291. Lunacy and painting

A new paint finish

The other day I was running around trying to feel a new paint finish. I’ve been a big fan of the semi-gloss finish, for both inside and outside, because it both looks good and stays clean longer/is easier to clean. I still think this is true, especially outside.

I’ve come around to the satin or eggshell finish for inside, as it does look better and is still better than flat for keeping clean. Benjamin Moore, in the latest issue of Dwell, is advertising a new line of paints with a matte finish they claim feels like soft leather. I was intrigued enough to look up some of their stores near where I was, in hopes of getting my hands on a finish sample. 

While I did an excellent job of spreading the word about this new “Century” line of their paints, I had no luck feeling the feel. Upon a little further online research I discovered that this line of paint is, as they say, but didn’t in the ad I saw, “for the trade.” I now have a list of fancy paint stores that do carry it and I still plan to get my fingertips on a sample, but this product is probably not in my future. And for so many reasons. First, I’m not sure they would even sell to me, not being in the trade. Second, they don’t offer any shades of white. They only offer seventy some colors -- very nice ones, I will say -- but nothing even close to white. And third, my current schedule for repainting my apartment -- whether it needs it or not -- is for nine years in the future. Since I’ve been changing my mind about my next paint color every year (or month) for some time now, my second reason may not hold up, but I really do anticipate painting the walls and ceiling to match my largest piece of “furniture,” a large storage assembly in bright white melamine. Now I’m imagining myself being thrown out of the “to the trade” paint boutique for admitting this. As soon as the words “white melamine” leave my mouth, security is summoned and I hear, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave now. White melamine indeed.” *Spits carefully into an understated vase sitting on the counter.*

Anyway, thinking about my nine year plan reminded me of Ari, my next door neighbor when I first moved to SF. His lover visited SF regularly but didn’t live here, so Ari was frequently at loose ends at night. One of his favorite ways to pass the night was repainting his kitchen. Noisily. I would sometimes get up in the middle of the night and go over to inquire if possibly a bear had broken into the building and to see if he needed a bandaid or a tourniquet. We would then talk for hours as he painted -- driving me nuts as he was a sloppy painter who did not do the prep. (There’s a reason my paint still looks fresh after twenty years.) My nine year plan (it was a ten year plan before I made some small changes and touch-ups last year) would have made him laugh. Given ten years he would probably have spontaneously painted a dozen times and quite possibly retextured or gutted and plastered. (Retexturing is what I would like to do, but it’s really too much work for how little of my walls you can actually see.)

I wish I could recall exactly when Ari died. I think it was right around ten years after I met him, so about ten years after he became Ari Ash, as this was a name he invented for himself. It was the AIDS version of tuberculosis, curiously, that took him. He wouldn’t have lasted a week on the Magic Mountain -- he would have gotten bored and run off to reinvent himself someplace more interesting. “Taking stock” was not his thing. He was more of a Peeperkorn character.

Not a day goes by...

The other day I was at the Bank Cafe and then went ‘round the corner for lunch at my favorite Vietnamese sandwich place. On the way back to the Bank Cafe, it occurred to me that I had not run into a strikingly crazy person all day. 


I managed to get one of the nice chairs facing out onto the busy intersection of Post and Kearny. Some time later, looking up from Genji, I noticed an odd looking person, barefoot, standing in profile right in front of me on the sidewalk. While I watched, he unfastened his pants, gave his genitals a good inspection, re-fastened his pants and then strolled across Post Street against the light.

162. Becoming Wise

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Open houses

Yesterday I was running errands in the Outer Richmond District -- a particularly suburban part of SF -- and while waiting for the bus and looking at the houses typical of the Richmond, I started remembering something about my youth. My mother's family had a tradition of visiting cemeteries, but our nuclear family seemed to have its own peculiar tradition of visiting open houses. In SoCal this was probably because we were living in a rental for once and my parents were probably always considering buying a house. But in Boulder, when we were living in a new house we had just built and still toured the model houses when a new development opened between us and the foothills, I think we were just being nosy.

I remember a new house in, I think, Semi Valley where the smell of the drywall made the biggest impression for some reason. Mostly, we toured houses that were for sale in the San Fernando Valley. Fortunately, this was long before the age of "staging" and the houses we visited were as the current owners had furnished them. So we were both looking at houses and at the way other people lived. This was over 50 years ago so I don't recall much detail, but there were some wonderful older houses in the Valley back then. 

I've checked out several apartments in my neighborhood over the years, and I would do much more snooping if I didn't feel I was wasting the time of the agents. 

An old friend from ASU is currently visiting Europe and posting museum photos to Facebook. I almost never visit museums when I travel unless I have time to kill or the weather is bad. But going to foreign cities and visiting open houses would be great fun. Now I'm imagining, "The Nosy Person's Guide to Inexpensive Travel."  

That little painting project

I knew when I started that there was a chance of feature creep -- or the home improvement equivalent of feature creep -- and it did happen. Besides the accent wall I de-accented, I've now painted all the window and door trim and touched up the paint on the south window. That's the one that gets direct sun and several horizontal surfaces had blistered from a combination of sun and poor prep in the past. 

I did a better job of sanding and spackling than I had intended, and it looks fine now, but I really should have stripped some of those surfaces down to bare wood. But why, really, if they're just going to get painted and not look much different than now. My dream is to find someone capable of retrofitting these old double-hung, sash style windows to modern insulation standards. But when I've looked in the past I couldn't find anyone who did that outside fine woodworking magazines. And to do that would mean ripping out some of the trim I just fixed so as to remove the sashes. I doubt the old trim would be reused. 

Since that process is just a dream, the final thing on my home improvement list is putting new weather stripping on the horizontal edges. I think I can make it significantly better than it has been.

The only thing in my apartment I have never painted is the ceiling in the living room and kitchen. The ceiling surface is a wonderful example of shit drywalling. And the paint looked okay, so I left it alone and have covered most of it with painted canvas. I briefly considered painting the visible surfaces the same color as the walls, which would have highlighted the canvases, but that would have been a lot of awkward work and I don't have enough of this 20 year old paint for that big of a job. 

