View of a Room

Study of architect, Donald E. Olsen, Berkeley, CA (room assembled 1954-present).

Straphangers

Dialectics

"Everything I've done is either made up or documented."

Pariiiiiiiis? Are you smart? Shit.
Not such an interesting or pertinent question.
(Obvi-tons: she's not a scholar but she knows just what she's doing. And let's not waste anymore time crying that she doesn't "do anything." What she "does" is work to convince you that she isn't "doing anything.")
Last night's MTV-aired documentary on the controversial personality, Paris, Not France, which, unlike this year's Britney Spears doc, was not created for the network (I think its makers hoped for theatrical release), asked after her smartness, because it seems to have been made years ago, when the dialogue about Paris was much less...developed. Frankly, the film made me sick. Not on account of Paris or anything that she said. On account of the mad camera tricks. The thing gave me VERTIGO. Pillow said, "we're gonna die tonight," and I nearly believed her. Truly, I had the spins. I figure the jerking and psychedelia and filming upside down in mirrors is meant to impart Paris' pilled-out-ness, so...effective-sort-of? But mucho time was spent rehashing the sex tape. AS IF THAT EVEN MATTERS NOW. Well, the tape does matter. But I want to discuss it beyond the olde gossip context and public humiliation and did she really plan its release or not. I want to talk about what it means now, as the bizarro launch of a bonafide superstar (the 2000 Vanity Fair spread was when I really took notice, but...). I liked it when Paris said she was much younger than 19 and blacked out or disassociative or whatever when Rick took the footage--that felt like the truth, in a human-drama way, not a scoopy, journalistic way...it felt familiar, really. There ought to have been more Camille Paglia, more analysis of her image, her life as an image. There was an incredible segment of Paris and Nicky doing a little press tour in Japan, a joy. Oh, to be big in Japan! Oh, the sweet sights and sounds of 2003! Last year sometime, Paris wore a vintage Cavalli to an awards show. The vintage of the dress was 2003. For me, it was a real head-turner. The choice spoke volumes: of course she was in on it dummy she maybe didn't "know" all along but by now she certainly did and was an icon of the aughts and the aughts were passing and she was being self-referential in the BEST way. And her current reality number, Paris Hilton's My New BFF, is fantastic. I'm through being miffed about the person-as-brand stuff, because it's how it works and she is totes brilliant at it (and she's done a lot for the English language). At one point in the documentary, Michael Musto (who is very important to me), claims people hate Paris because "she's that girl from high school, etc..." That's how tired, how phoned-in the line of commentary was. Through most of Paris' reign, I took umbrage at costumes and performance. I thought "unstudied" was the only way. Now, I understand that's deluded. My "unstudied" is a costume too, just a more elitist one. I wasn't all-only-ever-about elitist slouch. I'm writing a book on Britney Spears, because I've always (since 1998) thought of her as important in her costumes. Paris should have made sense to me like Britney made sense to me. But Brit is a tragic figure, and Paris most decidedly is NOT. I had to age a bit to learn how to celebrate the flinty and "invulnerable" characters of this world.

...Now for the Lindsay (again with the tragedy) five-parter...

TFLN

p: fat blocker* at the sky club!!!!!
a: GET ON IT
p: he's drinking Chardonnay with an ice cubeeeee
p: i'm distracted by the better-looking assistant bringing him things
a: NOT A BALLER


*defensive lineman

Le Divorce

Bad Gurlz 4 Lyfe

All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretense
Our wanderings to guide.
-Lewis Carroll

