Backed like a Camel

Like naming the shape of a cloud so rapidly changing
that the thing you thought it looked like it no longer looks like
when you say the word, say the word “whale,” the people
in the crowded room spend their days trying to name
the room, to call it what it is—or if there is no name
that corresponds to describe it in well defined terms
or if there are no such terms to make new ones
but the room itself is constantly changing and it’s their names
doing that, the thing that cannot be what it is
until you name it and that cannot be that
once you do.

Something to work on

What I’m walling in is the flowers.
What I’m walling out is the grass.

I know frost does not love my walls.
Each spring I am compelled
to plop tumbled rocks
upon rocks that haven’t tumbled.

It’s not hard.

In summer too the top rocks fall
when deer jump the paths
to eat the hosta, or when, I guess,
the world spins just a hair too fast.

I don’t know. The rain, perhaps. Rocks fall.
Rocks are put on rocks because
You need a line between the flowers
that draw you out of doors to care for them
and the grass

whose only good is the good of negative space
between the beds
like that space between Fred

and Ethel, Rob and

Laura. The frozen groundswell doesn’t care
one way or another for walls.
The dead mechanical earth,
water responding to temperature, I guess

the mindless plants don’t care either,
but that’s harder to be sure of, the grass
climbs the little wall,
like a company of thin green Romeos
ascending the balcony to the beds
of all those Juliets,

or it insinuates
itself between the spaces
pulling away from the blow
of the mower
like a thief
darting for cover.

The flowers seem to despise the wall.
They leap over it to their deaths
or throw their children down
to pop up in the grass
like immigrants:
If you can’t save us save our babies,
raised in the country of grass.

Maybe I don't love a wall.

Maybe I can't love without one.

A Better World without FOX

For decades now so-called Fox News has been pushing the absurd proposition that the “mainstream” media in this country is covertly liberal and the equally absurd corollary that therefore people who want to know the truth should stop listening to the “mainstream” which pretends not to be biased and instead listen only to those who wear their bias on their sleeve. If the first were the case, which it is not, the solution would not be to listen instead to the right-wing response but to listen to both the mainstream and the conservative media and make up your own mind. But they would never say this. There is a liberal media in this country, most obviously represented by in MSNBC. But neither the NY Times nor the Washington Post nor the major networks other than Fox nor NPR nor the major papers in this country—whatever their editorial stance—is pushing a liberal agenda in their news coverage. All responsible news organizations fight against their prejudices. They often fail. There are a great number of legitimate criticisms to be made of the media, but a clandestine liberal bias is not one of them.

Fox “News” has pushed the two absurdities so hard for so long that many Americans simply accept them. Thus Fox “News” has made significant steps toward raising the stupidity level of the country. If you base your network on brace of lies, if you invite your viewers to accept the irrational conclusion that only an avowedly partisan agenda can present the truth, you teach them to see everything through the clouded lens of unreason. If you want to get people to make irrational choices you have to work very hard and very long to make them stupid—not completely stupid, because that leads to chaos—but just stupid enough so that the starting point of their thought is inside your bubble. It’s working very well.

Fox can’t be given sole credit for the raise of the most mendacious candidate probably in the history of the country to the presidency, a grandiose and mentally unstable egomaniac, but I doubt it could have happened without the softening up of the territory that has been going on all these years. Irrationality and prejudice are not new to our culture. They have always been there. But I wonder if we ever had a machine as powerful for promoting them before this. If you can be sucked in by the founding absurdities of Fox “News,” you can be taught to accept any number of easily disprovable things: the Climate Change is a hoax, that immigrants are a threat, that Muslims are all extremists, that socialism is evil, that the promotion of so-called American values of capitalism and democracy throughout the world is benign, that higher education is a form of liberal indoctrination. That a dangerous monomaniac has any business being in power.

And on and on.

As with any multivariable and constantly changing system, it will never be possible to weigh the particular effect of any one element. We’ll never know with precision what the world would have been like if not for Fox “News.” But we can be pretty sure it would have been a whole lot better.

What I learned on my China Vacation

1. The length of a day depends on how far you stray from your bed.

2. Water and oxygen are among the most destructive elements in the universe. So is love.

3. The Chinese man pushing his invalid mother behind me in a wheelchair proves by his “Hello” the emptiness of the proposition that words have meaning.

