Daytime

Blue spaces open, luminous, behind the black branches and leaves. Through the skylights, I can see the the trees shrug and shiver in the wind: then they settle again. Behind them the blue-gray increases in brightness, and I consider the paradox, that as the light increases the color fades. It's not really a blue sky, it's  gray one, even dark gray one. Those earliest pools of light are intensely blue when they first appear. Now there are dark gray layers of cloud hurrying across a lighter gray field: it's all still blue-tinged, I suppose, but the color barely registers. Dawn settles into place. Shakes its coat, pats its pockets, smooths its hair. Daytime.

A couple deep breaths, a few business-like coughs. I sputter into life. Dig the sleep out of my eyes. Sketch out the day ahead: much to do, much to do. Finish the week's soup, pack up food for the day, shower and launch.

But I take the time to close my eyes, and slow down. What was it I said? "Close your eyes and turn toward the sun." Listen to the pipers of tinnitus. Let things fall away. There's time.

Walking Naked

Nah, you know, rewind, all the way back. All the way back, lad.

What should be in your life?

heart work
Well, this should be Spanish and Writing, yes? Any kind of Spanish, any kind of writing. This has been totally out of wack since I've been sick and stressed over the holiday work surge. I shouldn't need an especially compelling book to make this happen. I need markers, milestones. I need to get my kindle reading going. Perez-Reverte's history of the Civil War, (or the one he refers to?) would be an excellent choice. History in general, if available. Profitable reading that doesn't have to be literary.

In any case: there should be a minimum of two hours' Spanish work daily. Get real about this, Dale. A hour and a half of hard reading with vocabulary building, half an hour of listening to videos. See how that goes: see if the tempo accelerates. I think it will: but record the time. And make yourself really do the listening. Use your earbuds and just do it. The half-assed stuff really doesn't cut it. Do you think you're going to live forever?

money work
I'm  getting ready to retire, in my mind, which means it's probably a damn sight closer than I presently know or understand. Eight years from now is the longest timeline. Think some more about this. Think about the transitions. Think about whether a three- or four-day work week would make sense, after the end of the year. All that. A lot to think about here, actually.

social stuff
Right now this absorbs a lot of "soft" time -- social media "checking in" that I think is pretty low-nourishment for the amount of time spent, and has lots and lots of negative side-effects. A lot of these habits were set when I was low-level prowling for flirtation prospects all the time, honestly; and I don't need that shit any more. Maybe less of open facebook, more of closed-group... something? This bears a lot of serious thinking.

exercise
The exercise, really, feels like its stable and handled, or will be anyway when I get over this damn cold. Daily back exercises, three workouts per week, five walks to and from the train per week. Done. Handled.

what's it for?
So really -- it's handled, all handled, except for: what the hell is it all for? What is this life? I mean, you have to fill in the days, one way or another, and this is one way. But might another way be better? And how would I know? I'm beginning to feel that I need a... vision quest? A psilocybin trip? An intense artistic imagination? The pieces must all be here, somewhere in this fluctuating chaos of a mind. How to locate them, to order them, so that in moments of bewilderment or dread I can get my bearings? 

My Buddhism didn't so much collapse, as fade. I didn't really want to be wired in to a group and lodged in an institution. I didn't want this -- this heart center -- to be muddied with wanting to please and impress people. I wanted it to be a different kind of thing than that. No disrespect to people who find that helpful. You use what works. But for me... I think of Prince Andrei, murmuring, "this life... this life is not to my taste."

Of course, one crossway is the Christian, or Deist, one, which frames the question -- disingenuously but sometimes fruitfully -- as, "what does God want me to do?" As if that was something a creature could usefully discern! And as if you could actually do anything else. But we are wired that way, partly: wired to look to the Big Man and fret about whether we're pleasing Him. Another of those things: you use what works, and no disrespect. I don't think that one is going to work for me either, though. I want truth, or as close to the truth as this poor mortal can cut.

The mushrooms, if they worked, could be a shortcut. But they could only work, really, if the stuff is all here in my mind already. Whatever can be imagin'd, said Mr Blake: and he should know. As Martha said, what's available by way of mushroom should be available by way of meditation. It's just that you'd have to walk rather than drive. And what has my life of the past three years been, but a continual demonstration that driving is actually slower, more expensive, and more roundabout? You end up serving the car, not the trip. There's more enterprise / In walking naked.

Walking naked: the dream of the Puritan. No priest; no middleman; just you and God, face to face on the blasted heath. (Heh. As if anyone could keep their feet in the gale.)

But enough: the grandiosity doesn't serve, either. All it has to be is the discipline of turning. Even with your eyes closed, you know where the sun is, and you can turn towards it.