ooooh boy

never ever ever gonna let you go

These past two weeks have brought forth a "new party line" on Dash Snow, a whole mess of revisioning eulogy. Folks who clearly would have said last month that he was a scourge and a dummy are now, post-overdose, calling him a genius. Most of these non-journalisms are stuffed with doughy quotes from his dealer (art, not smack), a certain Javier Peres, who, though a friend, also stands to make some money off of being baroque-sentimental and celebrating the whole "oeuvre" of the L.E.S. of aughts. I've avoided posting any responses here (other than my admittedly callous, clipped posts on the day Dash's death was announced--see somewhere below...or don't). But Saturday I went shopping in Midtown and then I went to Williamsburg. I bought a pair of sandals at Barney's and I spent a few minutes sitting in front of the glorified flophouse I briefly called home with my deadbeat love of 2005, E__, a friend of Dash's. This summer, I've had these odd "relived days," generally and specifically. I have a feeling of old information, of recycling experience wherever I go. And then sometimes I'm doing it on purpose, killing an hour by going to the Frick and sitting in the conservatory like I always used to in 2004 and 5, when I needed to cool off and be Uptown and religious. Even that phrase, "killing an hour," is history, straight from a moment in which I thought time was fit to waste and kill (obviously these things still happen, but I'm sick with guilt over it).....so much is going on here.....it's getting tricky to be graceful...There's the reliving of things, which is a sure sign of a break-up, of an ENDING, a post-, a memory. Then there's the Uptown and Downtown and "early" (colonized) Brooklyn. I related to the geography of this city so differently a few years ago (before I'd ever set foot in my current Flatbush), and so did a lot of people. In the early aughts, Dash and his friends (a kind of massive, varied, sub-categorize-able crowd) were trying to squeeze the very last bit of juice out of that old up-down (high-low) dichotomy, which is so easy and fun (and defunct)*. Williamsburg played a role, because there were plenty who couldn't afford the L.E.S. and Chinatown. They built (colonized) a suburb with easy access to their end of Manhattan island and a series of amenities. And where did I come from? Technically, a dormitory, but I crashed with E__ in that weird maze of a place, full of partitions and milk crates, on Metropolitan and Roebling. I was one of a few outsiders making it into (or just sitting and observing) the inside. I was young: 19, 20. That was the point. I injected my youth and, of course, my ability to be impressed. And class. I wasn't just young. I was young with a good education and a little expendable cash (the most unexpected people warmed to me when they found out I went to Andover, and were warmer still when they learned I was kicked out--the old dichotomy, or 'Dash story'). This group of O.G. hipsters, who I was falling in (love) with, took pride in grit, but also had a stake in SUCCESS and GLAMOUR. Some (few), like Dash, came from the thin, blue air of 81st street (or 70s-art-royalty TriBeCa). Some, like the two Sevignys, came from very preppy and well-heeled, Darien. Some, like Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley, were skate kids from respectable Jersey commuter towns. Some, like E__, were really blue-collar, rough and tough and thick and from Upstate and the Middle. There were hep 'Euros,' like Dash's wife, Agathe, or the guys and girls of Asfour, who may or may not have been wealthy. It was hard to tell, but they were clearly glamorous. And, this being a New York story, there were bands and artists and djs and stylists and designers and a few models/actresses (no--ahem--writers). Whosoever was gaining notoriety was the subject of fawning and gossip (Dash). The first time I met Dash, he had just been explained to me by a girl I really didn't like, in the following way: "You don't know who he is? He's gorgeous and he's one of those Uptown kids. He lives in a huge mansion or something. Last week, we were doing a bump in my car on 15th street, just the two of us. And we made out. And then he just got out and ran off, toward 10th Avenue. I really want him to like me." He made himself rare. And he didn't have a cell phone. He was skittish and always fucked up. And just then, to me, he represented a seedier type of seedy. He was one of E__'s party friends who I hardly ever saw. So, I assumed (and did so correctly) that he came packing heroin and group sex, two items E__ worked diligently to keep me innocent of (with varying success). The thing about Dash's Polaroids is that I'd seen them before I saw them (each of us probably had). E__ made those kinds of pictures too, not consciously, diligently or artfully. Just because his friends used Polaroids, and occasionally when there was an Asian hooker in the room doing blow off of someone's dick a body felt the need to document it, all tinny and flash-flooded. Imagine my mortification, a nice girl from Memphis (ha)**, upon finding that picture on my boyfriend's bureau. E__ knew this. He had seen me start, seen me try fruitlessly to disguise my alarm at the tableaux he brought me before most night/mornings. Though I was between schools, these were my college years. I certainly had energy and a drive toward drugs and bars. I was thrilled to meet this sweet guy who had some famous friends and could get me and a bevy of my friends into whatever party or bar or club that we wanted and keep us in free booze and drugs. There was more to it after a while, because he was so kind and such a gentleman, more felicitous and thoughtful than any guy of mine before or since. But the longer we were together, the more ugly things I saw. There was an incredible distance between the dressing room where I tried on the new dress for the party/Pillow's apartment where we met to have champagne and KILL TIME/our arrival at the party/our getting high/our commandeering the dancefloor--and--our leaving the second or third late night bar for the first of one or several morning parties in semi-stranger's apartments/bringing the last stragglers home to blow lines for a few more hours before finally passing out en masse. Between 4:00 A.M. and the afternoon, in more intimate groupings, I became aware of the "culture" afoot. My boyfriend and his friends were drug addicts and alcoholics and they were older than me. Some had children and would attempt to make self-effacing jokes about it mid-binge. There was a violence about them, about the way they did drugs and the way they treated people, black people, Mexicans, women. In that world (at least the parts I saw of it), women were disposable, not the stars, not the artists (usually), but the flitting girlfriends/bartenders/whores. There was an air of 80s metal. The dudes had long hair and the feminine ideal was a stripper circa 1990 and people called things rock n' roll. Because of, and beyond, the Bush White House, it was an anti-intellectual moment. Dash (yes, we are returning to him), despite his pedigree, was a high school drop out. Whether or not people had finished high school or gone to art school or Columbia even, there was widespread disapproval of academics, institutions (disingenuously). This was tricky for me. I came from a family of academics. But I had been, on the whole, an academic failure. I could make the argument, in a personal way, for a disconnection between smarts and school. I learned a lot from E__'s crowd about the efficacy of my non-academic interests in popular music and clothes and television and gossip. But so often, as I travelled in my man's pocket, I'd survey a room and think: what am I doing here? I was being given a chance to rebel, to build a generation gap, to both mimic and reject my parental forebears, Downtown New Yorkers of the 60s and 70s, hippies (though those came back in style---apolitically), intellectuals. And I said no. I liked it better at home.