Still, now that I've done all the things I was imagining at the end of last year, now I'm imagining what the space would look like with that change. It never ends.


There's one other thing I changed in my apartment. To reduce cord clutter, I replaced a light switch on a power cord with a connection to a regular wall switch. The room looks a little neater. However, muscle memory is proving an unexpected problem. I continue to reach for the place on the wall where the old switch was Every. Damn. Time. Mostly this is because I've had the switch there for so many years, but I'm beginning to think that another reasons is that the old location was simply more convenient.
 

Becoming Wise by Krista Tippett

Penguin Press 2016

Another book club book. I was over 100 pages in and convinced I wouldn't need to write anything about this one, as it is mostly teasers for her PBS interviews. But then I ran into something interesting relating to what is probably the most common theme in these blogs. 

p108 ...in American life, every vision must begin and end in an economic argument in order to be heard..."

p109 Rename these "issues" in light of what is at stake in human terms, and consider the complex mix of questioning, applied virtue, and, yes, political economic wisdom we need to muster for robust, sustained, generative grappling: the future human vocation, of how we punish wrongdoing and create space for redemption, how we treat outcasts and strangers and the hungry, how we reimagine health in a world of ever longer lives, how we nurture our children's minds and equip them for the world they will navigate and make...

Then we come to john powell. 

p116 You make this really fascinating point that there are two "parents" to the way we are now, the way we grapple with race. One is slavery -- I get that. The other is the Enlightenment -- that, in fact, it's from the Enlightenment that we inherited this idea that the conscious mind could know everything, and that we could be reasonable.

p117 Yes, and the United States became extremely, extremely attached to the notion of individuality and independence. Though think about the groups who were not independent. They were the Africans, they were the Indians, they were women, they were anyone who was not a white male. The Enlightenment Project had this hubris that we could control everything, including the world, when we can't even really control ourselves.

And if we were having this discussion in 1980, we'd say, "OK. Let's not do race. Let's look at everyone as an individual. Why do we have all these categories?" Well, now if you ask the question of why we have all those categories, science will tell us that's the way the mind works. The mind actually works with categories. We simply cannot process the world, we simply would not exist as a species, without categories.
...

p118 The human condition is one of belonging. We simply cannot thrive unless we are in relationship. I just gave a lecture on health. If you're isolated, the negative health consequence is worse than smoking, obesity, high blood pressure -- just being isolated. We need to be in relationship with each other... How we define the other affects how we define ourselves.

And so when we define the other as an extreme distance from ourselves, it means we have to cut off large parts of our self...
...

p119 ...At one time, we talked about integration, and we equated integration with assimilation... That was clearly wrong. We're not going to melt into each other. And yet, we do have to have a beloved community, not in the small sense, but in the large sense. And I would even extend it beyond people, to a beloved relationship with the planet. And to live that, and to have structures that reflect that, is a very different way of ordering society. 

This comes back to the discussion in The Brothers Karamazov of the State becoming the Church. I've skipped the discussion of the L'Arche communities that are also very close to what Dostoevsky was arguing for. 

p120 Then I think we can also learn to relax. Then we don't have to be afraid of the force. Yes, it will take us beyond what we're comfortable with, who we are right now. But I think we need help in getting there. And right now, we don't have the language for that because we still have the language of the Enlightenment Project. We still have the language of, "You can be anything you want to be, you can control, you're in charge of your destiny." Even the notion of sovereignty is very problematic. Whether it's a community or a nation, there's no such thing as sovereignty. We are in relationship with each other. It can be a bad relationship or a good relationship...
...

p121 ...I think actually people are longing for this. People are looking for community, right now, though we don't have confidence in love. We have much more confidence in anger and hate... 

p122 ...There are a lot of things we can do. But it needs to be animated by a sense that we are connected, that we share each other, and yes, that we in fact love each other.

Next - 162. It's been a while

156. The end of garden tending

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30th programming anniversary

While it wasn't my intention, I spent much of last Saturday confusing a young coder. He had posted a little piece on Medium using a book vs newspaper metaphor to help explain the difference between using arrays and objects for data storage in Javascript. I don't know anything about Javascript, and I haven't done database work in almost 20 years, but I was still interested enough to read this piece. 

I responded with a vague question about delimiters, which was mainly intended to be supportive and show that people were reading what he's written. But he was unclear about what I meant, so I elaborated with an example of how I used to use multiple delimiters to create multi-dimensional arrays. It wasn't until after I'd posted, that I remembered a couple key facts.

BASIC was my first computer language and it had (what I believe are) traditional data arrays (which give you the capability to store a mass of data and then pull up just the chunk that you need). Then I switched to languages that lacked arrays because they were intended for multimedia work that performed data storage differently. Except that I always ended up on projects where traditional arrays would have come in very handy. So I created my own, virtual arrays.

By pulling my entire "array" into memory, I could use simple coding and any number of delimiters to simulate an array of as many dimensions as I needed, and it worked reasonably fast, though probably not as fast as a real array. (Multi-dimensional arrays, when you go past the second level, were the first programming concept that transcended my ability to picture in my mind what this would look like... rather like nearly everything in quantum mechanics.) 

Over time, I developed a robust and flexible set of functions that would do everything I needed to do and forgot that they weren't the real thing. 

Since I don't know anything about arrays in Javascript, I can't say how apt this guys analogy is -- it isn't very apt for BASIC arrays, but it works perfectly for my virtual arrays. Step one: Load the book; Step two: Fetch the chapter. And since he was so puzzled he didn't know how to respond, I have no idea if you can specify delimiters or not. And I'm not quite interested enough to start down that rabbit hole. But since this is the 30th anniversary of my transition into software/technical writing, I decided to indulge myself some database reminiscences.

Painting again

I planned phase 2 so carefully and almost everything has gone according to plan. (When I get home I'll see if it needs touching up, if not it will be the first time... ever.) The big thing was to schedule the painting for the one day this week it's reasonably warm so I can leave windows open for cross ventilation. And the weather today is perfect. What is less than perfect is the pile of human crap right under one of the open windows. I just called the city to have it cleaned up, but that will probably be tomorrow when it's cold again and all my windows will be closed. 

