she looks at her baby’s photographs
laying on a blanket just a few
weeks old—while
another fixes her ID badge
at the collar and two others talk
quietly—while
half-built skyscrapers slide behind grey
girders, old trestles against dappled
grey clouds in the late spring sky—while
noses dive into magazines and
books and fingers dance on touch screens, eyes
straining for backlit words—while
the conductor crackles with news from
up the line that we can’t hear about
things we can’t see—while
wet napes dry against cool air as hips
rock and jerk to absorb the shocks of
sliding underground—while
one man gets up so the woman with
a cane can sit down and apply her
makeup layer by layer—while
smells of coffee and sweat push against
each other hanging from straps on rails
hanging from the ceiling—while
the dark tunnel moves, its walls broken
by shallow wells filled with words read by
those who care what they say—while
a man wears a salmon buttoned down
shirt folded over his chest like a
kimono—while
headphones and earbuds build parallel
worlds far away from everything here
in the everyday droll—while
a really tall black girl in purple
clutches her diploma as her mom
smiles and sits down—while
strollers and bicycles park against
seats and poles and a backdrop of plaids
checks, stripes, and solids—that
wash the scene and keep it vivid, live,
connected. There’s no race there’s only
a runner.
—Brooklyn, June 2015
Notes and Credits
The opening photograph was taken during a raging snow storm on the F-Train’s Culver Viaduct overlooking Carroll Gardens and Red Hook. The train comes above ground briefly there to cross the Gowanus Canal, then diving back down underground in Park Slope. “Two of Us on the Run” is a song by the group Lucius, which formed and cut its teeth in my neighborhood here, Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. I saw Lucius at the Prospect Park Bandshell this summer and then I bought their CD over iTunes and had it on my phone while I took the subway to work over the last few weeks. Brilliant song, wonderful treatment, makes me wish I had a daughter to play it for, over and over again. And when I listen on the train, I think of all the stories traveling with, on the way somewhere in the city.
On January 19, 2012, Brooklyn Reading Works is pleased to present “The truth and the ghost writer,” a panel of ghost writers who will share their experiences as part of the Brooklyn Reading Works series. The panel brings together 4 writers who have written for others. They have written in multiple voices for different purposes. Most have been “ghost writers,” bringing their skills to the task of telling some one else’s story. They have also written for hire “with” more well known (or at least well-off) first authors. They have also written under their own names, being “authors” in the more traditional sense of taking full credit for their own work.
For this evening, we will hear from these writers as they talk about the different experiences of writing as ghosts, hired hands, and authors of their own creative vision. They will help us understand differing ways of being an author and what it’s like to transition between writing as one’s own self and writing as another person.
January 19, 2012 Old Stone House 8:00 – 10:00 pm Refreshments will be served All are welcome
The Old Stone House is on 5th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, between 3rd and 4th streets. Take the R train to Union Street, of the F train to 4th Avenue.
The Panel:
ALISA BOWMAN – In the past 10 years Alisa has written 30 books, including many ghosted works and others under her own authorship. Six of her ghosted books have made the New York Times bestseller list. In addition, she has written for blogs, advertorials, pamphlets, and magazine columns.
JAMES BRALY – Braly’s monologue, Life in a Marital Institution, premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, sold-out 59E59 Theaters in New York City, and transferred Off Broadway to the Soho Playhouse. He is a familiar presence on the one-man show and storytelling circuits around the country.
KEITH E. GREENBERG – Keith has coauthored numerous autobiographies of professional wrestling personalities, including Freddie Balssie and Jesse “The Body” Ventura. His books have included a New York Times Bestseller, and he his work has involved relationships of remarkable intensity with his coauthors.
SARAH DEMING – Sarah has written novels for young audiences and also ghosted works of erotic fiction. She is an essayist with a blog, The Spiral Staircase, and several articles published in major magazines and periodicals.
When I wrote the post on the view from our building this afternoon, I wasn’t sure if the clouds would obscure the view of the memorial lights tonight. For a few minutes, however, the clouds parted just enough for me open the window and take this last photograph from the windows of apartment 4-A.