And Dash. He was one of those that was A-squad, cooler, tougher, scarier, junk-usinger, distanter, inscrutabler. I was around him only a handful of times. I heard a lot of noise. I knew his wife a bit better. I never knew this girlfriend who had his child. But I knew he made me uneasy. And I knew his artworks up and down as soon as I first saw them. It's all familiar. All a direct, guttery/al response to a time and place and way of seeing that I shared in (if briefly and not so totally). I know it's cloying and tiresome to have this discussion, to continually call upon words like scene and crowd and moment. But it's what was happening. It's all that mattered---social life, I mean---among these characters. In the gruesome*** Times piece on Sunday, there were a couple of quotes of import. An excerpt from an eulogizing email Ryan McGinley sent around to friends is so telling. What he has to say rings true. It is an accurate description, and also, in tone, incredibly indulgent and irritating:

"...irresponsible, reckless, carefree, wild, rich — we were just kids doing drugs and being bad, out at bars every night. Sniffing coke off toilet seats. Doing bumps off each others’ fists. Driving down one-way streets in Milan at 100 miles an hour blasting ‘I Did It My Way’ in a white van.”

This was followed shortly by a wonderfully succinct soundbite from the New Museum's Benjamin Godsill:

" [Dash's work] captures this period bracketed by the fall of the World Trade Center and the fall of the financial system.”

I know this. I know this first hand. I've spent the past couple of years scrambling to retell recent history, the arc of the empty-headed, existential aughts. But that's it. September 11, 2001-September 15, 2008. When E__ and I went on our first, official date (we'd known each other peripherally for a while), we walked from dinner on E. 7th to Ludlow, where we went to Max Fish and Dark Room. As we rounded the corner onto that cozy little block of bars (I did love it back then), E__ said, "Here we are. Ground zero." He was so hokily giving me "an education" (dirty word) in "the scene," and so flip-ly, referencing the rubble of the Twin Towers. Without thinking, E__ had admitted that the debauchery therein was a direct response to that certain hole in the ground further west and south (there was a very important acid trip soon after that involved an accidental arrival at the WTC, but that's another blah blah blah). In reviewing the old A.P. images of the Ground Zero rubble, a thing as unpleasant now as it was then, I see a hamster's nest. But art, and a lot else, contains meanings or sub-surfaces beneath surfaces. One mess is tremendously different from another. The oft racist and sexist scribblings on the walls, the drugs and vomit and giz and urine that covered Dash's mess installation, the party, the exclusive masturbatory masturbating event, all of that was dumb and ineffectual and hollow and boring. The ashes and cranes in the Battery. They're a crumbled America (you know I'm not overstating the matter). I don't want readers of his work to get so carried away. Dash Snow was a poet of an extraordinarily unpoetic Bohemia. The creative output of the naughts (my new new--new since I began writing this a MILLION hours ago--word for the people outlined above) was slim and dim. They looked better and dj'ed better than most, but that's...most of it. Acting busted in a boom (oy the explosions). Never trying to be grown-ups, making a case for their own...experience (existence)? Carelessly. Messily. Thoughtlessly. In a few more years, when I'm feeling more generous, I might say they shook up some heavy, pointless pedagogy, made it possible for us to live in the middle of High and Low (maybe not for the first time, but...) and take a break from the rigidity and neuroticism that had so defined New York-ness before. When I moved back here, last summer, I was long(ish) out of touch with E__ and the naughts. I wasn't coming back to reclaim a past thing. It was clear to me that something had crested. Ludlow was Greek Row. I've told this story before. P.M.C. said to me over burgers (dinner 2) at Le Parker Meridien that "friends" or "groups of friends," "crowds," in the sceney or collegiate sense did NOT matter anymore. I was devastated. I was so lonely and heartsick for Tennessee. I listened to the Kink's "See My Friends" over and over. I knew P.M.C. was correct. When Lehman Bros. toppled on September 15th, the two of us were downtown, answering some silly tickets at the Courthouse. A fellow traded me a Wall Street Journal for my Post and there they were: four angry, downturning red graphs, the future of futures, the end of aughts and naughts. How funny that we (imperial, I know) acted skeezy and collective when the market was up, when luxe and greed and bling were KING. When the Depression started a year ago (lord knows where it's going), all we wanted was green pastures and clean consciences and OURSELVES. And I get why Dash's suicide is getting so much attention. He always did do. And it was...a statement, a meaningful escape? Because, you know. But I'm not trying to pretend he produced good work. It's not the materials. I make Polaroids and save Post covers (who doesn't). It's the vapidity, the lack of dignity, the puerile antics, the "fuck the police for not letting me tag shit" and the doom and gloom (with no measure of gravity).


