184. Our electric future

Previous - 183. Seeing the end

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Last time on Bloggity-blog...

Last time I talked about getting a glimpse or foreshadowing of the end of life or my event season. This morning I realized there is another way this is true just now. Below is a picture of the poor tree that grows in a pot in our alley. 

Last year it suffered all kinds of injury and indignity as it was pushed about the alley by various workmen before finally coming to rest outside my alley window. And then someone knocked off yet another limb for no reason I'm aware of.

But here it is, fully leafed out on its few remaining limbs, and doing surprisingly well. Except that I happen to know that it is already preparing for winter. It's going through the process of pulling the things it still wants out of its leaves and putting the waste it doesn't want into those leaves. Soon the leaves will all drop -- over a surprisingly short period of days -- and it will be bare for the winter. 

This is especially odd here as the tree's peak growing season -- when the days are longest and the sun is highest in the sky -- doesn't mesh with our warm weather, which will start in maybe a month, at which point the tree will probably be bare. Maybe if it was a species of tree that was native to this area it would have a cycle more consistent with our weather? I don't know. If it was in the ground instead of this pot, I'm pretty sure it would keep its leaves longer, so the fact that it is already starting to hibernate wouldn't be obvious. But it does serve to remind me that natural processes are going on all around us that we are unaware of. That appearances can be deceiving.

My Name Is...

I'm finished reading but not finished thinking about this novel. It's the story of a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a writer. Aside from it being fiction, it is remarkably similar to the memoirist parts of Salie Tisdale's collection of essays. 

It would be nice to have a book that mashed together the stories of families where the husband left the wife, the wife left the husband, and neither left but someone probably should have. The children would all be resentful of different things. Maybe one of them would be aware that the adults were all just doing the best they could. But this probably wouldn't be the kid who was the biggest screw-up his or herself.

And we never do get the hinted nasty bits of the story. I don't exactly mind that, except that it means we can't judge the protagonist's actions. If we knew we would be in a position to say she acted correctly or incorrectly -- from our perspective -- but as it is we have to give her the benefit of the doubt. Not that that's a bad thing, but it does seem a little unfair. Or a little too uncritical.

Cafe calculus

Or, "Life is hard, Yo." I'm at the Peet's on Market because I got off BART at Powell and because it's the weekend  (so the Bank Cafe isn't open). Besides having to pay an extra dollar for my iced tea here, I'm also subjected to the hits from the 1960s. At the Bank Cafe, the music is better (usually) but the WiFi (while better than it was) still sucks. The Specialty Cafe (also, sort-of Peet's) has better seating, but costs a little more and has WiFi that is usually in the middle, plus they are also closed on the weekend and even during the week they close early (5 pm, I think). There's a Starbucks that has excellent WiFi and similar prices, but I'm not fond of Starbucks and they also have very limited seating. 

Yesterday I went to Caffe Grecco in North Beach because I wanted a change of pace and because I wanted to thoroughly browse the new hardware store there -- I suddenly realized that it was about the same distance as the one I usually go to (same company) but there is less of a change in elevation going to this new one. It does seem to be well stocked and not as busy.

An optimistic future

Recently I read a piece that spun several current trends in a very positive direction. The author saw electric, self-driving cars leading to a world with relatively few, long-lasting cars serving the majority of people. This would reduce drastically the need for oil (at least 30%) which would lead to a collapse of that industry and an end to both drilling and pollution (including greenhouse gases). Parked cars would become a thing of the past, freeing space for people and bicycles and for housing where there are parking lots and garages today. 

The author thought these changes would have job creation effects that would balance the obvious job loses of people who currently drive or work in the oil and automobile industries. I didn't buy that, so I didn't bother to remember the job creation details. I will give the scheme credit for preserving the value of suburban real estate, since it preserves automobiles in a new form. Since we appear to be too stupid now to build neighborhoods that work, I would rather see a return to public transit and walking, but I do think the autonomous electric car dream is more realistic. Even I would give in and buy a smartphone so I could access these vehicles when the prices were reduced to reflect the lack of a driver. 

