One more thing

There's this thing I've noticed about Istanbul: Nose jobs are really popular. Most days, if I look closely, I can see a woman walking down the street with a bandage on her nose indicating that she's just come out of surgery. I call this badge the rhinoplaster. Sometimes I'll even see the recent recipients of nose jobs strolling in pairs. I learned that one of my friends has had a nose job. Very well done, I might add. Other forms of plastic surgery are also very much in demand, they tell me. I have it on good authority that every Turkish girl has a Brazilian wax. My limited experience does not refute the assertion.

Maybe this embrace of superficiality has something to do with Ataturk's project for Turkey: Out with the old, in with the new. That includes your nose, lady. In the light of the secularists' attempt to outlaw the AKP, the nose job assumes a new symbolic significance. More than a white flag raised to European conceptions of facial harmony, it becomes a badge of the project of modernization, the antithesis of the headscarf. In a battle between the rhinoplaster and the headscarf, who would win? Stay tuned. Maybe we'll find out this summer. It will be like a mudwrestling tournament with political significance.

Two for three

I like to throw things. I like to throw them far, for power, as when throwing a rock into a mountain gorge. I like to skip stones along the water for finesse. I especially like to throw small items across a room, as when throwing a crumpled sheet of paper into the trash. The last type of throwing is not done merely for finesse, but in a partially conscious attempt to assert mastery over my physical environment. I go through spells of accuracy and deviation, but being mocked for bad aim really gets to me--because my brain is used to associating the action with greater implications. Over the past few years, I've spent more time that I'd care to admit, usually with friends, flicking or tossing bottlecaps across the room at various targets. It got to the point where it was formalized into a game called Bolf (Bottlecap Golf), complete with its own obstacles, scoring system and handicaps. One of my fondest memories from my time in Zambia in fact involved an extended morning session on the linoleum fairway. Cherished memories!

The deeper connection I was referring to reminds me of something that I did a lot as a child, and which I still catch myself doing from time to time today. If there is a question hanging over me, most often a romantic one, I will attempt to resolve it by a trial of manual dexterity and coordination. As in: If I can make 7 out of 10 free throws, then she will agree to go out with me. Or: Making this Q-tip into the trash on the first try means I should go ahead and tell her how I feel. Damn! All right, maybe I can still think about doing it if I go two for three. Shit balls! Three for five then.

I'm interested by this stuff. Does anyone else do it? What does it mean?

Some Weather

My thought drifted to the weather as I walked on. It struck me that the weather was not only coloring my thoughts in a certain way, but was actually directing them. The specific play of wind and clouds and temperature seemed to make certain thoughts possible while precluding others. There was something to this. I began keeping a log of the weather, jotting down each day's particular combination of atmospheric elements, as well as the thoughts and moods that they entrained.

