Dictionary of The Inexpressible (part I)

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera devotes an entire chapter to the expression or idea of litost. Succinctly, litost can be defined as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery" But it is more than that, as Kundera goes on to explain. It is also a fallen state, a tumble after a realization. That is, he explains, the fallen are to some degree immune from litost:

"Anyone with wide experience of the common imperfection of mankind is relatively sheltered from the shocks of litost. For him, the sight of his own misery is ordinary and uninteresting. Litost, therefore, is characteristic of the age of inexperience. It is one of the ornaments of youth."

Like Kundera for the Czech, the poet Garcia Lorca famously went on about the Spanish concept of "Duende" in his essay The Duende: Theory and Divertissement writes:

"... people constantly speak of the duende and find it in everything that springs out of energetic instinct. That marvelous singer, "El Librijano," originator of the Debla, observed, "Whenever I am singing with duende, no one can come up to me"; and one day the old gypsy dancer, "La Malena," exclaimed while listening to Brailowski play a fragment of Bach: "Olé! That has duende !"- and remained bored by Gluck and Brahms and Darius Milhaud. And Manuel Torres, to my mind a man of exemplary blood culture, once uttered this splendid phrase while listening to Falla himself play his "Nocturno del Generalife": "Whatever has black sounds has duende." There is no greater truth."

This idea of the duende has been characterized succinctly too as that spirit of the sublime in art - but that darker aspect of the sublime, a baritone depth, a minor key rather than a major key. The duende lies near the realm of the fantastic and is so palpable and complex as to have a sense of physical embodiment. The Duende arrives, like a medieval spirit or like a Greek muse:

"The arrival of the Duende always presupposes a radical change in all the forms as they existed on the old plane. It gives a sense of refreshment unknown until then, together with that quality of the just-opening rose, of the miraculous, which comes and instils an almost religious transport."

It is in the nature of Arts to strive towards the duende, at least in Garcia Lorca's view.

Finally, there is that Portuguese state of mind known as Saudade. The article on Saudade from Wikipedia does a fine job and makes the following reference:

In his book In Portugal of 1912, A.F.G Bell writes: "The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."

Saudade seems to sit at the intersection of solitude and longing. But perhaps more of a passive sense of dislocation: Of being "here" instead of "there" I will say no more about Saudade since I am still learning what it means.

Dictionary of the Inexpressible (part II)

I've tried to add my own unclassifiable states to the previous list. This is an attempt to begin a classification of states that defy words.

We experience claustrophobia and this can be mapped to, say, being trapped in a tight tunnel or wooden box. But we also fear being trapped by circumstance, by our inabilities or by our fears themselves. Sometimes the feelings are so indefinable that we can only hint at them and hope that the person we speak to has felt the same. Conversely, we all have had those moments of liberation, of flight, where the world seems open and limitless. But, are you feeling the same as me. Or, to use the analogy of color: Do you see the same lime-green as I do when I say "lime-green" or do you see magenta?


Nostalgia of the Infinite
So-named for a favorite De Chirico painting. (The first use I found for a color copier was to take a postcard of this painting and then post the copies on walls, doors and telephone poles)
There is a sense, akin to a claustrophobia but not quite, of being trapped in this particular moment as this particular person. The moment is suffocating because there is no alternative to it and one can feel Time as one feels a rough wind, shoving leaves down a hill. Combine this with a distant memory, or sense, of being somehow larger than circumstance, of being able to fly against Fate, to ascend out of this moment, not unlike a liberating dream.

Amnesia of Identity
This happens usually upon waking. The world has fallen away. At first it is like that feeling you have when you have dived into a large pool and have lost your sense of gravity. The world which consists of yourself, your place, the people who inhabit it arrives in layers or in waves, or like sheets of rain, or like clothes pulled around your body, dry and weighty, after surfacing from a chilly swim.
Identity arrives first (who am I? who else is here?) followed by time and space and then artifacts of the world, filled in roughly at first, still half-dissolved, like a painting with faded colors.

Dislocation;"Homesick for another state of being"
The English word "homesick" is an inelegant word. It describes one of a variety of feelings that occur when one has been too abruptly snatched from one state to another. But it is the closest word in English to what I am trying to describe: a homesickness which is more of a nostalgic yearning, a longing that can be felt with the entire body. It is the feeling of being displaced or dislocated but not lost. The Portuguese word "Saudade" also comes close.

The Potential Moment
Something is about to happen. You can feel it in your chest, taste it on your tongue (its a metallic taste). Writers will often use the phrase "the moment was charged with potential" and I believe they are trying to describe or unravel this same emotion. Anything might happen now. Events are happening too fast to either comprehend or control. It is a momentary dizziness. It is standing on a precipice where you do not know if you will fall or you will fly.
But, it is more than just a feeling of possibility. It is also the feeling that the decisions you make now will be far-reaching and continue to manifest themselves in your future. These are the transitions in an episodic existence.
These moments have almost a religious significance and so I can see some similarity to the Bardos of Tibetan Buddhism - those junctures in life where possibility is at its peak.
(Also discovered that Jung, that explorer of inner worlds was himself profoundly affected by the notion of these Bardos)

Feeling of The Unseen
Let us say you walk through an empty room at a party or function where there are others about - one which you have walked through only a few minutes ago. But, since you were there last you notice some small detail has changed. Perhaps a pillow has been moved - or a cup of coffee now sits on the table. But, you see nobody there.
This is akin to that "feeling of being watched" in that a "presence" is nearby but cannot be seen and that affects all perceptions. It can also be the feeling that there is an unseen mechanism, of people and things, which move the world forward. It can also be noticing that someone has closed the door, or the door has closed itself, when there is a cold wind blowing outside. .

Dictionary of the Inexpressible (part III)

Curiously, the notion of the unnameable has its attractions. Drawn by the beauty of words such as duende and saudade, new, forged words have appeared. One such word is "Razbliuto" which is supposed to be "the feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but now does not."
But, languagehat does away with that one handily.

The Night Sky as a Performance

Photo by eddy/aqui-ali. This was at an underground party in San Francisco last night. You call a secret phone number and are told the location. A DJ is there as is a bus serving drinks. I sat in that chair on the right. The moon was full and the sky had a cinematic clarity.

Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value

"Fate will have it - and this has always been the case with me - that all the 'outer' aspects of my life should be accidental. Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value. As a result, all memory of outer events has faded, and perhaps these 'outer' experiences were never so very essential anyhow, or were so only in that they coincided with phases of my inner development."

-Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Introduction (1961)

Love poem (ten minutes after the end of gravity)

-Adam Cvijanovic's Love Poem (ten minutes after the end of gravity)
The city of Los Angeles, ten minutes after gravity has failed, with floating lawns, beds and kitchen utensils.

I try to evoke...

When I go to see art, I always read the artist statements. Typically, the artists stated intentions bear no relation to the actual effect of the art. That is, I am of a mind, that an artists statements can be disregarded. Once their creation has been released to the world, it no longer belongs to them.

For fun, a quick Google of artist+"try to evoke":

I try to evoke the process of self–organization and emergent behavior
I try to evoke some type of emotion in the viewer by the way that I paint the nude
I also try to evoke childhood memories, sometimes weird
I try to evoke an excitement and passion while capturing the fleeting effects of light
We try to evoke elements of the style of objects installed in a room
I try to evoke what Zen practitioners call nothing and everything
A sense of uneasiness and fear is what I try to evoke in my viewer
I try to evoke bodily systems and fluids in a way that allows the objects to seem like mutilated matter
I try to evoke the feeling of images beginning or passing away in ephemeral change, and full of mystery to be discovered

Temporal and spatial distribution of high energy electrons at Jupiter

Temporal and spatial distribution of high energy electrons at Jupiter

I have seen this man before. One friend of mine referred to him as "The Pigeon Man" because of his habit of holding injured pigeons in his arms, tenderly, cradling them like a treasured pet and feeding them, dropping breadcrumbs into their beaks.

He is here now at Cafe La Onda carrying a sheaf of paper. He is distributing leaflets to everyone here. Most people wave him away but I know that his leaflets contain secret messages.

Each leaflet is a xeroxed copy of something he typed up on an old typewriter. It has that beautiful rough look - the irregular type, the randomly bolded letters where the ribbon carried extra ink or the key and lever was hit hard in exclamation.

This particular piece of writing is a random diatribe. The usual suspects are here - "Galactic Stranger","the Businessman's Messiah", medicine, taxes, "the rich and powerful" In this piece, the author, who calls himself JM Ratliff is apparently proposing a scheme of government reform but there are also fragments which I would not hesitate to call prose poetry, cosmic reflections, peeks behind the veil:

"The soul is you in the nite-dream standing thinking seeing feeling & flying, with feet, hands & eyes & wearing memory clothes. Once you are dead it won't matter to you if you lived short or long or at all so why preserve the crims or the basket cases. All things die--birds, trees...If it is to the Something we go, we mite wish we had got there younger."