4. Language is rife with superfluous precision.

Regarding number 1, I've often been struck by this quasi-arbitrary notion of a day. We may be trained to assume or believe that before you can measure something, it has to exist. But this apparently is not the case. The measurement of the day creates the day, as becomes more and more apparent the more closely you try to measure it. In its grossest measure, it's pretty simple, a day is the interval of light between darknesses. There are latitudes where this causes problems, but few people live in those latitudes, relatively speaking. But when you want to mark where one day turns into another, you have a problem. But it's not a big problem. You create a ruler (love that word!) and break the intervals up into sections. What matters is the hours. The number 24 is arbitrary, but useful. If take the total expanse from the middle of one dark period to the middle of the next and break it into 24 equal units--voila, a day. When clocks aren't all that precise, the fact that the units themselves lack perfection doesn't raise a noticeable problem. But as you try to measure more precisely, into minutes and seconds, then you come into the wobble problem. Days are not exactly equal. They're astonishingly close. But clocks have become more precise than the thing they were created to measure. The brilliant solution to this problem is to announce or pronounce that our clocks no longer measure the temporal distance from the middle of one dark to the middle of the next (or from noon to noon). What do they measure? A period of 24 hours. This can be done very precisely because the thing being measured is created by the ruler itself. It's true by definition. Days do not exist as such. But that doesn't mean we can't measure them.

The problem becomes even more complicated when you think about the 24 hour period itself. Plane travel makes it apparent that from an experiential standpoint, a day can be much longer or much shorter than 24 hours. "Experiential" is the key word here. For a day to be 24 hours long you have to define it from a spot, the spot where you place your clock. As soon as a human gets out of bed, she changes the length of her day, and constantly changes it as she crosses the longitude of her bed or moves along it. No one experiences a day as 24 hours except invalids or other sick people.

So there's no such thing as a day. Days aren't 24 hours long. And yet we can measure them.

As for number 3, the prejudice that words have meaning is so ingrained that at first it seems difficult to comprehend that in fact they don't "have" meaning. A word does not have to "have" a meaning for it to be used in a meaningful way (or if not meaning-full, since meaning is never full, certainly in a meaning-generative way). In short, the man behind me was asking me politely to get out of his way so that he could move past me with the wheelchair. He was using his only English in order to inform me that I was the object of his speech. His intention was to get me to direct my intention toward him so that I could infer what he wanted. If you look up "Hello" in the dictionary, it won't list, "Please get out of my way, foreigner" as one of the definitions. But that was the meaning of "hello" in this case, and I would argue that the word was properly used. Words have uses and histories of uses, not meanings. Words normalize and regulate situations or events. This gives us the illusion that the "signified" is tied to the "signifier." (This is part of a discussion that has been going on for over a century now, which you learn all about and also enter in graduate schools in many disciplines. I'm fascinated by it and always on the look out for examples that illustrate this.)

As for number 4, many times each day in this crowded city I found myself impeding the progress of someone, usually someone on a bike. To move me out of their way, most of them rang a bell which sounded a lot like the bells they attached to children's bikes when I was a child, fifty years ago. But when the biker or pedestrian didn't have a bell, they used various phrases in English or Mandarin to serve the function of the bell, not just "hello," but "good morning," "excuse me," and others. It occurred to me that there are a lot of ways to ask people to get our of your way, but they all come down to the ringing of a bell. Some just grunted. The words are all associated with various other meanings than "please, I'm in a hurry, let me pass." And the possibility of processing those associated meanings is always present. But the "good morning" was never really a wish for me to have a good morning any more than the "hello" was a greeting. Those meanings in fact could only interfere with the intention, which is inferred from the fact of a sound. The advantage of a voice over a bell is the greater precision it renders for emotion. But even a bell can be polite, sympathetic, or angry.

Knowing v Understanding

Proposition: A small child knows language, but does not understand language. The child knows language the way an animal knows its way around the forest, the way you know how to walk or run. The learning is both deep and shallow—because these words are metaphors and depend on the perspective of the observer on the phenomenon not the phenomenon itself. The child knows how to use words the way it knows how to move its arms and practices, regularizing situations via repeating the sounds (we could at this point call them sounds rather than words) that get uttered in this situation. “Now we use the soap.” “Now we open the door.” “Now we say goodnight.” The child goes through a well documented phase in which it uses irregular verbs correctly and then a phase when it no longer uses them correctly, when “we went to the store” turns into “we goed to the store.” That’s the moment when understanding begins. The next phase is to return to correct use of irregular verbs but it’s not a return, but an advance, a sign of a yet more sophisticated understanding.

We never lose this instinctive relationship to our first language. It develops into understanding, but understanding doesn’t erase the instinctive origin and basis of our knowing. Language habits that never rise to understanding are hard to break.

As we grow older we gradually those this instinctive way of learning. It’s obvious with language, but it is true of everything we learn. We turn from “picking it up” (it could be an instrument or sport for example) to funneling it through our understanding. We learn the rules of cases and declensions and genders, we learn scales, and roots, and sevenths, and tunnel a path from understanding through the hard crust of the understanding. But we have to get there. You can’t think of what you’re doing on the soccer field. You can’t think about the right way to say, “The way your eyes reflect the sun is just wonderful.”

The goal is knowing. Understanding is not the only path.