This is the view from the window next to my desk. From that window, I took the photo that was the first masthead for this blog (it’s in the page on “the blog” if you want to take a look).
This was the view last night, from the ground, at the corner of 6th Avenue and Union Street in Brooklyn.
My downstairs neighbor, Sarah, took that photo, and I saw it on her Flickr.
For the last three years, I have engaged a small ritual on or about September 11, when I can see the beams of light from Ground Zero over downtown from this window.
I turn out the lights. I sit for a few minutes, 10 minutes or so. My son is asleep in the next room, or maybe he’s at his mom’s apartment, just a few blocks away in the neighborhood. Either way, he’s safe, while I gaze at the lights. Irony is not the word for this.
I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with a memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far … Where you see ideals, I see what is human, alas, all too human.
Nietzsche’s words stream through my mind as I look at the beams and write my friends—
The clouds have cleared now and I have turned off the lights. I just want to look out at the beams of light streaming up to the heavens. So strange to think of the world before that day, and the world we have now. And it made me feel like reaching out to a few people who matter to me. I hope you’re all well.
As it happens, I never have taken a photo of the 9.11 beams from this window. Tonight I will try, but I fear it’s going to be cloudy. That’s unfortunate, because over the last couple of years, the view was so spectacular, iconic – and this year, 2009, will be my last at this window. I will be moving at the end of September, to a new apartment in “Prospect Park South” which is the trendy name for what has often been called “Kensington” or simply “Flatbush” in the local dialect.
As all things happen, however, Providence gives us what we need, and Sarah’s photo from last night is such a gift. So: Thank you much to Sarah for this photo. To all those who have touched my life, or whom I have touched in any way however small, I say this,
Be well and cherish those whose love you share. We have no way to change what was, and our attempts to shape what will be never have their intended effect. Where we are absolute, however, is the moment at hand. Let us live that moment well, with love, and with all the peace that the world so deeply needs. Only then do we stand a chance against the forces of darkness. Strange as it may seem, those are pretty good odds.
The precise address of our building is 211 Sixth Avenue. Or the Union Market, at 754 Union Street, Brooklyn. 11215.
The quote from Nietzsche was taken from the opening of the BBC documentary of him, which can be seen here. See also this and this.
My own quoted email was what I sent in 2007, the first year I sat at this window. I cannot find last year’s email, which was a little more focused. My three years of having this view have been important to me, because this window was a starting-over in many ways. I will miss the view – but mostly I will hold dear the fact that I have the chance to have this view for a little while. I only hope that the folks who come next to this little apartment are able to appreciate it as well.
Personal Note
I moved to New York in May of 2004. In 2001, I was in Rock Island, Illinois, teaching at Augustana College. On that particular day, I was in my office early. Jane, who was the secretary for the departments of History and Political Science, came running down the long hallway to my office – we might have been the only two people on the floor. She told me that I needed to come to the television and see what happened. Her husband had called and said that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Jane and I watched the rest of it happen, in a conference room on the campus of Augustana College which from its own window had a wonderful view of the Mississippi River and America’s own “heartland” on the border of Illinois and Iowa. We saw the second plane crash into the other tower, and we saw the buildings fall to the ground, all live. In my office, I heard about the plane crashing into the Pentagon, live. I was very afraid. My wife was out of town, and she was very possibly pregnant with our child (we had this confirmed just weeks after 9.11). My country was under attack.
I don’t know if folks in New York know what it was like to experience 9.11 outside of this city. It was pretty dreadful. Nothing like here, of course, but awful nonetheless. For a little while, we had no idea where this would lead, and everyone feared bombs and flames and explosions.
A few weeks later, November 10-12, 2001, we were in New York. My wife had some meetings and I was along for the ride and the visit. We knew then that our child would be expected some time in May or June. I had some good runs in the city, in Central Park, along the avenues, but not on the West Side Highway. It was blocked, for security reasons. As we prepared to leave on the 12th, we heard odd news suddenly: all the bridges and tunnels were closed, and so were the airports. A plane had crashed in Queens.
