Compass points

Somewhere in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains that those animals that act to maximize the well-being of close kin can pick out their cousins, aunts, and so on. Dodging the question of how they recognize relatives, Dawkins says they "just know." The authors of Baboon Metaphysics offer a similar observation. I feel that my ethics and lots of other behaviors are part of my "just knowing." I never saw my dad do it, I can't remember anything he said to me before I was sixteen, he drives me crazy, but in countless situations I act just as he would, as he must have.

Did you ever choose a certain course of behavior because it was championed in a tv show you watched or in a neatly reasoned argument endorsed by Rawls? Or did those things just come along, adhering to your awareness because they squared with your predisposition? And where did that come from?

Orphans grow up without the terrible insufferable models we with parents are cursed with. Lucky, lucky orphans! Free to fuck up without feeling even dumber about it because your fuckuppery was handed you with your diapers, your bunkbed, your first car.

Original sin

Why is it Sarah's habit of baring her teeth to take food from her fork irks me far more than Alex's abominable politics? Why do we overlook a president's decision to cut off food to a hungry people and rail against him for putting his cock in a young woman's mouth? Why do we scold our children for failing to greet new acquaintances warmly when we ourselves pass up daily opportunities to lift the fallen and succor the sick?

We register the world through eyes addicted to beauty, ears long since spoiled by the most exquisite sonatas. We go for the close-up when the wide shot offends. We move along.

By the time I was thirteen I knew pretty much how things were supposed to be, and it was my job to open the eyes of anyone who'd gotten that far, or as far as fifteen, fifty, without seeing what was right in front of them. Things further off—my binoculars never quite gave me the focus I had when peering at beach glass damp in the cup of my hand, or Colby's hand. In retrospect, that all seems misbegotten, but there's no fixing it, there's only the occasional possibility of smiling with a hint of self-mockery as the correctives come pouring out.

Joe told me in 1997 that I was better then, a shade more tolerant, than I had been in 1980. Maybe. Or maybe I'm just better at the manoeuvre that elicits a compliment. The circles within circles make explanations as unending today as they were in my supremely self-conscious adolescence.

My house

I want to go back to Plato's cave, to sit with my back to the sun watching the play of light through branches and off moving cars. Sometimes, at that moment of losing day, when a book demands a lamp, I stop halfway to the switch and linger in the middle of the front room, while patterns wash over me from passing headlights.

Light, the obliterator

There is something creepy about a well-lit house. Every corner glows, all doubts vanish. No passing satellite or car stands a chance of sweeping a shadow against the floor or wall. I can't live like that.

A victim

While performing my morning round, I saw the corpse of a black cat in the street. I walked to it and bent to pick it up. A Prius hit me.

I didn't fall down. The driver had hit me with the side of his car while performing the left turn from Keokuk onto Washington. My forehead is slightly abraded and he left his filth on my left hand.

All the traffic stopped and drivers stared. The driver of the Prius pulled over and got out of his car. He stood there, staring at me, his mobile phone blinking in his ear. "Are you all right? Are you all right?"

I walked back to the house, crying. I thought the dead cat was Stumpy. Then I came upon Stumpy in the back, staring at me. I went inside, still crying. "He could have killed me!"

I got a paper bag and a pair of small plastic bags. Gloving my hands with the latter, I returned to the corner, waited until no cars were near, then went and collected the eviscerated cat.

I left the corpse in front of the house. Petaluma's Animal Control will collect it.

Being an American

I need to look at pictures like this to remind myself how odd I am by American standards. Americans think it's fine to carry loaded firearms around, to have them in a purse, a belt holster, a briefcase while eating a burger and drinking a Pepsi at the local restaurant or bar. I do not like guns and I think it's a sign of degeneracy to carry one for any reason but law enforcement. And many cops should have their weapons confiscated.

When I lived in Beijing in 1993, an adult student asked me in all seriousness, "If you go to the supermarket, and you and another customer have a disagreement, do you think it's okay to use a gun to settle the argument?" The answer I'd give today is that the American Supreme Court does not think it's okay to settle the argument by shooting my interlocutor, but it does think it's okay to show that person my gun and announce that it's loaded.

Lolita

On the bus late last night a woman was reading the edition shown above.

Here is a nice blog entry about the variety of covers:
http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/2009/08/lolita-covers/

A walk among the Trinity Alps

On July fifteenth, as I was walking through the woods, I met a dog. A friendly dog, glossy copper, loped up to me, his back covered with a dirty t-shirt. I smiled because I am fond of dogs of a certain size and color, and because the meeting was unexpected and welcome. One caress and he was off, back up the trail, glancing back to see that I followed. I did, but the dog outpaced me, and I never saw him again.