That aside, it's going well and I'm also cleaning up the long, low bookcase I had to move. This is the bookcase that holds my favorite fiction along with my World Book Encyclopedia from the 1950s. The piece of furniture we bought unfinished in 1960 and stained and varnished ourselves. 

It hadn't moved in 14 years so it needed a good cleaning, and I'll oil it up before I reload the books. Honestly, it looks about the same as it did in 1960. It's made of soft wood and what you see is mostly the stain my dad selected. If we had had any idea it would last 57 years we probably would have gone with a nicer wood, maybe oak. 

Last I saw the companion chest of drawers it was in my cousin's basement in St Paul. It looked good, too. Do I still have these pieces -- or this bookcase -- because of the labor I invested back then? Or because I always need bookcases and this one just happens to fit perfectly under my front windows? I have to say that last is the crucial factor. I would have left it with the chest of drawers if it hadn't fit so well.
 

Candide!

p185 [André Delattre on Voltaire] Voltaire, son of a bourgeois Jansenist, was situated from his birth in the opposition, and he would become a leader of it. Jansenists in France, like Puritans in England, were both a religious movement and the central political force of the rising bourgeoisie; both currents, being essentially united, made up between them a dynamism, perhaps the most powerful of the age...

Our editor seems to be desperate to find content to pad this Critical Edition. The passage above, which I quote because it helps me understand the social/religious/political dynamic of the age, only hints at the resumption of the topic of The Fall and Free Will in other paragraphs I'm not quoting. This ought to interest me -- as it's another way of viewing the individuation problem that I prefer to approach from the Prometheus angle -- but when this question is so deeply embedded in Christian controversy, my mind wanders. If Shakespeare had been able to see forward 50 or 100 years I think he would have been even more liberal with his "a curse on both your houses." Choosing between Jesuits and Jansenists is a fools game. Rather like betting on whose invisible sky fairy can move the larger immovable object. (Could you update and revitalize some Scholastic controversies by introducing black holes? By definition, God must maintain all information about matter and energy that falls into a black hole, but could he retrieve something if he wished?)


Gustave Lanson - published 1906

p195 And if we just consider a bit, if we pause to visualize the France of Louis XV with all its many abuses and shortcomings: the capricious despotism of its government; the self-centered, extravagant court; the powerful clergy and judiciary, both more concerned with their special privileges than with the general welfare; the financial disorder and oppressive fiscal system; the poverty of the parish priest; the chaotic condition of the laws; the confused conflict between various authorities and their jurisdictions; the intolerance that condemned Protestants to concubinage or hypocrisy and dismissed their pastors to the galleys; the multitude of rules and privileges that were nothing but so many sources of vexation and misery for the common people -- if we compare to those conditions the reforms Voltaire advocated, and if into this Catholic, monarchical France of the old regime we introduce tolerance, freedom of the press, a graduated tax-scale, a uniform code of laws, reforms in criminal procedure, a subordinate, salaried clergy, a program of public assistance, liberal and peaceful principles of government, and honest, conscientious administration, public servants truly concerned with the public interest -- then, and only then, can we realize the extent of the transformation that Voltaire's critiques aimed at bringing about. Only then do we realize how wrong-headed it is to regard Voltaire's work as negative and timid. His criticism labored to produce a new and different France, a France extricated from an old feudal and monarchical chaos that was Roman and ecclesiastical, anarchic and tyrannical...

The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, so to speak. A society based on merit and fairness. And how has that worked out? Reading this I couldn't help thinking that many Trump voters would have recognized the weaknesses of the old regime when it comes to people of means valuing their own privileges and ignoring the plight of the less fortunate. 

And in a nation founded on the principle of the separation of church and state, people now argue for bringing the church -- or at least Christianity -- into the state. If we imagine Candide visiting America today what would he think? Actually I find it easier to imagine Candide's reaction than Voltaire's, since Voltaire was so invested in his bourgeois reforms. Candide would have shrugged it off and tended his drip-irrigated, permaculture garden. Voltaire, I fear, would be more like Pangloss in refusing to admit that his path had not led quite where he expected.

In conclusion

Days have passed. There is nothing more in this edition of Candide that I feel the need to comment on. And I've decided to paint the trim of my door and the last window in my apartment, if it ever gets warm again. 

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155. Last of Tisdale

Previous - 154. The Sutra...

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Violation, last

"Falling"

This is another essay about her family, mostly her older brother this time who spent most of his adult life skiing. 

p318 ...We learn to walk by falling; we learn to relax into gravity until we dance with it. Skiing is just another way to fall, and dance. In the inhuman snows of the high mountains, there is not much more one can do; surrender is your only choice.

I like this about gravity and falling. This is also what anything in orbit does, fall without hitting. With walking or roller skating or riding a bike or skiing, velocity is what we first use to beat gravity. (Ever notice how toddlers are always racing around?) On earth we eventually learn to go slow and even to stop without falling, but in space velocity is the only antidote to crashing.


Last weekend, around the time I was losing my expensive filling, I was talking to someone who had been living in Colorado when I did. He was going to the University of Colorado in Boulder while I was attending Martin Park Elementary school. What we had in common was a fondness for Boulder and Winter Park ski stories. I was not like Sallie's brother in either my level of skill or my degree of boldness. But I loved the mountain top first thing in the morning. For me skiing was just an excuse to get up on the mountain in the snow (and to spend time at the delightful lodge we always stayed at.) 

We've run into this type of person at least once before, Primo Levi's mountaineering friend Sandro from The Periodic Table. (I say "at least" because the young Oliver Sacks was a bit like this as well. And he was also chased by personal demons.)


"The Indigo City"

So much here to love. (This is about her growing up and believing she was naturally artistic but finally realizing she wasn't a painter or musician or photographer or really anything else. And then leaving her small town roots and discovering real art in the worlds great museums.) 

I recognize so much of this, though aside from a brief period of photography delusion (deflated by exposure to the works of the Westins and their circle in a gallery in Carmel), and a longer period of believing I was a great writer -- if I could only think of something I needed to say -- I don't recall being as invested in the need to be artistic. (I did, at the age she's writing about at the start of the essay, plan to be a forest ranger after all.) 