Downstairs, we spoke to the hotel personnel. The looks on their faces and the emotions in the air are emblazoned on my mind, in a way that makes me think of my parents’ generation when they talk about what they were doing when Kennedy was assassinated. I won’t forget that.
In the first installment of The truth and change, I wrote about how the Enlightenment gave us a new kind of science and social discourse that pictured a perfectible mankind, which would be the basis of real democracy and freedom in the future. Yet it was really a Greek tragedy.
Jefferson snubbed the ancients by declaring that there will be something new under the sun, and a hundred years later the world embarked on a century that would witness versions of apocalypse previously imaginable onlyin epics and divine texts. Everything that the Enlightenment made it possible to imagine, it also made it possible to destroy. That was the dilemma of my generation . . .
Technoredemption Goes Pro
The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair gave us the “House of Tomorrow,” which still stands in Indiana and at 78 years old combines the future and past in one space. Like most dream houses created since the 1930s, it has a double garage, with a twist – one for an automobile and one for the airplane that “World’s Fair optimists assumed every future family would own …”
One can only imagine how this garage has played out of time – rumpus room, game room, massive mud room, cluttered workshop where grandpa used to build boats in bottles, and now the place where mom and dad surf the internet when the other isn’t looking.
The House of Tomorrow held out a vision of the future at odds with much of what was going on around it. A few years earlier, World War I gave people a glimpse of the horror to be wrought by chemical warfare and bombs. In 1933, faith in individual action and the capitalist economy was well under seige. On February 27 of that year, Hitler burned the Reichstag and The Third Reich began. World War II, with its multiple Holocausts of genocide, firebombing, and nuclear warfare would be soon upon us.
The House of Tomorrow, 1933, Berlin version
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (published in 1973) portayed this entire destructive arc of the twentieth century. Science fuelled a spiral of violence, which unleashed and unbound human emotions both zany and horrific. Pynchon captured this most vividly in Brigadier Pudding’s humiliation scene, a Pavlovian experiment in the malleability/perfectibility of mankind that was a living annihilation at the border between the past and our future in which Pudding relived and relieved himself of the filth of Ypres and Passechendaele over and over again. The ritual became the center of his being.
Zak Smith: Brigadier Pudding, p. 236
Still, annihilation and holocaust were not the only ideas on the table. The playfulness of Pynchon’s novel and its main character, Tyrone Slothrop, held out the competing narratives of innocence and technologial redemption, impulses ironically (and perhaps hypocritcally) present in Robert Moses’s 1964 New York World’s Fair. This was the year of my birth and the year in which Stanley Kubrik gave us Dr. Strangelove. At the Fair, GM’s “Tomorrow Land” provided a delightful tour of the wonders yet to be bestowed on us by reinforced concrete, steel, and plastic. Tomorrow Land was a glimpse into the world that could be, minus the evils of nuclear war, poverty, and exploitation.
At the Fair’s Pepsi Pavilion, “Children of the World” used mechanized dolls and music to showcase a world of hope and diversity. This became Disney’s “It’s a Small World,” leading to the installation of its relentlessly saccharine theme song in the minds of millions of people every year, some of whom must wish that Slim Pickins would ride a missile into Orlando and put an end to the little dolls and gadgets just so they could get that song out of their heads.
The world we inherited in the Reagan years was reeling between the Jetsons and Dr. Strangelove as Paul Westerberg wrote “we’ll inherit the earth, but we don’t want it.” If we were finally, really going to do it, to blow it up, I’d at least try to spend my last years thinking of other things.
The Mighty "Trash-80"
In 1981, I bought a TRS-80, Model III. I was 17 and had saved up the money from my job at the pizza parlor down the street. I read Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave and John Nesbitt’s Megatrends. A future of progress was much more appealing future than the one forecast by the “Doomsday Clock” on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Such was the future according to Generation X, as we stumbled between slackerism and technoredemption.
In 1989, I remember being in my kitchen, washing dishes and listening to NPR when they announced that people had climbed over the Berlin Wall and were taking it apart. In my own mind, I replaced The Day After with Blondie and hummed “Atomic” over and over again as I felt relief wash over me.