*Note, I refer to: Uptown:Downtown as High:Low, not the whole idea of High and Low, that would be silly.
**That "(ha)" was for Memphis, not for me...
***The death is outlined. The "scoop" of suicide revealed. We are given access to that hotel room, to the experience of the people who loved him watching paramedics beat his chest for an hour and a half. It's totally gross, inappropriate journalism.

I HATE YOU SOULJA BOY

Happy birthday. This video is really one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

Trinity

Tuesday

Verses

"Bahama Mama"
Boney M.
(1979)

Bahama, bahama mama Got the biggest house in town bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama But her troubles getting down bahama mama She has six daughters And not one of them is married yet And shes looking high and low And none of them plays ever hard to get So if youre lonesome go there go Bahama, bahama mama You should all be looking for bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama And Im sure you will adore bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama Got the biggest house in town bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama But her troubles getting down bahama mama Youll meet her daughters They ll be treatin you to honeycake Theyll be sweet and nice to you And maybe there is one youd like to take Well then youll know just what to do Bahama, bahama mama She is really in a fix bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama Being stuck with all them six bahama mama Whats the matter with men today Six beautiful roses And nobody to pluck them Its a crying shame Bahama, bahama mama Got the biggest house in town bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama But her troubles getting down bahama mama The thing is each of them looks Like a gorgeous moviequeen Every one a perfect find And if a man refused that temptin scene He simply cant make up his mind Bahama, bahama mama Got the biggest house in town bahama mama Bahama, bahama mama But her troubles getting down bahama mama

Plaxico Pleeeaaaase

...shave that goatee!! You're such a beautiful man.

A Jenny Lo song worth talking about. We all hate Ja Rule and whoever the fuck that guy was who ran Murder, Inc. and had half a season of a reality show on MTV, but with eight years of critical distance, we come to find: their output was all about some dulcet soprano with a flouncy disco beat. It was Fern Kinney--those dudes were erroneous. This one is just lazy enough. A slope. It was part of a bundle of pop songs receiving radio play through an awkward/sexy/near-tragic field trip from my prep school to one of those commercial sledding slopes that's sort of like a water park but far far less. We were let loose in this trashy, foreign place. And such a soundtrack.

jewel eye

Ten years ago this June, Jennifer Lopez (who is 40 today!) released On the 6. It was the summer before we (our generationally uniform A&P staff) started high school. And it was the last of some wine, at once blissful and terribly depressing/ive. I was becoming aware of finite-ness (the finite-ness of any mini-epoch, any happy afternoon, any--oy--childhood?). I went to Venice with my grandmother. I went to a house in New Mexico with my parents and sister. I listened to On the 6 throughout. Pillow and I had a mutual love for the record, forged while staying up all night listening to it in her cedar closet, getting high on pure conjecture: video images, foggy notions of adulthood, choreographed dances, stretchy and flared denims, inside jokes about the less attractive members of boy bands.

There's not so much to say about the music. I loved it then because I was 14. I love it now because I'm sentimental. But the album cover. As far as I'm concerned, gold hot pants, beige chasmere sweater, and ponytail really add up. J. Lo is most iconic as a beauty, a dresser, as a glam caricature (and a Nueva Yorker), as the demander of culticle oils and fresh-cut flowers. Her musical and filmic successes, whatever they've been, are directly linked to her personal excesses (and thank G-d!). The two favorites from Summer '99:

Happy Birthday Jennifer Lopez. Happy Belated Birthday Monica Lewinsky.

READING Hall & Oates

She`ll only come out at night, the lean and hungry type
Nothing is new I`ve seen her here before…watching and waiting
Ooh, she`s sitting with you but her eyes are on the door
So many have paid to see what you think you`re getting for free
The woman is wild, a she-cat tamed by the purr of a jaguar
Money`s the matter, if you`re in it for love, you ain`t gonna get too far

(Oh oh, here she comes) watch out boy, she`ll chew you up
(Oh oh, here she comes) she`s a maneater
(Oh oh, here she comes) watch out boy, she`ll chew you up
(Oh oh, here she comes) she`s a maneater

I wouldn`t if I were you, I know what she can do
She`s deadly, man, she could really rip your world apart
Mind over matter, ooh, the beauty is there, but a beast is in the heart

(Oh oh, here she comes) watch out boy, she`ll chew you up
(Oh oh, here she comes) she`s a maneater
(Oh oh, here she comes) watch out boy, she`ll chew you up
(Oh oh, here she comes) she`s a maneater

Ooooooooooh ooh (Oh oh, here she comes) here she comes
Watch out boy, she`ll chew you up
(Oh oh, here she comes, watch out) she`s a maneater
(Oh oh, here she comes, she`s a maneater) Ooh, she`ll chew you up
(Oh oh, here she comes) Here she comes, she`s a maneater
(Oh oh, here she comes, watch out) She`ll only come out at night, oo
(Oh oh, here she comes) Here she comes, she`s a maneater
(Oh oh, here she comes, she`s a maneater) the woman is wild
(Oh oh, here she comes) here she comes
Watch out, boy, watch out, boy (Oh oh, here she comes)
Oh watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out
(Oh oh, here she comes) Yeah yeah, she`s a maneater
(Oh oh, here she comes, she’s a maneater) She’s watching and waiting
(Oh oh, here she comes) Oh, she’s a maneater

I saw the most wonderful clothing rack on Brighton 3rd.

