Author: admin

Today was a beautiful day in Seattle, where I am visiting all too briefly. The more often I visit here from NY, the more I become aware that I am – albeit in a subtle way – a visitor from a somewhat alien culture. I start to see myself through the eyes of my friends and colleagues. They and I have much in common, and yet we differ in so many ways, subtle yet systematic, that bind me to my fellow New Yorkers.

There is a love of the outdoors here, a premium on natural dress and a kind of “green” way of being, which belies the fact that people drive big cars to get anywhere.

Everything here must go into the correct recycle bin, apparently on pain of death (although I would not dare to test this theory, for fear of an untimely demise), and there is a kind of laid back attitude that is distinctly un-Manhattan.

It’s not that either way of being is right or wrong, and it’s fun to slip into another way of being for a few days. I’ve enjoy my time here, and I adore Seattle, to see my casual friends with their wonderful brown hiking boots, their easy and slow style of talking, their unhurried way of strolling and driving about their vast wooded world.

But I must confess that some part of me is already looking back to being home again, to that cramped fast-moving world of people piled upon people, of a million different cultures all zooming past each other at lightning speed, of everyone wearing black and feeling fabulous to be part of something so fast moving and outrageous and crazy as New York.

Whenever I set down to write something here I am aware that there is a kind of zooming process at work, a subject lens that moves in and out. Sometimes this lens pulls out to take in the Universe, metaphysical questions and the like, while at other times it hovers around some middle scale – discussions of politics or social conflicts. At still other times – as in yesterday’s post – my lens zooms all the way in to discuss something highly personal.

But I’ve noticed a funny thing. The posts that are the most tightly focused, personal and idiosyncratic in scope, are often the ones that receive the greatest response from readers. There seems to be a kind of strange loop at work here, a meeting of polar opposites of scale. The most highly personal issues, the expression of thoughts that I grapple with alone in my heart, often seem to be, paradoxically, the most universal and highly resonant.

Perhaps this is what binds us together most tightly as humans, the quality that allows us to understand and empathize with each other in our respective separate (and often lonely) selves. The more personal things get, and the more deeply we burrow into our own individual hearts, the more universally we forge the really important connections with each other.

A strange loop indeed.

Today, on a beautiful evening boat cruise on a lake, under a flawless night sky, I was aware of the presence of someone I’ve been successfully avoiding for years. There are some people (fortunately only a few) who come into your life and proceed to sow a path of utter destruction, dismantling your dearest friendships, your professional relationships, the trust between you and others, wreaking untold havok in that place deep within yourself that anchors you, that tells you you are safe.

To encounter such a person some years later, in an unexpected place, is a shock. I found myself carefully monitoring the situation, some part of me going into emergency survival mode. I did not wish any sort of confrontation, or even encounter. My goal was to get through the evening as though this Grendel were not there.

To a large degree I succeeded. The presence of a few good friends helped considerably. At the end of the evening the boat docked and I maneuvered silently past my nemesis, realizing that I had survived, that the circumstances that had allowed this person to cause such horror in my life no longer pertained, that I was relatively safe.

Of course we are never completely safe. We each, from time to time, meet our nemesis, someone capable of tearing down the things we most care about. But we move on, watchful, wary, until one day we encounter them again, perhaps under a night sky on a lake, and we observe, with a kind of watchful relief, that their dark power seems at last to be gone.

Today I walked up a mountain. Not a very big mountain – only about three thousand feed high – but still, a mountain just the same. It was with friends, people I really like and see not nearly often enough, and the climb itself, both upwards and downwards, was the context for delightful conversation on a myriad of topics.

It’s marvelous the way a walk up a mountain, somewhat strenuous and sustained exercise, can provide a context for the most delightful conversations. Far more inspiring than merely sitting around for several hours. It’s as though our bodies, moving through space and time, engaged in a form of hard-won progress through the world, spurs our minds to journey as well.