I could not let it go. There was a charette coming up at the journal, a deadline approaching on a translation, and my apartment was developing a nasty plumbing problem that had me wearing flipflops in the bathroom and pinching my nose. But I could not stop thinking about the weather. The days wore on, and infatuation tilted into obsession. I was not unaware of this greased gradient into folly, but I would not be persuaded that my obsession was anything less than fundamentally healthy, that mine was a solipsistic or irrelevant descent, or that my quest, if pursued with diligence, would not yield up a pearl stunning to behold--a pearl whose at once prismatic and cloudy surface would show its reverent beholders that their true evolutionary destiny lay in not in riding elevators to the tops of air conditioned skyscrapers, but in joining the ranks of homo sapiens meteorologicus.
I saw my hunch confirmed every time I looked out my window onto my wide view of sky and water: There really was something to the weather. More than a shifting background or a convenient foil to smalltalk, weather constituted the fundamental conditions of our daily experience. My conviction grew like a seed that had found purchase in good soil, and soon I thought that the world needed to know. And I already had the perfect forum. My swelling notes on the spiritual mechanics of meteorology could be turned into a running feature in Anatole. Some Weather, I would call it--The Vaporous Science of Meteorology.
Being a literary and cultural magazine, Anatole was perfectly suited to the topic. Any reader who stopped for just a minute to think about it would know that weather and literature were inseparable. Observations on the interplay of sun and wind and rain, or fictional admixtures of the same, seem to be sine qua non tools for the writer's art if it is to live up to its mandate to chart out limitless exemplary maps of the human experience.
As much by instinct as by read example, I knew that the body of human literature contained as many portentous thunderheads and blazing sunsets as did the history of man's tenure on the planet.
And with good reason, too. Weather not only frames the mood; it impels it onward in an incessant series of small adjustments, taps on the soul's steering wheel. Just as man's Enlighted understanding of the world cast fields as diverse as physics and history as dynamic, evolving, revisable, so any latterday holistic understanding of the human experience must cast mankind not as a blessed creature apart, but as a creature of the weathers. And, continuing in the Enlightenment tradition, the weather itself must be seen as an unremitting act of physical becoming which tows the receptive spirit closely in its wake. The examples in literature are as numerous as the storms that have fed and battered the earth thorugh the ages, and are too many to cite here. [But consider, if only for a moment, Defoe's publication of observations on the winter storm of 1703, when the lead roofing on Westminster Abbey scrolled up like parchment, and up to 8,000 souls came to grief at sea. Or the fact that poetry, regarded on the whole, is well and truly the result of meteorological measurements performed on the atmosphere of the poet's brain.]
If all this seemed obvious to me, it also seemed uncanny that no one had before thought to systematize the effects of weather on the soul. Indeed, there was a yawning gap at the very heart of the humanities. Who has ever undertaken a systematic examination, not only of weather's role in literature, but of its function as a barometer to the human spirit, and as the missing ingredient in nearly every attempt to chart the course of human history? That this failure stood in such sharp contrast to the hurtling progress being made on the apocalyptic meteorological problem of the age made it even more egregious. On a personal level, I also thought that such an exercise would be good for me, since it would help me understand my own moods and prejudices much more objectively. It might, for instance, help in parsing my own reactions to any future Braxator installments.
To answer this plaintive calling, then, I decided that I would continue making my daily notes on the weather, with consideration paid to its dynamic and dictatorial nature, while leaving open the possibility of asking important questions or drawing tentative conclusions as I saw fit. The idea was for this effort to function as a spur to reader contributions, since the experience of the weather was sure to be as diverse and enriching as the fertile field of humanity itself.
What were the questions I asked myself? Maybe, I thought, the experience of weather was genetically conditioned. Maybe there were people out there who were impervious to it, people whose spiritual constitutions were insusceptible to variations in temperature and sunlight by virtue of an ancestral bequest of storms and other extremes, and who as such were most qualified to lead institutions through times of turbulence and uncertainty: Icelandic helmsmen, the shepherds of the Caucasus, Bedouin. Or perhaps it was quite the opposite, that the centuries of storms running in their blood made them too volatile to be trusted at the helm? And what role did ancient weathers have as an ingredient in religion, in philosophy? Was it a coincidence that the cruelest and most impossible of the monotheisms was hatched in and then flourished across an unremitting desert? Did Siddhartha's upbringing in a lush Nepalese valley play a part in the detatched equanimity of his teachings? Might not the diversity and capriciousness of the Hindu deities have something to do with the subcontinent's endless succession of monsoon verdure and dire drought? And do the surviving pagan superstitions of Europe have anything to do with the cruelty of that continent's weather in prehistorical times? What about paleometeorology? Could ice cores and fossil records tell us something about the conditions that formed the crucible of human perception?
And what of the way the weather mirrors the human metabolism? Typical days start still and sluggish before progressing to a mid-afternoon peak of activity. Body and soul both ride the crest of this wave through the afternoon. But winds quiet again at dusk, the waves on the water die, giving way to a time of withdrawn reflection. The wind is still, the surface of the water reflects its calm. Might not the waves playing on the surface of the mind suddenly still in the same way? And if such waves do not settle at the approach of velvety dusk, is it not desirable that they should--that the proper condition of the human soul is to be receptive to and reflective of the weather, lest we miss an important message coded into the elements?
Finally, does it make a difference to the human metabolism that hyperborean twlights are more prolonged than in the middle latitudes? Do breaches of the diurnal cycle, whether by virture of dissoluteness or of nocturnal duty, impose a spiritual penalty? These were the things I wanted to find out.
So much for lofty thoughts. Here is what I eventually settled on for an opener to the weather serial:

Some Weather: The Vaporous Art of Meteorology

--"Wrap me in the weathers of the earth. I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones."