After he departs, I decide to type his supposed name into Google. The only JM Ratliff I can find is a co-author of a scientific paper titled "Temporal and spatial distribution of high energy electrons at Jupiter" Could it be the same man?

Reading list


"There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly"
- Boris Vian's L'Ecume des Jours (oddly translated as Foam of the Daze)

I was turned on to Vian by Claudia. Her and I made a City Lights expedition to stock up respectively on new books.

There is a grisly story associated with Vian. He wrote another small book called "I Spit on your Graves" and had told a friend that he intended to make it a bestseller.

The book did not sell particularly well at first. But, later a copy of the book was discovered next to the body of a murdered prostitute. Her killer had underlined several passages in Vian's book and had used it as a sort of instruction manual for the murder. After all this came out in the press, the book became a best-seller.

---

Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling
The photographs of Lourdes Grobet

This book, with its striking photographs, covers the mythology of the masked Mexican wrestlers. Most of them inhabited several worlds: appearing in the ring of course, but also in films and comics. The central dogma in the mythology was that a Masked Wrestler (Enmascarado) was never to appear in public without his mask. This makes for some surreal photographs of wrestlers at home, leading ordinary domestic lives, holding their children, going on errands - but always with their mask.

I had not realized the depths to which each one had worked on their own story. Here for example is only a small fragment of the backstory for a wrestler called Tinieblas:

"He is the prototype of the Mexican science fiction superhero: a survivor of a superior pre-Hispanic race that cultivated physical, mental and intellectual powers; a civilization bonded by the magical energy emanating from the universe. His name is Tinieblas ... a direct descendant of beings from another world, who, mistaken for gods, arrived with our forefathers. One of their vessels that reached the Earth, a pyramid-shaped spacecraft, was covered by boulders somewhere in the southeastern jungle..."

And this goes on for pages and pages. Here is a photo of Tinieblas along with Tinieblas Jr, and their dwarf alien sidekick. Incredible stuff if only because it is so fantastic and outrageous.

---

Avalovara
Osman Lins

From my first impression - a convoluted labyrinth of a novel. What else can be said about a novel whose organization stems from the structure of a Latin palindrome? In the book's introduction the translator, the well-regarded Gregory Rabassa, calls this an architectural novel but one that is more akin to "De Chirico than Vitruvius"

Recollections


My parents are both extroverts, by even a loose definiton of that term. They both "know everybody" and are well-loved in return. My mother befriends people at the grocery store- always coming back with some story about how she met a wonderful person in the vegetable aisle. My father is the grand entertainer, hosting parties every weekend, even to this day.

I still like to tell the story that as a child - it was me who was diligent about doing his homework while my parents and ten of their closest friends were dancing to salsa music downstairs, my mother cooking up small plates of food, my father passing out beers and going through his immense record collection. It was me who would say "Can you keep it down, please? I'm trying to get my schoolwork done." It was my own parents who replied "Aww. Always so serious! Come on down and have some fun!"

---

When traveling to visit family abroad, I was known as the "serious" child - the one who seemed lost inside himself. I made friends warily and only with others who seemed to have something to say. Otherwise, I kept to myself, a private person who some still consider to be unfriendly or aloof. I know that this sometimes embarassed my parents. They would anxiously try to explain me away - "That Ricardo lives in his own world." - "He has a rich inner life, you see."

That inner life consisted of my own explorations. Imagined worlds. I still have old notebooks that I used to write in as a child. I see them today only as the monologues of a lonely child. They are full of stories, dreams, invented worlds, attempts to create the axioms of new geometries. There's even a touch of paranoia that I can see now - I was convinced that the role of parents and teachers were to quickly feed us illusions about the world, quickly, before we could see it as it really was - a sort of naked view of things, the world laid bare. And, just as the memory of a dream vanishes quickly upon awakening, most of us have forgotten what we once saw, the pulleys behind the stage, the un-interpreted world.

---

My brother was more like my parents. He started drinking at an early age. He started dating girls before me even though I was two years his senior. He partied downstairs and away at other people's houses while i studied upstairs. He got involved with street gangs, was thrown in jail for graffiti he painted on walls. He never graduated from high school.

As children, and even later as adults, we would have these tremendous fights. We would sometimes hit and punch and brawl, sometimes drawing blood, until our mother, in screams, would separate us. And yet, and yet, despite our seeming differences I will always tell people that the person who is most like me in the world - is my brother.

All of us have a mischievous side - the child-like part of us that loves to play and laugh. That part of us that attacks the world. That part of us that confirms the act of being alive by embracing risk.

That particular part of me is just like my brother's. We have the same sense of humor and the same sense of what is attractive danger. Despite our seeming differences, it is not uncommon to find us both in the corner, laughing together at some joke or plan that only makes sense to us and to nobody else. If our mischievous side is like an inner demon, then the only difference between me and my brother is that he let his demon have too much control. Uncharitably, my brother is how my inner demon would appear - fully unleashed.

---

At the age of 16, I did not know what to do with myself. I can't say that I had many friends although that seemed to be of my own choosing. I did have girlfriends - for some reason I had the inverse problem of most young introverts: I knew how to talk to women but had trouble making lasting friends. My fellow high school students had inexplicably voted me as "Most likely to start a cult."

As I was reeling in indecision, a recruiter from a distant college named Harvard called me at home. He said that all of my high school teachers had urged him to talk to me and that he was impressed by what he had heard. I hadn't really decided that I was in fact going to college. I thought that an ideal life would be close to a monastic life - except with some sex involved somehow. But, maybe academics would suit.

I recall telling my mother: "These people from Harvard keep calling me - urging me to go to their college" Her response was: "Well, that sounds suspicious. I've never heard of the place. Let me ask my friends."

Photographer of the Supernatural

Everytime I've considered giving all this up - this strange little online journal - I manage to get a reminder of why I shouldn't.

I once told my friend Mina that I was giving up - privately archiving everything here and then making it vanish. Her response was pure commonsense:

That's ridiculous. Write every day if you want to. Or, abandon it for months. Just leave it there until you are ready to write again. Don't think of it as an obligation.

Then there is misteraitch. I've never met misteraitch but his weblog is fascinating and well-loved and one of the few I still bother to read. He manages to prove that weblogs can be about more than just navel-gazing or about linking to the same inane things everyone else is linking to. Giornale Nuovo stands apart as a well-curated library of the extraordinary and under-explored.

Finally, there are the emails I've received and the people I've met. When Claudia, of O Mundo de Claudia mentioned she would be visiting San Francisco, I offered to show her around. I had always been a big fan of her writing and photography and observations. (Her weblog, like mine, is linked to by misteraitch - creating essentially a small circle of journals whose themes tend to be the underbelly of culture and arts, the exotic and the mysterious and the sublime sense of the unknown)

I discovered several things about Claudia. Firstly, she is like her weblog - a cultural explorer, a lover of the artistic and the curious. She also has at least two superpowers that I know of:

The first is that she has some secret power amongst the spiders. They seem to know when she is around and react strangely to her presence. If she sees one, as she did on one of our walks, she will pick it up by its little legs and drop it onto her arm and study it.

The second is that she can take photos of dreams. Not unlike, I suppose, those Victorian photographers who managed to snap pictures of ghosts. Here, for example, is a photo she snapped of me, and of a woman who was running at the edge of my imagination. A perfect capture.

Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera

The story of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo is now well-known. The whims of popular culture has rescued this pair from obscurity, especially Kahlo who up until recently was no more than a footnote in the history of Art. (In my opinion, Kahlo's art, imbued with genuine suffering, will outlast Rivera's)

Rivera has always been well-known but he was but one of a holy trinity of Mexican muralists. The other two were David Alfaro Siquieros and Clemente Orozco. Of the three, I'd always preferred the bolder style of Siquieros and considered Rivera to be more showman than artist - like a Mexican PT Barnum (both in audacity and proportions). Siqueiros could be extreme in a way that Rivera could not - I certainly can't imagine Rivera painting anything like Siquieros' "Echo of a Scream"

Still, I had always dismissed all of the muralists - I love the grand format but the style has always seemed to obvious, too full of easy symbolism. I've always preferred their contemporary, the modernist Rufino Tamayo who fused abstraction with Native symbolism and has produced works that are both gorgeous and vivid with color but can also be terrifying and inexplicable. I've never been able to exorcise the image of Tamayo's primeval hounds from my imagination.