But, but, but -- and here is where the Buddhists can really help me -- it ain't worth a damn if it ain't a practice. Turning toward the sun once a year, because you're stressed out by work or by Christmastime, just means you turn toward the sun thirty times -- or more accurately, you imagine turning toward the sun thirty times -- before you pop into your pine box for your nice refreshing nap. Is that the program? If so, then gluttony might be a more rewarding one.

This -- this, what I'm doing right now, tippety-tappety, hunched over a keyboard at dawn; a skinny-fat virus-ridden old man with his head thrust forward at an unattractive angle, his face lit ghastly blue from beneath -- this is maybe the half of it. Bring myself back, reel myself in, tease myself into remembrance with bucking and prancing words. Because eventually the sun comes up. And eventually, you -- even you, Favier, even you -- can be brought to remember: Oh yeah. I need to turn toward the sun. I need to close my eyes and do this thing. Like, now: not next year, not next month, not tomorrow. Now.

The Arteries of the Spirit Harden

Arthur Rackham: illustration for Ruskin's King of the Golden River

6:30, and the dark is still complete: windows and skylights are dull black, except where they reflect an old, shrunken fellow huddled over his laptop. Not a hint that dawn is anywhere near.

I get on with the work of clearing phlegm from my lungs. My cold is ceding a little bit of territory, so there's some hope of getting ahead on that, at last. I've taken the last couple days off work, but that means, this being the giving season, that work is piling up for me, gifts that need to be entered into the database. I've tended this database for over a decade now, and I don't really like anyone but me entering the crucial gift data. Which means that, at this time of year, data entry tasks accumulate relentlessly.

On the other hand, there is an end to the task. Every year the spigot shuts off, abruptly and completely, on midnight of December 31st. The mail straggles in for a couple more days, and there's a couple big end-of-year tasks, but that's it. If I can stay on top of things till then, then I will have shot the rapids for another year, and be out into still water.

I began reading Isabel Allende's memoir, La Suma de los Días, but lost interest after sixty or seventy pages. My tolerance for vague and self-indulgent mysticism has dropped sharply.  A wealthy Marin County lady believes herself to be witch who makes things happen with the aid of her prayer circle: well, sure. Why not? What's the cost? And the fact that the centerpiece of the narrative is a marriage which I know busted up a short while after she finished writing adds, unfairly maybe, to my skepticism. The woman who wrote Eva Luna had things to say to me: I'm not sure this woman does.

And that, of course, stirs my deepest fears of mortality. The body dies, sure, that's right and proper, but it strikes a chill into me that the imagination dies. The arteries of the spirit harden. You look into the windows for a hint of dawn, and see nothing, and pretty soon you start making things up just to relieve the blankness, to fill in the darkness. But there's nothing there but your own reflection.

Well. You have to be willing to travel. And you have to be willing to wait for the darkness to resolve, on its own schedule, and to see whatever finally does appear. Whatever it is, welcome or not, and whatever it demands of you.

But beyond that, the point is, there are stories that belong to you and stories that don't, and there are stories that should be told, and stories that shouldn't. (These are separate distinctions, mind you, not the same thing said two ways.) That's what troubles me.

And if the dawn doesn't come, then it doesn't come. You leave the page blank. You go for a walk, or you take up the next duty that presents itself.

Less Red Meat, More Chinese

Little surges of delight.

The joy of figuring out practical things. Algorithms of daily life, such as "supplement vitamin D, lightly, in the dead of winter, when I stop walking to and from the train with bare arms."

I think I've quit eating red meat. We'll see how that goes. I've eaten (at least) a quarter pound of hamburger daily for most of my adult life. I'm very, very used to it. I couldn't have succeeded in my weight loss without it. But now it might be time. There's a tectonic rhythm to these lifestyle changes: the pressure builds for a long time, and then suddenly, one day, for no observable reason, there's abrupt, surprising movement, and everything reorders around the new behavior.

... or it might not. My body's kicked back pretty hard against efforts to stop meat-eating before. But I'm still eating tons of animal protein, more than my body can possibly process. So swapping in bean salad for my nightly burger might pass under the radar.

It would be nice to not be supporting the factory feed-lot world any more. And nice not to have to clean grease off the stove top (wall, counter) every evening. Meat is kind of a chore.

In unrelated news: I've been reading about language acquisition recently, and it seems that "massive comprehensible input" method is what's recommended now. Read and listen -- to stuff you can mostly understand -- and your brain does the rest behind the scenes. But you have to do a lot of it, and it only works if you're receiving comprehensible, interesting messages. There's not much point in even trying to speak or write until you've absorbed a ton of it. Which makes my failure with Chinese make sense. I never had comprehensible input, of any kind: so my dogged memorization of Chinese characters yielded exactly nothing in the way of reading capacity. You have to understand something, and build on that kernel. It's a bootstrap problem. If you're not actually receiving messages the clutch doesn't engage: you can rev the engine all you like, but you're not going anywhere.

