Sunset in a Cold Month

There wasn't a place to sit last I was here. There was bustle, congestion, the underlying hum of chatter across many conversations. Not unlike a hive of honeybees. 

Today is different. The setting sun throws flecks of radiant pastels--lavender, tulip yellow, pink carnation--down the fading blue canvas sky, down to this empty and deserted station, down to my singular figure upright in space. I slide onto a south-facing bench. The sky splashed in color, the jungle beneath cloaked in shadow. 

Withered leaves scrape the sturdy-as-ever cement in a cool autumn wind of impending night. I look out over the tracks, running far to the west, straight until the curvature of the Earth brings the parallel into one. The rumbling had stopped when the train crossed over that line of horizon. Like it fell of the edge, silently, gracefully. 

 

Last I was here the railroad cars reached far towards that western frontier. They were filled to the brim with the waving arms and jostling torsos and fidgeting steps of men in anticipation. Their laughs and calls could be heard down the line on this very platform, now eternally holding empty chairs and empty benches. 

 

Their energy seemed to rock the entire train. Maybe it did. I don't know. I was shaky in my starchy uniform, its sharp edges not yet creased to the angles of my body. 

 

I remember sitting on this very bench, too. I stared at the leafy tree-tops of the jungle ahead under a white sky, so bright it hurt the eyes and burned away the clouds. People kept kicking my feet because we were all equally unfamiliar with the heavy steel-toed boots. Clumsy and frantic, we all were. I sat on this bench with my bag between my ankles and I stared in stupor at the jungle line. 

 

I remember a man sat next to me. He sighed and heaped his body beside mine with forceful noise. He pulled out a picture of a farmhouse in a hilly field lined with mature sorghum. I hardly took a glance before returning my gaze to the bush. He went on chattering about the house he could not bare separation from, his wife and child, his dark airy soil. Eventually he got up and left. I didn't get to catch his face before he went away. 

I wondered where such a deep jungle could come from, so dense it blocked meeting of sky and land, lying just there across the tracks. It was as if the radiating sun above did not exist. This time, I notice, I wonder how the sky could possibly light up with brilliant hues, rich and vast, while the jungle beneath could stay in such impenetrable darkness. Where could it possibly end. 

Lost in thought, I feel, for a moment, the vibrations of an eastward-bound train rolling towards me. I sense it coming out of the enormous sun dipping behind the flat crescent valley. But when I look up, nothing. It's not coming this time. The station is empty, that is except for me.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,

One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those great books that's really about everything. Incredible pain lives alongside ecstasy, the pendulum of fortune swings back and forth, there's war and obsession and family and faith. It appears at first as a fantastical tale, but somehow transforms into a monument capturing the breath of humanity in an odd, poetic way. 

 

At points the novel feels like a series of fables. Magic is part of it all (see last post); many of the situations described are so absurd they require a second take. 

 

The non-linear storyline follows the Buendía family, a cursed, larger-than-life, dysfunctional group where everyone shares the same few names and traits with their predecessors. The Aureliano's act one way, the José Arcadio's another, the Remedios' their own. It's hard to keep track of which character did what and where their spot on the family tree is (conveniently drawn on the first page). But it becomes clear that this confusion is intentional.

Gabriel García Márquez distorts time and its forward flow, showing beginnings and ends as not-so concrete, the barriers between past and present and future not so impenetrable. The memories of time gone slosh around in the muck of daily life. 

 

The world turns round and round in cycles. The characters tread the same paths their ancestors did because what are we if not combinations of those that came before. The way this vast, epic story is told is equally beautiful and scary and raw. 

The first sentence sets the tone. 

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

 

It's so famous because time is all jumbled up--as if what will happen is already known the same as what has happened before is. The sentence starts in the future, jumps to that present, then returns to the past in one fell swoop. This continues to happen throughout the rest of the powerful, devastating book. 

It isn't a disheartening tale, though. Wonder is far too central to it. I recently learned that demographers estimate more than 100 billion humans have lived on the planet--I get the same feeling from knowing that, trying to wrap my mind around it, as I do from One Hundred Years of Solitude. It makes me imagine myself in a much larger and intertwined system that fundamentally characterizes my life.