Then in the mid-1990s, Newt Gingrich started invoking Alvin Toffler at every opportunity. 1984 and Y2K came and went with neither Orwellian nor apocalyptic futures taking hold. The most prescient glimpse of the future provided in my entire lifetime was not Space 1999 but Prince’s 1999, which accurately forecast exactly what I, and countless others around the world, were doing in 1999. Whatever the future would be, it would be weird, and once Tim Berners Lee put the World Wide Web up, Gen X went online and, as if following Hunter S. Thompson’s consultation to our parents, we went pro.
Technoredemption provided a kind of cure-all for anxiety about the future. Today it feeds the relentlessly positive assessments of Twitter’s contribution to revolution and freedom around the world. Yet the same technology can bring us back to Huxley or Orwell, and we know it. Evgeny Morozov writes that even as “activists and NGOs are turning to crowdsourcing to analyze data, map human rights violations, scrutinize the voting records of their MPs, and even track illegal logging in the Amazon”, ” governments are also relying on crowdsourcing to identify dissenters and muzzle free speech.”
Technoredemption remains as much a promise now as it was in 1776, 1933, 1964, or 1989. Rousseau’s famous line from the opening of On the Social Contract – “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – strikes me as quite true today, in the same sense that Rousseau meant it, and with the same consequences.
We didn’t need nuclear bombs alone to create armageddons of pain and horror. Madhukar Shukla writes “The Firebombing of Tokyo was as devasting as the nuclear, Hidden in the history of that time, is an unnoticed footnote – the ‘Tokyo Fire-Bombing,’ which the Western press would not touch, and the Japanese survivors would not like to dwell upon [was an] event which happened months before the atom-bombs and with far more lethal consequences.” Shukla’s blog is called “Alternative Perspective” and his homepage is here.
The illustration of Brig. Pudding is by Zak Smith, from his work Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Much thanks to Zak for granting me permission to use the image. The series of illustrations was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial (agh, just before I arrived in New York!) and is now part of the permanent collection at the Walker in Minneapolis. In the episode referenced above, Brig. Pudding must undergo a scatological humiliation scene with Domina Nocturna as part of his atonement for his role in Ypres and Passechendaele, a scene occupying pp. 232-36 of the book (Viking Press, 1973). Click on the image and you will be taken to a website featuring all of the illustrations.
Among Pynchon’s themes we count the Europeans’ damning of the world to endure the repetitive future of their own racist, colonial past, which sits perversely at the heart of American innocence and condemns America (white America, especially) to this struggle between technoredemption, dystopia, and annihilation. Like Rousseau, Pynchon sees the chains that reason has placed on mankind. He continues to explore that theme in his writing, with impressive intensity in Mason and Dixon, in which the two famous astronomers are contracted to create an artificial boundary between two artificial entites (Pennsylvania and Maryland) that have been imposed on something like a state of nature.
Pynchon’s new novel, Inherent Vice, goes into the territory of detective fiction and film noir, two of my favorite genres. I am giddy and cannot wait to read this book. Expect more posts related to TP.
On August 31, 2006, Douglas Coupland posted a wonderfully ironic vision of the future as past and present on his New York Times blog. At that point he boldly foresaw the Kindle-future, as he predicted that books will “cease to exist” and become “extinct.” Looking at his old novels and thinking of insects, he began to think about how wasps made paper from wood, and then he used his own mouth to pulp his novels and make nests from them. The resulting photos are quite beautiful, and the blog posting shows what Generation X looks like as a nest.
I learned about Evgeny Morozov’s blog post in a Tweet from Cause Global’s Marcia Stepanek.
The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning and I, I live by the river
For as long as I can remember, people have been trumpeting the big changes that were supposed to occur in my lifetime. In this span of years, roughly the 1960s-forward, change was the key ingredient of the future, which amounted to three alternatives: progress, dystopia, or annihilation. Looking back on the future of the last 45 years, however, it turns out that these aren’t mutually exclusive alternatives.