PANTS!

Not usually a favorite...I think she's great at what she does; it's just a little too plainly performative for me. However, THESE PANTS!

The Hits

Let's revisit this, likely the best essay yet published here.

BLESS

Fiorello LaGuardia spoke Yiddish!

Best Thing Going (For Tuesday)

Pillow and I have been discussing acrylic and gel wraps, generally upping the seriousness of our nails. Perhaps we should purchase an issue of Below Zero.

Doris Salcedo Sculptures

Paining

Ayer, half-napping, directly after an episode of Tiny and Toya (which, I've now realized is about the mother of Tip's bebes--jealousy, anguish and admiration), I watched Waiting to Exhale. I'd never seen it, though I was familiar with a few key scenes from...I Love the 90's? Angela Basset setting her scoundrel (white-lady-loving) husband's suits on fire inside of a BMW sedan. (The incomparable) Loretta Devine offering up a plate of cookedfood to Gregory Hines.

The film is strange. It's set in Arizona (whaaaa?). And, typically, while the four principles, Devine, Basset, Ms. Whitney Houston, and Ms. Mike Tyson, are meant to be a unit of gal'friends, the actual links drawn between them are flimsy, the editing scatter-brained, the writing puerile. The thing is this: its view of women's love lives is dark. Crackheads, underminers, and, almost universally, other people's husbands. Truly, in the course of the movie, 3 out of the 4 heroines are involved with one or more married men. This is all well and good for spring chickens like us, but for women-of-a-certain-age, who really want to settle down and make babies and run errands, it's pure tragedy, the pits. But is it accurate? Are married boyfriends standard for thirty-something singles? Or is Waiting to Exhale simply a relic of 1995, a testament to how uncomfortable Hollywood was with non-traditional trajectories (like late marriage) for women? Whatever the case, I did feel there was a distinct sexism dotting the story, a sexism distinct from the present brand, one that felt more "Eisenhower" than "Girls Gone Wild." It's quite something how much cultural ground has been covered even within our wee quarter century of experience. This guy totes does it justice:

Simon Rex, will you still be a slag when we're married?

Happy (35th) Birthday baby!

Verses

The second letter of Paul Valéry's "Crisis of the Mind," (1919)--

I was saying the other day that peace is the kind of war that allows acts of love and creation in its course; it is, then, a more complex and obscure process than war properly so-called, as life is more obscure and more profound than death.

But the origin and early stages of peace are more obscure than peace itself, as the fecundation and beginnings of life are more mysterious than the functioning of a body once it is made and adapted.

Everyone today feels the presence of this mystery as an actual sensation; a few men must doubtless feel that their own inner being is positively a part of the mystery; and perhaps there is someone with a sensibility so clear, subtle, and rich that he senses in himself certain aspects of our destiny more advanced than our destiny itself.

I have not that ambition. The things of the world interest me only as they relate to the intellect; for me, everything relates to the intellect. Bacon would say that this notion of the intellect is an idol. I agree, but I have not found a better idol.

I am thinking then of the establishment of peace insofar as it involves the intellect and things of the intellect. This point of view is false, since it separates the mind from all other activities; but such abstract operations and falsifications are inevitable: every point of view is false.

A first thought dawns. The idea of culture, of intelligence, of great works, has for us a very ancient connection with the idea of Europe -- so ancient that we rarely go back so far.

Other parts of the world have had admirable civilizations, poets of the first order, builders, and even scientists. But no part of the world has possessed this singular physical property: the most intense power of radiation combined with an equally intense power of assimilation.

Everything came to Europe, and everything came from it. Or almost everything.

Now, the present day brings with it this important question: can Europe hold its pre-eminence in all fields?

Will Europe become what it is in reality -- that is, a little promontory on the continent of Asia?

Or will it remain what it seems -- that is, the elect portion of the terrestrial globe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of a vast body?

In order to make clear the strict necessity of this alternative, let me develop here a kind of basic theorem.

Consider a map of the world. On this planisphere are all the habitable lands. The whole is divided into regions, and in each of these regions there is a certain density of population, a certain quality of men. In each of these regions, also, there are corresponding natural resources -- a more or less fertile soil, a more or less rich substratum, a more or less watered terrain, which may be more or less easily developed for transport, etc.

All these characteristics make it possible, at any period, to classify the regions we are speaking of, so that at any given time the situation on the earth may be defined by a formula showing the inequalities between the inhabited regions of its surface.

At each moment, the history of the next moment will depend on this given inequality.

