that I discuss what it was like consuming my favorite animal while in China. Because I lack the needed vocabulary to describe food well -an effect of living in state of almost total gastronomic deprivation- I’ll be brief on the question of taste: dog was delicious, very tender and very rich in flavor; it did not taste like chicken, or indeed like any other meat. It seemed quite fatty, but in a pleasant way, and even a vegetarian with us made an exception and enjoyed it. On the ethical question, I won’t retreat to spiritual vagaries about “grokking the essence” of a creature I’d as soon have spooned in my bed, but I will say that having worked in a veterinary hospital (and having lost family pets) I know that dogs don’t fear death. Living in the eternal present, without language or super-perceptual consciousness, even fear and suffering in animals are almost magically different. But rare are those not affected by images like this or arguments like those below it, and I tend to be heartbroken by the mortality of even amphibians. Indeed, I don’t even kill cockroaches. What accounts for my willingness to eat dog is not disregard for dogs’ moral value or capacity for suffering but a simple sense of my statistical irrelevance: as my eating cows, which have personalities and nervous systems, after all, and chickens, and pigs, makes no real difference to the quantities killed, so too was my consumption of dog effectively unrelated to the killing of the dog, which was already accomplished. And about dead meat I am not sentimental: nothing resides in the body after death of an animal (or a man, I would note outside these parentheses if I weren’t worried about seeming demented), and so the consumption of this inert material has little emotional impact on me. The reverence for flesh disconnected from life that some feel seems odd to me. In any event, I freely admit that all this violates the chief principle of my morality: that effects and praxis have no place in real moral thought. I have no excuse for that except that, on occasion, I have been tempted against morality by the desire for experience. But I am certain that the distinction between, say, beef and dog-meat is so arbitrary as to be specious: animals feel, and merely anthropomorphizing the cow you eat less than you do your dog is not reason to consider one worth killing and eating and the other sacred. In any event, a story from Kundera: Salvador Dali and his wife were to leave for a long trip and worried what to do with their beloved pet rabbits. One night, as he finished a delicious meal, she warmly told him that she’d killed them, cooked them, and he’d eaten them, feeling that it was only in this way that they could truly bring them along. Salvador found this wanting: he ran to the bathroom and forced himself to vomit. What we want to protect, and how we think we can protect it, are matters of the most personal and private sort.

As I’ve mentioned, I take requests when possible. It is an instance of odd serendipity that the two requests I’ve received have both concerned dogs: first, how much we love them and second, now, what it’s like eating them. Yumwatch, for reasons both culinary and ethical, has asked that I discuss what it was like consuming my favorite animal while in China.

Because I lack the needed vocabulary to describe food well -an effect of living in state of almost total gastronomic deprivation- I’ll be brief on the question of taste: dog was delicious, very tender and very rich in flavor; it did not taste like chicken, or indeed like any other meat. It seemed quite fatty, but in a pleasant way, and even a vegetarian with us made an exception and enjoyed it.

On the ethical question, I won’t retreat to spiritual vagaries about “grokking the essence” of a creature I’d as soon have spooned in my bed, but I will say that having worked in a veterinary hospital (and having lost family pets) I know that dogs don’t fear death. Living in the eternal present, without language or super-perceptual consciousness, even fear and suffering in animals are almost magically different.

But rare are those not affected by images like this or arguments like those below it, and I tend to be heartbroken by the mortality of even amphibians. Indeed, I don’t even kill cockroaches. What accounts for my willingness to eat dog is not disregard for dogs’ moral value or capacity for suffering but a simple sense of my statistical irrelevance: as my eating cows, which have personalities and nervous systems, after all, and chickens, and pigs, makes no real difference to the quantities killed, so too was my consumption of dog effectively unrelated to the killing of the dog, which was already accomplished.

And about dead meat I am not sentimental: nothing resides in the body after death of an animal (or a man, I would note outside these parentheses if I weren’t worried about seeming demented), and so the consumption of this inert material has little emotional impact on me. The reverence for flesh disconnected from life that some feel seems odd to me.