So if I ever take up Chinese again, I'm going to get a tutor I can hear and make them point to things and talk about them in Chinese, walk me through kids' books with pictures. What's that? What's he doing? Why?

Thanksgiving tomorrow. Going to my daughter's wife's aunt's, for a totally low-stress, unfraught holiday. Grateful for that.

Anodyne

“Death I think is all right, you know? It’s a natural ending of everything. But I think it’s very important to be alive until the last moment. It’s important that death seem to be just an accident.” Mario Vargas Llosa, a 2015 interview in The Telegraph.

A sudden sharp yearning for everything to come to a point: it comes of years of reading stories, watching movies, listening to songs. The turn, the denouement, the moment the wave crashes -- so important to narrative, and so rare and ineffective in life. 

I view weddings and graduations and funerals and so forth with a distant horror: people are prone enough to fetishizing their expectations and encapsulations, without being encouraged in it. Let's all sit around and reinforce each other's prejudices, and wrap ourselves up on the bandwagon with barbed wire! I escape such things when I can.

The universe does sometimes squeeze itself into a ball, but it does so on its own timetable. Generally at dawn, or just before. With this, as with so many things, the trick is to wait, with my hands empty, and with all distractions put aside. So if that is, in fact, what I want, as I so often say -- well, there's how to do it. No secrets there: it's pretty obvious.

In the meantime, I follow the Wordsworthian life of accumulation, willy nilly. I don't believe in it but I don't know what else to do. Another day goes by, another four Spanish words learned, another eighteen pages read. Even when you don't want to harm anyone, you don't particularly appreciate being so obviously harmless. "Anodyne" is the tag I would spray paint on an urban wall, if I were to do such a thing, which of course I wouldn't. 

And this, I suppose, is simply my version of the pathetic lament of the middle aged white guy, indoctrinated to be a soldier but unwilling to shoot or be shot. So I reread my military history, fiddle with my toy soldiers, train for combats I fully intend to avoid: a wearying business, really. Housework is a better return on investment. A clean sink may not be the sun over Austerlitz, but it does at least shine.

Tired, Bone-Weary, and Old

An immense liberation: the heartbeat, slosh and knock, like a dishwasher heard from the other room -- sure, all that, and the fear that wakes you in the night with a sour taste, and a sudden jolt of forgetting -- but mostly the clouds moving, the dappled ground, the sense of space that comes when you have drastically, drastically shrunk.

And I have shrunk, and I may shrink some more, in prosaic inches and pounds. The desire to vanish altogether is almost overwhelming, at times. When I first lost my weight, I immediately embarked on a project to build more muscle. I was panicked by the thought of being small. But now I don't care. I want to be small. I want to turn sideways and vanish. I want to feel the air blowing through between my ribs and carrying the last bits away. Something for the squirrels to build nests with.

But that too is one of the deflections, one of the ways I have always evaded the real issues, and my patience with all those subterfuges is pretty much gone. The truth is that I have always been fearful and desperate for approval, and there is something unlovely and sly about the way I linger. But another thing I have lost patience for is blaming myself for being what I was inevitably made by my circumstances. I need only do that if I am determined not to change, if I'm not willing to do the work. I'm willing to do the work, now.

I ate lunch in my car, today. Romaine with bits of carrot and radish; almonds; two bananas and an apple. A rain shower visited while I ate, and moved on, and a rainbow appeared to the north. I wasn't feeling up to lunching with the other people in my workshop, even though half my motive for taking it was to find people to practice Thai with. Time out. And eating is still so hard, so fraught. I remind myself of our older, rather neurotic cat, Kiki, who can't bear to eat if anyone is moving about within a few yards of her. I sometimes try to sidle past her in the kitchen without disturbing her at her meal. I'm usually unsuccessful. She hurries away, and like as not Van Buren saunters up to eat her dinner before she can stand to come back.

So no: one thing at a time. Willing to do the work, but not all the work all the time all at once: that's not possible either.

The almonds were sweet and good. And I am tired, bone-weary, and old.

Haidt

I just read two books by Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind. I heartily recommend them both: I think they both shed a great deal of light, and they both say things I've struggled and failed to express. As well as much that I had never thought of.

