Author: admin

Of course you can say it backwards… oh never mind.

This morning I became curious to discover the ancient roots of Valentine’s Day. A Google search led to the following historical precedent (it’s on the internet, so we know it has to be true):

In ancient Rome, February 15 was Lupercalia, the festival of Lupercus (or Faunus), the god of fertility. As part of the purification ritual, the priests of Lupercus would sacrifice goats and a dog to the god, and after drinking wine, they would run through the streets of Rome striking anyone they met with pieces of the goat skin. Young women would come forth voluntarily for the occasion, believing that being touched by the goat skin would render them fertile.

Not at all pleasant for the goats and dogs, but so much more interesting than sending a Hallmark Card.

Speaking of V.D., an intriguing question came up in a conversation with a friend today. Suppose you are unattached on Valentine’s Day, and so you are planning to pamper yourself, to treat yourself to a film. One film only, old or new. Which film would you pick? I had asserted in my conversation with my friend that it probably wouldn’t be The Pawnbroker, but that doesn’t really narrow things down very much.

And once I had recognized
the taste of the crumb of madeleine
soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers
which my aunt used to give me
(although I did not yet know and must long postpone
the discovery of why this memory made me so happy)
immediately the old grey house
upon the street, where her room was,
rose up like the scenery of a theatre
to attach itself to the little pavilion,
opening on to the garden,
which had been built out behind it for my parents
(the isolated panel which until that moment
had been all that I could see);
and with the house the town,
from morning to night and in all weathers,
the Square where I was sent before luncheon,
the streets along which I used to run errands,
the country roads we took when it was fine.
And just as the Japanese amuse themselves
by filling a porcelain bowl with water
and steeping in it little crumbs of paper
which until then are without character or form,
but,
the moment they become wet,
stretch themselves and bend,
take on colour and distinctive shape,
become flowers or houses or people,
permanent and recognisable,
so in that moment all the flowers in our garden
and in M. Swann's park,
and the water-lilies on the Vivonne
and the good folk of the village
and their little dwellings
and the parish church
and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings,
taking their proper shapes and growing solid,
sprang into being,
town and gardens alike,
from my cup of tea.

– Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff)

For reasons that I don’t fully understand, today I opened up Microsoft Paint and started to draw, and this is what emerged.

Whoever this is, I think they are feeling sad.

Well, now that Sally has run my work through an automatic translator, I suppose I must provide an proper translation, if only to defend the honor of my muse. But if you want to get the poetry of this, you’ll need to go back to my entry of February 8 and read the original in French.

"I shall speak in French
It is the language of truth
To say to you what I know"
Thus the demon said

"It is the time for you to hear
It is the moment for you to understand
Your dreams which I wish to take"
Then the demon laughed

The girl was pensive
"Seventeen years" she repeated
"That is many years
And life is brief"

The boy said "My love
I speak to you from my heart
You know that I adore you
Has it all been a dream?"

In a day a life can change
All is rearranged
A dream is disturbed
And love is dissolved

The night was somber
The world was in shadow
What is in a number?
Sadly, perhaps everything.

When I was really little there was a book for kids that I loved called Just around the corner. The basic idea was simple. On every page they would say something like “just around the corner you might spy….” and then when you turned the page, they would describe some wonderful impossible thing, like “a man so tall his head was in the sky”. Does anybody else remember this book?

I think that this concept has stayed with me throughout the years, this idea that the thing you haven’t seen yet, the event that might happen tomorrow, is still completely full of possibility. The phone rings and you pick it up, and suddenly you are off on an adventure. Or you go to a party and you meet somebody, and meeting that person changes your life.

It seems to me that this is as good a philosophy as any when dealing with the immense uncertainty of the future. I was having dinner recently with my European friend Carine who is visiting New York. And the reason she is visiting New York is that last month she got hit by a bus. Literally. Hit by a bus. And miraculously, she survived, with just a few bruises.

Before that she had been explaining to her friends who were converging to New York for a mutual friend’s birthday celebration from places like Montreal, Dallas and Morocco that she couldn’t possibly take time off from work and drop everything to join in the fun. But after she was hit by the bus – and lived – she realized that life is only as full of possibility as what you are willing to let in. And so she took a week off from work and came to New York.