Let us now examine, not our theoretical classification, but the one that actually prevailed in the world until recently. We notice a striking fact, which we take too much for granted:

Small though it be, Europe has for centuries figured at the head of the list. In spite of her limited extent -- and although the richness of her soil is not out of the ordinary -- she dominates the picture. By what miracle? Certainly the miracle must lie in the high quality of her population. That quality must compensate for the smaller number of men, of square miles, of tons or ore, found in Europe. In one scale put the empire of India and in the other the United Kingdom: the scale with the smaller weight tilts down!

That is an extraordinary upset in equilibrium. But its consequences are still more so: they will shortly allow us to foresee a gradual change in the opposite direction.

We suggested just now that the quality of her men must be the determining factor in Europe's superiority. I cannot analyze this quality in detail; but from a summary examination I would say that a driving thirst, an ardent and disinterested curiosity, a happy mixture of imagination and rigorous logic, a certain unpessimistic skepticism, an unresigned mysticism...are the most specifically active characteristics of the European psyche.

A single example of that spirit, an example of the highest order and of the very first importance, is Greece -- since the whole Mediterranean littoral must be counted in Europe. Smyrna and Alexandria are as much a part of Europe as Athens and Marseilles. Greece founded geometry. It was a mad undertaking: we are still arguing about the possibility of such a folly.

What did it take to bring about that fantastic creation? Consider that neither the Egyptians nor the Chinese nor the Chaldeans nor the Hindus managed it. Consider what a fascinating adventure it was, a conquest a thousand times richer and actually far more poetic than that of the Golden Fleece. No sheepskin is worth the golden thigh of Pythagoras.

This was an enterprise requiring gifts that, when found together, are usually the most incompatible. It required argonauts of the mind, tough pilots who refused to be either lost in their thoughts or distracted by their impressions. Neither the frailty of the premises that supported them, nor the infinite number and subtlety of the inferences they explored could dismay them. They were as though equidistant from the inconsistent Negro and the indefinite fakir. They accomplished the extremely delicate and improbable feat of adapting common speech to precise reasoning; they analyzed the most complex combinations of motor and visual functions, and found that these corresponded to certain linguistic and grammatical properties; they trusted in words to lead them through space like far-seeing blind men. And space itself became, from century to century, a richer and more surprising creation, as thought gained possession of itself and had more confidence in the marvelous system of reason and in the original intuition which had endowed it with such incompatible instruments as definitions, axioms, lemmas, theorems, problems, porisms, etc.

I should need a whole book to treat the subject properly. I wanted merely to indicate in a few words one of the characteristic inventions of the European genius. This example brings me straight back to my thesis.

I have claimed that the imbalance maintained for so long in Europe's favor was, by its own reaction, bound to change by degrees into an imbalance in the opposite direction. That is what I called by the ambitious name of basic theorem.

How is this proposition to be proved? I take the same example, that of the geometry of the Greeks; and I ask the reader to consider the consequences of this discipline through the ages. We see it gradually, very slowly but very surely, assuming such authority that all research, all the ways of acquiring knowledge tend inevitably to borrow its rigorous procedure, its scrupulous economy of "matter," its automatic generalizations, its subtle methods, and that infinite discretion which authorizes the wildest audacity. Modern science was born of this education in the grand style.

But once born, once tested and proved by its practical applications, our science became a means of power, a means of physical domination, a creator of material wealth, an apparatus for exploiting the resources of the whole planet -- ceasing to be an "end in itself" and an artistic activity. Knowledge, which was a consumer value, became an exchange value. The utility of knowledge made knowledge a commodity, no longer desired by a few distinguished amateurs but by Everybody.

This commodity, then, was to be turned out in more and more manageable or consumable forms; it was to be distributed to a more and more numerous clientele; it was to become an article of commerce, an article, in short, that can be imitated and produced almost anywhere.

Result: the inequality that once existed between the regions of the world as regards the mechanical arts, the applied sciences, the scientific instruments of war or peace -- an inequality on which Europe's predominance was based -- is tending gradually to disappear.

So, the classification of the habitable regions of the world is becoming one in which gross material size, mere statistics and figures (e.g., population, area, raw materials) finally and alone determine the rating of the various sections of the globe.

And so the scales that used to tip in our favor, although we appeared the lighter, are beginning to lift us gently, as though we had stupidly shifted to the other side the mysterious excess that was ours. We have foolishly made force proportional to mass!

This coming phenomenon, moreover, may be connected with another to be found in every nation: I mean the diffusion of culture, and its acquisition by ever larger categories of individuals.

An attempt to predict the consequences of such diffusion, or to find whether it will or not inevitably bring on decadence, would be a delightfully complicated problem in intellectual physics.

The charm of the problem for the speculative mind proceeds, first, from its resemblance to the physical fact of diffusion and, next, from a sudden transformation into a profound difference when the thinker remembers that his primary object is men not molecules.

A drop of wine falling into water barely colors it, and tends to disappear after showing as a pink cloud. That is the physical fact. But suppose now that some time after it has vanished, gone back to limpidity, we should see, here and there in our glass -- which seemed once more to hold pure water -- drops of wine forming, dark and pure -- what a surprise!...

This phenomenon of Cana is not impossible in intellectual and social physics. We then speak of genius, and contrast it with diffusion.

