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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On a windy night, one sees that the ground is grounded; the higher one goes the greater the wind’s effects. I don’t care what anyone says: it must be hard to be a leaf.

On a windy night, one sees that the ground is grounded; the higher one goes the greater the wind’s effects. I don’t care what anyone says: it must be hard to be a leaf.

Tags: streetlamp
Third in a series of sunsets with office lights extruded by reflecting windows. Here are the first and second.

Third in a series of sunsets with office lights extruded by reflecting windows. Here are the first and second.

After a Memorial Service

Someone loved by a close friend died recently, and today I went to the memorial reception. Some things were exemplary of Louisiana: the boiled crawfish, shrimp, muffalettas, boudin balls, catfish, and jambalaya on offer. Shouting children from all branches of the family filled the spaces in conversation left by trailing recollections of the departed: one memory, another, a tentative laugh over some bit of recalled ribaldry, then sighs. And then the children running in the distance, a beautiful day for play affording us all the luxury of hearing them. These were the sounds of the gathering. These are the sounds of past and future.

The program from the service included letters to the deceased’s from his wife and two young sons; all three mentioned that he was in Heaven, that his death was the will of God, and one son mentioned that someday he’d join his dad there. All sorrows can be born if they are part of a story, it is said. Who are we to try and destroy one another’s stories? Why are all stories in competition?

As I looked at a photograph of the dead man and his family, his mother –very old, perhaps senile –came up behind me and said, “That’s my boy who died,” just like that. Moments later, his son charged through the room and out onto the front lawn, face reddened and contorted as he was again overcome by grief. When he returned, he brusquely and with obvious effort at self-control asked if someone would please turn off the television playing the slide show of his father, which had been repeating for hours. Someone did. The son then changed and went for a run. The last time I saw him, he seemed to be smirking. At what? At the peripheral mourners, I thought: what the hell do they know about it? But maybe I just felt guilty that I couldn’t share more of his grief.

On the drive back to the office, everything I saw neutrally announced its impermanence, but that neutrality was offensive to me: I am upset at loss. The cigarette butts along the side of the highway, mixed with pebbles and trash and the detritus of commuters: they formed small spatial scenes out of which could be composed an entire world but which would wash away with the next rain. Closed shops seemed like unkempt tombs for the aspirations of ordinary people, and who knows what failed with them: security, marriage, life itself? Felled trees across the ground retained the frozen gestures of their branches:  they had grown old, grown hard, towered in the forest only to fall, as everything must.

“The other night I was lying in bed, in that half-waking, half-dreaming state familiar to all. I imagined my death, and realized that I would not see you and Alex and Ellen again. The feeling was powerful and very sad. Now I have this thought. Without death would we understand love, real love? Could we love? The connection may not be apparent, but it may be implicit in that saying from the Book of Common Prayer: “In the midst of life we are in death.”
An email from my dad, who very seldom writes this sort of thing to me; that he is sixty-six years old concretizes this observation in a manner I find terrifying.
I love Mardi Gras unreservedly. Despite having quit drinking more than eight years ago, I find it as thrilling and affecting as I ever did, and even tend to enjoy something of a contact-high from the intoxication of the city. This year, I decided to use the occasion not solely as an excuse to experience euphoria but also to work on photographically capturing both night scenes and the spaciousness and energy of crowds. Some of the results are amateurish, but I was happy as hell to have another way to interact with my city and to see the lights and kinetics of the parades more precisely than I had before (and thanks to Benjamin Hilts and Nudawn and Nora Leah -who’s been there- for the kind words!). Many photos are in this Mardi Gras photoset, and a few are below. I hope some of them impart a sense of the affair, but that might be asking a lot. Selections: An LED-covered clown-bearing float in Endymion passes our spot on Canal. Flambeaux. Will enjoys a moment between bouts of catching more than any adult male I’ve ever seen; he is at Gallier Hall, where thanks to Eric, a legislative director, we sat in the booth next to Ray Nagin’s for the Sunday day parades. A little girl claps along with a marching band at night. Throngs disappear into the lights of passing Bacchus floats on St. Charles. I tried many like this. I remember wanting so much more than I caught, too. A Zulu rider and a Saint. A makeshift “Let Them Eat Shit” banner accompanies chants of “Laissez-les manger la merde,” before this krewe collided with a “Jesus train” beneath St. Louis Cathedral: quintessence of Mardi Gras. More are here, including shots of Will unknowingly attracting cougars, Eric as the next mayor, the Quarter, and -of course- Five, who didn’t come to any parades.

I love Mardi Gras unreservedly. Despite having quit drinking more than eight years ago, I find it as thrilling and affecting as I ever did, and even tend to enjoy something of a contact-high from the intoxication of the city. This year, I decided to use the occasion not solely as an excuse to experience euphoria but also to work on photographically capturing both night scenes and the spaciousness and energy of crowds.

Some of the results are amateurish, but I was happy as hell to have another way to interact with my city and to see the lights and kinetics of the parades more precisely than I had before (and thanks to Benjamin Hilts and Nudawn and Nora Leah -who’s been there- for the kind words!).

Many photos are in this Mardi Gras photoset, and a few are below. I hope some of them impart a sense of the affair, but that might be asking a lot. Selections:

An LED-covered clown-bearing float in Endymion passes our spot on Canal.

Flambeaux.

Will enjoys a moment between bouts of catching more than any adult male I’ve ever seen; he is at Gallier Hall, where thanks to Eric, a legislative director, we sat in the booth next to Ray Nagin’s for the Sunday day parades.

A little girl claps along with a marching band at night.

Throngs disappear into the lights of passing Bacchus floats on St. Charles. I tried many like this.

I remember wanting so much more than I caught, too.

A Zulu rider and a Saint.

A makeshift “Let Them Eat Shit” banner accompanies chants of “Laissez-les manger la merde,” before this krewe collided with a “Jesus train” beneath St. Louis Cathedral: quintessence of Mardi Gras.

More are here, including shots of Will unknowingly attracting cougars, Eric as the next mayor, the Quarter, and -of course- Five, who didn’t come to any parades.

In 1981, my mother completed a camera strap for herself. An excellent amateur photographer, she took albums and albums of pictures as I and my sister grew up, so that Rolleiflex cameras and the strap above have for me the incredible resonance that the iconography of childhood retains: the illustrations from a bedtime book, a favorite stuffed animal, etc. When I arrived in New Orleans on Saturday she gave it to me. I found it a more moving exchange than I probably should have: I was touched, excited, a bit honored even, although she’ll laugh at that. I love having this strap, nearly as old as I am, holding the Nikon; she used to sing “Kodachrome” to me, too, I think unaware of its drug reference, and I have that terribly rare and happy sense that something good in my family now expresses itself through me.

In 1981, my mother completed a camera strap for herself. An excellent amateur photographer, she took albums and albums of pictures as I and my sister grew up, so that Rolleiflex cameras and the strap above have for me the incredible resonance that the iconography of childhood retains: the illustrations from a bedtime book, a favorite stuffed animal, etc.

When I arrived in New Orleans on Saturday she gave it to me. I found it a more moving exchange than I probably should have: I was touched, excited, a bit honored even, although she’ll laugh at that.

I love having this strap, nearly as old as I am, holding the Nikon; she used to sing “Kodachrome” to me, too, I think unaware of its drug reference, and I have that terribly rare and happy sense that something good in my family now expresses itself through me.

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.

Tags: jerry lewis manohla dargis film criticism
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.