Floating Worlds

This weekend I visited the bonsai garden in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Most bonsai are arranged off-center--planted to one side or the other of their pot's axis, or with a trunk slanting away from it. A note on one of the walls of the exhibit offered an explanation from the garden's chief Bonsaiman: "The center is for the Deity."

I thought of catamarans, of bicycles, of the innovation of parliamentary government, of donuts and bagels, of LPs, of equal signs, of a passage from Nabokov I had just read:
the very attraction...lies...in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised.

Bonsai is one of those idioms that appears timeless and pure, but is in fact modern and hybrid. The cultivation of miniature plants was a well-established and highly regarded art by the 14th century. A scroll from the Kamakura period (1185-1333) argues that "to appreciate and find pleasure in curiously curved potted trees is to love deformity". But these trees were always taken from the wild, and their natural miniaturization merely maintained. It was not until the 20th century, when the previously unknown art became popular in western countries, and the globalization of Japanese culture created a huge demand for the trees, that Japanese craftsmen learned to start with young trees and keep them small artificially with root-pruning and wires.

For two centuries before Commodore Matthew Perry's canons arrived at Kanagawa in 1854, Japan's now-familiar crescent of islands, balanced around the empty sea east of Russia, was itself a blank spot on the West's cultural maps. The only Europeans allowed in the country were Dutch traders, restricted to a post on the island of Dejima. (Interestingly, the bonsai house at the Botanical Gardens is named after Cornelius Vander Starr, the son of a Dutch railroad engineer from California, who founded American International Group--now the largest insurance company in the world. Starr began his career as a mail clerk in Yokohama during the lull between the World Wars.)

Within a decade after Japan was opened to international trade, its aesthetics began tipping the balance of arts far beyond bonsai. European painters, from Monet to Bonnard, became fascinated with Japanese woodcuts. As Paris became a hub of exported Japanese culture, the subjects of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings drifted toward the corners of their canvasses.

How much of this history was Ernest Hemingway conscious of when, living in Paris in the 1920s, he began writing according to a "new theory"? He mentions his germinating technique briefly in A Moveable Feast, in the chapter "Hunger Was Good Discipline":
Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story after losing everything…It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted it and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Dots

Yesterday I picked up a copy of the business section from the November 19th New York Times that had been left in the bathroom. I was surprised to find the section dominated by media-related stories. Maybe this would not be so surprising to someone who reads the business section regularly. Of the four stories on the front page, one dealt with the coinciding strikes by Broadway stagehands and Hollywood screenwriters; one with the launch of an internet television network; one with a maverick film producer; and the last with the recent, media-magnetic OPEC conference.

I realize that blogs often serve as little more than personalized news digests, so I'll resist, for a moment, reviewing what I read there. The tiles in our bathroom are made to resemble marble, but close inspection reveals that their marble pattern consists of a grid of tiny dots, like a Lichtenstein painting. I don't think I've seen marble-print tiles anywhere else. Turning a few pages into the business section, I found stories of not just of media, but of media doubling media, directing media, and misquoting media:

One article explained that women's book clubs, long an insulated form of media ignored by the larger world of publishing, are now being recognized as powerful trend-setters in the book industry. One woman, who heads ten book groups and lives in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, now acts as a sort of informal marketing liaison between several publishing company and the powerful inner circles of suburban women's book discussion groups.
An entry from the increasingly ubiquitous Wikipedia, another Times article explained, was reproduced, word for word, in a recent book on oil in the Middle East by strangely named author George Orwel. The entry dealt with the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Copyright infringement was not an issue with the open-source wiki page, and the author of the entry was not concerned by the borrowing.