Her painfully unsuccessful artistic efforts, in the end, were the best class in art appreciation anyone could have devised. And, what she writes about the lives of geniuses not usually being enviable, is true enough. 

What I finally decided about writing, and I think this is true of all artistic ventures, is that these lives are for people who can't imagine another life. I haven't stuck with philosophy because I'm good at it or because the rewards (ha) are worth the investment, but because it is necessary for me. I didn't take a photograph for probably a decade or more. I was a bit relieved when I stopped trying to become a published writer -- technical writing doesn't count -- but you couldn't offer me anything to stop doing philosophy. That would be a deal breaker. (It occurs to me as I write this, that this is the answer to the question on that end of life questionnaire about when would you consider life to be not worth living. Though how would anyone else know if I were doing philosophy or not? Still no help.)

And I still prefer my story about my parent's "library." Besides my mother's murder mysteries, I learned when we were packing up the house that I was the only one to read the novels stashed away with the silverware in the big chest of drawers that matched the china cabinet. The books that I read so stealthily and carefully because of the dirty bits that, it turns out, no one but me knew where even there.

And we, or rather our parents, overlapped in providing us each with a set of The World Book Encyclopedia... or as I think of my set, The Time Machine. She doesn't make it clear at what age she got hers, but since she's five years younger, my set is probably better, as it reflects the 1950s and not even the 1960s.


"So Long As I Am With Others"

This is more what I expected from Tisdale from having discovered her with "The Sutra..." This is a nice combination of memoir and philosophy and it touches on some old favorites of mine like Prometheus and individuation. But she starts by describing a personal crisis when she was in her early twenties. 

Growing up you hear about puberty. You hear about mid-life crises and menopause, but I've yet to hear anyone mention this crisis of the young adult making the transition from puberty to early adult life. And yet nearly everyone struggles with it. Even me. This was one of the two times in my life where I, too, sought therapeutic help. (In my case I decided to just get on with it after realizing that my therapist had worse problems than I did.) I still don't know if this life crisis has a proper name. 

p347 Socrates said that one should simply be as one wishes to appear. But one self implies another, makes another; without two how can there be one? "Up to a point we can choose how to appear to others," wrote Hannah Arendt, who knew a thing or two about choices. "Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage." In hundreds of photographs, Arendt stares at the camera, ironic or solemn; she doesn't smile. She is alert to self-display, its possibilities. Its sorrows. Be as one wishes to appear -- an absurd idea. I don't know what I wish for, and I don't seem able to control the being part, either. I am alive and so I present myself to others. I align with Arendt -- up to a point, I choose. Trouble is I am often past that point; by existing, I have crossed it.
...

I've added Hannah Arendt to my reading list, especially The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Life of the Mind. The following is a quote from Wiki about the latter book,

Life of the Mind went beyond her previous work concerning the vita activa. In her discussion of thinking she focuses mainly on Socrates and his notion of thinking as a solitary dialogue between Me and Myself. This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience (which gives no positive prescriptions, but instead, tells me what I cannot do if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought where I must render an account of my actions to myself) and morality (an entirely negative enterprise concerned with non-participation in certain actions for the sake of remaining friends with one's self).

p348 [Following talk of the modern world of constant photography] ...Up to a point, I think I can choose how I appear to myself. But most of us glance at ourselves and glance away, unsure. One wants to own oneself, be oneself, but how? This is how I look. I present myself to myself, and what a disappointment. On certain days, the mirror shows me a conjoined twin I've come to hate and can't escape... 

p349 I would hide from Diogenes's lamp; my secret fear is that this is it, this its as real as I get, this false and slippery face like a fun-house mirror, attenuated, swollen, halved. I am mirrored inside and out, stuck in this meaty machine and not always happy about that, and stuck also in this consternation. I am split: observing, observed. Observing the observer, aware of being observed. Helplessly distant. "So long as I am together with others, barely conscious of myself," (Arendt again; I always think of her as the old woman, weary, a bit gnomish) "I am as I appear to others." Barely conscious?
...

Consciousness of self is the soul of individuation, that heartless gift of Titan or devil. Genesis 3:7: "At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves." 

Now I'm imagining that the knowledge of Good and Evil came with a little traveler's sewing kit with thread and needle and a button or two.

p350 Until the first century of the Common Era, there were no full-length mirrors, no way to see one's entire body. People saw only parts of themselves. Imagine that first time: at last the whole... there, upright, lit, still. Complete, or seeming so. At last an answer to the burning question: How do I look?...
...

p351 I seem to have lost years of my life when I wasn't looking. Rilke prayed: "Fling the emptiness out of your arms / into the spaces we breathe." Pay attention. My selves flash out of emptiness; they jostle like a crowd at the fair, giving way, pushing back. I am less concerned with the place from which they appear -- with whether it is a nothing or a something, with whether knowing would be a comfort or a nauseating vastness outside my reach -- then with the becoming. [the unreality and subjectivity and ephemerality of self] Who wins today? The self who displays (who preens, poses, curries favor) or the self who watches (wonders at, pities)? The judge? The one who flees the very sight? Selves multiply like layers of paint, [on a canvas] and in the crowd it seems impossible to wholly become one, to completely become, anything, even for a moment. Impossible to be complete. Rilke, who wrote a great deal about the struggle of being and appearing, spent his life creating a veneer; he was his own brand, the brand Rilke, a narcissist and philanderer; Rilke was a bit of a creep. 

This sounds a bit like Goethe or Byron or how many other artists. How much of art and performance is simple a wanting to be seen, and seen in a particular -- not necessarily revealing -- way. And given what we've learned about the tenuous and ad hoc nature of self, isn't this why there is a trend in film and literature -- going back at least as far as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- to ponder the nature of robotic or AI self-consciousness? 