I am not likely, of course, to agree with the political opinions of someone who calls himself a centrist. While I agree with him that conservatives bring a great deal to the table, I do not think the current crop of Republicans are conservatives; I think they are simply a nightmare version of liberals -- far more like us, in all important respects, than they are like the Republicans of, say, 1970. They are not concerned with conserving anything but their own prestige and their own assets: and they are sold on a version of Christianity that Bonhoeffer neatly summarized as "cheap grace." No need for messy crucifixions or time-wasting penance! God approves of you right out of the box, and all He wants you do do is feather your nest.

(I actually think of myself in my heart as a conservative, although I longer call myself one, since it only confuses people. Those little online quizzes consistently identify me as "very liberal." They ask no questions about Edmund Burke, or perfectibility, or the importance of custom and tradition.)

Anyway. Where was I? Yes. I completely agree with Haidt that we arrive at the best solutions when Liberals and Conservatives (as he defines them) bang up against each other and knock each other's rough edges off. But I think the political positions of, say, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, are, in fact, just such compromise positions -- old compromises, informed by both conservatives and progressives as we used to know them. The Left used to have some bargaining power, because our labor was needed, and the sinister figure of the Soviet Union was lurking behind us. Now our labor is superfluous -- plenty more where that came from, should you need it, which you probably don't; and where the Soviet Union used to be is the gangster state of United Russia, a China which really would rather not bother with us, and a European Union that can't even mind its own store, let alone anyone else's. Different world. Our leverage is gone. And in the meantime, the very wealthy coalesced, under the Kochs, into a formidably organized and fabulously rich political machine. They hold all the cards, now, and they can only fail by drastically overplaying their hand. (Which seems to be exactly what they are doing, so maybe we have a chance after all. Who knows?)

But. Read Haidt, who is much cleverer about social psychology than he is about politics: both his books are very illuminating reads.

Ellen and W

Well, I'm on Ellen DeGeneres' side. 

Of course by several criteria George W. Bush is a war criminal. So is Barack Obama: I can't think of any criterion that rules George in that rules Barack out. Waging undeclared war? Check. Authorizing strikes intended to kill civilians? Check. Maintaining prisoners in inhumane conditions, because it's politically inexpedient to release them? Check. Authorizing torture? Check. The difference is that Barack is our war criminal, the scale is smaller, and the justifications are slicker. The victims, though, are just as scarred, injured, and dead.

Tu quoque is a much used and abused argument these days. I'm not saying I find the two men morally equivalent: I don't. George is more to be blamed because he caused a great deal more suffering. Barack is more to be blamed because he knew better what he was doing. For those who get a thrill out of reckoning up exact quantities of blame, and being sure to assign people to the correct seat in the correct circle of hell, no doubt there's hours of excitement here. I'll pass.

I'm not offering anyone forgiveness, and I don't hear DeGeneres offering anyone forgiveness either. What she's offering is kindness. The recognition of humanity, even in our erstwhile or present enemies. There are some notable authorities who recommend that. I stand with them. 

People can be wrong. They are wrong. I am wrong. I recognize at least one time when, had I been president, I would have made a disastrous foreign policy mistake that would have cost thousands, probably tens of thousands, of lives. It would have been a sin of omission -- failure to act in the face of the Serbian ethnic cleansing -- but that wouldn't have made it any less disastrous, or made the suffering of the Albanians any less. You all could have rightly despised me forever.

If you can't think of a disastrous policy mistake you would have made, as president of the United States, then -- to put it as gently as I know how -- you're an ignorant idiot. So shut up and let Ellen and W watch their football game. And hope you're never in a position to display to the world the depth of your ignorance and the shortfalls of your compassion.

Peeling Eggs

For over a year now, I've been eating three boiled eggs every morning. It's not that I particularly like my eggs boiled: I prefer them scrambled, and I make good scrambled eggs. But boiling eggs is easy, and one of the secrets of my dietary success has been the rule, "if it ain't easy, it ain't happenin.'" I start them boiling, and by the time I'm done with my oatmeal and brocs, they're ready: the part of my breakfast I most enjoy.

So I have a lot of experience now with boiling eggs, and I feel I can make authoritative statements about it. In particular, how to do it so as to make peeling them easy.

First, and most important: don't boil new-laid eggs. Just don't. There is no way to make really fresh eggs easy to peel. (And anyway, if they're as fresh as that, why wreck them by boiling them? Make an omelet.) I deliberately age the eggs I'm going to boil: I want them at least a week old.

Second: "shock" them with cold water. This helps, a little, though not nearly as much as some people think. Mostly it just makes them easier to handle when they've just come out of boiling water.

Third: some eggs will never peel easily. Ever. No matter how old they are, or what you do to them. The occasional egg comes along with a membrane that sticks tighter to the flesh of the egg than to the shell, and there is no good way to peel it. Surrender gracefully. You can strip the first layer of flesh off and scrape it from the shell with your thumbnail. Whatever. Do what you must. It's not your fault.