In any event, I freely admit that all this violates the chief principle of my morality: that effects and praxis have no place in real moral thought. I have no excuse for that except that, on occasion, I have been tempted against morality by the desire for experience. But I am certain that the distinction between, say, beef and dog-meat is so arbitrary as to be specious: animals feel, and merely anthropomorphizing the cow you eat less than you do your dog is not reason to consider one worth killing and eating and the other sacred.

In any event, a story from Kundera: Salvador Dali and his wife were to leave for a long trip and worried what to do with their beloved pet rabbits. One night, as he finished a delicious meal, she warmly told him that she’d killed them, cooked them, and he’d eaten them, feeling that it was only in this way that they could truly bring them along.

Salvador found this wanting: he ran to the bathroom and forced himself to vomit. What we want to protect, and how we think we can protect it, are matters of the most personal and private sort.

“Another good thing about living in New Orleans these days, according to some: it’s a great refuge from the recession. The gyrations of the Dow, the collapse of General Motors, the prospect of regulating credit default swaps – even the collapse of the housing markets – mean little to most New Orleanians. The city operates at such a low level of economic activity that it never really prospers in good times or suffers in bad.”

The Way of the Bayou in the NYT, from my parents. Many are fond of attributing to their cultures -those of their cities, states, regions- the characteristics of their personalities, and I’m sure Stephen Pinker would reject it all out of hand, but: this article explains a significant portion of my worldview. It also explains why, despite its diminishing fortunes, New Orleans will always be an important city: it is the largest American city in which the war against “dollar and clock” has been won.

“New Orleanians have been guardians of tradition and masters of living in the moment — a lost art. Their preference for having more time than money was at the heart of what made that city so much fun to visit and so hard to leave.”

Long live the anti-revolution; long live the moment!

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Philip Glass - Knee 5, from Einstein on the Beach.

K. and I listened to this today, and I was reminded of my mother’s amusement at the strangely intoned description of the lovers at the end. My intellectual ambivalence about Glass has never interfered with my fondness for his music.

See also: Glass’ contribution to Sesame Street.

“[The purpose of storytelling is] to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

Vladimir Nabokov, quoted by Colum McCann in an editorial about Ulysses in the NYT. My father sent it to me to support his assertion, made often before, that when “we remember a time in the past kindly, nostalgically, even a time we know we experienced as difficult, awkward and unsatisfactory, we may be seeing life more truly than we knew how to then. This goes contrary to the more common idea that we distort the past in order to spare or deceive ourselves, although we may do that too.”

I like the idea that reality is more sublime than we think it as we experience it, that only “the kindly mirrors of future times” permit us to accurately perceive its “fragrant tenderness.”

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Led Zeppelin - When the Levee Breaks, posted by Elle. I think this is an exceptional song, and I thought so before Katrina too. See also.
“Quoting Ferdowsi, the epic poet, he said, “If there is no Iran, let me be not.” Poets are the refuge of every wounded nation — just ask the Poles — and nowhere more so than here in this hour.”

Roger Cohen, whose column from Tehran is very moving. My father sent it to me, noting Cohen’s comment that he had previously “argued that, although repressive, the Islamic Republic offers significant margins of freedom by regional standards. I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.”

It is well to remember when contemplating the stability, prosperity, and cultural opening of authoritarian states like China that the arbitrary and ultimate power of the government means just that: we err if we relativize their freedom, as their freedom is contingent, illusory, unreliable. If threatened, such governments will do whatever they must to control their own people.

Cohen continues:

“Majir Mirpour grabbed me. A purple bruise disfigured his arm. He raised his shirt to show a red wound across his back. “They beat me like a pig,” he said, breathless. “They beat me as I tried to help a woman in tears. I don’t care about the physical pain. It’s the pain in my heart that hurts.”
He looked at me and the rage in his eyes made me want to toss away my notebook.