An hour after that meeting, I emerged from the woods and stepped into an alpine meadow, long and wide, stippled here and there with granite slabs. This was Morris Meadow, and it was as far as I'd walked when I first took the trail from Cherry Flat with my father probably thirty-two years ago. Six or seven years ago I'd tried the trail again, the trail that climbs and falls beside the Stuart Fork for mile after mile. On that outing I'd barely slowed for the meadow, and I'd reached Emerald Lake, a sort of El Dorado in my family.

So I decided, months ago, to repeat that feat, but at a more leisurely pace.

This is what I wrote as I sat eating my lunch at the edge of Morris Meadow:

From my rented car at Bridge Camp I walked two hours and forty minutes to get here. Left a bit after eight; it's now 11:30. Hot for the last bit—otherwise shady & cool. Two bridges along the way: reached #1 at one hour, #2 at two hours. Left Achilles tendon a bit sore. Splendid day. I'm on a big black rock in the shade facing across the meadow toward the trail, the river, the ragged snow spattered peaks two miles away. Before Cherry Flat a fawn bounded away then stopped and stared: gorgeous, spotty. Later two does and a special secret spot up the hillside where five species of butterfly supped on the nectar of soft white flowers. A tiny trickle of water over parti-colored stones. Much lichen on the dry rocks. A junco preening. Mountain roses. Spikey plants with tiny white flowers capping the stalk. Sun warming the hillside. A butterfly landed on my hand, its infinite tongue lapping vainly at me. Another flew between my legs. Minutes later another (the same one?) on my cuff, then my wrist. I shook it gently off. Huge tiger swallowtails feeding on the handsome white blooms within my reach.

Here on the rock I opened my shirt and the breeze chilled my soaked chest. Sound of distant water, birds, flies whizzing.

Shall I descend to the stream for a rinse?

I decided not to, instead following a faint trail that curved along the edge of the meadow, parting from it to inspect patches of orange lilies, clumps of columbine. I even found a small collection of Calochortus elegans, an example of which appears above.

Maybe I should have remained in the meadow, but it's often hard to give up on a project even when you've been shown a host of reasons. And in this case the reasons were not yet apparent.

Into the woods again, the trail now narrower, less kempt. Two boys turned the corner up ahead, walking toward me. One held a snake, and when we were face to face I asked about it.

"A rattlesnake I killed just up there. It was in the middle of the trail."

The animal was still coiling and uncoiling around his arm as he spoke.

Facebook math

response rate ∝ 1 / seriousness

response rate ∝ mentions of children or athletics

Psalm 1

I am struck, in Psalm 1, by the sense of a single enlightened figure who stands apart from a multitude. Ever one man, a figure whose meditations suggest solitude, an inward light. Here is one who listens not to the ungodly counsel of others, but who stands, in the psalm's central metaphor, like a tree--not one tree among many, as in a copse or a vast forest, but a tree unshadowed by neighbors, and indeed one may speak of this righteous figure as the tree, figuring Man and Woman through their initial defining act, The Fall, and the Son of Man, who mounted a tree at Calgary.

There is a basic rhythm in the verses, a pendular swinging back and forth between the ungodly and the godly, until in the final verse the two are united in God's Manichean vision of the World. The Jew, like the early Christian, was a being apart, one who dared stigmatize all who followed other paths. And the God worshipped by the Jew wielded a type of power always accompanied by force: law. Laws can only exist where force exists, as Tolstoy reminds us in that memorable passage late in War and Peace that shows Pierre Bezukhov facing a military tribunal that exists only "to inculpate him."

Judgement seems somehow, for me, far from the vision of a tree on a river's bank, but the same winds that ruffle an elm's heavy plumage disperse the chaff that has no place in an elysium.

A small sampling of reasons to hate J. D. Salinger

From the first ten pages of "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters":

some twenty years ago
Along about two
as far as I remember
At one time or another
at least as far as
I, for one
so to speak
To make things still more provocative
I might well bring in here
that specific time
in my opinion
ostensibly
invariably
unspeakably
technically
typically
presumably (page 7)
all but exclusively
almost directly
not quite parenthetically
a trifle guardedly
presumably (page 8)
apparently (page 9)
laboriously
roughly
religiously
only nominally
apparently (page 11)
suddenly
interestedly (last three all in one sentence)
rather immoderately
indescribably hot (page 11)
stifling hot (page 11)
extravagantly speaking
with perhaps typically pungent Coast-to-Coast irony
. . .

The man did not believe that one could add too many adverbs to a story.

Announcement

I intend to devote an essay to the Johnsonian dictum "The same proposition cannot be at once true and false." My reflections will inspire a new generation of Wittgensteins, some of them pianists.