It's delightful when the shell slips off an egg all of a piece, and it makes you feel very skillful and clever. The impulse to take credit for it is overwhelming. But in fact it's just dumb luck. Anybody would have found that egg easy to peel. If you only boil eggs once in a while, you can be forgiven for thinking that you've got the hang of it now and you've solved that egg-peeling thing and you know exactly what to do with them. It's an illusion, I'm afraid. There is an impossible-to-peel egg in your future. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but soon. 

Reflections on a Tour of the Grand Spreadsheet

I just went through my grand spreadsheet, updating it with the weekly averages for my weight and waist, which meant filling in data for two and a half years. It was inefficient -- I could have written formulas to do the same thing -- but I find it useful sometimes to wade through data and get a feel for it at different scales and tempos.

In general, I'm happy with what I've accomplished and where I am. The great disappointment, of course, has been that no magic resolution has presented itself. The grand fantasy is that at some point one recovers normalcy of appetite, one can eat ad libitum without gaining weight. I'm pretty much certain, now, that that will never happen. I can restrict my daily eating carefully, or I can be obese; there is no middle option.

Given, then, that I'm restricting carefully, weighing and measuring, going to all this trouble (and the trouble is enormous: it occupies quite a bit of my uncommitted time), I might as well get exactly what I want out of it. So what do I want?

The question arises because I have been batting back and forth several potential steady-states, and how to arrive at them. Should I ride the present regimen down to a 32" waist, and see what that looks like? Or should I continue my gradualist, "follow the blue lines" strategy, trying to keep my waist very slowly dwindling while my weight very slowly increases, as my lifting program progresses and I put on more muscle? What, exactly, am I aiming for, and how will I know when I've gotten there?

One risk, as so often, is mistaking markers for actual goals, and obsessing on hitting numbers that don't actually capture the end-goals. And another risk, one I'm especially prone to, is setting a goal of endless progression: at present really what I'm attempting is to perpetually build muscle mass while perpetually reducing fat. I used to design my exercise programs that way, until I finally understood that basically what I was doing -- piling on more weight, more reps -- was guaranteeing that I eventually exercise to exhaustion or injury. Not clever. I should have end-points. 

What are the actual goals, then? There's an optimal body composition: I should get there and stay there. It's not that far off. I pretty much like how I look now. I don't particularly want to be bulky and hugeous. I'd like my waist to be a little trimmer, my legs to be a bit thicker; but that's about it. I think that if I do get to having my waist measurement be 90% of my hips, I probably will have something like a 32" waist, and I'll probably look as good as I want to bother with.

But backing off to get a wider view, looking good -- although I must ruefully admit it's the best motivator -- is only a side goal. What I really want is -- as a duty -- to live vigorously as long as I can, so that I can avoid being a burden on my loved ones, and hopefully help them out, for as long as possible; and what I really want for myself, my deepest wish, is for mental acuity and physical energy. That's what I want to maximize. And here's where I need to be careful to measure what I'm actually interested in. 

I am much more energetic at this weight and fitness. I used to be basically exhausted by dinnertime: now I often do things in the evening. Every night before bed I do the dishes and prep for breakfast, which would have been totally beyond my powers. But of course this extra energy is largely devoted to... keeping up my diet and fitness regimen. My disposable energy has not really increased: it may even have declined.

It feels better though. And feeling mentally sharper is priceless. I think better. I'm more concise, more methodical, quicker on the uptake. That's what I care about most. 

I have long harbored the notion -- probably picked up from the elderly protagonists of Michael Innes mysteries, and offhand comments by longevity buffs -- that if I restricted calories really severely I'd be sharper still. Now that I examine it by daylight, it doesn't seem especially likely: it's probably an ascetic fantasy. There's probably a sweet spot, and it's probably considerably this side of starvation.

There may be actual information about these things. I should seek it out. 

And I should think about how to measure these things. Energy and acuity. People like to say that this, that, or the next thing can't be measured. They're always wrong. Anything that can be perceived can be measured.

Morning

Morning: a fine rain, and wet branches gleaming.

At one point I grew self-conscious and annoyed with myself: It turns out I begin about half my posts by informing my public that it's morning. Morning is important to me. Morning is not a time of day so much as a state of being. Morning is freedom, possibility, freshness. A whole new world with the dew still on it, and not a trammel or a busybody to be seen. I love mornings. But not everybody does, and even if they did, the whole point of writing is to Make It New (we know this because Ezra Pound told us so, which maybe should rouse our suspicions right there) and anyway, how new and fresh is this morning, when to the reader (very possibly not inhabiting morning at all, or inhabiting it and wishing they weren't) reads the same damn thing every morning? So I pulled up my socks and tried to avoid it, or at least cut it out when I was done.