The already ubiquitous Paris Hilton was recently credited, by the Associated Press, with raising awareness for the suffering of drunken, rancorous elephants in northeastern India. It turns out that attribution was fallacious, though the plight of the elephants is not: the animals really do go on drunken rampages after getting into farmers' rice beer, but the story about Hilton was constructed around a manufactured quotation in a British tabloid called The Daily Star. It made it to an entertainment news website, then was picked up by an Indian AP correspondent. Earlier this year, the A.P. broke a moratorium on Hilton coverage when she was jailed for drunk driving.

Our marble-print tiles, intended to be slightly classy, instead make the bathroom look cheap. I imagined our faux-marble was supposed to mimic some specific marble variety, with a specific pattern, from a specific location: Chinese cream jade? Mexican Rosa Aurora? Solker Kristallmor, from Austria? Comparisons with online marble indexes instead led me to conclude that our tiles originated in the imagination of a faux-marble designer somewhere, or maybe a committee of designers, charged with creating a pattern that satisfied some Platonic ideal of veined pink marble, without actually resembling any existing specimen.
One (genuine) quotation from the Times story on the unconventional film producer might be clarifying here : A venerable MC once advised the filmmaker, who was planning a biopic about a then up-and-coming rapper, not to "clown out our world." The producer has profitably followed that advice ever since.

A Mantling of the Blood

Recently, while on a farm in New Jersey, I opened a door to what I thought was the bathroom of the office-building. Expecting a toilet, my eyes were instead assaulted by a pair of dead deer hanging from hooks above two small pools of blood. My brain seemed to recognize a corpse first, and a deer second. In the first flash of unconscious thought after I opened the door, I felt what we are supposed to think that doomed character in a horror flick feels when he first stumbles upon the serial killer’s bloody work. The conscious part of my brain almost immediately arranged the scene into something coherent—hunter’s game hung in preparation to be processed—but a vague feeling of alarm lingered. I was on the farm for a photo shoot, and the people on the shoot were using the office building for their equipment. The farm’s owners hadn’t thought to tell us what the back of the building was used for.

It’s hard to say how natural my reaction was—whether there’s something in our brain that’s triggered when we see a slain body, or whether the surprised horror I felt was conditioned by things like the formulas of hack-‘em-up movies. But even those formulas might suggest we have an innate reaction to the sight of a murder victim, if the shock of the scene truly depends on it. Last weekend I saw The Assassination of Jesse James, which is not a horror movie, but a visually poetic elegy for a hunted man, containing a fair amount of realistic violence. In it, the narrator informs us that James’ preserved body drew thousands of paying visitors, and photographs of it sold millions of copies. Whether or not this account is true, it suggests that precisely this thrill--of glimpsing in a corpse the possibility of one’s own end--drew the crowds, as much as James’ fame while alive.
I can imagine that other times and cultures might have been more comfortable around a corpse. In Inca cosmology, for instance, there is no "moment of death"--death is a gradual transformation from a fresh, pliable state, to a dried-up, immutable one. The Incas' view of a corpse must have been radically different than our modern, Western view. In his diaries of the 1660s, Samuel Pepys reports deaths and burials with dizzying frequency, suggesting those occurrences were more habitual in his time. The death of an uncle (whose body is kept at first in the house and then in the yard before the funeral); a woman who sails across the channel with her husband’s cadaver; the abrupt passing of the Duke of York’s son: none warrant more than a brisk report in Pepys’ account. Only the body of a man murdered by his brother in a scuffle near his house rouses an emotional statement in the diary. Pepys writes: “after dinner [I] went in the church, and there saw his corpse with the wound in his left breast.” He calls it “a sad spectacle, and a broad wound, which makes my hand now shake to write of it.” The slain body elicits a response that those of the naturally dead do not—yet I can’t tell if it’s the wound's appearance, or the circumstances of the death that unsteadies Pepys’ typically even, journalistic hand.