"If I could express with a single word what it is that distinguishes Tamayo from other painters, I would say, without a moment’s hesitation: sun. For the sun is in all his pictures, whether we see it or not: night itself is for Tamayo simply a sun carbonized."
-Octavio Paz

There are no works of Tamayo here in San Francisco that I am aware of. But, Rivera and Kahlo paid a visit here. San Francisco is where they remarried. And Rivera had a chance to creatively vandalize some of our walls. The mural at City College is one I have not seen in person. I have seen the image before but had never noticed one thing - Right in the center of the mural, standing as if she is either joining or dividing two worlds, stands Frida Kahlo.

I dont know what this means, this juxtaposition. The antique and the modern clash on the rooftop of a neighbor's house. It is only visible though from a hidden staircase.

I've also started taking photos of colorfields - large expanses of pure color. I've discovered that this works best when there is some small imperfection in the field - an object, a speck, an impurity. The enormity of the snow field is best seen as a contrast to the footprints of a small animal which has wandered through. The sky seems limitless as a field of blue intensity, broken only perhaps by a white wisp - a tiny roving cloud.

"In Italy, the magnetism of museums is irresistible. Last June the Roman Institute of Psychology released the results of a national study involving 2,000 visitors that found 20 percent of them had embarked on an "erotic adventure" in a museum. Also according to the study, a Caravaggio painting or a Greek sculpture is more likely to lead to sex than works by Tiepolo or Veronese. The experts have even compiled a hit parade of Italian museums, listing the institutions in order of their ability to awaken Eros. This state of emotional arousal has been called the Rubens Syndrome, a term derived from the sensuous, superannuated nudes painted by the Flemish Old Master.
...
This isn’t the first examination of the emotional response to art to have been undertaken in Italy. In 1989, Professor Graziella Magherini, a Florentine psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, made her name with the publication of The Stendhal Syndrome, addressing clinical instances of queasiness, disorientation, heightened sensitivity, and panic in people confronted by great works of art or architecture. Some skeptics have attributed the Stendhal Syndrome to fatigue in the age of mass tourism. But the basic difference between the Rubens Syndrome and its nobler forebear is simple—while Stendhal merely makes you swoon, Rubens makes you go out and act on your feelings."

-from a past issue of ARTnews

Bernini's Armadillo-ish

Bernini's rendition of an Armadillo
from The Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi

What is Poetry?

¿Qué es poesía?, dices mientras clavas
en mi pupila tu pupila azul.
¿Que es poesía?, Y tú me lo preguntas?
Poesía... eres tú.

-original by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

What is poetry?, you ask
while your blue eyes rivet mine.
What is poetry? And you ask this?
Poetry... is you.

-translated by Howard A. Landman

What is poetry? thou say'st, and meanwhile fixest
On mine eye thine eye of deepest blue;
What is poetry? And canst thou ask it?
Why, - poetry - is - thou!

-Translated by Owen Innsly, Copyright ©1882 by A. Williams & Company

"What is poesy," you ask
While you fix your pupil blue
On my own. - An easy task
To reply; but why should you
Put this question unto me?
- You, yourself, are poesy.

-Translated by Jules Renard, Copyright ©1908 by Richard G. Badger

"What is poesy?" you ask me, gazing
Into mine eyes with your eyes blue.
What is poesy? And do you truly ask me?
Poesy . . . are you.

-Translated by Young Allison, Copyright ©1924 by Young Allison

"What is poetry?" you ask, as you hold
My eyes with your eyes of blue;
"What is poetry? Well, since you ask me,
It's you."

-Translated by Rupert Croft-Cooke, Copyright ©1927 by Rupert Croft-Cooke

What is poetry? you say,
Holding my eyes with yours of blue,
What is poetry? . . . You ask that?
Poetry . . . it is you!

-Translated by Ina D. Singleton, Copyright uncertain - from Poet Lore magazine circa 1939

Celebrations of the Devil



I have these cycles of sociability. I am capable of being extremely extroverted. But, a few months later I will tumble into an introverted state that is almost monastic in its extent.

I first met my friend A. during an extended social streak in high school. We have remained friends over the decades. He has never let go of this image of me, of this popular person, this charismatic being that he knew then. I think I was juggling several girlfriends at the time and first impressions are lasting.

A. lives in San Francisco now and every few months he holds private sessions at his loft with some of the most well-known DJs and musicians in the city. The guest list for these things is kept small. As he confided to me "This should be small enough to cultivate a sense of family but large enough to qualify as an event"

I sometimes make a showing at these things. I saw M. again who I have not seen in two years. She made me promise again that I would pick up my jazz piano again and her and I would play every hotel in town.

M. and her husband D., also an old friend of A's, are one of the few people I recognize. The guests at these events may be small but they are also always changing.



Afterwards, we wandered over to PapaTobys cafe on 22nd St where we got a private performamce. Talented singing girl with violin.




The night before, I was at the GenArts event which was fantastic. Firedancers, interactive art, large indoor and outdoor spaces, a number of smaller spaces where you could walk in and feel as if you have stumbled into something new. I showed someone some of my salsa moves. I was there with AH. We had walked into the event without paying ($35 I think) and right into the open bars.

I just told her "Lets walk forward confidently until someone stops us"
Nobody did.

----------

The week before, I attended an event (I was there with Bryan who was meeting all his fans) at which a woman whom I had never met came up to me and said this:

"You are the Devil."

When I tried to get her to explain, asking her what was it about me that had prompted that remark, she just looked at me suspiciously and added:

"You do like to talk about yourself, don't you?"

All that comes out of me is a landscape in which you are everything, tree, bee, flower, toast, salt; you are the hard bright stamen of the kingcup, the Greek asphodel, the nervous speaking calyx.

-The Black Book, Durrell

From Ossian to Oscar Wilde

1762
James MacPherson discovers an ancient poem written in Gaelic.
The author is Ossian, son of Fingal.

1773
Thomas Jefferson establishes himself as a great fan of Ossian

1774
The Sorrows of Young Werther is published by Goethe, another fervent admirer of Ossian.
Within it, Werther exclaims:

Ossian has, in heart, supplanted Homer.

1796
Various editions of the Ossian poem are widely distributed and well received.

1813
Napoleon declares himself a huge fan of Ossian and commisions a painting by Ingres: The songs of Ossian

1844
Napoleon's godson becomes King Oscar I of Sweden.
Oscar was not a name in use at the time but had been imposed by Napoleon.
Oscar appears in Ossian.

1854
Named after King Oscar, Oscar Wilde is born

An excerpt from Ossian:

As the dark shades of autumn fly over the hills of grass; so gloomy, dark, successive came the chiefs of Lochlin's echoing woods. Tall as the stag of Morven, moved stately before them the king. His shining shield is on his side, like a flame on the heath at night; when the world is silent and dark, and the traveller sees some ghosts sporting in the beam! Dimly gleam the hills around, and show indistinctly their oaks! A blast from the troubled ocean removed the settled mist. The sons of Erin appear, like a ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners, on shores unknown, are trembling at veering winds!

.

This is all well and good. It draws a literary line of influence through history. Napoleon held his dear book with him, printed up with old poems. The poems themselves however - were an invention.

-Stephan Doitschinoff

The polymathic Piet Hein was an artist and mathematician. He invented the game of Hex, created a unique puzzle called the Soma cube and also is the father of an entirely new geometric entity - the SuperEllipse, as seen in Sergels Torg:

Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over. In the whole pattern of civilization there have been two tendencies, one toward straight lines and rectangular patterns and one toward circular lines. There are reasons, mechanical and psychological, for both tendencies. Things made with straight lines fit well together and save space. And we can move easily — physically or mentally — around things made with round lines. But we are in a straitjacket, having to accept one or the other, when often some intermediate form would be better. To draw something freehand — such as the patchwork traffic circle they tried in Stockholm — will not do. It isn't fixed, isn't definite like a circle or square. You don't know what it is. It isn't esthetically satisfying. The super-ellipse solved the problem. It is neither round nor rectangular, but in between. Yet it is fixed, it is definite — it has a unity.

—Piet Hein

But, Piet Hein for me and for many others is best loved and remembered as the father of grooks:

consolation grook

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.

what love is like

Love is like
a pineapple,
sweet and
undefinable.

Grook to warn the universe against megalomania

The universe may be as great as they say.
But it wouldn't be missed if it didn't exist

A grook is a short aphorism and Hien wrote thousands of them. Each one is a short statement of truth or an admonition. And most were accompanied by a small drawing or cartoon. An encylopedia of abbreviated wisdom.

The City Unraveled

So, I was going by Philz coffee again. (I had written about his popularity with women.)

As I was getting my coffee this time, I noticed a small pile of handmade books titled 'Love Letter to San Francisco' by a certain Spiralgirl. I bought one, the next to last.

