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.

My first Almodovar movie was probably in college and it was probably Labyrinth of Passion, starring a young Antonio Banderas. My personal early favorite film of his is Matador, with its odd take on the cultures of sex and death.

Almodovar has a set of themes that I like to look for and then discover in each of his films. He may or may not have put them there consciously but they have come to define him. I dont mean obvious things like transgendered characters, strong women who draw others in around them or plots about the cruelty and disappointment of love. The themes I have in mind are more in the background and sometimes peripheral to the main story, like an Almodovar-esque wallpaper.

The Lives of Strangers

In idle moments, when we are waiting for something to appear, the camera will catch a peek of other people's lives. A woman sits by herself in a car. Strange shadows in a distant window. Receptionists, when approached, quickly close a drawer. Every character, no matter how minor, has a rich inner life, briefly glimpsed.

Crying

Nostalgia. An emotional catastrophe. Everybody is ready to cry. Often with sweeping music rising in the background. And everybody carries a handkercheif which they can quickly pull out to dry the tears of a stranger.

Characters from the fringes of Society

There is one scene in the movie All About My Mother where the protagonist is looking for her old prostitute friends. She arrives at some area where cars are slowly driving around in a sort of procession. The headlights of the cars look like stage lights. The brightly dressed prostitutes prance slowly around.

Before we leave this scene, we see two prostitutes who are off to themselves, idly playing the childrens game of patty-cake. The entire sequence seems as if it was lifted from a Fellini movie, as if any moment 8-1/2's La Saraghina herself, with her painted eyes and toothy smile will walk by and do her dance.

Almodovar films include characters with a hint of unreality, like refugees from a dream. But the characters are not surreal nor carnivalesque. They are real but exist at the edges of the everyday life:suicidal lovers, terrorists and pregnant nuns, people who are both unfamiliar and yet share the same capacity for emotional tragedy and mischief.

Voyage into the Underworld

In many movies, there is a search for a missing person or someone who bears something vital. There is an inevitable scene where the searcher, like a modern Orpheus, must make a descent into the Underworld. In Almodovar, this is a modern underworld, a street world of drugs and prostitution, with men and women who cast our hero an unsavory look.

Music

Its the movie Labyrinth of Passion (I think) where Almodovar himself, dressed in a black leather jacket with his bare legs showing, makes an appearance as the lead singer in a band. The song was'nt much but it was catchy: Gran Ganga, which translates roughly as Big Party.

I've bought a few albums based on nothing more than hearing a song in an Almodovar film. Here's two songs I'll make available:

1. Paloma by Caetano Veloso from the film Talk to Her
2. Puro Teatro by La Lupe (the Queen of Latin Soul) from the film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

The surgery room itself was bathed in a luminescence so radiant that I could count the particles of dust in the air. It stood somehow apart, stark and inviolate. And there in the center of the room lay the Countess Kifune, focus of concern for both those outside the room and those inside, who were closely observing her. Wrapped in a spotless white hospital gown, she lay on the operating table as if a corpse - face drained of color, nose pointing upward, chin narrow and frail, and her arms and legs seeming too fragile to bear even the weight of fine silk. Her teeth were slightly visible between pale lips. Here eyes were tightly closed, and her eyebrows drawn with worry. Loosely bound, her hair fell lightly across her pillow and spilled down the operating table.

-from Kyoka Izumi's Japanese Gothic Tales. So lavish and attentive.

Is it possible to imagine a fusion of the Japanese and Gothic aesthetic? The bare surfaces upon which events unfold, the subtle chill in the narrators voice as if the story is being carefully spoken and not just read.

Reading different books I'm always struck that I'd like to combine the voice of one narrator with the scenery of another, the prose of one with the compact storyline of yet another. What would a literary mutant read like that combined the lush scenes of Peakes' Ghormenghast with the ascetic cruelty of say Lautreamont's Chants of Maldoror?

Izumi has drawn parallels with Edgar Allan Poe. His stories are short-ish but memorable episodes usually with some haunting fact that lurks in the background. Also, Izumi's prose is less spare than Poe's; His prose is much more visual and sometimes confusing in its attempt to casually disregard Time and try to present the story all at once.

Izumi's Japanese contemporary, Rampo, author of Japanese Tales of Mystery and imagination has not only drawn comparisons with Poe, Rampo has adopted Poe's name and wrapped it in Japan. What do I mean? Rampo's full name is: Edogawa Rampo

I haven't read Rampo yet but he is next.
.......

I've also been reading pulpish things lately. Like the adventures of Quatermain by H. Rider Haggard.The story She for example is one of those kinds of stories that begins with a breathless narrator. See what I mean:

In giving to the world the record of what, looked at as an adventure only, is I suppose one of the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men, I feel it incumbent on me to explain what my exact connection with it is. And so I may as well say at once that I am not the narrator but only the editor of this extraordinary history, and then go on to tell how it found its way into my hands.

Some years ago...

Karl

And so he was telling me all about this traumatic event, that that moment was like a pivot upon which his life had swung around.

He seemed to me to be like a man who had just returned from a long voyage. He was surrounding himself now with a new set of friends and ideas, both like trinkets or adornments which he brought out eagerly to show to others.

He explained that the human need after trauma is to either run away into isolation or to try and create a new small society. He had taken the latter route. We talked about the immediacy of life, the deceptive sense of order we keep rebuilding in our own mind even as we know that most events are chaotic and impermanent.

...