Time is fickle and strange in the world Márquez created, just like it is in the world he physically inhabited. A story like this gives perspective to how unfathomable and astonishing is life as we know it. 

A final thing. I came across a video of this Canadian dude singing from the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian. The passage he recites is about the olden times, the countless days before. The distant past when things began. 

 

To think that one of the first pieces of literature and music, ancient by our standards, pays homage to the immense amount of time that has passed is amazing. Time seems to have always been a mysterious shadow drawing our attention. The grand questions that pester us today have been asked and pondered for longer than we can possibly know.

Magical Reality

I read a feature on Kevin Durant in The New York Times Magazine by Sam Anderson (s/o a former housemate of mine with the same name) with a questionable title and many, many beautiful phrases describing the Slim Reaper, the former MVP, the enigma known as KD. 

Anderson's description of Durant as an esoteric-thinker, a stoic savant ("He has exactly the sort of transcendental galaxy brain that likes to rise up very high, and then slightly higher, to think about things like deep time and space rocks and the meaning of life") is awfully different from the public image Durant has with the many NBA fans as a petty, delusional, somehow insecure superstar. I'm obviously in no position to comment on his character given that I've never met the guy; what I liked most about the piece was the way Anderson wrote about KD's game.

"He moves with a pure, unforced economy of motion, a frictionless glide," "When Durant makes a shot, its swish seems extra pure — the ball hovers inside the net for a second, as if it lives there, as if it wants to take its time and really enjoy itself before it falls," "the tall ethereal phantom."

A master in his craft is at a spiritual level, Anderson is trying to say. Almost magical. 

This got me thinking about the ubiquitous place that idea, magic, has in regular life. The concept of the inexplicable, of irrational occurrences, of things beyond our sphere of knowledge, is everywhere people are, and it permeates quite deeply. 

Authors use magic all the time. It feels like every piece of fiction employs an element of the fantastical. And in a somewhat contradictory way, the role it plays in storytelling is to help tell the audience something about the material world, the world that is in many ways defined by not having magic on its list of possibilities. The world defined by scientific principles and reason and logic.

 

I'm reading One Hundred Years of Solitude; it embodies the genre of magical realism, which itself comes from ancient human traditions. Religion, through its priests and shamans, has been crossing the canyon between real and magic for thousands of years, bringing stories and signs and even supposed displays of the divine existence to our holy rituals for time immemorial. 

Our levels of skepticism on the subject vary widely, but even if you only recognize the widespread, nearly universal presence of the metaphor of magic, the idea of miracle and that some things in our lives elude rational explanation, you see that there's something deeply ingrained about magic in us. It seems to be everywhere, and humans seem to rely heavily on it to grapple with a strange and chaotic existence. 

Magic might be a rudimentary word. But I think it captures the scope of what I'm talking about--how we have an urge to explain what we don't understand, and there's a whole lot we don't understand, so we need a stand-in idea to fill the gaps and allow us to move on with the day. When faced with the subconscious, or the bizarre laws of physics, or the endless creativity and curiosity of the brain, or the skills Kevin Durant has on the hardwood, we recognize a perceptible form of magic, a mundane and grand reality we can't really explain, a world that demands the inclusion of the great beyond in all its aspects. 

What each person considers magic is different, but I think there comes a point for everyone where the only explanation left is an ultimately unexplainable one. That's why it comes out in the mediums in which we try to answer those big questions; art, human communication, spirituality, our passions. Facing, and reckoning, the unknown is another shared experience between all of us.

Big History & Moving to the Water

I came across something called Big History.

It's a field of study, as founding Prof David Christian explains in this TED Talk, that aims to understand history in its totality. Not just starting with civilization, or the evolution of Homo sapiens, or even the beginning of life. It includes everything in the story of the universe, from the Big Bang to today, the Big History.

To better explain our world and how complexity has arisen from an entropic, empty blackness, these historians study subjects normally separated in academia; physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, philosophy, archaeology, paleontology, all of it. They’re trying to re-conceptualize history as not just a slightly-aloof pursuit of primary documents and chains of events, but as a grand, macro-level telling of everything that has ever happened.