Next - 185. Almost a holiday

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

153. Violation

Previous - 152. 420

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[Here's an interesting look at Tisdale and this collection. Edits and additional matterial from 4/29/17 in red.]

Violation

p155 Stephanie, gawky and disheveled, is easily the best writer in the class [Tisdale is teaching at a university]. After a few weeks I realize I'm half in love with her, with her scary ideas, her absolute fearlessness, and I come to class hungry and ashamed, wanting to hear her read, wanting her to ask me for advice. She is only dimly aware of her talent. She's not a writer, she tells me one day. She's a painter. She likes big canvases with solid blocks of color, and writes only "for fun." Her wild stories, her willingness to say anything, anything at all, are the blessings of not being a writer, of having nothing to lose. The other students, the rule-bound ones who want to be writers very much, are startled into attention.

This is from "Big Ideas," an essay about writing.

A few essays later, about the middle of the collection, we come to the title essay -- which I have been anticipating. This one is also about writing and specifically about writing memoir, which is Tisdale's specialty, it seems. She refers back to an earlier essay called "The Basement" which is about a family visit to her grandmother's when Sallie was a child. In particular, she refers to this passage where she describes her sister, "Susan, barely a year younger than me, isn't brave at all. She's squeamish, chubby, pale, and black haired -- she's the one left out, the baby." Reading this, I wondered if there might have been hurt feelings about this description. I know in my family the "baby" (my aunt who died a couple years ago at 94, still aggrieved by some slights from her youth) was not amused by accounts of her early lack of status in the family. And it turns out Susan was, in fact, offended and this essay is about truth and the writer's need to tell the truth. It is also about the subjective and ephemeral nature of truth.

Before admitting that her truth was not the whole truth, and possibly not the truth at all, except to her at the time, Tisdale insists the memoirist must not make stuff up or tell anything but the truth. That non-fiction must be factual. I'm not sure I agree with this. 

Mostly I'm thinking of the non-fiction of humorists like Calvin Trillin and Bill Bryson, who I expect to elaborate a bit. I can imagine James Thurber's grandfather reading Thurber's hilarious accounts of family life in Columbus, Ohio, waving his stick around and insisting that no such thing ever happened. And I would find that just as funny as the original story. 

Did Alice Trillin actually originate all the sayings or hold all the positions Calvin assigned to her? Maybe. Maybe not. But the "Theory of Compensatory Cash-flow" (that if you think you are going to spend $X on something and then don't, you now have $X you are free to spend on something else) or of "Enough" (that past a certain figure $1 million? $10 million? 100% of a wealthy person's income should be taxed, because it's just obscene for anyone to make that much money) derive a common sense quality from their association with Alice and not Calvin.

My point is that I'm willing to give a writer some leeway if it's going to payoff in the end.

But here's the thing, in "The Basement" this description of her little sister doesn't payoff. We see her as Sallie saw her, but the story is about Sallie's experience and perception of that experience and Susan barely appears. The description is true to the author's truth, but isn't crucial to the writer's aim in telling this story. 

Now if, after that description, Susan and led the way into the dark basement and fallen into a large heater vent left open by mistake -- as actually happened to my aunt when she was little -- you would have to include both the description and the pratfall. But in this case, I think Susan has a point.

But then we get to truth in general. What do we remember and how close are those memories to what actually happened? Everyone in the story holds different information about what is happening and what other people are dealing with, plus none of them see the same things from the same perspective.

Truth (and I think I may have said this before) is like spacetime: never absolute, always relative.


"Second Chair"

Another good essay. This is about growing up in a small town where you attend the school where both your parents work, so that the teachers are also people you know as your parent's friends. And it's about being in the school band, constantly challenging the first chair but never winning.

It's about a great deal else as well.