The column is worth reading, particularly for its scale and concerns: in the midst of it are individual, powerless people; in the face of it, journalism and poetry are at once essential and irrelevant. Power decimates their value, but crushed by power they are all we have left.

I am extremely pleased to announce that the long-awaited D. Mills Baker International Lawn Refuge has finally been completed and was dedicated today in a very moving ceremony attended by dignitaries from across Ills Manor. Originally conceived as a place where citizens of Gaia could witness beautiful, undisturbed, uncut, natural lawn, replete with all the fauna and flora that live there, the project -modestly named after one half of the heteroduplex pair who rule Ills Manor and its environs- took on additional urgency when I learned recently that there are some who do not even have lawns. In a moving letter, the always-wonderful Little Potato lamented that all she has to compensate her for her lack of lawn in the poor district of the United States where she lives, a barrio called “California,” are trifling trees too old to be in style and the occasional small lake. Moved, I decided to rush the project ahead and finalized the barriers protecting the region from the surrounding land, which continues to be logged and mined to the benefit of Ills Manor’s many citizens. It is now open to visitors from around the world, and admission is completely free. You’re welcome, Earth.

I am extremely pleased to announce that the long-awaited D. Mills Baker International Lawn Refuge has finally been completed and was dedicated today in a very moving ceremony attended by dignitaries from across Ills Manor.

Originally conceived as a place where citizens of Gaia could witness beautiful, undisturbed, uncut, natural lawn, replete with all the fauna and flora that live there, the project -modestly named after one half of the heteroduplex pair who rule Ills Manor and its environs- took on additional urgency when I learned recently that there are some who do not even have lawns.

In a moving letter, the always-wonderful Little Potato lamented that all she has to compensate her for her lack of lawn in the poor district of the United States where she lives, a barrio called “California,” are trifling trees too old to be in style and the occasional small lake.

Moved, I decided to rush the project ahead and finalized the barriers protecting the region from the surrounding land, which continues to be logged and mined to the benefit of Ills Manor’s many citizens. It is now open to visitors from around the world, and admission is completely free.

You’re welcome, Earth.

“We could tolerate their odd sexual behavior, but they were also sentimental and cruel -or rather sentimental, therefore cruel. One goes with the other. They are mainly interested in self-esteem… They do not know themselves or what to do with themselves.”

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, in which he proposes a thought experiment involving aliens interacting with humans from which the above comes: an alien’s description of human consciousness.

I adore Lost in the Cosmos, but what struck me about this passage was that it echoes something Hemingway wrote in a Nick Adams short story called “Fathers and Sons,” which I posted some time ago:

“…he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused.”

This consensus association of sentimentality and cruelty is precisely the sort of insight for which one must rely on literature, and it reminds me of many in my life, and indeed of myself, and I wonder: why should this be so? What determines this connection? Of what coin are sentimentality and cruelty the two sides? Excessive regard for the feelings of the self? Is it that both reflect the abandonment of social protocols in favor of the freely-expressed emotions of the petulant, volatile inner self, now fawning and now frothing, now extolling and now excoriating, now sweet and now savage?

Our society tends towards easy sentimentality; does it also tend towards emotional cruelty?

Overtone singing.

Mongolians at a bar in Beijing perform overtone singing, in which one person sings two notes simultaneously; I remember hearing it done by monks visiting my elementary school years ago. It’s almost trance-inducing, and for reasons I can’t explain the song above -better in person, of course- caused me to tear up.

Regarding this form of singing among the Tuvans: “[It] seems to have arisen as a result of geographic location and culture. The open landscape of Tuva allows for the sounds to carry a great distance. Ethnomusicologists studying throat singing in these areas mark khoomei as an integral part in the ancient pastoral animism that is still practiced today.”

Isn’t it beautiful to imagine “the open landscape” allowing such sounds to “carry a great distance,” part of an “ancient pastoral animism”?