Later on the day of the shoot, I passed the same door again, to find one of the farm's owners pushing the hanging carcasses on their hooks into a storage freezer. Hunters drop off their kills, the farm processes them, and the hunters come to pick up the product, she explained. She showed me inside the freezer, where bagged trophy heads sat on a shelf, each bag with the name of the hunter it awaited. She asked if I hunted. To her busy eye, the dead deer were just another farm chore. But as the shoot dragged on in the first autumn dusk of the year, and an ancient basset hound drooped back and forth across the yard, the farm felt disconcertingly emptied (the abandoned buildings near the road, at that moment used for the shoot, had been occupied by cattle until recently), and something of my earlier disturbance lingered.
A painting I saw a few weeks ago at the Met by Jan Weenix, called The Falconer's Bag, takes the trophy as its subject. It depicts a hunter's prize, but is itself a sort of trophy piece--a masterly composition, whose effect is heightened by the fact that its true-to-death rendering of slain birds in front of a classical backdrop could not have been executed from an actual scene. The hunt and its trappings were popular subjects in 17th century Dutch art, commissioned both by the aristocracy, who could participate in the pastime, and the aspiring bourgeoisie, who couldn't. In these "game-pieces," the representation of the slain body becomes an assertion of a successful life. But Weenix's painting retains a sense of twilight, decadence, and loss--as if the birds would not be eaten, but left to rot among the statuary of a baroque garden.
While I waited for the shoot to finish, I read a book of poems by W.B. Yeats I had with me. As if on purpose, I came across the tiny, two-sentence "Death of the Hare." In it, the narrator links a lover's glance with the moment of the kill; later, beside the slain hare, he recognizes in both (as he experiences again) the blow felt at the sight of "wildness lost."

The Divine Perhaps

“The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.” This is all we hear of the justice passed upon the nameless narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” In Poe’s universe, punishment need not accompany a crime—the accused begins guilty, and his entire literary life is occupied with the realization of his sentence. Justice is anonymous, disembodied; there is no trial, only the sentence, announced by a fever-dream of faceless judges. The narrator sees their white lips “fashion the syllables of my name,” and he shudders, “because no sound succeeded.”

Last night, I watched Jan Svankmajer’s 1983 short film “The Pendulum, the Pit, and the Hope.” With no narration or dialogue, the Czech director's film takes the short story’s disembodying of justice one step further; we catch only a glimpse of darkened, robed figures leading down dank corridors before we see ourselves, through the gaze of the victim, tied down beneath the pendulum. The entire film is viewed as if through the eyes of the victim, so that we never see his face. In Svankmajer's view, justice’s anonymity makes it omnipotent, while the accused’s anonymity makes him universal. Punishment is not quite senseless, but is certainly source-less. Precisely this absence of origin that prevents us from judging justice in the world of the pit and the pendulum—how can we judge that which comes from nowhere and has no explanation? And it is from this absence that justice derives its authority.

Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. According to Jewish tradition, justice moves entirely outside the realm of human law during the High Holy Days. The season’s most emblematic prayer intones:
On Rosh Hashanah it is written, On Yom Kippur it is sealed:
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall see ripe age and who shall not,
Who shall be secure and who shall be driven,
Who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled…
The sentence has been passed without a trial; punishment will be meted out with no warning. Hooded monks and black-robed judges must appeal to the same authority and fear the same unknowable judgment as the common sinner. Justice is disembodied in the most profound sense, as it belongs to no human body.

The Jewish tradition I’m familiar with does not draw a clear line on "decrees of fate," as Poe puts it. Does atonement absolve us from our prescribed punishment, or is atonement merely an effort toward acceptance of that fate? One line from the liturgy offers a possible answer: “For sins against god, the Day of Atonement atones. But for sins against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone until you have appeased your fellow.”