The small booklet is divided into two parts. The first half is a series of love letters to san francisco. For example:

"Everything is timed, to the second. And
when you are synchronized with her, time
gets wider. And when time is wide, there is
more of a chance for the people to come into
your life who you are meant to meet.

When time is narrow, we barely notice
what we are doing, we are just going
through the motions."

The city is depicted as a woman, a lover. In these series of short pieces, Spiralgirl reveals a city that can be at times elusive, at times warm, a capricious creature who taunts us with her ravishing architecture but betrays us with her frigid weather. A city full of faults "She's impossible (when it comes to parking)" but redeemed by her charm , her "creative fire."

The second half of this little book is a list of specific places that Spiralgirl has collected. We all have collected places like these, those of us who have made a home here. A small private treasury:

"If you were a film director looking for the perfect lounge for your two characters to have an affair, I'd take you here..."

And

"Expect to see older men wearing white aprons at these places..."

The associated blog for this book is here.

------

"This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
Whatever interests the rest interests me. . . ."
-Walt Whitman

How do you characterize an entire City?

In 1925, the artist Frans Masereel set out to do just that in a small novel called Die Stadt (The City)

It is a wordless novel. Through a series of images, Masereel presents us with a collection of glimpses into this vast accumulation that we call a City.

Start here and then click on the words "Die Stadt" on that page to get started.

She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines -- not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality. Solly was in a measure a victim of this unscrupulous passion, but Freddy was wholly in the grip of it.

-Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

Aztec Religion

On that Saturday, I decided to eat my lunch in Dolores Park in the Mission. The amount of activity at the park is always surprising for its size. Tennis players in one corner. Children playing in another corner, not too far from where gay men in speedos sun themselves on a hot day. In between, Mission area hipsters have picnics alongside large Latin families. You can hear the ringing bell of the Mexican popsicle vendors with their little carts.

Entering the park, I heard the sound of drums. Loud and deep drumming coming from one edge of the park. I followed the sound and discovered that the drummers were a pair of men - tan, muscled men who seemed to be wearing not much more than colorful loincloths and feathered head-dresses. Flowers lay around their feet and they were circling three other people who kneeled solemnly. Two of them were a young couple. The third was an older woman who wore a colorful dress and had her eyes closed intently, as in a deep reverie. She sat among piles of flowers and incense.

I sat down to watch. Sitting around me were about twenty others who, by their dress or by their serious gaze, seemed to be part of all of this. There were also a few spectators, like myself, but most of the others didn't seem particularly dark or Latin.

Sitting near me was a young girl, in her late teens perhaps. She was tall and slender and beautiful with dark skin but sparkling green eyes. Tattoos, abstract glyphs from afar, decorated most of her bare legs.

"What is this about?" I asked her "What is going on here?"

"This is a wedding." She answered. "We are all descendants of the Mexica and these are our ceremonies, our rituals. We follow the old ways. Some think that we have disappeared but we are here, all around this area. Everyone here is so out of touch with their culture [waves her hand to indicate San Francisco] and they forget what came before them. They live their lives not aware of all the treasure they have inherited from their ancestors. These people here around us now, these tourists, they come and just watch, like its a show. They take pictures. But this isn't a show. This is how we honor the gods of Fire, the gods of Death and of Life. A wedding is a sacred event, like a harvest, that connects the old life with the new, and also how we say that we are still here and this will continue - forever."

"Until the end of the world?"

"Until the world is reborn."

"I am just here too, watching"

"Yes, but you are one of us, one of the tribe, are you not?. We are speaking Spanish but Spanish is the language of the conquerors. I am learning Nahuatl. You should too. You should join us."

"How do I find you again?"

"We are meeting next Saturday. Let me tell you the address..."

"Yes. Ok. I'll try to remember. Yes."


The Other Mexican Empire

When Hernan Cortes landed on the coast of Mexico. he stumbled into an existing war. Much of Cortes' skill, as documented in first-hand accounts such as Bernal Diaz del Castillo's Conquest of New Spain (a fantastic read!), was in knowing how to play different Mexican tribes off of each other. The Aztecs were great warriors but they were not well-loved.

Prior to the arrival of Cortes, the Aztec empire was not only fighting small border wars and dealing with internal conflicts but it was also in the midst of figuring how to deal with a formidable new enemy - the Tarascan empire which controlled much of Western Mexico.

The Tarascans were an independent Mexican empire. Their capital was at TzinTzunTzan, the land of the hummingbirds, where a series of small pyramids still stand today. Their language is an isolate, markedly different than other Mexican languages. Many linguists believe that the Tarascans were a South American tribe which had ventured north.

Whatever their origins, the Tarascans were clearly an advanced, warring state. Their metal-working skills were unrivaled in the New World and their new empire was quickly expanding. Over a period of approximately one hundred years, the Aztecs mounted several expeditions to try and conquer the Tarascans, but every attempt resulted in griveous losses. The most well-known is in 1478 where the Aztec king sent forth a force of 24,000 of his elite warriors. They were confronted, however, and ultimately decimated, by a force of over 40,000 Tarascans.

The Tarascans have not been as well-researched as the Aztecs. They left behind few written histories. But there has been a surge of recent interest. In an article titled "Mesoamerican Anomaly? The Pre-Conquest Tarascan State" one author writes:

Recent investigations, particularly over the past twenty years, have revealed a complex culture far more interesting than anyone had imagined. Not only did the Tarascans rule a substantial empire at the time of the Conquest, second in geographical size only to the Aztec – they had also created a culture which was in many ways unlike anything else in Mesoamerica.

As the Aztec empire was crumbling, the king, in a final act of desperation, sent messengers to the Tarascan king Tangaxoan. In effect, asking their greatest enemy for help. The Tarascan king sacrificed the Aztec messengers.

The Tarascans themselves fell quietly. Before the Europeans reached the West, the Tarascan empire was already crumbling from the ravaging effects of disease. Smallpox and Measles killed this powerful and mysterious empire.

Finally, a personal admission. I am Mexican but I am not descended from Aztecs. My paternal great-grandmother walked in bare feet and wore colorful skirts. She and her husband spoke no Spanish. They only spoke Tarascan.

Hinton's Cubes



-From C.H. Hinton (click for larger pictures)

Charles H. Hinton, the author of the 1906 book The Fourth Dimension, believed he had developed a system that would allow anyone to actually visualize the fourth spatial dimension. He went one further and invented a set of colored cubes that, if used properly, would develop this 4th spatial sense.

The 2nd dimension is best visualized as a piece of paper. Inhabitants of this piece of paper can move left or right (1 dimension), backwards and forward (2nd dimension) but cannot move out of the paper up or down (3rd dimension). We are three dimensional creatures who live in a three dimensional space. The fourth dimension is yet another "direction" that we cannot point to, anymore than an inhabitant of the piece of paper can point out of the page.

Hinton was the son-in-law of the famous logician George Boole, the inventor of Boolean logic. He was obsessed with the possibilities of the fourth dimension and published several books on the subject.

His visualization attempts focused on the Tesseract, a word which he coined himself and made its way into popular culture, for example in Madeleine L'Engle's children's book A Wrinkle in Time. A Tesseract is a four-dimensional object which completes the following analogy:

Square (2-d) is to Cube (3-d) as Cube (3-d) is to Tesseract (4-d)

A Tesseract wont fit into our universe. Although, we can construct both the shadow a Tesseract would make onto our plane and we can also construct an unfolded Tesseract. An unfolded Tesseract, for example, is the cross that Christ hangs from in Salvador Dali's Corpus Hypercubus.

The premise behind Hinton's colored cubes is that with sufficient exercise one can develop an intuition for how four-dimensional objects move and rotate in our space. Although it makes no sense at first, the properties of four-dimensional objects are well-defined and known precisely.

After a period of limited popularity, Hinton and his strange cubes lapsed into obscurity. They were re-discovered again in the 1950's when they were featured in an article in Scientific American by Martin Gardner. Gardner presented some of the same history I have given here. Shortly after the publication of his article, he received a series of letters from readers who were both amazed and also a little concerned about the rediscovery of the cubes. Here is one such letter:

Dear Mr. Gardner:

A shudder ran down my spine when I read your reference to Hinton's cubes. I nearly got hooked on them myself in the nineteen-twenties. Please believe me when I say that they are completely mind-destroying. The only person I ever met who had worked with them seriously was Francis Sedlak, a Czech neo-Hegelian Philosopher (he wrote a book called The Creation of Heaven and Earth) who lived in an Oneida-like community near Stroud, in Gloucestershire.
As you must know, the technique consists essentially in the sequential visualizing of the adjoint internal faces of the poly-colored unit cubes making up the larger cube. It is not difficult to acquire considerable facility in this, but the process is one of autohypnosis and, after a while, the sequences begin to parade themselves through one's mind of their own accord. This is pleasurable, in a way, and it was not until I went to see Sedlak in 1929 that I realized the dangers of setting up an autonomous process in one's own brain. For the record, the way out is to establish consciously a countersystem differing from the first in that the core cube shows different colored faces, but withdrawal is slow and I wouldn't recommend anyone to play around with the cubes at all.