But what resonated with me was the knowing teachers -- in my case, professors -- outside school; and also band. I was lucky, I could completely avoid the department that my mother worked for, so I rarely bumped into professors I knew through my mother, though they were demystified for me which is why I probably socialized more with my own professors than most students did.

The band connection is more interesting. I, too, was second chair, though in the trumpet section instead of base clarinet. But while Tisdale continued to challenge the girl who held the first chair even past the point where she knew she would never win, I don't recall ever challenging. I knew the guy ahead of me was much better and I had no desire to replace him. I think someone once challenged me, and I was happy to hold my chair, but I didn't care in the way Tisdale seems to have cared. Also the third chair adored Donovan, who I loathed, so there was that.

Where we were most alike was in how we turned our backs on band and so much else when we transitioned into high school. In my case I can point to another round of disgust at having to leave another place behind and start over anew (and in Scottsdale of all God forsaken places), and later to the bad crowd I ran into working at YMCA camp, and the new drug culture of the time. But if it wasn't those things wouldn't it have been something else? Does anyone get through those adolescent years unashamed? Or at least without regrets? And if you do, is that really anything to be proud of? 

And, with "Violation" in mind, I can read a bit between the lines and guess at some of the alcoholic-father things she doesn't mention because they are boring and petty to repeat and -- like those wounds you sometimes read about that much later re-open and finally kill the apparent survivor -- you don't want to take a chance bringing that stuff to the surface again. Still, having spoken about truth and telling everything, it's a little surprising how much she leaves out here.


Also, thanks to this essay, I now see Tisdale as one of those bold high school girls who infested our shared apartment after we graduated from high school. Was that a quirk of the times? An aftereffect of the Summer of Love and all the related social quakes? Or is that just how some girls are at that age? I would guess that grandparents, raising their grandchildren, are disappointed to discover that all the lessons they thought they learned with their own children have been rendered moot by the changes of the times. They are probably just as lost and even further removed from the children they are trying to care for.

Land-poor

It turns out that one of the cons of owning an SF BMR (Below Market Rate) condo is that there is no way of accessing your equity short of selling the property. Reverse mortgages are generally considered to be a bad idea, but it would have been nice to have had the option. It would have at least bought me some time to stay in my unit if my finances fall apart. Now, a big part of my Plan C will be finding a new place to live. Mind you, I’m just doing worst-case financial planning here, but still.

(This is not the dictionary definition of “land-poor” but it comes down to the same thing. Your wealth is situated so as to do you no good. In my case, I don’t even own any actual “land” to speak of. What I own is the space inside the walls of a building. That part I’m not complaining about, having grown up in suburbia, owning yards and fences and driveways was never a goal of mine. How many people, I wonder, who long for a home with a white picket fence have built or even painted such a thing?)

Accessing your equity seems to be hard regardless. I know that in France (at least at one time) you could sell your place and continue to live in it until you died. If that’s an option at all here, it wouldn’t be an option for me because of the BMR restrictions.


Still, I’m better off than a friend who is poor while sitting on over a half million dollars in equity. Now that would be frustrating. 

Next - 154. The Sutra...

152. 420

Previous - 151. CBF and Sisters

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420

Tomorrow we're Greening the 420 (cannabis) celebration in Golden Gate Park's Sharon Meadow for the first time. Not sure what to expect but wouldn't be surprised if it was a shit-show. Today a crew set-up and the day after tomorrow another crew is scheduled to do the final clean-up. I'll just be there for the main event which should be similar to any number of other free concerts we've worked at Sharon Meadow. But we will see.

Sallie Tisdale

Yesterday I started reading Violation, a collection of essays by Sallie Tisdale.  I love Tisdale both for her prose and for her eye -- she and Annie Dillard are very good at seeing nature for what it is.

I'm four essays and the introduction in and haven't taken a single note. Which is a good thing since I procrastinated starting the book and don't have that much time before our club meeting. But I can't really explain why I both enjoy this and feel no need to write anything down. 