Just now we are considering a curious balance that worked in inverse ratio to weight. Then we saw a liquid system pass as though spontaneously from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from intimate mingling to clear separation.... These paradoxical images give the simplest and most practical notion of the role played in the World by what -- for five or ten thousand years -- has been called Mind.

But can the European Mind -- or at least its most precious content -- be totally diffused? Must such phenomena as democracy, the exploitation of the globe, and the general spread of technology, all of which presage a deminutio capitis for Europe...must these be taken as absolute decisions of fate? Or have we some freedom against this threatening conspiracy of things?

Perhaps in seeking that freedom we may create it. But in order to seek it, we must for a time give up considering groups, and study the thinking individual in his struggle for a personal life against his life in society.

Love in this Club

NY1's Pat Kiernan, who applies his own make-up every morning (and keeps newspapers relevant). It's always nice to see an Irishman make something of himself.

GO SEE THIS GO SEE THIS GO SEE THIS

Verses

I am a criminal alarmist, not really in my personal-life so much as in my estimations of society and WHERE WE ARE GOING. There are some unique dangers we face in the 21st century, principally those of crumbling Eco-systems and overoversaturation of bodies and information. But it always tempers me to recall our 20th. I put myself in my parents' shoes, imagine witnessing three assassinations of three great leaders, literal snuffing of hope. I think of the draft too. And then there's my grandparents and great-grandparents—TWO great wars and nuclear armament and new drugs...

Here, Paul Valéry in 1919 (a terrifying year, the whole of Europe knee-deep in its losses), the first letter of his "Crisis of the Mind":

We later civilizations . . . we too know that we are mortal.

We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. . . . We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia...these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers. That is not all. The searing lesson is more complete still. It was not enough for our generation to learn from its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perish by accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and common sense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally believed.

I shall cite but one example: the great virtues of the German peoples have begotten more evils, than idleness ever bred vices. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labor, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends.

So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill so many, to waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed. Are Knowledge and Duty, then, suspect?

So the Persepolis of the spirit is no less ravaged than the Susa of material fact. Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.

An extraordinary shudder ran through the marrow of Europe. She felt in every nucleus of her mind that she was no longer the same, that she was no longer herself, that she was about to lose consciousness, a consciousness acquired through centuries of bearable calamities, by thousands of men of the first rank, from innumerable geographical, ethnic, and historical coincidences.

So -- as though in desperate defense of her own physiological being and resources -- all her memory confusedly returned. Her great men and her great books came back pell-mell. Never has so much been read, nor with such passion, as during the war: ask the booksellers. . . . Never have people prayed so much and so deeply: ask the priests. All the saviors, founders, protectors, martyrs, heroes, all the fathers of their country, the sacred heroines, the national poets were invoked. . . .

And in the same disorder of mind, at the summons of the same anguish, all cultivated Europe underwent the rapid revival of her innumerable ways of thought: dogmas, philosophies, heterogeneous ideals; the three hundred ways of explaining the World, the thousand and one versions of Christianity, the two dozen kinds of positivism; the whole spectrum of intellectual light spread out its incompatible colors, illuminating with a strange and contradictory glow the death agony of the European soul. While inventors were feverishly searching their imaginations and the annals of former wars for the means of doing away with barbed wire, of outwitting submarines or paralyzing the flight of airplanes, her soul was intoning at the same time all the incantations it ever knew, and giving serious consideration to the most bizarre prophecies; she sought refuge, guidance, consolation throughout the whole register of her memories, past acts, and ancestral attitudes. Such are the known effects of anxiety, the disordered behavior of mind fleeing from reality to nightmare and from nightmare back to reality, terrified, like a rat caught in a trap. . . .

The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us in all its force. But the intellectual crisis, being more subtle and, by it nature, assuming the most deceptive appearances (since it takes place in the very realm of dissimulation)...this crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its true extent, its phase.

No one can say what will be dead or alive tomorrow, in literature, philosophy, aesthetics; no one yet knows what ideas and modes of expression will be inscribed on the casualty list, what novelties will be proclaimed.

Hope, of course, remains -- singing in an undertone:

Et cum vorandi vicerit libidinem
Late triumphet imperator spiritus.

But hope is only man's mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind. Hope suggests that any conclusion unfavorable to us must be an error of the mind. And yet the facts are clear and pitiless; thousands of young writers and artists have died; the illusion of a European culture has been lost, and knowledge has been proved impotent to save anything whatsoever; science is mortally wounded in its moral ambitions and, as it were, put to shame by the cruelty of its applications; idealism is barely surviving, deeply stricken, and called to account for its dreams; realism is hopeless, beaten, routed by its own crimes and errors; greed and abstinence are equally flouted; faiths are confused in their aim -- cross against cross, crescent against crescent; and even the skeptics, confounded by the sudden, violent, and moving events that play with our minds as a cat with a mouse . . . even the skeptics lose their doubts, recover, and lose them again, no longer master of the motions of their thought.