Keys, black and white

To my ear, the geese seemed stuck
in some sorry squawk-show rerun,
their sloppy V the envy of no commuter
in her orderly lane.

No beauty queen queueing for lip gloss
fretted about her animal past,
what a life spent erect might
and might not yet mean.

On my chair, worrying a wan dream,
I saw roadside ditches
full of fur, feathers, lost bodies.
I slumbered on coals.

The queer pianist took a breath,
determined to play pitchblack
on snow white keys:
rapping cantilena.

Floral remains

Here is an exchange between two members of the Pacific Bulb Society. I find the image remarkably poignant and extremely beautiful.

My question is this: along with daffodils and Hyacinthoides, what other winter-spring flowering bulbs are likely to persist and thrive, decades after planting? Which crocus, tulips, etc, are truly survivors that outlast their gardens?
—Kathleen Sayce

Around Denton, TX where I lived for six years, the outlines of old homesteads are delineated with persisisting Muscari neglectum, Rhodophiala bifida, Lycoris radiata, Narcissus jonquilla, and a few other types of Narcissus. There were also clumps of Cooperia pedunculata at these sites, which were farther north than that species normally grows I think. Many of these places have been lost since the 1990s as undeveloped gaps in the urban landscape are filled in.
—Shawn Pollard

a beginning

Wet wasted leaves crowd the steps
From a place dry and seldom swept
Just outside my door, never locked,
A white rectangle spotlit by the sun.

My halting mind returned early
Freighted with headlined names
Halted by the door, hesitated.

They burn easily, kindling arias.

Hands on

How can people be so dim? Slamming a movie for being "manipulative" is akin to praising a corkscrew for opening a bottle. Was Aeschylus not manipulative? If a movie is to be faulted, it should be for a failure to trigger strong feelings, for a reliance on hackneyed devices, for speaking an emotional language more primitive than a punch in the nose.

Help

She was lying on the pavement, rolling slightly. I stopped my bike, got off, asked whether she needed help. She did. I gave her one hand, but she needed two. A white woman, abrasions on her very pale face, very drunk. I asked where she needed to go and she said the bus stop. We were halfway there when she said something about a man forty feet ahead. Her companion. He marched towards us, several inches taller than I, sober, angry. She'd been pulling this all day long, he said, falling down drunk, getting people to help her, and that was fine. He barely knew her, had never hit her, had let her sleep at his house the night before, but had not, he insisted, had sex with her. I looked at him and told him that I was going to help her to the bus stop. He wheeled and stomped away. She called out to him. He came back, told her he wasn't waiting for her, she'd dropped her bus pass, he was going to Longs, and if she showed up she showed up. Her knees buckled and, as I had earlier, I said to her, "You can make it. Keep walking." We got to the meager bench and she sat. I asked did she have her bus pass, she tried her pockets, nothing. I went back for my bike, felt a pang as I rode past her. A hundred feet further the tall angry man was lurking in a doorway.

Newspapers

If I knew the world better, I could explain it, predict its next moves. Not just financial markets, flows of precious metals, outbreaks of violence, but the complexion of next week's clouds above the Atlas mountains, the number of grains of sand that will lodge in my sweatshirt pocket during a Christmas Day walk on the beach--it would be something fine just to be able to count these. As my determination to master the world grows, as I have cards printed that read "S. R. Gilbert, Supervillain," I lose some of my focus, some of my hair, some of my memories. Cats still come running when I whistle, no matter what alley I'm moving along, and that hardens my resolve.

Life

Come home.
Check mail.
Cook meal.
Wonder what to do next.
Turn on computer.
Peek at others' lives.
Feel cold.
Hear phone ring.
Check email for umpteenth time.
Turn off computer.
Wonder what to do next.
Think about a movie.
Think about a book.
Wash dishes.
Make bed.
Check to see if front door is locked.
Stand on front porch and look at moon.
Wonder what to do next.

Ruby, no slipper

I've told a friend that I'll write something about my injury for his company's blog. The small nonprofit sends doctors to very poor nations to provide those who need them with prosthetic limbs; I suppose many of the injuries are due to American landmines. My experience is only in some distant way comparable to that of a person born with a clubfoot or shorn of an arm, but I will try to convey something of what it's like to move between ability and disability, how confusing it can be, how it directs your vision into the mirror even as you suddenly see every broken person as a sister or brother.

I've been walking for a few weeks without my crutch, but I have a limp, my calf muscle is weak, and if I stand still for a minute my foot becomes bloated and ruby. My surgeon told me he believed I'd always limp, so of course I will do all I can to prove him wrong.