My life long, I have heard people complain about the weatherman. The usual charge is that his forecasts are inaccurate. Some even suspect him of duplicity aimed at clearing the golf course or the beach of impediments to his view. But we all know full well that he has no greater hand in the forecasts than we ourselves do, determined as it it by complex computer models and weather satellites. I do share the plaintiffs' general sense of grievance against the weatherman, and have always found him to be possessed of a sorely deficient character. But my gripe has nothing to do with the accuracy of the forecast. I am always filled with quiet pleasure when computer models are disproved by the weather's true complexity. Another relatively common complaint is that the weatherman is boring, which is closer to my own assessment. For me the problem is that the weatherman as we know him is too trifling a character to address his topic with the gravity it deserves. To the average weatherman/woman, weather is like traffic, or the day's lottery draw. To prove how completely he has failed in addressing himself to his task, let us ask ourselves a leading question: Is there anyone more vapid than the weatherman?
No. Nobody is more vapid than the weatherman. But why? This question is best answered by way of another: What is more profound and inscrutable and sublime and awesome than the weather? The answer is nothing. The weatherman is vapid because he fails to live up to the weather's profundity. Of course, the weatherman's inadequacy to his task should hardly be surprising. The weatherman is employed by and panders to the same people as the newscaster, after all; and to weather the news requires exactly the same gravitas, integrative critical ability and wicked humor required to announce the weather.
It is a very sad fact indeed that the marks of a good weatherman are limited to a smooth delivery, an upbeat attitude, and a pleasant sweeping motion.
But what would a man truly worthy of the weathers do in our banal weatherman's stead? What improvements would he undertake in the realm of weathermanhood? We'll start with what he would look like. For my ideal weatherman I envision a man with a salt-and-pepper beard, elderly but vital, with a glint in his eye that could be interpreted as either sprightly or malicious. For his garb I see a simple tunic or kurta, perhaps a Nehru shirt, and for the understory baggy pantaloons and unpretentious thong sandals. This would be the foundation, and a sage one at that. Over this he would place accessories appropriate to his forecast: A yellow fisherman's slicker and galoshes to cover the sandals in the event of rain; a panama hat and a wristband for a hot day with strong sun; and a walrus pelt parka fitted with an ermine collar for days with temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit--and maybe a hat of otter fur thrown in for the truly frigid days.
More than just a mark of good taste, appropriate dress would be a touchstone for appropriate behavior. Which is to say that the weatherman's style and mood of presentation would be as variable as the weather itself. Meteorology affects us all more than we know, and it would affect him the most. It would be the ideal weatherman's task to heave open the floodgates and abandon himself to what we'll call the total meteorological experience. He would not embarrass himself, as today's weathermen do, by simply relaying satellite pixellations while actually contemplating his next round of golf or his next assignation with the woman unfortunate enough to be the mistress of the weatherman. My weatherman would not put the weather out of mind as soon as the studio door shut behind him. The forecast-watching public deserves more!
This man, this Utopian weatherman, would live the weather. His waking mind would be bent on it, his dream life would be populated by fantastic and freakish weather phenomena, and his home would be all portholes and skylights and aneroid barometers. He would go for long meteorological walks every morning and afternoon, often with friends and disciples, not to trump the information about storm fronts and pressure systems provided by satellites, for that is impossible, but to subject it to a more relevant, you might say spiritual, human exegesis. I am not afraid to say it: My ideal weatherman would be a philosopher, and it would be a sign of his very profundity that he has taken what is commonly held to be such a banal topic for the object of his philosophy. Like certain poets, his trick would be to access the numinous and the sublime in the ordinary, the everyday--though of course weather's everydayness is not as much a fact as it is a mark of our own calcified perception and growing intellectual poverty.
His philosophy would be transcendental-epicurean. Which is to say that, while able to meet the buffets of stormy weather not only with equanimity, but with a keen view to its philosophical lessons, he would also take childlike delight in the blessings of fine weather--the enthusiasm would be infectious. Such a weatherman would never be caught dead moaning and groaning about snow or rain or cold in the fashion of our base and childish crop of modern weathermen. He would delight in the extremes that serve convincing reminders to sensitive souls that they are alive.
The philosopher weatherman would be sensitive but never lachrymose, reflective but above brooding, wonderstruck yet not easily mystified. For instance, when discussing snow, he might take a moment to discuss the wonder of seeing water in a different phase, the beauty of crystal structures, and the bittersweet melancholy that attends the certainty of their transience. He would pay homage to snow's knack for blunting the edge of hibernal darkness, and cite the role of snowmelt in the coming regeneration of life. The current vapid manner of talking about cloud formations and atmospheric fronts would be completely revolutionized. Cloudmasses would be infused with the spirits that they eminently represent. A thunderhead would be cast not only as a source of inconvenience and destructive potential, but as a stormy disturbance fast approaching the percussive skin of the collective soul. Generally, clouds would receive a great deal of attention. Like snow that is sure to melt, clouds are a convincing reductio of life's frail transience, but also of its heartrending beauty. My ideal weatherman, then, would be a serious connoisseur of clouds. He would encourage his readers to take as their ideal a life floating among the clouds. His segments might feature footage of clouds taken from the ground, from buildings, from airplanes, from space. On certain days he might invite viewers to call in to pick out the shapes of faces or animals or other things that sometimes flicker through passing cloud formations, awarding some meteorologically relevant trinket to the most imaginative caller. He might also sponsor contests in which viewers made competing predictions about how long it would take lone clouds passing over a great desert to expire.