But this, O Reader, turns out to be a very bad idea. Because it means I begin my morning self-consciously, in an editing frame of mind, which is a very fine frame of mind in its way, but is NOT the writing frame of mind. And besides, most of what I have to say, if you boil it down, is that it is in fact morning. I write for the same reason the cock crows. There it is. So from now on, I am going to begin every post by informing you that it's morning. Feel free to skip that part.

---

Some time ago I read a book about cultural evolution, The Secret of Our Success, by Joseph Henrich. I recommend it, both for itself and for a way of thinking about our present political polarity. We do have a culture war going on, and it's important, and it's not as simple as it looks. I am thoroughly and unapologetically on the liberal side, and I think actually that we are winning handily, dark though the days look sometimes: but that's not my point, not at the moment. We liberals are outcompeting conservatives for several reasons: we pay more attention to science, which gives us a consistent edge; we're more open to innovation; our childrearing practices are more effective; we have a near-monopoly on education, the media, and the arts. Short of nuclear war or genocide, we are probably going to win this thing. But we do ourselves no service by refusing to examine the conservative strengths. They understand things we don't (culturally speaking), and they can do things we can't. We should think about that. 

The winner of this culture war is not going to be the smarter, better informed side (that's obviously us.) It's not going to be the more stubborn, belligerent side either (that's obviously them.) It's going to be the side that makes people feel safest, most special, most connected to each other, most like they belong to something, most like their lives are important and make sense. The side that seizes and holds that redoubt is the one that's going to win. We need to think about that. Because the problem is hard and the stakes are enormous.

The Light of Summer

Morning: the throb of the washer: a single fat sparrow in the hedge, cautiously investigating the birdbath.

The skylights are covered with dew, and beyond them the sky is gray. A somber day: the light of summer already seems far away and long ago.

Ironic, that this new moment of nationalism comes precisely when global capitalism has made us all so much alike; and that we should be extravagantly focused on cultural difference precisely when there is so little of it left. There was more cultural distance between a Southerner and a Yankee in 1860 than there is between a Honduran and a Norteamericano now. We live in the same conditions: we respond the same way. If I were a strategist for the Right, I would put all my energy into trying to suppress language learning: I don't think there's any other way to try to keep up the fiction that we're terribly different from each other. We wear the same t-shirts and bill caps, eat the same food, watch the same kitties on YouTube. We work the same absurdly long hours under the same unremitting financial stress. We have the same loss of faith in government and the same witless loathing of our political opponents. The same inability to conduct a legitimate election. It's at this moment that we choose to defend our borders? What's to defend? Our uniqueness consists of playing football with a prolate spheroid, instead of a ball.

Speaking of which, what the hell, Thorns? losing 0-6 against North Carolina? Sheesh.

Just finished reading Jonathan Haidt's "Happiness Hypothesis," which I found disconcertingly like my own thoughts on the matter. I think I'm going to just turn back to the beginning and read it over. As always, finding my own thoughts in print makes me doubt them: if somebody else thinks the same thing, then we're both probably wrong, right? But it's also interesting. And I don't at all understand what he means by saying that "Happiness comes from between," so I need to read that last chapter again, in any case.

The other book I'm reading is La Tía Julia y El Escribor -- "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" -- by Mario Vargas Llosa, which is really quite a wonderful book, so far, though you have to be alarmed by the thought of a man dictating the story of their courtship to his lover, which is apparently how this book was written. Yikes.

Corymb

I said to myself, "I need to take a walk and figure out what it is I want to be doing for the next ten, twenty, thirty years."

I started walking, and realized: "no, I don't need to figure it out. I need to discover it. I've gone as far as figuring is going to take me. I need to speculate -- brainstorm -- and then try things out. Run pilot programs. The last thing I need, right now is to figure things out."

My life is already replete with rumination. I do all the ruminating I could possibly need to do. What it lacks is experimentation. I need to build prototypes, and see how they perform.

--

Corymb: an inflorescence with the flowers growing in such a fashion that the outermost are borne on longer pedicels than the inner, bringing all flowers up to a common level 

--

Woke to silent lightning, this morning. And now the daylight: slow and halting, and as yellow as evening light. The sound of a sparrow bathing in a plastic tub lid, and little chirps and quick leaf-shudders in the hedge. It's quiet this morning, as quiet as a weekend morning: maybe lots of people are already embarked on their Labor Day weekend? But the chickens are finally tuning up, with those long, quavering moans. "My God," they say, "I can't believe it's another day: why, O Lord?"