So I guess that’s my point. Absolutely any exciting thing can be just around the corner. But somehow this wisdom, which little kids understand completely, gets lost on us as we grow up. And then we forget that in order to see what’s around the corner we actually need to turn the corner and look. But we don’t, and so we miss all the cool stuff.

Unless of course we get lucky and get hit by a bus.

Tonight I went to a really interesting party, filled with New York artists. The conversation was intelligent, there were people from around the world, the wine flowed freely, and it was all music for the soul. The most interesting person there, to me, was a lovely woman named Sarah. She was not one of the “guests” but rather was helping out with the party. We started talking, and somehow our conversation ended up roaming to all sorts of topics. And the more we talked, the more I realized how interesting she was to talk with. And gradually I realized that although I didn’t know her, I was somehow starting to be able to trace out the contours of a fascinating mind, somebody I would be able to speak with about all kinds of topics, and each of those topics would be new and exciting.

It’s amazing when that happens, when unexpectedly you meet somebody that you resonate with, and you realize just how unbounded and non-linear human minds are. We randomly meet people as we go about our lives, and then every once in a while we run into somebody who wakes us up, makes us realize that the potential of these minds of ours is infinite, and that sharing and exploring this beautiful infinity is the supreme joy of being alive.

And so tonight i am happy.

Ah, another Friday. Please forgive my terrible french, but a poem must speak to its muse, and this week my muse is in Paris. 🙂

"Je parlerai en français
C'est la langue de la vérité
Pour vous dire ce que je sais"
Ainsi le démon a dit

"Il est temps pour vous d'entendre
C'est le moment de comprendre
Vos rêves que je veux prendre"
Alors le démon a ri

La jeune fille a pensée
"Dix-sept ans" a-t-elle répété
"Cela fait beaucoup d'années
Et la vie est brève"

Le garçon a dit "Mon amour
Je te parle de tout mon coeur
Tu sais que je t'adore
Est ce que tout était un rêve?"

En un jour une vie peut changer
Tout est ré-arrangé
Un rêve est dérangé
Et l'amour s'est dissout

Le nuit était très sombre
Le monde était dans l'ombre
Qu'est ce qui est dans un nombre?
Tristement, peut-être tout.

I see Caroline’s point about the non-time traveler having little or no power to sway the group. I was thinking not so much of his power in society, but rather of his obligation to his own convictions. In other words, not what can he do, but rather what must he do.

After all, even the time traveler needs to proceed carefully, in that his best strategy to effect abolition probably involves stealth. My own current opinion is that the most effective way to work toward the abolition of slavery, in a society that does not yet realize there is a problem, is to work toward transforming the means of production, so that the ruling class no longer finds slavery to be in its economic self-interest.

I am fairly certain that if you reach people in their wallets, then their hearts and minds will follow (apologies to LBJ). I think history is fairly consistent on one point: Within a generation after any exploitive practice is no longer useful to a ruling class, many people in that class will find said practice to be morally repugnant, and will wonder how their forebears ever could have been so thoughtless and cruel.

Just taking a small detour today from the recent time-traveler discussion thread, to share a wonderful video that my friend Andy brought to my attention the other day.

I had been fretting that the attack on the World Trade Center might mean something very different to folks who don’t live in New York. It turns out that our friends at The Onion were waaaaay ahead of me on this one:

“Country Music Stars Challenge”

🙂

I completely agree with Sally’s comment. She totally saw where I was going with this: People in that society don’t know any better – how could they? In contrast, for the time traveller from the future simply to accept slavery, given what he knows, would be monstrous. He does not have the option of ignorance.

Strategically, I also wholeheartedly agree with Sally that the time traveller (assuming he cannot leave) is obligated to work toward emancipation in the most effective possible way, rather than flaming out in anger or merely freeing a few individual slaves to assuage his conscience.

Now that we’ve established that, let’s ask a slightly harder question: Suppose an individual has come to realize that slavery will no longer be prevalent in another fifty years. Perhaps he has unique insight into a coming shift in technology that is difficult or impossible for his peers to understand, such as a new kind of mechanization that will take the place of slave labor.

Is he in the same situation as our errant time traveller?