Einstein observed that the experience of an event is subject to relational factors like who’s observing it, where, and under what conditions. So it is with the future. It may not be the world itself that changes, but rather how we experience it, a future that happens inside our bodies to make the world look, sound, feel, taste, and smell different. The House of Tomorrow may well be the house of yesterday, but it won’t feel that way.
This is the first of three posts on The truth and change. The series will look at how tangled, ironic, and weird (to invoke a favorite category of Hunter S. Thompson’s) the future will be, if it’s not that already. The exercise in lateral thinking takes us from perfection to dystopia, annihilation, technoredemption, slacker paradise, Qoheleth, Big Pharma, and cyberchange.
From perfection to dystopia
The future, change, and progress are products of The Enlightenment. For millennia, people were assumed to be what they were. Thinkers in the West and the East had explored all sorts of ideas about how to create good societies, find peace, and achieve enlightenment (The Buddha’s kind) – but there was no belief in a “future” that would be different from the past. Differences in politics, spirituality, or technology were seen as superficial, and the great wheel of history rolled along.
Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity! …
One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays …
What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done.
Nothing is new under the sun. [Eccl. 1: 2, 4, 9]
Then in the eighteenth century the philosophes in France and other spots around Europe started to think about the life we could have on Earth through science, reason, and (in one form or another) “democracy.” The twin notions of change and the future became tangible, captured in a repurposing of the word “progress.” In The Invention of Air, Stephen Johnson shows how these ideas were tied together across science, politics, and religion. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Joseph Priestly (the nominal subject of Johnson’s book) were scientists and radicals who imprinted the American Revolution with the Enlightenment’s vision of the future.
As Jefferson wrote to Priestly after the presidential inauguration in 1800, “We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new.” In another context, Jefferson famously quipped, “Every generation needs a new revolution.” Compromised as Jefferson’s revolution was, eventually even the enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans, written out at the beginning, would build their own revolution to insist on (some of) Jefferson’s ideals, among others. The times, they would be a-changing, and the early Abolition movement itself was a part of the Enlightenment’s vision of change.
New industries and the “New World” conjured an image of humankind’s infinite malleability – we were blank slates on which a better world would be drawn. People were, in a word, perfectible. Yet perfection was a contestable quality, and disagreements over perfectibility would draw the lines of ideological battles that lasted from 1776 to 1989. One of the central lines in the struggle over change was who would make change happen best — freely acting individuals, private corporate entities, or the state.
These conflicts underlay Adam Smith’s own writings. He placed great faith in individuals and very little in either the state or corporations. In Smith’s ideal world, we were a self-correcting society of individuals guided “by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [their] intention.” In other words, people following purely individual motives could create social good, almost accidentally.
Smith applied his faith in individuals to economic life, but he saw a conflict between the capacity of individual action to create a moral world and the effects of capitalism’s main motor for change, the division of labor. Far from perfecting mankind, the nature of industrial production (and with it, the creation of wealth) would render the bulk of people ever more ignorant even as democracy expanded their ability to affect their world:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human to creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment … Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging …
This would be the product of capitalism, said Smith, “unless government takes some pains to prevent it.” Smith never resolved this conflict in his understanding of change, and his fans have ignored it and instead dwelled on the “invisible hand” alone, taking this half-premise to logical extremes.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand made a grand dystopian plea for her version of capitalist utopia that in general (if less radical) terms is part of everyday political discourse in the United States, where faith in powerful, dynamic individuals is strong. The fear of the state is great, and the relation to mass politics is complicated. The masses are fickle and in general not to be trusted (even by the masses). To wit: In the wake of the economic collapse of 2008, “going John Galt” has become the calling card of dissident financiers holding out against the reactions of the federal government and the populist fervor aimed at them, though this fervor was short-lived and now is turned against the government and health care reform.