I think of moving to a riverside cottage, if such a thing is still possible, and learning to shop once a week, and going for long walks at dawn in the hills. I used to be sure I wanted to be forever in the city, where things were happening, and there were lots of new people to fall in love with. Now -- I don't know. A quiet morning and flowing water, maybe a kingfisher, the splash of a fish? I tire of fret and striving and hysteria of high-strung, overcrowded primates. Who cares what anyone thinks of me? And what new world is going to be brought to me by strangers? All the worlds are old, now.

The Fall of Meredith

Illustration for George Meredith's The Adventures of Harry Richmond. George du Maurier (1834-1896)

In my youth, George Meredith was one of those novelists you were always going to get to one of these days. There was no hurry. His novels were always sitting, fat and well-bound, on the library shelves. But I never did get around to him. A couple days ago until I happened to pick up Chesterton's little book on Victorian literature -- sheer happenstance: my eye had fallen on it at the library when I was looking for something else -- and there was Meredith, ranked beside, if not above, Thomas Hardy. Huh, I thought. I'll read a Meredith novel. After poking about a little I settled on Harry Richmond, and went to the library website to slap a hold on it: that's the usual way I obtain books these days. To my astonishment, they held exactly one Meredith novel -- The Egoist -- and that was that. The solidity and permanence of Meredith was a mirage, a trick of the light.

I was piqued, rather than discouraged, and went off to Gutenberg. Sure enough, plenty of Meredith there, although apparently not much in demand. So now I'm eight chapters in to Harry Richmond. It's interesting, so far -- well worth reading, and it casts oblique lights forward and back. Many of us young men are in a similar plight, I often think: raised to princely expectations, groomed for monarchy, and then rudely thrown into the world as ordinary people after all.

I wonder why Meredith fell? So many mysteries.

Sad Cypress; Glad Morning

Cyparissus (1670s) by Jacopo Vignali: Wikipedia Commons

Cool morning air drifting in from the windows; a light blue sky beyond the hedge. For the moment, untroubled and at peace.

It's an arborvitae hedge. Martha pronounces it, charmingly, as "arborviety," rhyming with "variety." Tree of life, that is, which seems a little highfalutin for a hedge shrub. But apparently it got the name because tea made from it cured scurvy. 

It's a kind of cypress. A thuja. The which name is another anomalous perplexity, at first sight, but it turns out to just be an odd spelling of the Greek name for a particular sort of cypress. Thuia, would be the normal English spelling. What possessed some botanist to spell it with a 'j'?  'i' and 'j' are originally just variant forms of the same Roman letter, but to anyone with linguistic sensitivities the 'th', which fairly screams its Greekness, sits very uncomfortably in the same short word with a Latin 'j'. 

I do not know why cypress trees are associated with sadness, though I suppose the internets would tell me. They don't strike me as particularly sad trees. A little dusky, but not strikingly dark like a yew.

Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

... I'm back! The internets say that of course cypress trees are sad because once upon a classical time Cyparissus accidentally shot and killed his pet stag, and he made such a nuisance of his grief that the gods turned him into a tree: an immortal cypress so that he could grieve forever. But then other of the internets say that Cypress trees are not only immortal but protective (here the arborvitae theme is foreshadowed, no?), so they're planted in cemeteries to guard the dead from demons. That seems more likely than the stag story, but of course you never know. So I will put Mr Vignali's picture up top. One does hope he gave the model a comfortable pillow to embrace, but artists are notoriously ruthless.

Absorbing a Setback -- Naps -- Deep Work & Deliberate Practice

Morning. Up before the sun today: for the first time since the solstice, I had to turn on lights to perform my morning ceremonies. A little sad for the waning of the light. I have, now, a late-found affection for summer and warm weather. Some combination of getting older and getting thinner: I tolerate heat much better than I did when I was younger and stouter.

Speaking of thinner and stouter, I dropped back below 160 lbs yesterday. During the stresses and disruptions of this Spring I went off the rails with my eating for a week or two, and skipped or reduced a bunch of my workouts, and found myself at 165 lbs, with a 34 1/2 inch waist. It's taken four weeks to bring things back to where I want them to be. One complexity is that I don't have a goal weight or waistline, any more. My goal is a relationship -- the hips measuring three inches more than the waist -- and what that may work out to, in absolute pounds and inches, I can't know until I get there. Plus, I don't know whether the three inch thing is really appropriate for my age. Some people think that more padding is to be desired, at my advanced age, but what they base that on is (so far as I know) a single study that shows that you die slower if you're fatter. I don't know that I want to die slower: I just want to die later. The active and healthy-looking old people I see are skinny as a rail. I suspect that's the way to go. Not having absolute numbers to aim for, though, is a bit of a psychological disadvantage. My graphs show me moving in the right direction: but the waist and hip measurements are mushier than the scale's. It will be nice when I have a simple stable number of pounds that I want to weigh. 