Perhaps in ancient times, when our ancestors were nomadic by necessity, roaming the world as a way of life, conversation arose as a way for a tribe to bond in its journeys. We still maintain these pleasurable instincts even when not moving. And yet there is something about walking and talking, about the sheer pleasure of sustained conversation during sustained activity, that speaks to some deep ancestral call within.

Several years after its cultural moment, I’m finally watching “Cloverfield”. It’s enormous fun, because of its paradoxical premise. Normally when you watch a movie you are so completely immersed in the artificiality of it that you forget the artificiality entirely. The characters – who are obviously movie stars merely playing actual people – are so transparently synthetic that you tend to ignore the unreality of it all. You end up rooting for Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant to win in love precisely because you had already made a deal when you sat down to watch the movie that you would politely ignore the fact that they are really movie stars playing a role. And it’s that contract which makes the whole enterprise function so seamlessly.

“Cloverfield” is quite a different beast. On some level it’s an answer piece to “The Blair Witch Project”, but it comes with none of that earlier film’s ambiguity of provenance. If you saw BWP when it first came out in theatres, you could perhaps convince yourself that it might be real – found footage from a series of actual events.

But “Cloverfield”, while maintaining the same gritty feeling of cinema verite´, tells you at every moment, which each shot, that it is a highly artificial construct, a window into a world that not only never happened, but could not have happened.

For me the effect while watching it was that my consciousness of what was happening was neatly cleaved into two. On one level I was watching a gritty, gripping tale of terrible things happening to people who were oddly affecting in their detailed imperfection (like real people). On the other hand, I was acutely aware at all times, every single moment of the film, that I was watching something as artificlal and laboriously constructed as a Japanese Noh play.

This might very well be a new genre – one attuned to the PoMo sensibilities of users of Facebook and Twitter. When everything is in quotes, the entire audience ends up being invited to become a kind of critic of postmodern cinema.

I wouldn’t want all films to follow in this path, but once in a while there is something very cool and fun about having such an experience of double vision.

I was walking down Broadway this afternoon in Greenwich Village, watching all of the fascinating people, each in their own little world, their own personal movie within this astonishing and densely packed backdrop. I passed by a young couple kissing passionately in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to anyone but each other, then an old man walking slowly, lost in his thoughts, followed by two woman sharing an obviously very funny joke. I felt very pleased just to be here, immersed in this endless panoramic display of lives barely glimpsed. Yes, on the one hand the city is a huge swirling mass of humanity. But on the other hand, each individual within this mass is utterly unique.

Just as I was having this thought, I saw a young woman, probably in her early twenties, standing on the sidewalk and holding in her right hand a cellphone, which she was talking into with great animation. As I got closer I noticed that she was staring right into the window of a liquor store, all the while chatting away amiably. I wondered what she saw through the window, and whether she was describing it to a friend. Then I noticed that a young man was inside the store, at the window, looking in her direction and smiling. In fact, I realized, the two of them were looking right at each other through the glass.

The entire scene seemed rather mysterious. I could tell by the way the young man was dressed that he probably worked in the store. OK, that made sense – he couldn’t leave the store because he was working. But why was he just looking at her through the plate glass while she talked on the phone, and who was she talking to? Then I remembered that some people have “hands free” cellphone headsets – and that would make particular sense for someone working in a store. The young man was probably wearing an unobtrusive headset, and she was most likely talking to him.

By now I had passed the couple by, and the little tableau was already behind me, but I was still trying to puzzle it out. Why would a young woman hold a conversation with her young man over a cellphone while staring at him through a plate glass window, when she could just as easily go in the store and talk to him directly?

Unable to contain my curiosity, I turned to look back, and that’s when I saw the telling little detail that I had missed before – the one detail that explained everything. This is, after all, New York, and there are certain rules, and sometimes those rules require resorting to cellphone conversations through thick plate glass windows. For clearly the young man, being in the middle of work, could not leave the store in the middle of his shift. And yet his young woman friend could not enter the store to talk with him directly, for a simple reason.