On the same day as our experience in Tiananmen, where Mao is insultingly preserved like some pharaoh buried with his slaves, we watched a teen at Mao nightclub plugged into a Marshall stack tuning as he glanced at the parodic, iconographic reduction of that dictator’s hair -as though Hitler’s mustache were used to market cola. Such recontextualization is powerful to see in a land where the dictator’s portrait still hangs, the reclamation of his name and image a proof of the inevitability of change.
On the same day as our experience in Tiananmen, where Mao is insultingly preserved like some pharaoh buried with his slaves, we watched a teen at Mao nightclub plugged into a Marshall stack tuning as he glanced at the parodic, iconographic reduction of that dictator’s hair -as though Hitler’s mustache were used to market cola. Such recontextualization is powerful to see in a land where the dictator’s portrait still hangs, the reclamation of his name and image a proof of the inevitability of change.
“The roar of traffic… Ceaselessly, in great surges, the waves roll in over the length and breadth of our cities, rising higher and higher, breaking in a kind of frenzy when the roar reaches its peak and then discharging across the stones and the asphalt even as the next onrush is being released from where it was held by the traffic lights. For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.”

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo. There is a life that we have been destroying: the slowness of the past, the monuments and movements of which seem to have taken an incomprehensible amount of time to unfold, is ontologically unintelligible to us; scale of sufficient magnitude begins to be a difference not of degree but of kind.

We are a life being destroyed: already the teenagers stacked on motorbikes in Beijing, texting as they weave through traffic while chatting and listening to music, cannot understand how it takes us so long to say anything or why we should want a bit of quiet while writing out our over-long notes, some more than 140 characters, to one another.

This gratuitous photo of me and Adam, taken by Jack July during a three-hour train ride from Shijiazhuang to Beijing for which we had no seats, documents one of the happier times in my life -seriously, this is the best way to ride a train- and therefore was preferable to this one, which merely confirms that I resumed smoking when we landed in China and didn’t stop until we left. (And yes, Elle: I am shoeless). The enormous, mostly mediocre photoset from China is now up; many of the shots are likely only interesting to the people who were there. It can be hard for me to take decent shots in a place I don’t know, and this time, overwhelmed and overjoyed most of the time, I didn’t work too diligently at it. What a wonderful place it was.

This gratuitous photo of me and Adam, taken by Jack July during a three-hour train ride from Shijiazhuang to Beijing for which we had no seats, documents one of the happier times in my life -seriously, this is the best way to ride a train- and therefore was preferable to this one, which merely confirms that I resumed smoking when we landed in China and didn’t stop until we left. (And yes, Elle: I am shoeless).

The enormous, mostly mediocre photoset from China is now up; many of the shots are likely only interesting to the people who were there. It can be hard for me to take decent shots in a place I don’t know, and this time, overwhelmed and overjoyed most of the time, I didn’t work too diligently at it.

What a wonderful place it was.