Who is it -- what is it? -- that knows the difference between itself and another? That knows itself to be a self, this face to be its face? What knows its own hiddenness, its self-deception? I am me because I know myself to be me, but how? Here I am; I am me partly and confusingly because of what I know myself not to be; what I feel as difference. I and me because I am not you. You are the other, forever an other, irrevocably not-me. And thank god for that. I am irrevocably not other -- and yet I seem always to be the tiniest fraction removed from being this. (What would it be like to be you? To be her? Him? To be, for just one damned second, not me.) 

Isn't this part of the appeal of intoxicants? Something that makes us not quite me -- though it could also be more me. The dance of identity, whether Freud's id- ego-super-ego three-step or the even more confusing ones of Multiple Personality Disorder and schizophrenia, just leave us all still more confused.

p352 And Socrates be damned, most of the time we are not trying to be as we wish ourselves to appear, but the opposite: even more expert at acting... The urge to claim a space for the self collides and colludes with the urge to construct a self to fit the space. We are not entirely in charge here; habits long lost to memory are driving the bus; we wake up in the midst of action. And the actor is only the self, of course; how could it be otherwise? [This sounds so much like what we've learned from studying neurological disaster of self where, the self tries to make sense of even a total lack of memory.] There is nothing this wormy ego does that isn't mine. All of it -- growth and loss like a rash; endless rebirth of a self beyond boring, refusing to die. The mask, the play, the rehearsed grin, the ritual gasp, the parsing of threats -- the certainty of not wholly belonging to any other; of being never wholly with. All mine. 

I'm almost certain I'm seeing something here that the author didn't intend. That like the Marxist commentators on Faust, I'm finding my hobby-horse everywhere I look. But still, you can see in the words above that quality of impermanence the self seems to have in general and especially when memory fails. Even when the new self seems to be entirely distinct from the prior self (so not so much a rebirth as a succeeding of the previous administration) it refuses to die, to surrender it's "self" for the prior "self."

Grieve... for the inability to be true, that one is never authentic. One is only, in Arendt's words again, "an appearance among appearances"; nothing and everything is false, authentic, whole, broken. More or less. "Our modern identity crisis could be resolved only by never being alone and never trying to think." We're working on that. She believed, or claimed to, that we are all the same in some buried place, that a kind of psychic fundament exists, a ceaseless biology of mind -- a sameness of selves as our cells are the same. (They are not, though, our cells: not exactly the same, any more than a blade of grass in a meadow is like another.)

We claim to want this place where we are the same -- claim that we would run to meet each other there. Finding that space is the purpose of our lives, we say, glibly taking each other's hands and swaying in affirmation. Kumbaya. Perhaps we mean it. I think I do. I think I don't; I am not certain about this. [This can go in so many directions: the German Volk, raves, "Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun," the mystical state people sometimes fall into and that religion sometimes offers for sale to monks and other seekers after holiness.] Where we are the same is, for now, just mine; this space remains mine alone. I may not want to share...

p353 Facing those others who believe themselves to know me, I smile and say hello. How nice to see you. a me speaks, a you listens -- at least with half an ear -- to words upon which we might in part agree. What is intimacy but having a few more words in our shared vocabulary than we have with the others to whom we turn in longing? -- though the meaning of each word is always a matter of debate, and one we no longer have the heart to carry on because of the risk we will find there is no agreement after all. The words hunker down like ticks, digging in, thick with cliche, the giant delicacy of the social sphere. You are so far away, your desires so different and vague, and language is little more than the demilitarized zone in which we try to negotiate some unstable peace. Never mind that these are old concerns, that they are solipsistic and infinitely regressive, that many good minds have followed them into tiny corners from which they seem unable to escape. Communication is the second self, or third, always false; the first one cowers or cries out, depending. 

Is "solipsistic" really the word she wants there? For the true solipsist the communication problem shouldn't really exist since there is no "other." Mind you, by this same logic I shouldn't have a problem hearing or understanding things in my supposedly self-created dreams -- which is a frustratingly common occurrence.

I say to a friend, I want to be done with the witness, and he turns away, hissing, I want to obliterate it. He would like to die as a self aware of itself, in order to be seen as a self at all. We can be exactly as we long to be, appear exactly as we are, only by not knowing we have appeared -- and what a thought of heaven that is. Our struggle to be at peace with ourselves would be gone; we would no longer be trying to be ourselves at all. Awareness without reflection -- animal life. Or perhaps more like the... heliotropic plant, quivering toward the light. Responding, but never having to act. The dream of extinction while still blessedly alive.
...

Individuation is indeed the leitmotif of this essay.

p354 ...For a long time I thought love meant not feeling alone. I thought love would cure the bounded self. In moments, so it seems: transparent collapse into the space of another...
...

p355 We are never visible to others exactly , nor is the world wholly visible to us; the shell is always there in between. I look out through a fogged window. So I accept that mine is a partial view, the product of untold errors and limits; I accept that I can't see all of a thing because I can't see everything. I accept that no one can be seen, and so I believe that no one will every wholly see me -- and what relief, at once, to know this. So I will call myself planetary, cosmic; my darkness hidden in the darkness, in the far side. (I do not, of course, really accept this. I am being as I long to appear. I will pretend this is some kind of consolation, that this is the point, that it is due to our largeness, the very size of our selves, that we are each larger than each other's views.)

Just last meeting the book club was talking about the impossibility of admitting new members because they wouldn't have read the books that are now a shared language we use to discuss each new book. This blog, or rather this series of blogs, has the same problem as I continue to refer back all the way to The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. And my fondness for Ryecroft is in part my delight in sharing a language based on reading the Classics. Did Tisdale even touch on this problem of education?

When Tisdale invoked solipsism above, I believe she had in mind our isolation from everything outside our own minds. But I think she is, like Kant, comfortable with the notion that, even though we may have no exact knowledge of the thing-in-itself, there's no reason to doubt the independent existence of that "thing." True solipsism, in my view, is not nearly so trusting. 

The unknowability of anything external to ourselves is first a sensory problem but, on top of that, there is the problem of sharing thoughts about those external things. We become like Eskimos trying to have a simple conversation about snow with people whose language doesn't go beyond "wet," "powder," and "yellow." 