It’s ambitious, clearly. And it goes against what we think of with academics; that research needs to specialize to truly grasp a piece of the complex universe, that dedicated submersion within a well-defined topic is how individuals can add to the shared body of human knowledge.

I don’t know if Big History will ever become mainstream, or if it should. From what I’ve seen, it seems to gloss over details (as something this grand in scale must inevitably do) and also approaches human history deterministically, which brings up its own ethical/philosophical dilemma. 

 

But with the help of Bill Gates, the Big History Project was made as a high-school level course free online. I like the potential Big History has to stimulate general intellectual activity in teenagers--it seems like it could show students how fascinatingly connected everything is, sparking exponential growth and linkage of their interests.

 

I came across this concept through one of the Great Courses called The Big History of Civilizations (free through your public library!). A disciple of Prof Christian, Prof Craig Benjamin, uses the interdisciplinary framework of Big History to examine human civilization.

Something he touched on is how water availability drove the establishment of ancient settlements in the Middle East. Jericho, which is the longest continually-inhabited city in the world, has had groundwater gushing from the Ein as-Sultan/Elisha spring for the more than 10,000 years that humans have lived there. That's amazing and totally logical. 

Life and water are intertwined by fate, so it isn't surprising that most human development sprung up right around ample freshwater. 

But compare that ancient, basic, most-obvious line of thinking with a modern dilemma. 

 

The Colorado River, flowing across the arid Southwestern U.S., is the water source for around 40 million people and millions of acres of agriculture in 7 states and 2 countries. The green lawns of Beverley Hills, the spewing fixtures of the Vegas Bellagio, Lake Mead and Lake Powell and 15% of all the crops grown in the United States (as of 2012) all come from the Colorado.

But there isn't enough water in the river for all this. And everyone knows it. 

Demand has outpaced replenishment rates for 20 years now, during which most of the basin was in a historic drought, yet the thirst gulps insatiably. Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona have been among the fastest growing states population-wise for the last 3 decades. Miles of aqueducts and dams divert the flow to such an extent that the river rarely even reaches the ocean anymore, only through concerted effort. 

On top of all that demand, supply is waning as the Rocky Mountain snowpack that feeds the river is shrinking under a warmer climate. Flow in the river has already declined notably and is predicted to drop off even more dramatically. The reservoirs are shriveling up before our very eyes.

When I told my friend about the impending water shortage out West, how insane it is that more and more people continue to move to a region with a contracting water source, he simply replied 

"Yeah, no one thinks about water when they move."

 

What a wild time we live in.

Side Note on Myself

I've been stagnant for the last week or two. The culprit for my idle frustration, I believe, is a multifaceted one. Getting into my personal details isn't the point, though. It's the upwelling of the frustration I want to focus on.

 

I'm finding compartmentalization difficult nowadays. It's like everything in my life swirls into one irreversible concoction. I can't pinpoint specific origins anymore, or limit aspects of my life to their own little boxes. 

 

Part of this has got to be work from home. I have no physical separation between personal and professional, so even if I work 8 hours, I tend to feel in the same mode as I did before and do after. 

The spillover is also exacerbated by the loosening of my schedule. I don't have a stated block of time for a specific class or a specific class for a semester block. Things in general are much more fluid and self-motivated, like I mentioned in my previous post. 

I do like the freedom I get in this more integrated lifestyle. I can better transfer positive energy from one thing to another, compounding the impact and efficiency. When it's negative energy, though, the same properties of transfer and compounding apply. A canyon can form.

That's what I think happened with me over the last few weeks. I got bored and lethargic in one manner, then the feeling escaped confines and infected everything. 

Oh well. I guess it's through these instances that you learn to pull yourself up off the ground and back on the horse. The flip side of the downward slide is that finding an inspiring motivation in one part of life can be the stimulus that rights the course for the rest of it too. 

There's a double-edged blade out here. Got to use it the right way or that cut will sting.

On Ambition

Ambition has taken new meaning in my life. In transitioning from school to work, the definition of that word, ambition, has changed. It has become an entirely different entity; a fundamental one nearly unrivaled in its intersectionality. 