Over time, dystopia transcended the narrow limitations of the conflicts between capitalism and socialism, seeing in both a massification of industrial society that used technology to dampen the very urges toward freedom and expression unleashed by the forces that Jefferson and Priestly heralded with such optimism. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We combined his experiences in the Russian Revolution and in the British factories of World War I to describe a true dystopia that was the forerunner of Orwell’s 1984. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World concentrated our gaze on the manufacture of pleasure as a way of breeding conformity and social order from the “torpor of mind” that Smith lamented in 1776.
Yet numbing sameness wasn’t the only threat to Jefferson and Priestly’s House of Tomorrow. The rocket scientists who stood on their shoulders (among so many others) eventually helped us create weapons of unparalleled destruction that could end all life as we know it. Beyond dystopia, the future created by reason might actually annihilate us all. These were our choices by the time I was growing up: Smith, Marx, Rand, Huxley, Orwell, Dr. Strangelove, or Charlton Heston on a beach some time in the distant future.
The Apes were able to perfect themselves greatly with people out of the way. The surviving humans, able to carry on through accidents of history and rocket science, became vermin and slaves until the moment in which Taylor and Nova became a new Adam and Eve under the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, now a fallen, man-made Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If you look hard enough, you can see in the background the shadows of Priestly, Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller. Thoreau and Whitman are nowhere to be found. They were buried by the knowledge of good and evil.
Notes and Credits
The quotation from the opening of Ecclesiastes is taken from the New American Bible, Eccl. 1: 2, 4, 9.
Jefferson’s statement setting aside Qoheleth is cited by Stephen Johnson in The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), p. 199. Overall, this book is a real treat that shows a rare and impressive achievement of lateral thinking. To extend your thinking, visit Johnson’s blog, where he is further ruminating on ecosystems, technology, and change.
My quotations from Adam Smith are taken from The Essential Adam Smith, ed. Robert L. Heilbronner (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), pp. 265 and 302. Read this book, which includes abridged versions of both the Theory of the Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. They are indispensable critiques of the world that Smith’s fans seem to adore.
The following five questions and topics address a very old issue involving a chicken and a road. In spite of many hours given to thinking about this topic, by myself and legions of others, many issues are unresolved even as we speak (or write). One brave chicken, one empty road, and a million synapses firing all at once all lead us to this juncture. Follow the links and then contribute something to help finish the story:
Twitter your immediate thoughts and include #chickenroad in your Tweet …
Leave a comment if there’s something you want to highlight for readers, or warn them about …
Write a story that addresses the following points and/or questions and send it to jguidry.7@gmail.com. We’ll talk about it, but mainly I’ll be looking to repost your story here.
Now … here we go.
First: Which of the following roads (paths, lanes, etc.) was the chicken trying to cross, and in what way did it matter? Each link takes you to the appropriate song (or book).
Second: When the bear went over the mountain, he saw the other side of the mountain, to be sure, but winding through the valley below was one of the aforementioned roads (paths, lanes, etc.). Alongside the road was a chicken. Note: the bear was hungry.
Third: In the middle of the road is Paul McCartney. Do they do it in the road? Or not? And what is “it,” specifically?
Fourth: As the bear reaches the road in the valley below, along with the chicken and Paul McCartney, “she” is coming round the mountain, when she comes, when she comes, driving eight white horses, and etc. What happened next? Who is “she?” And why were the horses white?
Fifth: Should any character in your story “live happily ever after,” please explain how, and why, in precise terms.
The drawings in the Bob Dylan video for Highway 61 Revisited are by a man named Giovanni Rabuffetti. I can’t find a home page for him or a Wiki entry, but I found this entry on him on a blog called White Rabbit by a guy named Andrew Keogh. I think it’s beautiful art, and there’s a lot of hits for drawings by Rabuffetti if you google him, including this video with animation by Rabuffetti for “All Along the Watchtower.”
One of the featured videos here is from The Beatelles, an all female Beatles tribute band from Liverpool. You can learn a lot more about them here and here. And if you like this, see The Beladies, who were the first all-woman Beatles band, hailing from Buenos Argentina.
And considering the road and highway theme of this posting, I can’t resist the temptation to post another favorite highway song by a favorite songwriter, Steve Earle, “The Long Lonesome Highway Blues.” Enjoy.