After Gardner's article and another small revival, the cubes were again forgotten. Recently the author Rudy Rucker has also tried to revive interest in Hinton's toys. Although I haven't felt the urge to do so, my copy of Hinton's book gives all the details for constructing the cubes.

This week I just received my copy of the "Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1990, Fifteenth Anniversary Report" in the mail. All 1600 of my college classmates, their lives laid out on the page. Except of course for those 11 listed in the back of the book as Deceased, including Maria Psychas, talented and beautiful, an acquiantance of mine who died long before her time.

In the 5th year report, and to some extent in the 10th year report, the dominant theme was success and ambition. Everyone was making partner in their Law or Consulting or Investment Banking Firm. Everyone was writing a favorably-reviewed book, touring the world giving concerts or working hard at the billion-dollar Internet firm they had founded.

Now, in the 15 year report, there is a change and it is visible to everyone. One girl, who I happen to know is a famous Hollywood TV writer and Producer with a string of well-known TV series to her credit, mentions this not at all. Instead she writes:

I have heard the opinion expressed that there is no point in a woman getting a Harvard education if she's just going to shunt her career aside in favor of being a mother. Of course, that presumes there is nothing before or after being a mother and that it wouldn't be awfully nice to have a mother who could explain Latin American history or Shakespeare....it got me thinking what it all means, this new religion called parenting. It is easy to satirize the parent of today, but I think parenting had to become a religion because it is competing with the religion called career.

Another acquiantance, who grew up near me and is now a succesful investment banker in Manhattan, devotes the space in his biography to encouraging other classmates to call and set up "playdates" between his children and theirs.

In an email mailing list, set up to allow all of us to communicate, yet another classmate (and former roommate of mine) writes:

I'm not going to be at the [reunion] but I, like [another classmate], am pretty interested in what the whole thing means. One interesting thing was that the 15th anniversary reports followed a much tighter typology than the 10th--I think kids are a crucial homogenizing moment, at least externally.

There are still some in the Report who write about their career trajectory but, with few exceptions, they tend to be single. After 15 years our class seems to have suffered a stark split into two religions- the religion of family and the religion of career. On the other hand, 40% of us, including me, wrote nothing at all. What is the third religion?

Notes:

I write little notes all the time - on my laptop, on scraps of paper, or as remembered things, cued off a mnemonic. Sometimes I develop these notes into fuller thoughts or into short essays. But most often they remain nothing more than short hints or observations.

These are my index cards to life. I've made thousands of them over the years. I've lost hundreds. Most are uncategorized. Some, I have sorted into categories such as:

Broken Mirror
Frozen Time
Truth as Narrative
Cultural Horizons
Love, Love, Love
Levels of Consciousness
The Land of Stepping Stones
Truth is Beauty
The Puzzle-Solvers
and so on...

The following ones are a few categorized under: The Labyrinth of Memory

Funes, the Memorious

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils.

-Borges, Funes the Memorious

The Art of Memory

I've written before that I see the world as it is seen by a cartographer. Words, ideas, and especially numbers are concrete things which inhabit a space in my mind. All sequences curl up into spirals (this is true of both the numbers and the alphabet) and both wind and unwind as I view them, rearranging and twisting into angles I can view. Old memories are disconnected islands. Hazy memories are dissolving substances; I try to rebuild them by pasting other memories on them, the way one might slap clay onto clay. Thin, electric lines (of experience?) weave these disjointed spaces together.

The Elaborate Art of Memory Palaces

It was Matteo Ricci, that wandering Jesuit, who introduced the art of memory palaces to Eastern civilization. A memory palace is a method for visualizing all of your memories, an internal architecture which may start as a small house and then expand to include several floors, balconies, hidden chambers. Later, you may add closets or an extra garden, each new space appearing as a repository, a storehouse for your memories. The place should also be fictive, a new creation, so as to flexibly accomodate the unpredictable accumulation of memories.

Jonathon Spence, in his book on Ricci adds:

"Therefore the Chinese should struggle with the difficult task of creating fictive places, or mixing the fictive with the real, fixing them permanently in their minds by constant practice and review so that at last the fictive spaces become "as if real, and can never be erased."

Sacred land

In the same trip to France in which I encountered the dead man, I also visited Mont St. Michel.

We arrived late at the night and that is the best time to arrive. The tourists have all gone back to their hotels but the stone corridors of the Mount are open, the recessed lights cast their glow like torches and, even if briefly, you feel as if you have stepped out of the river of time.

The next day we ran up to the top where the small church at the pinnacle was beginning a Mass. The windows were all open, with their wide views of the muddy plain below. We all had on layers of jackets, huddling from the bitter winds of the French winter. The morning sun lit up the church, cast its rays upon the stone walls and reflected off the swinging thurible which threw out its own incense curls. We sang and then prayed softly, the air disturbed now only by the exhales of frosted breath.

Dreaming tracks

"It was during his time as a school-teacher that Arkady learned of the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as 'Dreaming-tracks' or 'Songlines'; to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'.
Aboriginal creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path - birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes - and so singing the world into existence"

-from Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

If memory palaces are a scheme which invents a landscape to accomodate memories then the Australian songlines are the inverse: Invented memories or songs which are used to create an internal map of an existing physical landscape. Each architectural is named and placed within a story. The narrative develops along with the path on the landscape. A particular tale also marks a pathway.

a map of san francisco
(words as pushpins)

philz coffee

The official draw of Philz coffee is that it is some of the most potent coffee in town. Phil himself urges you to take the first sip immediately so that he can carefully study your reaction.

The unofficial draw is that Phil, an older, distinguished Turkish man, is an avid womanizer and his personal dramas unfold themselves out in the coffeehouse like a stageplay. When I was last there, a woman was standing by the counter and exclaiming with her hands: "This man has broken my heart!" She was also eyeing all of Phil's counter girls: they seem to change every week and are inevitably young waifs who seem down on their luck.

I always ask Phil to make me my coffee. As he was ringing me up, the phone rang. He answered and started nodding sympathetically. I can hear him whisper soothingly into the phone: "No, no... You're a strong woman. Yes....Ok, why don't you come by and see me this afternoon.."

hemlock tavern

Remember, this is where I was that night when we lost each other. Your friend Mira didn't recognize me at first. I told her I'd be wearing a black velvet coat on top of a black t-shirt. Reverting to my anxious young days of a high school Goth. It was dark and she must have confused me with a shadow.

The bands were playing in the tiny back room. Wild, loud, crazy music that reminded me of when me and Tom used to sit in his room in college and play the Sex Pistols at indecent volumes. This is the place in the city to see bands in their youth, playing loud, screaming with energy. The band that got us going was Radio Vago (they flayed like muppets). We stayed and dance longer than we intended. Restlessly I went looking for you, in every shop and bar. I found you later, sulking quietly with your cat-like eyes in the back booths of a dirty establishment.

cafe la boheme

Aging latin american revolutionaries. Salsa dancer gentlemen with their careful suits and tucked handkerchiefs. Chess players who look like they sleep in the street. A language tutor reciting Italian phrases. Medical students with their shuffles of paper, their tired gaze . Dancers from the dance studio next door waiting for their ride. Arguments about Central American politics. A couple girls with purple hair. I am here to order an espresso.

This is cafe la boheme. Sitting at 24th and Mission, a true cultural crossroads where bible-wielding zealots yell at commuters. Latin music blares out of windows and Chinese restaurants double as donut shops.

myth restaurant

Secrets (left as notes in my pocket) told me that the food, the experience would have that flow of a smooth dance, those invisible transitions and discarded time-sense of a settling twilight. I went with MB there for her birthday. I told her how much her presence had become a vital sensation, this tangible treasure in my life.

We shared Manhattans and got stinking drunk. By the end of the night we had forgotten our sense of time; we had misplaced anything outside of the immediate moment. As when you lean forward in the middle of a garden and surprise yourself with the frenzy of the ants or the thinly veined leaves of a wildflower.

hotel biron wine bar

This was the secret hideaway. On the way there, I pulled you out of the path of a car.
A small cavern that feels like you have stumbled on an underground affair (I'm still looking for a place like the one in Paris, where we stumble through tunnels in the middle of the night and emerge on a hidden cinema...there is a place like that in San Francisco but I won't reveal it so casually.) I am trying to compile a list of refuges.

I am thinking of a certain September: Wood pigeon Red Admiral Yellow Harvest Orange Night. You said, "I love you." Why is is that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? "I love you" is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.