Furthermore, there would be no mention of Canadian-born cold fronts without concomitant mention of the clarity of the faculty of reason that cold weather never fails to inspire. Finally, in those cases when weather causes loss of property or of life, the weatherman-as-philosopher would firmly spurn the usual platitudes about tragedy and calamity (on which the health of the modern economy and system of governance is anyways predicated), preferring instead to look on such events as a lamentable but nonetheless bracing and healthy expression of the human condition's frailty. And he would instantly terminate and maybe even rough up any acolyte weatherman with the gall to film a "why did this happen to us" segment in the wake of a natural disaster.
Rather than as a predictable broadcast of anticipated annoyance or pleasure, how much more uplifting to see the weather report forecast in detail what is about to transpire in the viewer's soul! It goes without saying that to pull this off, you need experience. The ideal weatherman must be elderly, or at least seasoned. To fix matters somewhat more precisely, I think the bare minimum should be a lifetime experience of 200 seasons, or 618 moons.
Of course, like most good philosophers and spiritual people, my ideal weatherman would also host public forums for discussing pressing weather-related issues. He would invite friends both serious-minded and frivolous, personages both esteemed and despised, to participate in panel discussions on weather-related issues. This charged atmosphere of debate, this serious-mindedness, would go some way toward rehabilitating the weather as a subject for earnest people. The obvious topic, of course, is global warming. It is worth asking how the ideal weatherman would approach it. To begin, he would not be content to ignore the issue in the fashion of the stooges and fools who now pretend to be weathermen on television. His would not be a tightly scripted refusal to entertain the notion that the weather has a spectral and even apocalyptic dimension. He would not shy from the issue that the weather nearly always carries whispers of an approaching calamity. I suspect that the ideal weatherman would be fundamentally sympathetic to concerns about environmental stewardship. At the same time, however, he would be wildly intolerant of the common class of fanatics who use the mantle of environmentalism as a foil for misanthropy and nihilism. No, our philosopher-weatherman would be too smart to reject the legacy of the Enlightenment and whatever Utopian traces it might contain. In short, his attitude to global warming would be one of restrained alarm. While refusing to shy from the plight of the poor African villagers hounded by desertification, he would punctiliously tack away from the siren call of defeatism. And if he could find an economical way to do it, the old sage might even put a cap on his own carbon emissions.
Is it really a secret that weather is inseparable from the world of the spirit? Am I alone in thinking it deserves such attention? Hardly. Through the ages, writers of every stripe could not have done more to corroborate my thesis. Open a novel and see how many pages pass before there is mention of rain or snow or sun or wind. If you look at it honestly and without preconception, you will glimpse clearly and without reservation that literature and meteorology are inseparable. Better put: You cannot have literature without meteorology, and while you can have meteorology without literature, why the devil would you want to? The link is fundamental. Weather is not cited in literature as an empty flourish of convention. It is strummed on with such frequency because weather is both the legend for decoding our lived experience and the surreptitious boot that spurs us to think and act as we do. More than that, it is the soundtrack without which nothing in the movie makes sense. Depending on our circumstances, stormy weather provokes either the desperation of exposure or the cozy comfort of interiority. A day of merciless sun is a cipher for the fragility of human endeavor, of nature's implacable indifference. And who will raise his head to disagree with me that the description of a storm at sea is the language of brute terror itself? There is a very good reason that, on recollection, these events nearly always seems portentous: Nothing happens in the atmosphere without its immediate complement in the heart.
But just as the philosopher-cum-weatherman does not yet exist, nor does the transcending humanist compiler of weathers. Yet instead of lamenting their refusal to be born, I will step into the breach. I will put my money where my mouth is. I will give birth to the ideal weatherman, with this publication as my midwife. In a grotesque turn of the metaphor, the ideal weatherman to whom I give birth will initially be myself. Yet it is my deeply held hope that he will go forth and multiply so that, before long, many of my readers will have converted to the gospel of said ideal weatherman. That said, I will leave the birthing of the transcending humanist compiler of weathers to someone else--I do not feel it to be my place, as I do not hold an endowed academic chair, which would be a distinctly more comfortable perch for such a lofty undertaking.
Here's what's happening, folks: Beginning with the next issue, I am going to put out a weekly weather report. As befits a text that aims to be philosophical, far from being a forecast aimed at minimizing inconvenience and helping you make money, my report will be a reprise of weather that has already occurred, and will tend to celebrate nasty weather wherever I find it. Nor does it lay claim to comprehensiveness: There may be some weeks when I report on the weather on seven out of seven days as a tribute to the weather's joyful motleyness, but others whose vapidity leaves me cold and with nothing to say. Also, in the interest of leaving enough space for Anatole's readers to file their own weather reports, I will try to keep my philosophical points as pithy as possible, with nothing approaching the magnitude of the above excursions.
By way of reader encouragement I would like to note that each of the following may be thought of as weather phenomena in the holistic way we like to see things at Anatole:

1. The way the setting sun gilds the top of a hill.
2. The way colors grow richer and more profound the closer they come to their final shuddering surrender to darkness. Witness the blue of the sky opening hallucinogenically into the infinitude of space. Witness the color of grass flaring into an impossible green at the threshold of dusk winking into night.
3. The way clouds or fog can inspire you with a feeling of interiority, making you feel, even when you are outside, that you are in a low room with a ceiling made of plush white cushions.

Readers, knock yourselves out!

~

This is what the three sets of meteorological observations I felt compelled to make the following week looked like:


1

Returning from town along the highway by bus the vehicle entered a drift of thick fog. I wondered if it might be coal pollution, but the thickness of it told me we would all soon be dead if it were. Most remarkable were the floodlit banking skyscrapers lining the highway. One of them looked particularly eerie. Spectral. The building panels were the color of alabaster. It was a white building ducking in and out of thickest white fog, its alternate appearance and occlusion like a tentative act of will faltering its way through tendrils of mist. In the topographical bowl of my neighborhood the fog had massed so thick that not even the bottom of my hill was visible, let alone the blotted currents of the strait beyond. It made my apartment feel even more like a ship's cabin. It also, more suggestively, made me feel that the things that happened that day would have no bearing on the events of any other day. It was a day encapsulated by fog, to which no other day could have any relation.

2

It was a day with the inscrutability and remove of a black and white photograph. The Bosporus was still, but the clouds overhead fled mistily westward along the backs of the hills. Most remarkable was the dramatically narrowed color spectrum. Almost all the blues and greens seemed gone from the usually vaguely florid water, and what blues were there were so profound as to be nearly undetectable, so that the water presented a palette ranging from turgid slate to marine cobalt. The aspect of the day seemed unfinished, as if it had somehow not yet come into its own, as if its painter had denied it a final touch or two of color before walking off. Yet this poverty of painterly detail somehow made its perspective deeper. I felt my vision liberated, as if my gaze could range up the seaway as far as distant Odessa.

3

The sky I saw when I peaked my head out the mudroom window in the morning looked like what the chief of Asterix's village used to see before he declared that the sky was falling. It was cold when I left the house. The rain was not steady. It came flicking down in spurts like the dangled prospect of punishment, a hint of sadism that its brandisher never quite applied. I felt that the sky and its particular pressure were filling me with malevolence.

Recently...

Oh
Can't anybody see
We've got a war to fight
-Portishead

As ever, there is a lot to say. It is just a matter of how to express it, how to get at the order of things, how to qualify them, how to sift the banal from the real, or, even especially, how to give up the distinction without seeming to have capitulated.

~

Recently I was in the Baltic. I lied about wanting to settle there, of course. Not much to report from that time and place. Nice to see my cousin, of course. While I was there we learned that the child his wife is pregnant with is going to be a girl. With long arms, it seems.

~

Recently I was in Greece. Having come from the bland and blanched north, the savoir vivre of the Mediterranean immediately stood out. A number of other things there also made a strong impression on me.

One evening in Athens my companion and I were walking to get dinner. It was around ten. The evening was warm and quiet and fragrant and elegiac. It was a long weekend, and with many residents having decamped to the islands or the villages, the streets were all but deserted. We may not have taken the main thoroughfares, but on a 20 minute walk through the seedy heart of a 4 million person city, we encountered hardly a soul. Barring my friend's assurances, I would have thought something was amiss. This background of desolation underscored the people populating the telephone booths. We may have encountered no one strolling, no one simply hanging around, but in every single every phone booth we passed--and there were many--there was a person huddled or hunched, speaking or listening, stuttering or summoning the courage to say something. They were speaking quietly, privately, even intimately. I remember thinking that the scene was worth noting, that it was a memory worth forming and then exploring. Every caller we passed added to a gathering sense of vaporous rapture. If there was something weird about it, something uncanny, there was also something touching. I imagined that we were walking through a city in the final stages of abandonment, that these were the last people left, and that they were pausing to say goodbye--to the city itself?--before leaving everything behind. After some time we ended up in a restaurant full of diners, but the scene of the callers tethered to the phone booths, those refugees tarrying for a final second by a cherished friend or memory before lighting out for whatever territories--that scene stayed with me.