The 140 Characters Conferencewas held at the New World Stages in New York on June 16-17, 2009. The New World Stages are a large complex of five stages seating different audience sizes, up to about 500 people, along with lounges, lobbies, and galleries. Much of it is underground – one who’s never been there is quite unprepared for what he or she will find once inside the doors and down the escalator.
In the theatres, the seats rise on a steep gradient. Everything is painted black, and the lighting makes anything on stage come out into the setting, seeming to float in space, vividly in color.
During the conference, I was distracted by a low hum in the background: the sounds of fingers on keyboards. At least half the audience had their laptops open and were tapping away at all kinds of messages, dozens of Tweets being unleashed as each speaker spoke about the world of Twitter and Tweeting from some different point of view.
The hum was distant and faraway, sounding as though it came from some hollowed out source not quite in the room. It was enchanting, if in an industrial kind of way, bringing to my mind in a Proustian moment an incident that was altogether different and yet fundamentally similar.
Act 2: One dog, one man, and thousands of bees
On a sunny spring day in April of 2008, I laid down with Duke under a gnarly, knotted, scrubby, runty tree. There we rested for some time, children (including my own son) playing nearby, blue sky and warm yellow sunlight all around.
I noticed a bee flying just over me. It wasn’t trying to touch me, though it came close. As it buzzed off, I saw another coming down, slowly descending – then another, and another. Suddenly, hundreds of bees reminded me of World War II photographs of paratroopers, but unlike paratroopers, no bees landed on us. They came close and then flew off.
In the air above, I heard the low grade, ambient sound of buzzing. Unlike anything I’d ever heard, it was assuredly distant, warm, and safe. An aural blanket covering the scene, enchanting in a distinctly pre-industrial kind of way.
Act 3: Enter the Queen
I sought a pattern in their behavior, and I soon found one. Each bee – after buzzing around in an inert, hovering, apparently directionless state – slowly made its way to an extended branch of that knotted tree. The swarm began packing itself on one part of the branch, growing from a small ball of bees to an enormous, undulating bulb. A huddled, tired mass, to be sure.
Swarms like this occur when the Queen decides it’s time to move the whole the colony to a new home, or when a new Queen is born and leaves with part of the old colony – her brothers and sisters and not her offspring – in order to establish a new one. Somewhere beneath the mass of bees above me was the Queen, who would be vulnerable until they built a new home.
Act 4: Of the social organism
In the Queen, the insect colony becomes incarnate and we see that very magic trick that occurs again and again in nature: the metaphysical made real. To live or die as an individual bee makes sense only as a function of the Queen’s existence. She alone carries the source, yet she cannot exist alone, without her offspring. The social organism is a whole that has no physical being in itself, but is instead a thing greater than sum of its irreducible, individual parts, each of which will fight to the death to protect the Queen.
The social impulse, according to Donald Ingber, is something we can see in fractals throughout organic nature, beginning with bacteria, single-cell based colony creatures, cellular cooperation in larger organisms, insects, and possibly ourselves.
One group of Argentine ants may have broken the geographical barrier between kinship and colony. These ants have created a kind of mega-colony that exists in North America, Europe, and Japan. Even though they live across such vast distances, they behave like ants who live in one colony, refusing to fight each other and yet ruthlessly destroying non-kin ants they find in their way. It is the “largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.” Interestingly, these ants were able to establish such distant colonies because people, however unwittingly, carried them there.
Human beings are the only large animal that has managed to populate the world in numbers and social structures that can be compared to the social insects – ants, bees, termites. Our technologies – language, boats, smoke signals, printing presses, as well as the World Wide Web and Twitter – have enabled us to break the micro-social, hunter-gather barrier and form true social organisms.
Act 5: Living in the land of ideas
Unlike ants or bees, however, we may be creating a new kind of meta-social being that relies on the very gap between the individual and social organisms. In that gap, we remain as individuals happily, fruitfully, and contentedly human in the smallish communities that make our lives meaningful. Exploring that gap was the whole point of the 140 Characters Conference, as it is of the plethora of commentary on Twitter and social media that one can find all over the Web, from those who damn Twitter for destroying thoughtful cultural production to those who celebrate and explain its benefits.