Can the autobiography also be a novel? What if you depict your life as seen from above? I've been re-reading Louis-René des Forêts' ostinato and admiring how he has thrown his life onto the page. Here is himself as a young child:

"Without anything of his own, without a place to flee the gaze of others, hurling himself into with the confused ardor of a young animal penned up, with a right only to an iron bed, hiding away in it until the cruel surprise of dawn"

"The complicitous vocabulary by which we designate the most natural places, the peculiar smells, the familiar objects, like a barbarous chronicle in which we are addressed in a babble without rhyme or reason by invented characters with haughty manners...laughing together under the stupid eye of the parents excluded by their prudent forgetting of the past from this theater of madness until its time to draw its curtain and send all these seraphic princes with their barnyard language off to bed"

It was no surprise from Nathan Spoor

Last week I was invited to a birthday party on Treasure island. Treasure island sits halfway between San Francisco and Oakland, right off of the Bay bridge. Its a flat man-made island and with its small size you feel as if you are walking on the deck of a ship.

One of the highlights was an entire circus trapeze setup. All the guests were given basic lessons and then climbed a narrow ladder, grabbed onto a tiny trapeze and swung out into the void.

The picture on the left is of A. in mid-swing. The picture on the right was taken later in the evening, a view of the city from Treasure island.

1.
The roofers came today. Like trained soldiers assaulting a castle, they threw up their ladders, scurried up to the rooftop and fired up their tar roofing engines.

The owner told me they were doing several roofs that day. From the top of my roof you can see the entire downtown of san francisco, stacked up like a toy city. As they hop from roof to roof, walking through fumes thick as veils, I wondered, do they take time to appreciate the views?

2.
"Ah yes. You and your sardines" a friend of mine used to say, and shake her head.
I have to admit that my love for sardines is visceral, almost savage.

I can trace this back to a hiking expedition in the mountains of Mexico. We were unprepared and had become at first disoriented and then, more clearly, lost. This was in a tropical area and so we fed our thirst by cupping our hands and drinking from springs, lapping up the water like dogs. The only food we had was a small can of sardines that one of us had brought, admittedly, as an afterthought.

I had never had sardines before but we opened up the can and carefully alloted one or two tiny fish to everyone. This was my first experience with sardines, then being presented as a precious delicacy. The smell, the texture of the fish, the fat and fragrance of the oil, and the saltiness produced such a euphoric feeling that I must have closed my eyes and moaned.

Perhaps this is how all food should be first experienced, from hunger, in a moment of desperation.

These days, I don't eat sardines that often because I do not want to dilute that sense of pleasure. When I do buy them it is as a treat, a gift. Each time I do, I get to re-experience that sense of a savage desire being sated.

Musicians in a Graveyard. Exquisite Corpses.

Humor is so innate to culture and language and I have to keep re-learning this.

Idly flipping TV channels with A. and we stop on a Mexican variety show. There's a short skit playing out. I watch the skit and laugh. A. turns to me and asks me to explain it, to translate it for her. So, I start to explain it and as I do so I begin to realize just how completely bizarre it all sounds. "Thats so morbid!" she says and looks at me, incredulously.

Here is the skit:

Destitute man stops well-dressed woman and points his gun at her.
Woman: Oh my God, please don't hurt me!

Man holds out his hat with his other hand.
Man: I'm collecting money for my funeral!
Woman: Your funeral?? I don't understand...

The man then points the gun at his head and pulls the trigger. Only the click of an empty barrel is heard.
The man holds his hat out again to the stunned looking woman.

Man (sheepishly): Actually, I guess I'm first collecting enough money for bullets...
[Audience laughs. Skit ends]

Mexican humor is dark yet elicits a light-hearted laugh. The topic of Death is more apt to appear suddenly in conversations in Mexico than in conversations in the U.S. It is something I've noticed and is also central to what Octavio Paz is saying in his book The Labyrinth of Solitude.

"The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love"

The embrace of death can be seen in the Mexican Day of the Dead which I've written about before. A band of musicians plays in a graveyard. Children point and laugh at skeletons, run and tumble over tombstones. An old woman laughs and tells stories. Another sits silently near a grave, muttering to herself. Everyone eats candy skulls and exchanges small figurines. There are colorful scenes of the world of the Dead. The world of the Dead is just like this world, if not brighter and more colorful, vivid and real, at least for this night. Skeletons dance and get married and sing each other songs of love.

.........

When I was a kid, my friend Matt and I would play something that was like an Exquisite Corpse. But, it went like this: One of us would speak a Noun. The other person then had three seconds to utter another Noun that was unrelated to the first (or lose the game). Now, the first person continued OR he could name a word that united the two previous nouns and win the game. And so on.

So, if I said "fish" you could say "icicle" then I would say "train" then you would say "scissors" and I would say "graveyard" and you would say "paper" and I would say "cannon" and you would say "fire" and then I would say "cannonfire" pointing out your mistake and I would win. Its harder than it sounds since by default your mind makes associations, however subtle and when forced to say another word quickly you will often make an association that even you might not be aware of at first.

We also would play a game of questions not unlike that of the two main players in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

Rosencrantz: Do you want to play questions?
Guildenstern: How do you play that?
Rosencrantz: You have to ask questions.
Guildenstern: Statement, one love.

Rosencrantz: Cheating.
Guildenstern: How?
Rosencrantz: I hadn't started yet.
Guildenstern: Statement, two love.

Rosencrantz: Are you counting that?
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: Are you counting that?
Guildenstern: Foul, no repetition, three love and game.

Rosencrantz: I'm not going to play if you're going to be like that.