 

Within the educational framework, ambition can manifest clearly. Do well and succeed in school to express that urge to thrive. Get good grades, excel in extracurriculars, score high on standardized tests. Direct effort and desire into this channel for a positive outcome, a straightforward, worthy, beneficial, rewarding, agreed-upon path in every sense. Not the only one, but a definitive one. 

Now, outside school, ambition has morphed into a more malleable, individualized force. There isn't such linear validation for achievement. Pursuit has become far more of a private affair, almost entirely self-motivated and self-disciplined. 

Down which endless avenue to travel? How to express this complicated emotion against the wide expanse? When is it too far, not enough, when is the time to change course, when to know if it's too late? How long to postpone these questions?

The future nags at my mind, always pestering, lobbying, for a seat at the table.

~~~~

Though not usually discussed in this way, I believe ambition is a foundational characteristic of people. It's based on everything in a life and it molds everything in a life. In the web of neurons that make the soul, ambition must be somewhere near the centre, a filter through which every little spark flying across the cortices must traverse. 

 

You can see it, or the lack of it, instantaneously. In body language. In the minute facial muscles. In the eyes, too. It's written all over everybody. 

 

But what exactly is ambition? I'm not sure any questions can be answered without knowing this one. What does it mean? What is its nature? Why does it take the forms it does?

~~~~

 

In The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie, a character named Saladin has ambition rooted in inferiority. His greatest desire is to escape India, not just the physical place but from the land built into his DNA too, the core self that can never be escaped, the identity that must be eventually reconciled. He fetishizes England as the superior alternative. Everything he does is cloaked underneath suffocating intentions.

The more he tries, the more the world rejects his dreams, his pleas, his gnarled ambition guarded by thorns of hatred and repression. Like Tony Montana in Scarface, Saladin struggles against a Karmic world that laughs at his feeble thrusts. The futility of unchecked drive is shown at every turn. We know of its dangers.

But on the flipside, to have ambition, I think, one must have great hope. There must be true belief in a brighter tomorrow, a purpose worth working for and towards. Ambition is often cast as a destructive vice, but it's optimism too. Finely balanced, the ambitious person might be the one with the most faith. 

Ambition is also far from sedentary. I think it is a learned behavior, not just something ingrained in personalities at birth. It's something that can be developed. Which means everyone has a chance to see a better life ahead. Perspective is everything, and perspective can be changed.

History musings

Certain things stick in history. They can be framed in the moment as defining of a time and place. A singular flash-bang event, or maybe a powerful individual, a monumental struggle, a movement. Things can also gain historical status after the fact thanks to later occurrences, having initially been not so obviously deserving of space in the pantheon of the human story. Only in hindsight may the pieces of a larger picture come to the fore.

I've been reading a collection of short writings by Hunter S. Thompson a few entries at a time. They're consistently filled with creative insults and sardonic insights on the world of the 1980s. 

At the time Thompson was deep in the Beltway covering politics even though he lived in the mountains of Colorado. A big topic he writes on for months in the late 80s, during the run-up to the 1988 GOP Nomination, is the Iran-Contra Affair. Thompson describes the scandal as equal or more damning to Reagan, his legacy, and his party, as Watergate was to its perpetrator, Richard Nixon. 

Now we know Iran-Contra had nowhere near the impact to Reagan that Watergate did to his sleazy precursor. At the time, though, it seems people misjudged the Reagan scandal as more historically significant than it has turned out to be (at least, so far). Today, Iran-Contra hardly makes high school history textbooks, much less general knowledge. And Reagan's reputation is definitely not tarnished by it. 

In case you don't know about Iran-Contra, it's basically this: 

The Reagan administration was secretly selling weapons to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran (who, by the way, we opposed in the horrific Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 by selling weapons to his opponent, Saddam Hussein in Iraq (the one we later killed to bring freedom and peace to the Middle East), but only for a bit, because we could make even more of a killing (haha get it) selling weapons to both Iraq AND Iran), a country which we had an active embargo against, using Israel as the go-between money-for-missiles launderer, which is a country definitely not recognized as legitimate by the Iranian Revolutionary government, to fund a gang of human-rights-abusing Nicaraguans called the Contras who were rampaging across the land with American-taxpayer-funded assault rifles to destroy the Sandinistas, a Leninist group of human-rights-abusers that took power from the dynastic dictatorship of the Somoza family (don't worry, also human-rights-abusers) in 1979 in the shitshow that was 20th century politics in Central America. Classic Cold War America stuff.