In her left hand was a cigarette.

I get loads and loads of attempted spam comments on this blog. They come in a steady tide of junk, seemingly from all sort of IP addresses and made-up user names. Of course they get filtered out before you see them, but I can see them when I look in my spam folder. One sad consequence of this situation is that from time to time a reader comments for the first time and I just don’t see it, because their comment has been drowned in a sea of overwhelming spam. I don’t mind the spam itself so much, but I do mind missing the comments of actual fellow humans with something to say.

Another consequence of the flood of spam is that I have no idea how many people are reading this blog. I do get a sense that there must be quite a few, because I keep running into folks around the world who tell me they are readers the first time we meet, and others who tell me that their mom or their aunt reads it regularly. After a while you get a sense of a lot of random connections, some large ungainly graph of human connections of which this blog is a part.

But because of the flood of fake spam “readers” I don’t know how to interpret any available log statistics to figure out the number of actual humans out there. I sometimes wonder whether it would matter to me, in terms of what I choose to write, or how I choose to write, whether the number of readers each day should turn out to average ten or ten thousand. On some important level it shouldn’t matter. If you start writing for an “audience” then the result is at best entertainment, and the entire enterprise is likely to devolve into a pointless game of maintaining high readership numbers.

I rather like this state of affairs, this sense of broadcasting from a lonely cabin in space, with just the occasional reminder that there may be some sort of crowd massed on the other side of my cabin door, waiting for the next interplanetary transmission. This way I can focus all my energies where they should be focused – unto a place that is unknown, and indeed unknowable, to spammers – the place that contains you, the unique and very real person who is reading this right now.

A number of years ago, at the invitation of the University of Catania in Sicily, I agreed to organize a week long course on computer graphics. I asked a number of my colleagues from various universities to teach on different subjects. College students, both male and female, signed up from all over Europe to attend. The course was held on the charming island of Lipari, one of a chain of eight islands off the northern coast of Sicily.

The town had been lovingly preserved for centuries, and was not much different than it had been eight hundred years before. Narrow cobblestone streets meandered around lovely little old buildings, and the entire village looked out upon the blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

We would spend days teaching courses, and then at night we would drink wine, tell stories, and students would play guitar and sing lovely folk songs, many of which were new to me. It was quite an idyllic week, and I suspect that just out of sight, a few of the students had paired together to personally advance the cause of international affairs.

I even got quite a bit of research done. For example, the first version of the iinteractive face that is on my web site was created that week.

Somewhere around the second day, feeling silly in my city shoes, I went to a local shop and bought a really comfortable pair of casual shoes, the kind the locals wore. The moment I put them on my feet I fell in love with them. I would wander around the cobblestone streets in perfect comfort, feeling as though I were walking on air. After a few days I started to wonder why they didn’t just make all shoes this comfortable.

When the day came to return home, I packed the shoes, eager to have them in my life back home. That first post-Lipari, morning, waking up back in my own bed in Manhattan, I put on my perfect shoes and ventured out into the streets.

And immediately discovered that I could not walk in them. Or rather, that it was impossible to walk in them fast enough not to constantly get jostled and bumped by all the busy New Yorkers around me. And I couldn’t really pick up the pace – if I tried to walk fast, the shoes would pretty much just slip off my feet. I suddenly realized that the entire time I had been in Lipari, I had been walking only about half as fast as I did when I was back in New York.

Sadly, I returned back to my apartment and, with a last wistful look, put the shoes away in my closet. They might be somewhere in that closet still. I lost track of them years ago.

Unthinkingly I used a word today that a colleague had never heard of, and that got the two of us talking on the subject of words that are in the language but are rarely used. I said that one of my favorites is “defenestration”, or the act of being thrown out of a window. As an example I gave the scene in the 1995 film “Braveheart”, in which the old king’s response to receiving sound strategic advice from Phillip – his son’s male lover/advisor – is to summarily pick the man up and throw him out the window to his death.