The next day we went to a pet shop. We needed to buy formula for an abandoned newborn kitten whose life we were trying to save. The shop was in a very seedy part of Athens, which is a seedy town to begin with. To get there we had to walk some way along a road that led downhill. At the top of the hill was a Pakistani/Arab neighborhood with sidewalks lined and trafficked exclusively by men. They tracked our downward progress with noncommital interest. Betel nut was being chewed, Qawwali played, merchandise bargained over and sold, food prepared and rung up and eaten. By the time we had got to the bottom of the hill where the pet shop stood, we had passed through a gradient along which Pakistanis and Egyptians had given way almost entirely to greasy and muttering drug addicts on the prowl, either coasting or coming down, whose gazes, when they did manage to land on us, were much keener and more appraising than those that had lingered on us at the top of the hill. I surveyed the scene outside and followed my companion into the store. She reached into the basket we had been carrying and presented the kitten to the owner for inspection. He gave it a practiced once-over as the two of them launched into a conversation about his prospects in Greek. I drifted off to have a look at the puppies and the kittens, the ferrets and the hamsters, the fish and the snakes. As I peered into the cages from the inside, junkies were passing by and leering into them through the shop windows, eyes vacant or crazed or both. At one point a pair of them passed to survey a particularly cute and helpless-looking puppy, exchanging views on what they saw. Once we'd bought the formula for our little foundling to nurse on, my friend said the shop owner was a nice guy, and related for me parts of the conversation she'd had with him. When the two junkies had been talking about the puppy (it went something like "Boy he looks dumb!" / "You think you're any smarter, buddy? Think again. You're the dumbest animal I know."), the owner turned to my friend and said "You see what I have to go through every day?" Something about the atmosphere of this pet shop down in the seedy bowels of Athens (a city which, in spite of everything, is still presided over by the [disappointed?] Attic sky that witnessed and spawned all the heroic accomplishments of Antiquity) captured my imagination. I immediately thought it would make a good central setting for a movie or a book or a story. It could be a cheap movie, too. The kitten pulled through, by the way, and is living happily now.

~

Recently I read a book on the Arab conquests in the first century of Islam by Hugh Kennedy. He quotes the writing of one Tu Huan, a Chinese man held captive for nine years in the court of the Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad, following a battle won by a Muslim army against a Chinese one in central Asia (the only recorded conflict between these opponents). Tu writes: "The entire land has been transformed; the people follow the tenets of Islam like a river in its channel." I found this to be a stirring metaphor, and an incisive one, to the extent that it reveals the unity of man's need to tame watercourses with his desire to conquer fellow men and to reshape the channels their lives run through. 1300 years have done nothing to diminish its relevance. In the modern age, the two projects are intimately and flagrantly linked: From the World Bank's many and monstrous hydroelectric projects to the Three Gorges Dam, power over water and power over people are never far apart.

~

Recently I read a devastatingly powerful book that attempts an integrative critique of the world-historical processes of modernity and the modernist art conceived in response to those upheavals. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, by Marshall Berman, is a herculean effort to capture modern experience and modernist art whose scope sweeps across 200 years. "To be modern," he begins, "is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world--and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, or religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, 'all that is solid melts into air.'" I recommend this book with all my heart and mind. For me, the act of reading it not only recapitulated the modern maelstrom of my own experience, but allowed me to establish a deep, newly illuminated spiritual connection with the most notable artistic responses to the threats and possibilities of modernity: Goethe's Faust, Baudelaire's simultaneous exaltation and vituperation of the modern types he saw haunting the streets of Paris, the phantasmagoric Petersburg literary tradition from Gogol to Dostoevsky to Biely.

Below I have compiled a series of quotes from the book itself, or which were in turn cited in the book:

From Rousseau's The New Eloise:
"I'm beginning to feel the drunkenness that this agitated, tumultuous life plunges you into. With such a multitude of objects passing before my eyes, I'm getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my heart, yet all of them together disturb my feelings, so that I forget what I am and who I belong to."

Marx: The atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a 20,000 pound force, but do you feel it?

Marx: There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life into a material force.

Nietzsche: We moderns, we half-barbarians. We are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger. The only stimulus that tickles us is the infinite, the immeasurable.

Berman, on the abandonment of the positive side of the dialectic by Foucault:
'Foucault reserves his most savage contempt for people who think it is possible for modern mankind to be free. Do we think we feel a spontaneous rush of sexual desire? We are merely being moved by "the modern technologies of power that take life as their object," driven by the "deployment of sexuality by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, their energies, sensations and pleasures. Do we act politically, overthrow tyrannies, make revolutions, create constitutions to establish and protect human rights? Mere "juridical regression" from the feudal ages, because constitutions and bills of rights are merely "the forms that [make] an essentially normalizing power acceptable. Do we use our minds to unmask oppression--as Foucault appears to be trying to do? Forget it, because all forms of inquiry into the human conditions "merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another," and hence only add to the triumphant "discourse of power." Any criticism rings hollow, because the critic himself or herself is "in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves, since we are part of its mechanism.'

Mephistopheles:
I am the spirit that negates all!
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly...

Berman, on the promise of modern adventure: Body and soul are to be exploited for a maximum return--not, however, in money, but in experience, intesity, felt life, action, creativity...Universally modern, too, are the Faustian pressures to use every part of ourselves, and of everybody else, to push ourselves and others as far as we can go.

Berman, on Faust, in his incarnation as a developer, in which he has Philemon and Baucis, the old couple who will not give up their land for development in exchange for a cash settlement, murdered: "It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works."