It's complicated. Brown has a good database on the whole thing if you really want to get into it. I digress. 

I was recently reminded by this Ted talk on confirmation bias of another event that has taken a roundabout route to infamy: The Dreyfus Affair. It was taught in my school as a sign of the ingrained European anti-Semitism and continent-wide persecution, oppression, and inequality of Jews that continued past the Industrial Revolution. 

 

(I'm not going to get into the details of this one. One rant per post is my self-imposed limit).

At the time of it happening in the late 19th century, the trial of Alfred Dreyfus was big news in France, and probably some other countries too. Big enough for Emile Zola to publish a letter about it that got him some jail time. 

But the Holocaust is the headliner in history that the Dreyfus Affair is a piece of context for. That's the reason teenagers in Texas are taught about it 120 years later; a genocide that happened decades after, an event that, like everything in the future, could not have been predicted with precision, defines The Dreyfus Affair in historiography. 

This makes me wonder whether something like Iran-Contra could become a more notable historical marker because of some future event. Or maybe the future event has already happened, but only later will people deem it important enough to highlight. It almost makes me want to place no historical judgement on anything. 

Then, I guess, I would be isolated from the process of creating history. That seems fundamentally un-human. Despite the ever-changing content of our remembered past, it still has to be a rock for society. I'm just curious how it will look long after I'm gone.

Irish Lit

The image that engulfed my mind from James Joyce's semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is that of a droplet of water plopping onto a still pond; that sound, so pointed and specific you can hear it clear as day, so quiet, subtle. Or the light crinkle of a page when turned in a silent room, the fickle tear through a cloak of invisible fabric.

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard calls it "Mood" 

As a reader I felt I was repeatedly dropped beneath the surface tension of the protagonist's life, a boy named Stephen Dedalus. I popped in and out of his childhood to observe his actions, follow his thoughts, see him grow. The novel is a remarkable piece of self-analysis, a delicate and intimate look that feels nearly intrusive at times. 

The narrative is layers of implied context, symbolism, and imagery hidden between the lines. Near everything is hinted at rather than explicit. There is tranquil depth to this novel.

I found it to be quite daring as well. Especially in the opacity of time, and the manner in which Joyce toys with the English language like its his clay to mold. At certain points I literally had to stop reading for a moment, in awe at the crafting of a sentence, re-reading it for further appreciation. The vocabulary and tone, often rhythmic like a rap, experimental even a century after publish. 

The story is ultimately about the creation of a young man under heavy influence of the Catholic Church, late-19th century aristocratic Ireland, industrialization, social masculinity, nationalism, and all the other domestic, interpersonal, and internal chaos we all live with regardless of setting. I found the role of religion in Joyce's life similar to its place in James Baldwin's life as detailed in Go Tell It on the Mountain: a deeply rooted pillar with divine proportion, an icon that must inevitably be confronted in a process that will fundamentally change life. 

They both tell their stories, swarming with the details of a life now gone, yet still universal at its core.

It's also beyond impressive when a writer can encapsulate the viewpoint of a child in their work. To build a cohesive narrative and transfer it, convincingly and accurately, via a child's eyes to an older reader without either side getting lost, that takes a special understanding. Like Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. 

 

The copy I have is a jacket-less blue hardback printed in the 90s. Its pages are sharp white and fresh, and the smooth front cover has a black rectangle with the following centered between its borders: 

 

James Joyce

-------

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

 

I felt like this book, more than probably anything I've read, touches down like a landing spacecraft in another person's life. It's like opening a portal to a soul. 

Worldwide Localization

What is far away, the mysterious unknown exciting, has a natural allure. Having been denied the freedom to pursue this urge in geographical terms by the pandemic, the vast swath of humanity has been forced to instead stay, and engage, local. 