Just as I don't have the patience to investigate the views on science of National Socialism, I suspect, but am not going to confirm, that the endless texts and dogmas of religions world wide, are at least in part an attempt to synchronize the minds of believers so that they will understand key words and phrases the same way. (If this is true then Protestantism indicates the total failure of Roman Catholic efforts in this regard.)

And speaking of solipsism, can you think of another explanation for Tisdale ending this collection with this particular -- previously unpublished -- essay? Who but me would find this the perfect ending? The cherry on top? Which must mean that the rest of you are merely figments of my imagination. But let me say that you're all doing a wonderful job. Keep up the good work.

Painting

I'm taking a lunch break but almost everything is painted. There's a little trim and some touch-up still to do before I start putting things back in place. What's odd is how familiar it looks, since I've been imagining this for almost six months. What's funny is that I doubt that anyone but me will notice the difference. It would take someone like Temple Grandin, with an eidetic memory, to identify what's different about the room. And it kept occurring to me as I was prepping and painting that most of the wall surface will be covered by furniture and art -- this is a lot of work for very little visual effect. Rather like our seismic retrofit last summer.

This painting is really mainly a test for my 10 year plan upgrade. When everything is back in place it will be a little easier to imagine what the room could look like in 10 years when it's all re-painted and some furniture and junk is removed. I'm so tempted to move up my schedule. I would like to see things simplified and down-sized. (Down-sizing from such a tiny apartment isn't really the right word. Minimalizing or Simplifying might be better. What I have in mind is getting rid of everything I don't really need.)


Hours later...

It is done. The furniture is restored and everything is back in place. Some things are rearranged, and all my painting stuff is put away. 

Not only is it a success, it pretty much demands a follow-up project where I paint the trim of the larger, double window to match. Now I have to work out the logistics of that. The furniture is much easier to move, but I still have to figure out where it can go -- and where all the books can go -- to leave room for working and a ladder. Next week.

Actually, this is kind of clever... or would be if I had planned it. I paint one wall and a bit of window trim and my room looks noticeably (to me) different and better. This should hold me until I take the whole room apart and repaint everything in 10 years.


Which reminds me about age and planning. I'm doing some long term financial planning, which in some ways is similar to what I do for my homeowners association, and with the same 30 year forecasts, except that in both cases I'm aware that past 15 years the part I play gets increasingly problematic. My (occasional) upstairs neighbors are doing relatively well for people a bit over 15 years older than I am, but they've had to stop doing things they did routinely even five years ago. I have very mixed feelings about the possibility that I won't be around to manage the next re-painting of our building. My personal 10 year plan is based in part on most of the paint in my apartment being 20 years old now (I painted it and it's holding up great) and will be 30 years old then while, in my experience, people's ability to handle physical tasks like painting diminish after they hit 75. If I get my apartment in great shape then, it should be fine for the rest of my life, and still looking good for the next lucky Below Market Rate lottery winner.

When I realized how long my recently replaced filling lasted, I quickly did the math and realized I probably would have to deal with this little ordeal again. Re-painting the building could go either way. 

The other problem for planning is that past 75-80, the game can change in unpredictable ways. Of course, for some people it changes even earlier than that, but for most people it's largely the same-old, same-old until then. This reality is made manifest in the options offered at your better retirement communities: independent living, assisted living, nursing/memory facilities. 

It's indicative of what I'm reading/watching of late that this process of accelerating -- and not in a good way -- change reminds me of spacetime around a black hole. Even in the accretion disk, things are going pretty much as they always have. The warp is getting steeper and steeper but that's been happening for so long you hardly notice. You probably think, "I'm getting so good at riding this." Like a cocky skateboarder about to discover that there is no extension into the shadow of the pipe he's riding. Next thing you know -- or not, who knows -- space and time are becoming confused and you see Einstein waving goodbye for an eternity before you (maybe) fall into that wacky quantum world.

So now I can justify my interest in QCD, and QED, as part of my future planning. When I think I've finally grasped QCD will probably be the signal that it's time to lock me away in a memory facility.

Next - 156. The end of garden tending

154. The Sutra...

Previous - 153. Violation

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Still Violating

"On Being Text"

When you pick up a collection of essays you can't really expect anything in particular, but I have to say that this is not what I was expecting from Tisdale -- not that I'm complaining at all. This essay begins talking about the academic penchant for bundling writer's together into anthologies for educational purposes. Tisdale starts by seeing it as a not unappreciated new source of income, but then goes on (after noticing that one editor has botched her biography) to actually read the collections. She also reprises her ad hoc education -- dropping out of high school and weaving through several universities, where she took no "literature" classes -- before finally getting a degree.

p234 ...the moment the students finish reading, they must start to dissect. I'm afraid that what the students of these books are really learning is what college students learn about so many subjects: how to take things apart, but not how to put them together.
...

p236 ...Literary analysis begins by presuming that writing can be understood by understanding its parts. The process is, in fact, called dissection, a term usually applied to dead things.
...

...Reading my own critics has taught me a little bit about my work and rather a lot about certain critics.
...

p240 How would I change college literature classes?... Read, read, read, and then try to explain how it feels. Read a book because someone you like tells you it's a good book. Listen to other readers when they react. Read some more. I believe that one reason I learned to write is that no one ever really tried to teach me, or... no one ever tried to tell me what a writer was supposed to be like...

p241 [From her note at the end of the essay] ...Anthologies give us a window into everything wrong with how we teach writing -- and reading -- and how one is actually read. It's not pretty.

I did take literature and history and philosophy classes, but I still agree with her. A good university philosophy department is the place to go to have your interest in philosophy deflated. And Thomas Mann, another autodidact, would agree with her as well. Academia (you would think) would be a magical place where people really cared about these topics, that few people in general care about, but instead it is where interest goes to die.

There's a great deal more here that I could have quoted, it's interesting to see an author respond to what is said about her writing by "professional" critics. What does please me is who Tisdale finds herself grouped with in these anthologies, Thurber and White and the other writers she mentions here. That would be nice.