Berman, p. 95: 'Our lives are controlled by a ruling class with vested interests not merely in change but in crisis and chaos. "Uninterrupted disturbance, everlasting uncertainty and agitation," instead of subverting this society, actually serve the strengthen it. Catastophes are transformed into lucrative opportunities for redevelopment and renewal; disintegration works as a mobilizing and hence an integrating force. The only specter that really haunts the modern ruling class, and that really endangers the world it has created in its image, is the one that traditional elites (and, for that matter, traditional masses) have always yearned for: prolonged solid stability. In this world, stability can only mean entropy, slow death, while our sense of progress and growth is our only way of knowing for sure that we are alive. To say that our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well.' Consider that this was written in 1981.

Baudelaire: I leave aside the question of whether, by continually refining humanity in proportion to the new enjoyments it offers, indefinite progress might not be its most cruel and ingenious torture; whether proceeding as it does by a negation of itself, it would not turn out to be a perpetually renewed form of suicide, and whether, shut up in the fiery circle of divine logic, it would not be like the scorpion that stings itself with its own tail--progress, that eternal desideratum that is its own eternal despair!

Berman on Benjamin's Parisian writings: "His heart and sensibility draw him irresistably toward the city's bright lights, beautiful women, fashion, luxury, its play of dazzling surfaces and radiant scenes, meanwhile his Marxist conscience wrenches his insistently awat from these temptations, instructs him that this whole glittering world is decadent, hollow, vicious, spiritually empty, oppressive to the proletariat, condemned by history."

Dostoevsky's Underground Man: "I was terribly afraid of being seen, of being met, of being recognized. I already had the underground in my soul."

The radical Khazov, in a pamphlet written in 1877, just before before his exile to Siberia: "Russia is led along the road to political freedom not by the liberals but by dreamers who organize ridiculous and childish demonstrations; by men who dare to break the law, who are beaten, sentenced, and reviled."

Dostoevsky, in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, addressing the great works of engineering he has seen over in Europe:
"Man loves to create and build roads, that is beyond dispute. But...may it not be that...he is instinctively afraid of attaining his goal and completing the edifice he is constructing? How do you know, perhaps he only likes that edifice from a distance and not at close range, perhaps he only likes to build it, and does not want to live in it."

Berman: "...the nihilism of modern revolutionaries is a pale shadow of the nihilism of the forces of order."

~

Recently I immersed myself full tilt in the television series Prison Break. By "full tilt" I mean that by the time I had finished the 22 episodes of the first season, I had worked up such an appetite for the second that I worked through the next 22 in 24 hours flat. Like the show 24--and like scenes constructed by Dostoevsky, or for that matter like the spectacle of current events broadcasting live from the centers of power--Prison Break's rhythm is defined by endless crises, by staggering crescendos of quasi-climax after quasi-climax, by folds within intrigues within Matruyoshka subplots that make the viewer simultaneously beg for resolution and wish that the titillation would never end. To be fair, I would rather watch Prison Break than CNN, no matter the crisis they happen to be selling. The experience of watching the show is a little bit like taking a drug, or playing a video game. It is a wild ride, but in the end the viewer (I at least) feels hollowed out, betrayed--as if the product hadn't quite lived up to its promise. This emotional crash must result from two circumstances. The first is the formal circumstance of the medium in which the story is told. Television needs to keep its users coming back for more, and over the years they've learned to do a damn good job of it. Prison Break is an entertainment product--and if we are disappointed by it, in some sense we have only ourselves to blame: Like a drug, or like any commodity, it seems to be invested with a certain fetishistic aura that it can never live up to, and which we ourselves are complicit in maintaining.

The second fact that breeds my sense of betrayal has to do with the content of the show (which cannot be fully separated from the form of its narration, in the sense that the need to attract advertisers and a mass audience imposes certain restrictions on content, i.e. in some sense the betrayal is the result of conflict between artistic vision and commercial reality). It is the show's content I have been thinking about most. At the risk of coming off a bit dramatically, I would say that the show manages to 'imprison' viewers in an atmosphere of despair and nihilism, while promising them an ultimate redemption from that despair in an imagined final episode where, by transcending both themselves and the small cabal of corrupt officials that rules the country, Scofield and Burrows "make everything right." Until that time, viewers are left to muddle along and make do with whatever hope and meaning they can find in the savage dialectic of violence and vengeance that the show will continue to serve up until the imagined day of redemption. The show imprisons its viewers not only by vividly bringing the grim realities of doing hard time home to the screen during the run-up to the brothers' escape, but then, after the escape, by painting an equally convincing picture of the outside world as a vast 'panoptic' prison from which escape is just as impossible, and which is just as inimical to life as life in a tangible cage--and in which, most importantly, the viewer can easily situate himself. So far, so good: We all know that we are as powerless as gnats against the state's vast resources, against its monopoly on awesome violence, and we can all easily imagine being on the wrong end of the barrel.