In Poe’s world, escaping judgment is possible, not through moral conduct, but with a strange combination of personal ingenuity and well-timed politics: although his narrator escapes the pendulum on his own, he is only saved from his Spanish dungeon by an invading French army. In Svankmajer’s movie, our hero escapes the pit through a hole in the wall, only to fall into the arms of a shadowy monk, his face darkened beneath his hood. Escape here does not mean deliverance: "What! my child! on the eve, perhaps, of salvation.... you would then leave us?" This is the closing epitaph of the film. They are the final lines of "A Torture by Hope," the short story by Count Villiers de l'Isle Adam, a 19th-century French writer who much admired Poe. In it, a Rabbi, on the eve of his execution by fire at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, believes he has found a way to escape the dungeon that holds him. A step away from freedom, he is intercepted by the Grand Inquisitor, who is charitably intent on the rabbi accepting God in his final moments before death. In Villiers' story, the most profound torture is that of "the divine 'Perhaps,'"--the tortured hope of escape from judgment, which is always inescapable.

Aphorism

He who reads with the least understanding copies with the most faith.

What I could hear of the boss' conversation with the phone company

"They've sent someone already. I know what they're going to say. They're going to say there's nothing wrong."
...
"Do those people get things done faster than the normal people?"
...
"Ok, what's the highest crisis level you can put it on?...That is the highest level?"
...
"Well, how can I get in touch with you?...Or anybody?"
...
"Yeah. Or today's winning lotto numbers."

The Legacy of the Olive Eaters

One of the most frightening articles I read this summer was a New Yorker piece on the massive fraud in Italy's olive oil industry. Apparently, I may never have tasted real olive oil in my life. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tons of oil from places like North Africa, Spain and Turkey are shipped to Italy and passed off as genuine Italian virgin olive oil. Sometimes the counterfeit oil isn't even from olives, but made from a substitute like canola. All this is done to make 'authenticity' cheaper and more profitable for the distributors. According to the article, fraud is so widespread that true genuineness isn't profitable any more--small farmers who grow actual Italian olives can't sell their produce.

Unfortunately, I was not too surprised to learn that big olive oil companies have no financial investment in the authenticity of their own product. But Leonardo Marseglia, one of the biggest distributors, doesn't even have an aesthetic investment in the genuineness of his oil. The Italian government and the EU feel they have to protect what they see as an essential part of the country's cultural heritage (although there is evidence that olive oil fraud is thousands of years old), and so have whole departments committed to investigating olive oil counterfeit. But Marseglia seems to think that 'authenticity' is itself a fraud: “When someone has two silos of oil, one Italian and the other foreign, you just have to switch them: the other one becomes Italian oil, this one becomes foreign," he told the article's author. If legitimacy can be so easily fabricated, he seems to be saying, why put any stock in it at all?

I read the article during breaks from a temporary messenger job I had at a well-known designer's office in Manhattan's fashion district, a neighborhood where immigrant-run, sweatshop-like fabric factories occupy adjoining floors of the same building as studios selling multi-thousand dollar items. It's the only industry I know where the people at the top walk across the street to do face-to-face business with the people at the bottom. Despite my surroundings, the olive oil expose put me in mind of a trip to Italy I took last spring. In both Florence and Rome I heard some extremely good gypsy street musicians (and some very bad ones). The groups always had one melody instrument--usually a violin or saxophone--and at least one accompanying instrument--usually a guitar or acoustic bass. The bassists always used only three strings, always made of brightly colored nylon strings which they would snap percussively. Performances consisted of various songs strung together into seamless medleys, with no tempo change or pause between melodies--only a chorus or two of each song would be played before moving to the next. But there were a few tunes that came up in idiosyncratic renditions again and again. The two I heard most often were the theme from The Godfather and "I Did it My Way."

These tunes aren't even Italian, let alone traditional folk music. However, they may be obvious choices for the street ensembles, who count on exploiting the picturesque notion of Italy that American tourists devour in stateside movies and television. But at the same time, the gypsy musicians' repertoire strikes me as odd. It romanticizes the notion of a self-styled, gangster-aristocrat Mafioso--the kind of person who left Italy to escape things like gypsy buskers, and who probably would be the first to spit at someone sawing away at a cheap violin next to their restaurant table.