Caliban: You taught me language and profit on't is
I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language.

-Written on the body

-----

A riddle ... The reader is curious first of all and convinced that
zaum means something, i.e. has some logical meaning. Hence one
can sort of catch the reader by a worm-riddle, by mystery. Women
and art have to have mystery; to say "I love" is to make a very
definite commitment, and person never wants to do that. He is covert,
he is greedy, he is a mystifer. And he seeks, instead of I - e [I love],
something equal and perhaps special - and this will be: lefanta chiol
or raz faz gaz . . . kho - bo - ro mo cho - ro and darkness and zero
and new art! Does an artist intentionally hide in the treehole of
zaum? - I don't know ...

-from Zaum

Occupation

1. I've returned to San Francisco only to discover that something from Asia returned with me. I first noticed it as a series of blood red spots on my lower legs. I dismissed it as a minor rash or as an insect bite (this is when you let yourself briefly imagine a shiny but terribly tentacled thing crawling up your pantleg before you shut down that avenue of thought altogether) But it turned out to be a bacterial infection and when I noticed it was starting to grow and spread, I called my doctor in a panic.

Its always struck me how there are so many different diseases out there and although some are rare and others are not so rare, they make up such a huge population that all of us somehow have to take our turn at hosting one or two, doing our statistical duty like being forced to quarter enemy soldiers.

2. In my volume of Icelandic fiction,, the author writing the introduction presents us with a vision of Icelanders as leading many lives, brightening their society with their multiple facets:

If it sometimes seems that everyone is a writer in Iceland, it must be noted that most Icelanders juggle several jobs - the only way to run a full-blown state and economy with fewer than 300,000 people, maintaining all the while the illusion of cosmopolitan city life in small-town Reyjavik. The mailman moonlights as a veggie chef, and the DJ teaches kindergarten during the day. Both have a couple of books of poetry out.

Hong Kong, China
Mid-Levels



I arrived in Hong Kong expecting to walk into an urban forest; the Hong Kong as seen and photographed by Michael Wolf, a modern city planted on an island but stretching up into the clouds.

I was used to the density of New york city but that didnt fully prepare me for the density of Hong Kong. Parts of Hong Kong manage to be the most densely populated areas on the planet. You can feel this for example even in Kowloon as you squeeze into the top of a double-decker bus, your face nearly against the window. Another double-decker bus goes by and you could reach out your hand and touch it if you dared. Below you, the buses are moving forward like boats, navigating through the sea of people on the street. The bus is filled mainly with Chinese, with older women and their shopping bags, older men reading their newspapers and racing forms (this is a theme in Hong Kong; Dim sum places have a special stand under the table to accomodate newspapers and racing forms), young women heading to their retail jobs and the occasional ex-pat, usually British or French. As you approach an intersection and look down the other streets you get an effect like a hall of mirrors as you see the same scene, the buses and the waves of people, in street after street replicated endlessly.

Hue, Vietnam
Zen Monastery



We had told the driver to take us to the monastery and he had assured us that he knew the way. Several times along the road, however, he pulled over the cab, walked up to a roadside vendor and after a short and uncertain exchange got back in the cab and continued driving.

We had left the main town of Hue much earlier in the evening. The haze glow of streetlights had been replaced by the occasional small fire or the raw, hanging lightbulbs which illumnated a small hovel or the faces of people huddled together in a tiny, earthy shack.

We almost drove right by the main monastery gate. It was not marked by any lights but as the headlights of our car swung around in the dark they revealed a large stone gate crowded with writing. Driving through the gate led to only more confusion as the road forked into many paths. We drove around wildly until, after a sudden left turn, the main gate which led to the monastery grounds appeared only a few feet away.

We got out of the car and I took out my camera that night for the first and only time. Our taxi sat there at the gate like a parked spaceship. We told our driver we needed to go on foot from here and would he sit and wait for us. We would try to return within an hour.

And so we walked through the gardens in complete darkness. We felt out and walked carefully on a gravel path which surrounded a series of black ponds. The only accompaniment to the sound of our shuffling feet were crickets and the sounds of both leaves and water. We guided ourselves by a small light we had seen in the distance.

When we reached the dimly lit building, a young aspirant in brown robes saw us and ran out to meet us. His aspirant status was marked by a thick lock of hair which dangled from his otherwise bald head. He motioned us to sit at a table and we bowed to him as he bowed to us in return. Several young boys appeared and stood back from us, watching us carefully as they cupped their hands to their mouths and hid their small giggles.

"How may I help you?" the young aspirant asked us with a broad smile. A. explained to him that she was here looking for two monks who were visiting from a monastery in France. He left us and returned a short while later. "They are in Meditation right now." he said and a after a short silence added "Would you like to join us in Meditation?"

At first led through the darkness, we walked into a broad temple where all the long wide doors had been flung open. About twenty monks, young and old, were taking their places on the stone floor. We followed, we with our loud Westerner clothes, removed our shoes and walked with as much grace as we could muster settling ourselves down cross-legged into our mats. As we sat down, a light rain had begun to fall outside. Gusts came in from outside and rippled through the monks robes as their bodies and ours tried to be still as statues.

During the hour of silent mediatation followed by a half-hour of chanting sutras, I was certain that I had killed all circulation in my legs several times. I imagined myself hobbling out after the meditation as a dissapointing casualty.

Like a magician at the crossroads
who summons up an illusory crowd and cuts off all their heads
And so, all worlds are equally illusory
And with this knowledge, he had no fear

After the meditation and chant (I memorized the one above) we slowly walked out of the temple in procession. A small dog had entered the temple during our all of our chanting and then had lain down across the floor and fallen asleep. The monks now scattered out of the temple, slipping on their sandals, and dashing off into the woods.

We could still hear the crackle of the rain outside and so we huddled just outside the temple. An elder monk came to greet us and to chat. He had dispatched several young monks to go fetch us umbrellas.

We again walked back through the darkness but this time each of us walked through the forest arm-in-arm with a monk holding an umbrella, leading the way. We formed an impromptu procession, all of us paired with a monk, sheltered by an umbrella, walking together through the dark woods. Their feet knew the path and at each imminent step or rise, my escort would whisper to me something like "Hup!" so that I would avoid a stumble.

The taxi was still there. We saw it from afar. With its headlights on, it was moving back and forth, back and forth, trying desperately to turn around in a small space. With its roar and its lights, it reminded me of some fantastic trapped beast.

The taxi driver saw all of us emerge from the woods and was astonished. We held hands with the monks and said goodbye.

Vientiane, Laos
Happy Laos New Year

We arrived in Vientiane at the same time as the New Year. Buddhist monks told me my fortune after I removed my shoes and paid my respects to the Buddha. My fortune looks good: I can achieve anything I want to achieve, they tell me, but first I must decide what it is that I want to do. I am a wandering soul who has strayed from his home, they tell me. Of course - I am traveling! No, they tell me, it is not about place but about the heart.

The streets are full of celebrations. One of the more popular rituals of the New Year is to throw water on other people. This has its origins in the Buddhist monks who purify others with water as a symbol of hope and a new beginning. In the streets of Vientiane, this has turned into a grand game in which the entire city takes part. Trucks full of young kids rove across the city and they throw buckets of water on people walking by the side of the road. A woman, determined to get her revenge, runs out of her house with a water hose and manages to spray one of these trucks; she laughs and laughs. Motorcycles roam the city too; the driver drives while someone in the back holds a Super Soaker and sprays people on the sidewalk, other cyclists, passing cars. We were walking down one street, Thanon Fa Ngum, where a woman and her small child were taking turns throwing buckets of water on peoples heads.

On another street, at first quiet, I could nevertheless smell danger in the air: a few wet kids sat and eyed us as we walked by. I saw one kid move suddenly and suspiciously and I yelled "Run for it!" Sure enough, six or seven kids ran out and soaked all of us to the bone.

I think our mistake is to run. Other kids have the right idea. They are already wet and so they stand along the street, with rock music or hiphop music blaring and just laugh and dance as more and more water falls on their heads.

Later, walking through a village we discovered a treehouse and climbed up. Nobody was around so we lay down and took a nap. The treehouse owner showed up later and laughed. She sat there smiling at us and laughed saying "Happy New Year! Happy New Year!"

This was how I spent my first five hours in Vientiane.

A message from A. who is in Vietnam traveling with Thich Nhat Hahn. I post this here for others that know her. Excerpts:

...Its like traveling with the dalai lama, we usually
arrive in places in a big procession. Its quite something, with the
drums going to announce his arrival, and everyone bowing to us and
giving us flowers.  People mistake me for a nun when I am wearing my
robes (the robes we laypeople are wearing are the same as the nuns - a
gray ao dai)....