Professor Malhi at Oxford is one of those many. He recently wrote an essay about his shift to studying the nature of his English surrounding instead of distant tropical rain forests. So many have similarly obliged, in various creative and intellectual ways, and I think the experience has been revelatory. 

It almost feels like the world has reached a level of global entanglement that is just too much. Like we stretched the elastic of ourselves until it could stretch no more, and now we're furling back into a more relatable size. 

I don't say this solely because the pandemic is distinctly of the time, its spread and reactions and aura exclusive to the Internet Age. I think it's been relatively clear that a point of satiation had been reached even before, but culminating, now. 

All the major political trends point to a rupture. Resurgent nationalism. Economic largess and inequality. Impending climate doom. The technological coup of society. The origin and facilitator of these widespread turmoils is clearly the modern lifestyle.

The obviousness of what's happening hit me when I read this article that explained how global health is no longer, and will never again be, centralized and dominated by the U.S. Power is dispersed, the world more equal and accessible than ever before, trudging through a radical newness. The paradigms of the 20th century are failing. 

I am realizing the value of local, less sprawled living, and from what I can tell I am not alone. Life is so much easier and more in depth this way. There ends up being greater connection with the world around you. Focusing on the details, which takes time and familiarity and a smaller sample size, is the best way to truly know something. 

And people are in sore need of connection these days. It's now evident that grand notions of global linkage don't really bring us closer together ideologically, and definitely don't alleviate our loneliness. We yearn for tangible bonds to the ground underfoot, the matter we can touch, hear, see and smell. 

 

Without mooring, without embedding an anchor in the seabed, we drift in a chaotic haze, isolated and unable to escape meaninglessness.

I think a smaller, more personal world is a necessary reaction to unprecedented globalization. I think it will not only help on an individual social level but on a planetary scale. It's so consuming to live the way we have. We all know we need to use fewer resources for long-term survival. The Swedes, even before the pandemic, were flying noticeably less for this very purpose. 

Maybe, with greater appreciation for what's directly around us, we could start along the path the world needs to go on. Isn't the air rife with possibility?

Change and Loss

I've talked with my sister recently about the human tendency to bestow meaning in the things surrounding us, animate or not. It seems a natural way to navigate through the complex world. We create placeholders to orient life amidst chaos. 

When through unrelenting, inevitable change, the familiar surroundings leave our lives, it feels like part of our very being is lost. It hurts so bad when the manifestations of our memories and identity are taken away. Sometimes the deep meaning these symbols of our creation have goes unrecognized until the weight of loss begins its heavy tug. Left hollow, lost, confused, our shape-shifting nature is unveiled as a series of layers that can never be ordered in the same way again.

I maintain that the worst part of death is how the absence gradually becomes normal. The presence is no longer present. It is forever a thing of the past. The tragedy is not only that which is gone, but so too that which is left behind by the living; the slivers and chunks of a fragile self that is buried with the dead. 

One of the defining themes characterizing my entrance into adulthood has been the loss of what once was. Aging is tangible now, and I have lived long enough for it to show me its mighty grip. Coming to terms with the ultimate reality is, in a way, what adulthood seems to essentially mean. 

As much as change makes the bad better, it takes what is good, too. Therein lies the trouble. It's a cruel setup that the greater something is, the more devastating, the more piercing its demise and disappearance will be. Even what is inside, protected by mass, mental barricade, and the shadows of the soul, is not exempt.

The highest challenge we the conscious face, the most insurmountable, crippling monster bearing down on every waking moment, is reckoning with change. For change is life and life is change, and refuting its authority is a losing, self-destructive war of attrition. 

To find peace is to accept change. It is a clear yet unbelievable taxing, emotional journey that seems to require the stuff of gritty fortitude and caring embrace. Loss makes me want to hate the unjust world, to lash out in a futile tantrum that forces the hands of time backwards so that I don't have to ever deal with it. I guess accepting it all means filing those reactions away and, instead of ruminating on the loss of what was, welcoming the creation of what is. And having faith that what is, and what will be, is worth a damn. 

Lastly, a song I heard again after many years: Dust in the Wind by Kansas