A Preponderance of Umbrellas: the Limits of Control in Tiananmen. On June 4th, the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen, we made our way through heavy security, bag searches, and questions about whether we were journalists to see the square. Around it, along each side, are arranged the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party, the National Museum of China, the mausoleum of Mao Zedong, and the Forbidden City, on whose walls Mao’s portrait -his gaze open, vacuous- hangs between words exhorting the “people of the world,” meaning only the right sort of people, to unite. The weather was dark, and -as happens in countries whose governments operate in secrecy and with impunity- everyone seemed sure that some conspiracy was afoot; a Marine guard at the American Embassy echoed the common belief that the government seeded clouds to control the rain. But their meteorological efforts, whatever they are, have no effect on the flowers, poisoned by pollution, which even in this epicenter of propaganda are as dead as 1989’s dissidents. The highway in which the famous, anonymous man endeavored to appeal to the humanity of the soldiers driving their tanks over their fellow citizens was arresting to see, but most notable was the strange preponderance of umbrellas: the undercover police presence in the square was matched only by the number of uniformed officers and guards; in total, they outnumbered ordinary citizens by a wide margin. The undercover officers, tall young men barely disguising their purpose, all spoke into their umbrellas periodically and never opened them, even in the short shower: whether they were batons or radios or both is hard to say. The atmosphere was incredible: tense, expectant, electric, paranoid. It was also sad. Many in the West believe that democracy is a meaningless abstraction, that freedoms of association and the press are made irrelevant by market forces, that our values are sham narratives which serve to support insidious forms of class power. Such absurdities seem worse than silly when in a place where so many died hoping for the rights we mock as inconsequential. The students were not dissimilar from those of the White Rose, although they were probably more surprised by their own martyrdom since many in the Party supported them. Officially, China maintains that few were killed and that the demonstrations had to be quashed to maintain civil order; that crushing demonstrations is a violation of civil order does not occur to them. The presence of all those armed and disguised enforcers of state policy in that peaceful square show how little they still understand, despite their opening, about what real civil order is. I have no doubt that time will teach them, and when it does the students of Tiananmen will be celebrated as “People’s Heroes” like those in the official monuments now wreathed in Party red. That is how time works, in China as elsewhere. (Update: thanks to Sazerac for the link explaining the umbrellas).

A Preponderance of Umbrellas: the Limits of Control in Tiananmen.

On June 4th, the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen, we made our way through heavy security, bag searches, and questions about whether we were journalists to see the square. Around it, along each side, are arranged the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party, the National Museum of China, the mausoleum of Mao Zedong, and the Forbidden City, on whose walls Mao’s portrait -his gaze open, vacuous- hangs between words exhorting the “people of the world,” meaning only the right sort of people, to unite.

The weather was dark, and -as happens in countries whose governments operate in secrecy and with impunity- everyone seemed sure that some conspiracy was afoot; a Marine guard at the American Embassy echoed the common belief that the government seeded clouds to control the rain. But their meteorological efforts, whatever they are, have no effect on the flowers, poisoned by pollution, which even in this epicenter of propaganda are as dead as 1989’s dissidents.

The highway in which the famous, anonymous man endeavored to appeal to the humanity of the soldiers driving their tanks over their fellow citizens was arresting to see, but most notable was the strange preponderance of umbrellas: the undercover police presence in the square was matched only by the number of uniformed officers and guards; in total, they outnumbered ordinary citizens by a wide margin. The undercover officers, tall young men barely disguising their purpose, all spoke into their umbrellas periodically and never opened them, even in the short shower: whether they were batons or radios or both is hard to say.

The atmosphere was incredible: tense, expectant, electric, paranoid. It was also sad. Many in the West believe that democracy is a meaningless abstraction, that freedoms of association and the press are made irrelevant by market forces, that our values are sham narratives which serve to support insidious forms of class power. Such absurdities seem worse than silly when in a place where so many died hoping for the rights we mock as inconsequential.

The students were not dissimilar from those of the White Rose, although they were probably more surprised by their own martyrdom since many in the Party supported them. Officially, China maintains that few were killed and that the demonstrations had to be quashed to maintain civil order; that crushing demonstrations is a violation of civil order does not occur to them. The presence of all those armed and disguised enforcers of state policy in that peaceful square show how little they still understand, despite their opening, about what real civil order is.

I have no doubt that time will teach them, and when it does the students of Tiananmen will be celebrated as “People’s Heroes” like those in the official monuments now wreathed in Party red. That is how time works, in China as elsewhere.

(Update: thanks to Sazerac for the link explaining the umbrellas).

Chuar in Beijing; Yumwatch asked that I post about the food in China, and I will -including my experience eating dog. Beijing has thousands of nooks like the one above, tiny, dirty rooms in which the most delicious food is prepared at all hours while people congregate on the sidewalk nearby.
Chuar in Beijing; Yumwatch asked that I post about the food in China, and I will -including my experience eating dog. Beijing has thousands of nooks like the one above, tiny, dirty rooms in which the most delicious food is prepared at all hours while people congregate on the sidewalk nearby.