"Twitchy"

What a great essay title. I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with Tisdale's categorization as a memorist... even though I think she's the one who suggested it. Her subject is life and she starts with herself, as we all do. Since we keep coming back to subjectivity, how nothing can really be known objectively, what isn't memoir to some extent? 

This essay is about, or at least starts with, a trip to the dentist to have her spectacularly bad teeth worked on. This requires a great deal of nitrous oxide which seems to be Tisdale's drug of choice. 

My teeth are as good as Tisdale's are bad, and yet a moment of wild abandon with a nutty biscotti at a delightful garden party last Sunday left me without the sole -- massive -- filling in my mouth. In fear the tooth would collapse if I forgot and put pressure on it, I rushed to the dentist the next day and had it refilled. Over $400 for those of you keeping score at home.

So I just this week spent time in a dentist's chair-of-discomfort. I wasn't offered nitrous. My iPod is on it's last legs so that's not an option. So I just had to lie back and be thankful this only happens about once a decade.

I was given nitrous once when three wisdom teeth were to be extracted without any other general anesthesia. I don't recall it doing anything. (And I don't recommend having your wisdom teeth pulled like that.) But what Tisdale's nitrous experience does remind me of is the intravenous anesthesia I got when they extracted the rogue wisdom tooth that somehow traveled sideways into the next tooth, leaving the cavity my massive filling is a reminder of. I was conscious but unconcerned with what was happening in my mouth. My thought processes didn't seem (to me) to be affected -- compared, for example, to drinking a bottle of wine -- and there was no hang-over or aftereffect when the procedure was over. I was told I was going to get a Valium IV, and I think I took a Valium before, but at the last minute there was a change of plan which I never quite understood, so I don't really know what they gave me, except that it wasn't what my friends had gotten that knocked them out, left them groggy, and finally resulted in vomiting later on. 

Tisdale goes on to explain her phobia in terms of scary childhood dental work from her (step)grandfather. But what she is averse to is what I dislike as well, the smell and sounds, the surprising pressures, and, for me, the discomfort of simply holding my jaw wide open for so long (that was the worst part of the three wisdom tooth extraction.) If I had access to Valium, and knew I was getting my work done ahead of time, I would have dosed myself up the same way Tisdale uses nitrous. By the time I need to get this filling replaced, I will have forgotten all this again.

She describes an annoying friend who goes to the dentist eager to learn if his flossing has paid off. I'm so much worse than this. Not only do I floss but I use these special little brushes between my teeth. My goal in life is to have the hygienist say, "There's nothing here for me to do" and run off sobbing. And I'm getting closer and closer each year. And yet I react to hearing the words "root canal" about the same way she does. 


"The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies"

Finally! This was my introduction to Sallie Tisdale and it is so unlike everything else I've read by her. For one thing it's as much about Buddhism as it is about flies. It's the only place where she really gets philosophical. And it's like a concise version of Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when it comes to the amorality of nature.

What I noticed this reading is something that Dostoevsky would have loved. Near the end she writes at length about the role flies and their progeny play in decomposing bodies. Then, talking about the Buddha, she writes this, 

p311 ...What lucky flies smelled the flowery scent of the Buddha's death, and came -- flowing through the air like a river in the sky, a river of flies? What lucky maggots were born in his body, in the moist heat of the afternoon while the disciples still mourned? The maggots and blowflies are the words of the old Buddhas, singing of the vast texture of things, a lullaby of birth and death. They came and turned him into juice and soil, the Buddha flowing gloriously like cream into the ground.

I'm thinking about the shocking (to the monks) decomposition of Father Zossima shortly after his death. Of course, I'm not sure this works with what Dostoevsky intended this to mean. But it would seem that Zossima would have enjoyed the interpretation. 
 

Ugly

Yesterday I was looking at some photos taken looking down from the top of Salesforce Tower. This got me thinking about when architects decided that the tops and bottoms of skyscrapers didn't matter? (Or, if we think of the architects as thinking like toddlers, that we can't see the tops, at least.) 

In one shot, there was a great view of the Shell Building and several other handsome structures from the École des Beaux-Arts period of architect education. These structures still appear as perfect sculptural constructions, as neatly designed at the top as where they meet the sidewalk. By contrast, many of the glass, curtain-wall monoliths from the 1960 and 1970s (and beyond) have unsightly mechanical tumors on their flat roofs while their bases seem completely arbitrary. If it weren't for the larger height of the street level floors, you would think that the entire tower was simply extruded out of the ground like a plant shoot with an undifferentiated stem. The few postmodernist structures here do a bit better at the top, but recently they seem to have gone back to pretending no one can see up there. I'll give César Pelli credit for giving Salesforce Tower a better top, but then it's intended to be a focus and focal point for the whole city.

The Shell Building is the petite tower in the left foreground between two flat-topped towers. There are more, old buildings from the early 20th century above and to the left between Shell and the dark mass of the BofA Tower. The other standout tower is the Russ Building. Sadly, the building that houses my gym is just out of the frame to the left of the Russ. The round tower middle right, is Phillip Johnson's 101 California. The dark, part flatiron, part round little tower just this side of 101 California has residential on top, but I don't know it's name. The former First Interstate Bank building is dead center, partly in front of the TransAmerica. The First Interstate building includes a hotel on top and was built in the middle of the block with connection to the streets on three sides, but with the other, older, buildings in that block left in place. It's my favorite large scale development in the city because it integrated itself so subtlety into the neighborhood.

Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building does have a blunt and unsightly top but no tumors sticking up above. The way it meets the ground is a classic example of being too playful with steel and the weightless effect it can give. Like Wright and the Guggenheim, it would appear that van der Rohe also had no sense for urban life.

About the same can be said for SOM's Lever House, especially at the top. The base is better if only because it fills it's site. It's still more a celebration of steel and glass then it is something that belongs in a city.

It would seem that architects started with those examples and then simplified and made the buildings cheaper. Even the BofA tower here, which I think is an unusually handsome tall building, has protruding mechanicals rising from the top and a Seagramesque retreat from the street. I suspect one of the reasons the TransAmerica Pyramid has become so famous is that it is almost Postmodern in the way it avoids both the top and base problems, at least visually. The base is still a sterile zone in an otherwise vibrant neighborhood. I give it a pass as an instance of architectural sculpture, rather like the Burj Khalifa.