Further distinguishing ourselves from social insects, each Twitterer and his or her followers constitute a kind of spontaneous swarm that exists only in cyberspace. Unlike the swarm of bees that I witnessed overhead last year, one very busy bee in Twitter can be part of many swarms, in addition to being the Queen of his or her own. These swarms are multiple, derivative, tumescent, and utterly human.
He notes such people are “lost in invisible worlds,” but that’s not true. They’re living in the spaces between very real and tangible worlds, seen and unseen, building swarms and with them the ethereal sounds of buzzing keyboards humming in the background of everyday life, as audible now to the rest of us as presumably the sounds of automobiles once were to our great-grandparents’ generation.
Dénouement
I doubt we’ll ever truly understand ourselves as a social organism. We are biologically individual creatures, and we perceive the world through individual minds, even when our perception is helped along by the grand edifice of knowledge and social consciousness that helps us understand the world.
Yet solipsism isn’t what it used to be.
We needn’t be as depressed and desperate as Sartre or Morrissey, nor as arrogant as Richard Dawkins, in order to understand how the gap between self and other makes us who we are. That gap is the place of creation: of all art, science, technology, storytelling, representation, and myth-making. Einstein, unicorns, cave paintings, and Twitter all come from the same urge to touch the whole, and in these bursts of creativity we see truth and beauty and all that makes our short time in the conscious world as good, or bad, as it can be.
Notes and credits
A special thanks goes to Marcia Stepanek, a friend and colleague whose Cause Global blog chronicles how new developments in technology and communications affect the worlds of philanthropy and cause-based action. She invited me out to the 140 Characters conference which made my observations on Twitter possible. You can also see her blog postings at Pop!Tech and the Stanford Innovation Review.
On the micro-social, hunter-gatherer societies: For people, these are the smallish, tribal societies that were the basic form of human social organization for most of our history, say from the time we began living on savannahs until the advent of large, social agriculture. This covered a time period of roughly a million years or more, depending on how you want to define human beings. In the animal world, wolves, lions, elephants, wasps, and a few other animals still use this form of social organization. Some of the writers I’ve read on this period of our history are Jared Diamond, in The Third Chimpanzee and Guns, Germs, and Steel, his blockbuster on technology and change in the social organization. Also quite interesting is Colin Tudge, The Time Before History, which examines human history and the impact of people on the planet for the last 5 million years. Tudge’s book is good fodder for thinking about global warming in a very long-vue sense.
William Saletan’s posting which I quote above was not about Twitter, but rather about Blackberry and cell phone usage. Interestingly, a search of Saletan’s blog at Slate for “Twitter” brings back no results. Full disclosure: his blog, “Human Nature,” has been a source of inspiration for a number of years.
Chris Weingarten’s presentation at the 140 Characters Conference was one of the more raucous and interesting. Among his provocations was this: “Crowd sourcing kills art,” and I reference him above as a critic of Twitter, who is also a constructive, critical user of it. At @1000TimesYes, Weingarten is reviewing 1000 CD’s on Twitter, even while he provides a very pointed view on the negative impact of Twitter on cultural production. Weingaretn’s blog is called Poisson d’Avril. Here you can see the Twitter reviews and appreciate the minimalist form of review on your own, such as the review of one of my favorites, Green Day, “If the world ends tonight, Green Day made the album of the year.” Or the more esoteric pan of someone whose music I have also enjoyed, Regina Spektor, “In New York, even our twee is meta.#4.5.” Gonna have to find the album just to figure out what he means, though I have an idea.
Counterpoint: Solipsism isn’t what it used to be, but for Chris Weingarten and lots of others, social media like Twitter have the ironic effect of increasing solipsism by creating flocks of people telling each other “all about me.” It’s a topic I am thinking about.
RT @JemarTisby: John Kelly should read this. It's about race, memory, & place as I experience it as a black man in the Deep South https://t…5 years ago
truth and rocket science 