The problem is that the show never makes the qualitative leap that true resolution (of the problem of atomized man versus nebulous omnipresent state) would require. In short, there is never anything close to a cathartic moment of solidarity that would transcend parochial ties. Even though the brothers' plight and the dizzying cycles of state violence that trail in the wake of their escape eminently call for mass action against the state, Prison Break inhabits a post-Thatcherite world, and that alternative is not on offer. There is no society: There is only Michael Scofield and Lincoln Burrows (and the other inmates and their families). Thus their only hope, once out, is either to disappear completely, or to get the state to wipe the slate clean by blackmailing the WASP mafia at its head.

For a taste of the nihilistic dimension of the violence that the show serves up as we wait in vain for a redemption that is forever deferred, look no further than the character of Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell. A Faulknerian mutant, Bagwell is the eloquent and murderous offspring of an incestuous tryst who, while obsessed with the elimination of his own bloodline, seeks to redeem his own nightmarish childhood by abducting a family and getting them to act out a pastoral set piece for his benefit. Along the way and after the failure of his project, he savagely murders a number of men and women for our viewing pleasure. There is something immorally intoxicating about the portrayal of Bagwell's violence: The long shots of him licking his lips before striking, the semi-learned and wholly deranged speeches he gives to his victims before murdering them--at heart a cat and mouse game in which the viewer is clearly cast as the cat, firmly rooted in the august American tradition of pornographic violence.

Not only does the show make the viewer identify with the experience of prison and the feeling of entrapment at large. It also builds an ideological prison the viewer, and then "throws away the key." The show's masterful dramatization and depiction of the dark side of power is a hermetic world. There is no way out, no iota of light beyond the nostrums of brotherly love and a vague faith in an ultimate justice that will be served up once the existing system is somehow "purged" (the parallel with the Stalinist/Maoist purges is a stretch, but the idea is the same: If we recapture the pure kernel of our society, all will be well. Until then, savage violence is the name of the game). The show (partially correctly) depicts modern America as a police state ruled by a shadowy corporate mafia where to oppose the state is to be faced with savage violence, yet it fails to hold out any hope for redemption beyond running away or getting lucky and somehow nailing the big boss at the top. The characters all tacitly to believe in the fairytale of an American paradise lost, and that all will be well with the country if truth is spoken to the right person, and the structure of injustice implodes like a house of cards. If Scofield and Burrows can unmask the truth, democracy will be restored, and the government will be run in service of the people, just like it says in the constitution.

The prison system, however grimly it is portrayed, is never problematized in itself. Nor are the vast resources of violence at the state's disposal. Nor is the immediate willingness of every random civilian in the show to capitulate to the state's orgiastic displays of violence. We are to believe, as the characters must, that if truth is spoken, and if the WASP mafia is brought down, then the vast resources of repression and apprehension and correction will be deployed to serve the people.

The character of Michael Scofield is very interesting. His struggles of conscience and his need to clean up the mess he makes in springing his brother have an eschatological dimension. Not only is he his brother's savior: He has been put onto the TV screen to redeem America for its sins, a wunderkind able to bear the world's entire weight. Scofield is obsessed not only with the escape itself, but with the 'immaculate' dimension of the escape--he wants people to understand the justice of what he has done, and is obsessed with removing any incidental traces of blood on his hands, even at the expense of the very success of the escape. Witness his crusade to put Bagwell back behind bars. The show's religious references and motifs are interesting when refracted through the prism of the show's Thatcherite/libertarian ideology. The foil of God allows the societal factors complicit in criminality to be sluiced off at a stroke, and firmly situates the problem of crime within the culpable self. Not that the show's writers necessarily do this consciously: I imagine the religious motifs to be an apt reflection of the role that religion plays within the walls of real prisons and in the hearts of those real men and women who add a theological dimension to the violence they have already wreaked and been made to suffer.

Of course, I'd be fooling myself and you if I didn't admit that these idle reflections on Prison Break were partly inspired by a sense of moral guilt at having spent so much time transfixed by the DVDs over the past few days. I'm trying to rehabilitate the banality of my experience, if you like. And maybe the show does have some value beyond pure diversion from and postponement of my "real life," if considered deeply. It is also true that I have only watched through season two. In a few days I will head down to a DVD burning warren I know downtown to buy season three. Who knows? Maybe there will be a redemptive catharsis waiting at the end of the tunnel. I won't hold my breath. Until then, I will contunue to think that the world of Prison Break was conjured from the crumbling bones of Michel Foucault.

Also, since my imagination is so inflamed by the prison and the possibilities and technicalities of escape from it, I think I may set my next piece of writing in one. Maybe it could be an epistolary work with my prisoner carrying on a correspondence with the outside world. Maybe, the better to reflect myself, he could leave the letters unsent.

~

Recently I acted on my wish to come back to America for a little while. I will be coming to New York on June 12.