I remember that when I first saw this film, that scene really bothered me; watching it gave me a dreadful, inexplicable sense of deja vu. The murdered man, played by the excellent British actor Stephen Billington, was clearly brilliant, charismatic, fearless, a man who would be an asset in any situation. By killing him, the old king was effectively destroying his own son’s greatest political asset (by the way, none of this is historically accurate – Phillip was in reality killed by rival courtiers after young Edward II had already ascended to the thrown). Although Gibson has publicly said otherwise, you have only to watch the scene to see that the audience is meant to side with the old king. In fact the moment reliably generates a big laugh from audiences.

But I was horrified by the old king’s act. Why would you dispose of the smartest guy in the room, and thereby possibly jeopardize your own kingdom? It’s not like the young prince wasn’t giving his father heirs (in real life, whatever his personal leanings, Edward II fathered at least five children).

It was not until today, during the conversation about defenestration, that I realized the sourc of my deja vu, recalling what other scene it had reminded me of. It was a moment in a film that came out two years earlier – Stephen Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” – when concentration camp prisoners are being put to work assembling barracks. A young Jewish woman engineer – good looking, brilliant, outspoken, rather like Phillip – tells the camp commandant that they are laying the foundations incorrectly, and that the resulting buildings will be unstable. Without a moment’s hesitation the commandant shoots her in the head, killing her instantly, and then nonchalantly orders the guards to follow her advice and rebuild the barracks.

What I realize now is that the two moments are essentially the same. We are presented with a brilliant young person who is clearly exceptional, with a dazzling mind and a superior ability to find solutions. But this young person belongs to the “wrong” group. So the response of the brutal and cynical ruler is to instantly have this person killed, so their continued existence will not offend the order of things. All of the wondrous and original ideas that might have come into the world from such a mind are deemed less important than the need to affirm the status quo.

The difference is that Gibson plays this concept for cheap laughs, whereas Spielberg plays it for heart wrenching tragedy. I wonder now whether I would have seen the essential horror of the defenestration scene in “Braveheart”, had I not already seen “Schindler’s List”. I’d like to think I would have, but there’s no way to know for sure.

In any case, our word of the day seems oddly appropriate. When you begin with mindless prejudice, then the very possibility of seeing others clearly – of appreciating who they truly are and what they might bring to the world – goes out the window.

When I was about twelve years old somebody told me that if you remember to drink a full glass of water every morning, for about thirty six thousand mornings in a row, you could live to be a hundred. Of course it’s an obvious joke, but even at twelve I understood that it was also a profound joke, maybe the profound joke.

After all, I knew I could count up to thirty thousand, and it wouldn’t take me all that long either. And if I counted every number as a day of my life, by the time I got to thirty thousand I would most likely have run out my own life in numbers. Even at twelve I knew that.

There’s no getting around it – we only have on the order of thirty thousand days or so to live our entire lives. Not a million or a billion, or some comfortably huge number that doesn’t bear thinking about. No, just around thirty times a hundred – not all that many glasses of water at all.

There are two ways to look at this potentially alarming fact. One way is to bemoan the tragedy of it all – to curse the clock upon the wall for its incessant tick-tick-ticking, or to run around the house throwing out all the calendars, with their far too brief inventory of days.

The other way is to think of each day as a rather generous portion of life, a large enough chunk of the total that it would be a shame to waste it. From the moment you rise in the morning until the moment you drift off to sleep that same evening, you are actually engaged in a rather profound act, whether or not you choose to notice. You are living out about one thirty thousandth of your entire life, a fairly significant slice of the pie – the only occasion when you will ever have that particular slice to work with.

On my better days I remember this. On those days I think of that glass of water I was told about at the age of twelve, and I make sure to drink it all down. I figure I might as well savor that water to the fullest, all cool and refreshing and new. On those days I drink in life to the fullest – every last sip.