..we went to a museum about an hour from the temple where
the monastics stay, and were watching the ethnic peoples perform these
fantastic dances to the drum and gong (and also displays of sword and
spear fighting).  This sweet woman in her seventies was fanning me so
i wouldn't get too hot.  She spoke english and had worked for the
american embassy and had a half american child.  All of this means
that she must of have suffered a lot, because the americans abandoned
the vietnamese who worked for them in the embassy, and people who had
amercian children here were reviled for a long time.  So I thanked her
after the performance and hugged her, and she started weeping and said
"I miss you so much"; I think she was not talking to me but to the
Americans who abandoned her...

ARMILIA. A mysterious underground city located at the North Obscure Pole. The only part of it ever seen looks like a cross between an armiliar sphere and a complicated clock. It appears that it can be used to manipulate both time and weather. The serious breakdown of 746 AT may have been caused by a little boy named Bronislaw Kunkely, believed to possess paranormal powers.

This is one entry in the Encyclopedia of Obscure Cities. This English introduction provides only a minor glimpse of what is an enormous and detailed invented Universe. The main site Urbicande is not so navigable; be careful or you might get lost within its structure.

One obvious inspiration is that of Italo Calvino and his Invisible Cities, a book composed of vivid stories of different cities, each both peculiar and ravishing. (Or, perhaps they are all facets of the same city)

There is of course a city named Calvani:

One of the loveliest of the Obscure Cities....Calvani is a vegetarian city, and no exception is tolerated. It produces great wines and subtle perfumes, and rare woods are used as currency. Because so much of the city is made of glass, window-washers are very powerful there.

I long ago abandoned Google's Orkut after having been an early member. Occasionally I still get "friend" requests from people I dont know, mainly Brazilians. I always say Yes because...well, why not?

About a year ago I accepted a request from a random Brazilian woman named Nancy. Soon after that she started emailing me (and her 300 other contacts) these random little messages, mostly what could be called life-advice. Stuff like:

It depends us! Education , Experience and memories are the three things , no one can take away from you . then , Things are as they are , it is you who label them as beautiful or ugly ..

Since I had called her a friend, she was able to email these little missives directly into my inbox. At first I was getting maybe one or two a week and I started to consider whether perhaps I should un-friend this woman. But, I came to start liking their quirky style, their simple platitude like nature as well as the gross grammatical errors and misspelling which make it clear she is putting these together herself. Here are some more of her happiness koans:

Happiness is a state of mind and can be achieved by cultivating the mind and not by possessing materials...

and, an untypically longer one:

"We all want to fall in love. Why? Because that experience makes us feel completely alive. Where every sense is heightened, every emotion is magnified, our everyday reality is shattered and we are flying into the heavens. It may only last a moment, an hour, an afternoon. But that doesn't diminish its value. Because we are left with memories that we treasure for the rest of our lives."

True friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget.
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend..
its a gift for me

Anyways, recently I realized that I had not received anything from Nancy since January. Perhaps she had wandered off, i thought, found some new forum to disperse her messages. I didnt realize I had actually started to miss her little notes and their strange little grammar. So, today, i was a bit relieved when I opened my mailbox and read this message, from a familiar sender:

Duty makes usdo things well but love makes us do then beautiful...

Cosmological fragments:

1. The ancient astronomer Hipparchus compiled a sky catalog which has never been seen.

Recently, however, it was discovered that the Universe of Hipparchus has been in front of us all along. A statue known as The Famese Atlas which sits in a museum in Naples, has held it in its arms.

2. I've always liked this short poem that the Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote as a homage to Claudius Ptolemy:

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

The Cosmic Triangle: The Fate of the Universe explained



The diagram above was first introduced by astrophysicists last year as a graphical way of representing the current state of the future of the Universe. You may have heard of exotic phrases like cosmic expansion, dark matter, dark energy and other grand terms. The Cosmic Triangle compresses all these different fates into a handy and colorful chart.

The Universe, as we know, is expanding. But, is it slowing down? Is it speeding up?What are those strange symbols on the edges of the chart and what do they have to do with it?
I will try to explain.

Omega-M: Matter Density
The Matter Density is a statement about how much gravitational matter is in the Universe. We have the tools today to estimate how much this is, although we also believe that Matter comes in two different types:

Visible Matter
Visible Matter is the Matter we are all famliar with. Matter is what we are made of. Matter is also light. It is also what we call Anti-Matter.
We can estimate how much of it there is in this Universe just by looking at the Stars. We know how heavy the Stars, like our own Sun, are and we know about how many Suns and other stuff is in a typical Galaxy and, finally, we know about how many Galaxies there are in the Cosmos. So, if we total all this up we get a number which is... not very much.

Dark Matter
It turns out that when Astrophysicists were modeling Galaxies they came up with something surprising. Galaxies tend to bunch up together and form Galactic Clusters. These Clusters are like big Gravitational systems, bound in the way that our Earth is bound to our Sun, but on a much grander scale.
But when they tried to model these Clusters they found that the Galaxies were moving in such a way that they seemed to be responding to more than the Matter we could see. The Galaxies in a Cluster are moving too fast! They should be flying off but they are not. Something is holding them together. But its not something that we can see. We call it Dark Matter but that doesnt mean that its like anything that we know. Its just a term for what should be there.

In any case, even if you calculate how much Dark Matter there is and add it to the stuff we can see, it is not enough to really affect the Universe in any significant way. That is, all other things being equal, all these objects in the Universe are not enough to slow the Universe down, to reign it in.

Omega-K: Curvature
The Curvature Parameter is a measure of the shape of our Universe. Our Universe has three dimensions but it also has a shape in a higher-dimensional space. The particular shape of the Universe strongly affects its ultimate fate. Essentially, there are three possibilities for the shape: Open, Closed and Flat. An Open Universe will keep expanding forever. A Closed Universe is about to shut its doors; the waiters are serving the last bits of coffee and someone has showed up with a mop. A Flat Universe sits right in between, expanding forever, but just barely.
All indications are that our Universe is or is nearly Flat (we measure this by looking at our Universe's past and how it has evolved). This means that it might be exactly Flat.
One of my old astrophysics teachers, a British guy who wore a tight collar and flailed his arms a lot, used to say: "If our Universe is nearly flat, then it must be Flat. Why would it be nearly-something if it were not that thing!"
It sounds convincing. But the same argument can be made about our Earth and how its orbit is nearly a circle. We have a history of searching for perfection and then discovering that its the deviations which are more fascinating.

Omega-Lambda: Vacuum Energy
Now this is interesting. In recent years, it has been discovered that our Universe may not only be expanding but also accelerating! But, since Gravity and Matter can only slow the Universe down, what is making it speed up? The simple answer is: We don't know. But instead of admitting that, it is easier to give it a name and then talk about it. The name for this mysterious energy that may be propelling the Universe outward is: Dark Energy
If something is making the entire Universe expand then it is probably not something that sits at a particular place; It is likely everywhere, intrinsic to the Universe itself. And so this Dark Energy can also be thought of as Energy of the Vacuum, that is, a repulsive force which is part of the very nature of Space itself.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy have similar names but they have nothing in common. If anything, they are opposites of each other. Dark Matter, like regular Matter, is slowing the Universe down. Dark Energy, this anti-pressure, is speeding the Universe up.

The Cosmic Triangle
Based on what we currently know, our Universe sits at the circle labeled Lambda-CDM (Cold Dark Matter). That is, we live in a Universe that is fairly flat, has very little matter, some sort of mysterious repulsive force and, by a clear margin, looks like it will keep expanding forever.

But this is all subject to change. One of the major assumptions is that information we have about the Universe now is even valid when talking about its past or future. It is like those spaceships with tailfins from 1950's era futuristic visions: What we know about the future can quickly become outdated.

Too Many Names


Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
and the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your weary scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed out by the waters of night.

No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or Maria, all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
Of Chiles and Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
and I know it is without a name.

When I lived amongst the roots
they pleased me more than flowers did,
and when I spoke to a stone
it rang like a bell.

It is so long, the spring
which goes on all winter.
Time lost its shoes.
A year is four centuries.

When I sleep every night,
what am I called or not called?
And when I wake, who am I
if I was not I while I slept?

This means to say that scarcely
have we landed into life
than we come as if new-born;
let us not fill our mouths
with so many faltering names
with so much sad formalities
with so much pompous letters,
with so much of yours and mine,
with so much signing of papers.

I have a mind to confuse things,
unite them, bring them to birth,
mix them up, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the oneness of the ocean,
a generous, vast wholeness,
a crepitant fragrance.

— Pablo Neruda

Yesterday was the vernal equinox, one of the two moments in the year when the Sun crosses the celestial equator. Days are as long as nights and so the world can be said to be balanced.