Painting a wall

I've been thinking about re-painting a wall in my living room for about six months and it's finally warm enough to have my windows open for a couple days. This evening I moved everything out of the way -- not a simple task in such a small apartment. It went about 90% the way I anticipated, which is surprisingly good. I had forgotten that I had velcroed my mirror to the wall, which makes that part of the job much easier than I was anticipating. On the other hand, I underestimated how much space my over-a-hundred-year-old desk and bookcase would take when I pulled it out. So I didn't move it as far as I planned. (I had already moved a chair out of the way to make room for the desk, and moving it back is impossible, so the chair clogs up my kitchen unnecessarily. Still, all in all it went well.

Tomorrow I will prep and prime. Tuesday I will paint and then move everything back. I've already added on a side project of putting something lighter in color at the back of the old shelves which I use as a display space. That should make my featured artifacts more visible. Maybe. We'll see.

Next - 155. Last of Tisdale

139. Paul Cézanne

Previous - 138. Good prions

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Preparing to paint

This afternoon I took an empty gallon paint pail for a nice walk around the neighborhood. Now, I know what you're thinking, this sounds like one of those strange exercises magazines recommend for the elderly in articles like, "10 Ways To Stay Fit As You Spiral Down Toward Your Grave." But no. The story is different, though no less inane.

Our weather has been "variable" of late. I frequently switch between regular and "rain" pants over the course of a day. And then there are the work pants I put on to do painting (every few minutes, it seems). So my junk -- keys and ID and pepper spray -- are scattered in a variety of pockets. 

Today I was taking advantage of a break in the rain to bolt across town to the paint store, to pick up a quart of the paint our painters ran out of yesterday. I threw on a reasonable pair of pants, found my keys and the pail of paint for identification purposes, and headed for the bus that takes me to that neighborhood. It's a five block walk and I waited 15 minutes for the bus, and as it was arriving I realized I left my transit card and all my ID in another pair of pants. 

I walked back home. Since a late lunch was part of my original scheme, I was now too hungry to wait for another bus to go across town. So now I'm at the nearer of my regular pizzerias-with-good-WiFi. I'll get my paint tomorrow.

Paul Cézanne - From Proust...

p97 ... Reality is not out here waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind. 

p98 Cézanne's art exposes the process of seeing. Although his paintings were criticized for being unnecessarily abstract -- even the impressionists ridiculed his technique -- they actually show us the world as it first appears to the brain. A Cézanne painting has no boundaries or stark black lines separating one thing from the next. Instead, there are only strokes of paint, and places on the canvas where one color, knotted on the surface, seems to change into another color. This is the start of vision: it is what reality looks like before it has been resolved by the brain. The light has not yet been made into form.

... even as his art celebrates its strangeness, it remains loyal to what it represents... Because he gives the brain just enough information, viewers are able to decipher his paintings and rescue the picture from the edge of obscurity...

...What starts as an abstract mosaic of color becomes a realistic description. The painting emerges, not from the paint or the light, but from somewhere inside our mind. We have entered into the work of art: its strangeness is our own.
...

p99 ...The symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, a natural skeptic of science, [and a synesthete] reviewed a photographic exhibition in 1859 by proclaiming the limits of the new medium. Its accuracy, he said, is deceptive, nothing more than phony simulacra of what was really out there. The photographer was even -- and Baudelaire only used this insult in matters of grave import -- a materialist. In Baudelaire's romantic view, the true duty of photography was "to be the servant of the sciences and arts, but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor suplemented literature. . . . If it {photography} is allowed to encroach upon the domain of the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man's soul, then it will be so much the worse for us." Baudelaire wanted the modern artist to describe everything that the photograph ignored: "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent."

p100 Inspired by Baudelaire's writings and the provocative realism of Edouard Manet, a motley group of young French painters decided to rebel. The camera, they believed, was a liar. Its precision was false. Why? Because reality did not consist of static images. Because the camera stops time, which cannot be stopped; because it renders everything in focus, when everything is never in focus. Because the eye is not a lens, and the brain is not a machine.

These rebels called themselves the impressionists... If the camera captured the dot, the impressionists represented the blur. They wanted to capture time in their paintings, show how a bail of hay changes in the afternoon shadows, or how the smoke of a train leaving Gare Saint-Lazare slowly fades into thin air. As Baudelaire insisted, they painted what the camera left out. 

Chased out of Brain Wash by a sudden incursion of stand-up comedy.

 

Painting

When I paint with a small roller I always try to save the roller cover so I can use it again. This is usually less than successful. I have a small collection of covers that are too stiff and uneven to choose to use, but I can't bring myself to toss out since... You never know what you'll need some day. And now that may pay off.

I couldn't be on site when the painter was finishing his work in our entry, so the last thing I said to him was, "If there's anything you can't get to, make sure it's low on the walls so I can reach it." And there is one low surface I need to paint now that I've bought another quart of the paint he ran out of. But, the biggest problem is at the top of the space in the hardest places for me to reach. 

I know exactly what happened: I watched him using the roller to "feather" the new paint in with the old paint so that the dividing line isn't obvious. But then he sent his assistant up the ladder (I'm guessing) to get the seams where the walls and ceiling meet. And that guy didn't understand the feathering concept. It looks terrible. My idea is to use a rough, small roller cover at the end of a long pole (a longer pole than the one that is no longer in our equipment area but that the painter insists he didn't take!) to feather all the visible lines near the seams. (On the ceiling the line is on the new paint, not where the new meets the old, and I don't even know how he managed that.)

Confidence is moderately high.


Hours later...
Only an utter fool would roller paint from a fresh can onto a wall without first testing if the color matched. Guess who is an utter fool? Me. Guess how closely the new paint matched the old paint? Not very.

I still have some options, and I can't do anything at the moment because the paint store closes early on Sunday?!?! 

My technique did work with what little of the old paint remained, which is even more irritating since I would be done now if the paint was a match. I really need to eat something.

Next - 140. Cezanne & Zola