After 420

I wasn't wrong about it being a shit-show. The report I heard on the radio this morning claimed the crowd was around 15,000, but it felt larger than that to me. There was great footage of what it looked like from a helicopter, but I can't find it now. (I had everything ready to publish last night when Blogger let me down and ate everything I had done that day. Not even the Cloud can stop this from happening on occasion.)

The morning news also reported that the park looked strikingly clean at dawn -- for years they had been reporting on what a disaster it was the day after. In fact, the park looked great by the time I left at 7:30pm and there were still teams picking up trash and bringing it to our crew to sort. That process was to continue the following day. 

We didn't collect that much waste during the event. I probably collected, and hauled to the compost dumpster, 20 bags of compost plus some cardboard. I also pulled a half dozen bags of sorted landfill and even a couple bags of recycling. The majority of the waste was left behind at the very end when the "celebrants" finally were convinced to go home. 

This event does not go into my list of favorite events to work, but it was very satisfying to finally be able to Green it. I would be willing to grit my teeth and do it again.

What made the event hard to work was also the most interesting aspect of the event for me. We and everyone else were told there would be no glass allowed in the park (no bottles or bongs) and people would not be allowed to sell water and the like as often happens at large gatherings like this. That's what we were told. Instead, free enterprise found a way and the main, paved, cart path that I usually use to haul heavy toters full of waste to the dumpsters, was almost impassable because of all the commerce that lined and crowded the little path. People were selling water and other beverages, food, bottles of beer, weed, "edibles," and even the forbidden glass bongs. And they positioned themselves and their wares where the foot traffic was best, as this was where one of the main entrances emptied onto the meadow. 

I finally gave up on the path and hauled my toter over the gopher pocked lawn. 

There was one sad (for me) aspect of the day. One of my favorite crew members, who I rarely see as it is, has finished her nursing classes and is leaving Green Mary to start her new career as a psychiatric nurse. I joked that this event would be a good transition. She should be very good at her new job. I hope I run into her when I finally lose my mind.

 

When is it too long?

I'm talking about essays... what did you think I meant? You're disgusting.

I finally have something to say about Sallie Tisdale. Most of her essays are reasonably short, but the one on elephants went on and on. It was no surprise when I finally reached the end and discovered it was written for The New Yorker. I recall reading a series of New Yorker essays on rice, wheat, and corn (if memory serves) that were wonderful, and this one is also great. I don't know that I would want to cut anything out. Still, I had to read it in two sessions and I don't think that was the intention. It should have been divided into more manageable sections, except that an essay is supposed to be all of a piece.

Anyway, I know a lot more about Asian elephants than before I read this. She makes the point that we never really know what elephants are thinking. We tend to think they are like us when we have no real idea what is going on in their heads. But isn't this nearly as true when it comes to other people? I may think I know what life is like for women or people of color, but I'm just assuming that their reality is the same as mine with a few superficial differences. Which is nonsense. 

If subjectivity is the basis of modernity in a post-quantum world where complete objectivity is a discarded notion, then we have to give up the idea that we can know what is going on in anyone's head -- human as well as animal, Just as we can only talk about probabilities when it comes to fundamental particles.

Death

I'm thinking there are basically three kinds of deaths: A. Sudden/surprise -- where you die in your sleep or just keel over or get hit by a bus; 
B. Quick, but with notice -- where you probably suffer more but have time to sort your affairs and say your goodbyes; and 
C. Protracted -- where time and suffering are a major aspect of the event.

I would like to ask people frequently involved with the deaths of others (doctors, nurses, hospice workers, priests) if they think there are advantages to B. and especially to C. I haven't seen advantages (for the person dying) in these cases myself, but perhaps my sample size is just too small. And, of course, people are different so even if A. or B. are best for most people, C. might be better for some.

Next - 153. Violation