I was at the San Francisco Exploratorium as part of their Chichen Itza event. A team of people were broadcasting from the pyramid at Chichen Itza to San Francisco. The Sun rose in the sky and at the moment of the equinox itself, the alignment of the pyramids cast the shadow of a serpent upon one of the staircases.

I was there speaking and answering questions about the Mayan Calendar system.

My favorite analogy for the structure of Mayan time is wheels within wheels. The Mayans like us, were attentive to the cyclical nature of most events. The cycles of the Moon, the Sun and the Seasons were like great wheels in slow revolution.

The Tzolkin calendar, or religious calendar, consisted of 13 numbered days and 20 named days. These two wheels turning together made up a 260-day calendar.

The Haab or civil calendar was 18 months of 20-day periods along with an extra 5 days for a total of 365 days, not unlike our calendar.

A specific day could be named with both its Tzolkin name and its Haab name. Because of the different lengths of these calendars, a day was unique within a 52-year period. This 52-yr period was the Mayan Calendar Round. Every 52 years the Mayans waited to see if the Gods would choose to renew their world or to destroy it.

For longer periods, yet another calendar, The Long Count, was used. The smallest wheel in the Long Count was a period of 20 days. The next was 18*20 (360) followed by 20*18*20, followed by 20*20*18*20, followed by 13*20*20*18*20. This longest period of days amounted to just over 5,000 years and is known as a Mayan Era. It was the longest period that had a direct effect on human affairs although longer periods were known and named by the Maya, including a cycle of 63 Million years known as the alautun.

From historical records, the beginning of the last Mayan era can be dated to 3114 BC. Counting forward, this places the end of the current Mayan era in December of 2012 AD.

Besides these well-known calendars, the Mayans had many others. It seems that the Mayans were intoxicated by both Time and Mathematics. One of my favorite cycles is one of 819 days (a little over two years) which has an unknown name or purpose.

The 819 day cycle is the product of three different smaller cycles: A 7-day cycle which was the Mayan Representation of Earth, a 9-day cycle which was the Mayan number of Heaven or Gods (and was represented by the Nine Mayan Lords of the Night) and, finally, a 13 day cycle which represented the Inferno. (It seems that the number 13 has been universally unloved.)

The diagrams we had prepared to help people visualize all of this was a large assembly of gears. The Universe depicted as a conjunction of all these different cycles, as a ticking mechanism whose parts, when they align, can signal transcendence or catastrophe.

A real-life acquiantance, Annelene, starts her own journal. About environmentalism. About the Spiritual Quest.

Audio as an Enchantment



Witness is an audio sculpture by the artist Susan Hiller. Tiny speakers of various lengths hang down from the ceiling. From a distance it seems like the babble of a crowd but, unlike a crowd, people are not trying to make themselves heard individually. So, each voice is more moderated, more rythmic. If you listen carefully, the combined pitches of all the steady voices sound a bit like music.

Each speaker is telling a story. For this particular sculpture, Hiller collected hundreds of accounts of people's encounter with extraterrestrials.

If you do not get a chance to see this work then you can buy the book from Artangel, which not only includes all the stories in written form but also an audio CD. First a man with a deep voice and a thick New Zealand accent tells us a story. Followed by a woman with a delicate British accent and another woman with a lazy Southern american accent. They are different ages and sexes and come from different areas and economic classes. But, their stories of abduction sound eerily the same.

As Hiller says:

I got very interested in the way that people see things and how they tell stories about what they’ve seen - sometimes it’s quite outrageous. In former times these would have been stories about angels or ghosts. Now people always tell you these UFO stories. Then I began doing this research and found out that there were just thousands of these stories.... As you walk through you’re hearing little bits of stories. I was very precise about not letting it deviate from a formal coherence. But because each voice is as individual as a fingerprint, there are no two voices that are alike in the whole piece; it becomes much more than I could have ever imagined.

.....

The Quiet American has been releasing unquiet one-minute vacations for over two years. Its an audio presence delivered to your ears:

One-minute vacations are unedited recordings of somewhere, somewhen. Sixty seconds of something else....If it's your birthday, this is your present.

......

The Audium is a sound-sculpture place here in San Francisco, a project organized and run by one man who believes strongly in the solidity of sound:

We are conceived in sound
we grow
and emerge in its wake.
Our history is a collection
of sound sensations,
experiences, emotions
All uniting into an aural identity.
It is this ocean
of recollections, sound images,
dreams, memories
We share.

In 1997 I met John Mack in New York City. He was in town giving lectures on UFO abductions and had already gained notoriety because of his association with Harvard (In fact, I met him in the lounge of the NYC Harvard club) He gave a small lecture that evening to a small group of us. There were about eight of us there that evening, leaning intently forward in our armchairs, listening to him tell us about the classic symptoms of abduction while he played videos for us of children and other "informants" that he had taped on a recent visit to South Africa.

The children, I recall, had the look not of amazement but of quiet reticence, as if by talking they were breaking a secret promise. One girl calmly told the camera about gigantic objects descending from the sky and opening themselves up to eject a few small dark men who moved like creatures made from lightning and talked to the children in strange tongues.

The story she told was fantastic and yet as she told it, she seemed to be reciting it, laying out a simple set of facts. As I listened to her, it reminded me of when a child tells you an invented story, at once imaginary yet also plainly told, as when they tell you all about the secret double life of a favorite pet.

i also recall that she visibly trembled at one point as she remembered the cold grasp of one of the strangers. What exactly had she seen?

----

As a child I had that strong will to believe. I had a theory that if the world sometimes seemed mundane it is because adults had wished it so. They had cast out all of the magic from this world in a sort of vast exorcism and magic now lived precariously, warily existing among the shadows.

Its with this frame of mind that I started reading books. To me, Spaceships and Icebergs were as real as Magicians and Demons. They all existed together out there, in a hazy half-reality at the edges of the visible world.

-----

In "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar", Roald Dahl advises us that this is not a story but a true account. He once met an Indian yogi who had developed a supernatural sense of vision. He had the ability to see right through everyday objects as if they were as transparent as glass.

The yogi instructs us as to how to develop these same abilities. You must stare into a candle flame. Not just stare but really look at it and focus your gaze. The path to supernatural vision is to practice looking deep into the candle flame until you have walked into the flame, until you have walked right through it and your eyes have received the gift of true vision.

Roald Dahl's friend, Henry Sugar, manages to penetrate the fire and develop this magic sight. He takes his gift and heads to casinos where he is now able to look through playing cards. He makes a lot of money but also realizes, as the story descends to its conclusion, how little money really matters. By the end of the story, Henry Sugar is a deeply changed man.

I must have spent hours staring into the flame.

-----

MB said to me the other day:

"In youth, we know nothing. But we do understand that this world is full of rules. Some make sense but most are completely incomprehensible. So what do we do? We start out in this world as mimics, as parrots. Parrots is a good word. Children have the instincts of birds."

I said: But then you grow up?

"But if you have even the slightest sense of depth inside you then you soon discover that these words, these tools, these things exist somehow apart from you. Inside of you is this turbulent mind, full of opposing ideas, of fragments, of vague conceptions and these ideas gather in your head like a storm. But you can't release these ideas into the world because the only form of expression you have are these words and this linear grammar. Words can never convey who you are can they?
They can never convey this You, this secret you."

Panegyric

I just found out today that a college friend of mine has died. I found out through a mutual friend.

He was terrifyingly brilliant. You could sense that anything was within his reach. Yet he also seemed a bit restless and sometimes you could see in his face a haunted look, like that of a man on the run.

In the mid-90's he tried to recruit me for one of his Internet companies. I didnt join him but he ended up making millions. Later, he lost those millions. Much later, he made millions again. He had that magic power as if his world obeyed a different set of rules than yours or mine.

Friends and I noticed that he seemed to be living life at twice the speed that we were. He struggled hard with addiction and substance abuse, problems which held him back from his own great ambitions. Whereas we saw a shining light, he was struggling against his own darkness.

I dont know much about how he died except that his body was found in a "hotel room in Venezuela" (according to one of his former wives) with all the imagined backstory that that conjures up regarding what he was up to in his final days. I was also told that he had collapsed to such a mental state that he was not the person "we once knew." It is clear that the decision to leave this world was his own even if that decision had the clarity of fog.

He was only 36. One of those cases of a life lived twice as fast but, unfortunately, only half as long.

Rest in peace, RD.

Two odd Flash thingies:

The Art Machine
Using a Myst-like interface explore some abstract questions about Modern Art.

Tropical America
"Your journey begins as the sole survivor of a terrible massacre - you must find four pieces of evidence to bring justice to the memory of your small village." I found it a bit unsettling but oddly compelling.