The swaying of the ship has been so violent that the best-hung lamps have finally overturned. . . .

What gives this critical condition of the mind its depth and gravity is the patient's condition when she was overcome.

I have neither the time nor the ability to define the intellectual situation in Europe in 1914. And who could pretend to picture that situation? The subject is immense, requiring every order of knowledge and endless information. Besides, when such a complex whole is in question, the difficulty of reconstructing the past, even the recent past, is altogether comparable to that of constructing the future, even the near future; or rather, they are the same difficulty. The prophet is in the same boat as the historian. Let us leave them there.

For all I need is a vague general recollection of what was being thought just before the war, the kinds of intellectual pursuit then in progress, the works being published.

So if I disregard all detail and confine myself to a quick impression, to that natural whole given by a moment's perception, I see . . . nothing! Nothing . . . and yet an infinitely potential nothing.

The physicists tell us that if the eye could survive in an oven fired to the point of incandescence, it would see . . . nothing. There would be no unequal intensities of light left to mark off points in space. That formidable contained energy would produce invisibility, indistinct equality. Now, equality of that kind is nothing else than a perfect state of disorder.

And what made that disorder in the mid of Europe? The free coexistence, in all her cultivated minds, of the most dissimilar ideas, the most contradictory principles of life and learning. That is characteristic of a modern epoch.

I am not averse to generalizing the notion of "modern" to designate certain ways of life, rather than making it purely a synonym of contemporary. There are moments and places in history to which we moderns could return without greatly disturbing the harmony of those times, without seeming objects infinitely curious and conspicuous . . . creatures shocking, dissonant, and unassimilable. Wherever our entrance would create the least possible sensation, that is where we should feel almost at home. It is clear that Rome in the time of Trajan, or Alexandria under the Ptolemies, would take us in more easily than many places less remote in time but more specialized in a single race, a single culture, and a single system of life.

Well then! Europe in 1914 had perhaps reached the limit of modernism in this sense. Every mind of any scope was a crossroads for all shades of opinion; every thinker was an international exposition of thought. There were the works of the mind in which the wealth of contrasts and contradictory tendencies was like the insane displays of light in the capitals of those days: eyes were fatigued, scorched.... How much material wealth, how much labor and planning it took, how many centuries were ransacked, how many heterogeneous lives were combined, to make possible such a carnival, and to set it up as the supreme wisdom and the triumph of humanity?

In a book of that era -- and not one of the most mediocre -- we should have no trouble in finding: the influence of the Russian ballet, a touch of Pascal's gloom, numerous impressions of the Goncourt type, something of Nietzsche, something of Rimbaud, certain effects due to a familiarity with painters, and sometimes the tone of a scientific publication...the whole flavored with an indefinably British quality difficult to assess! Let us notice, by the way, that within each of the components of this mixture other bodies could well be found. It would be useless to point them out: it would be merely to repeat what I have just said about modernism, and to give the whole history of the European mind.

Standing, now, on an immense sort of terrace of Elsinore that stretches from Basel to Cologne, bordered by the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the limestone of Champagne, the granites of Alsace . . . our Hamlet of Europe is watching millions of ghosts.

But he is an intellectual Hamlet, meditating on the life and death of truths; for ghosts, he has all the subjects of our controversies; for remorse, all the titles of our fame. He is bowed under the weight of all the discoveries and varieties of knowledge, incapable of resuming the endless activity; he broods on the tedium of rehearsing the past and the folly of always trying to innovate. He staggers between two abysses -- for two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.

Every skull he picks up is an illustrious skull. This one was Leonardo. He invented the flying man, but the flying man has not exactly served his inventor's purposes. We know that, mounted on his great swan (il grande uccello sopra del dosso del suo magnio cecero) he has other tasks in our day than fetching snow from the mountain peaks during the hot season to scatter it on the streets of towns. And that other skull was Leibnitz, who dreamed of universal peace. And this one was Kant...and Kant begat Hegel, and Hegel begat Marx, and Marx begat. . . .

Hamlet hardly knows what to make of so many skulls. But suppose he forgets them! Will he still be himself? His terribly lucid mind contemplates the passage from war to peace: darker, more dangerous than the passage from peace to war; all peoples are troubled by it. . . . "What about Me," he says, "what is to become of Me, the European intellect? ...And what is peace? Peace is perhaps that state of things in which the natural hostility between men is manifested in creation, rather than destruction as in war. Peace is a time of creative rivalry and the battle of production; but I am not tired of producing? Have I not exhausted my desire for radical experiment, indulged too much in cunning compounds? ...Should I not perhaps lay aside my hard duties and transcendent ambitions? Perhaps follow the trend and do like Polonius who is now director of a great newspaper; like Laertes, who is something in aviation; like Rosencrantz, who is doing God knows what under a Russian name?

"Farewell, ghosts! The world no longer needs you -- or me. By giving the names of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death. A certain confusion still reigns; but in a little while all will be made clear, and we shall witness at last the miracle of an animal society, the perfect and ultimate anthill."