Anyway -- to the purpose of my rather thought, as Mr Chaucer would say -- this is important to me because I had two criteria, from way back when I started this weight loss enterprise. One was, I had to keep the weight off for five years. The other was, that I had to be able to absorb a setback -- to go off the rails and get back on. For the first, well, I won't know for another three years whether I can declare success or not. But I seem to have demonstrated the second, now. I can recover from driving into the ditch, using exactly the same methods I used for the long march. They haven't magically become ineffective. (If that sounds absurd, well, it is: but it is also my experience of all the diets heretofore that have failed. Once they "broke" their effectiveness was wrecked.)

So -- that's all good. 

The other thing: I'm learning, in earnest, to take naps. In experimenting, a la Cal Norman, with trying to make space for blocks of "deep work" in my schedule, I discovered something important: the problem was not so much that social media was sucking up my time as that I was too fatigued. That is, I was lingering on Facebook and so forth because I was too tired to do real work, and I was too tired because my nightly sleep is regularly broken -- BPE -- and I was never making up the deficit. So I'm learning to sleep in the day. So grateful for having the flexibility of schedule to make that possible. A huge luxury.

There are two things I want to focus "deep work" time on: "deliberate practice" of Spanish, and "deliberate practice" of massage. I have periodically little fits of anxiety and dismay about whether my massage is good enough, which have never been wired to actually doing anything to improve it. But it does get better when I study and practice it. There's nothing magical about it. It follows the same path as any other skill. 

The anxiety is kind of stupid anyway, since it's already good enough, in practical terms: there's no way that the average kid just a year or two out of school is going to do work as effective as mine, and about half of the massage therapists out there are kids just a year or two out of school. From the business point of view, it hardly matters how good I am. It only matters from the point of how I feel about myself, and how I respond to anxiety. I'm sick of responding to anxiety about my worthiness with extravagant spiritual projects or literary enterprises that never quite happen. For more decades than I care to think about, my response to doubting my skills has been to work on a new and secret set of skills that I will someday unveil to the astonishment of the world. Screw that. I can just work on the things I actually do, and actually get better at them, right out in the light of day.

Venustas Ergo Venustas

I find the world much more difficult and obscure than most people do. I have friends to whom it seems obvious that a person belongs to herself: a statement which I find fascinating, bizarre and indefensible. But to them it is self-evident. I have friends for whom it is self-evident that there is a God who created people, and who believe that they therefore belong to Her: again fascinating, again bizarre, again indefensible. 

It's not clear to me that we exist, in any way similar to the way we imagine we exist, anyway: so Descartes' clear starting principle is for me the iffy conclusion of a dubious chain of assumptions. What are my responsibilities, even if I was created, even if by some unknowable fiat I not only exist, but belong to myself, even if "I" and "myself" are meaningful categories that can be meaningfully linked by a property relationship? That's not clear to me either. To me these are speculations in the outermost spheres of wild hypothesis. To my friends, they're daily realities worth killing and dying for.

Really. I'm not making this up, I'm not trying to invent difficulties. I'm just saying it's dark, to me: I stumble through an obscure world of shifting shapes and dissolving outlines, punctuated by moments of brilliant, wounding, transcendent beauty. 

Which vanish almost at once, leaving behind longings, traces, puzzlements. Descartes, bless his heart, was sure that he existed. For my part, I'm sure that the experience of beauty can exist, momentarily at least, however we conceive of the experiencer. And that's about as far as I get with first principles. This is why I'm so fun at parties.

Afterwards

gently to the water
the hierarchs recede
and the old men of the forest lift their heads
gently to the water
rain and rain
forty-seven days
and the drift of abandoned boats
but all that behind us now
gently to the water

You spoke and the dazzle is around us still
you felt and our own bones ached
you saw and the darkness fell
gently to the water

Crusted with bits of colored glass and shell
criss-crossed with scars that are old and white
or young and angry red and damped with sand
bring these unsteady hands
gently to the water

they undo the webbing
and the cinch under your trembling arms
begins to ease the breath comes back to your chest
where some small white-furred creature lifts its head
and with infinite caution makes its way
gently to the water.

Just Beginning to Breathe

for Jarrett on his birthday

So I was thinking today

how much I admire your work:

the attention to what ordinary people

want and need, to making the conversation

general. I was thinking about

the love of cities, where strangers

bring what they have and find what they need:

the glory of civilization, and its shame,

which are the same thing (generally) and I was thinking

of how hard and necessary it is to help people

go where they need to go

when they need to go there

and how the City is the whole human problem

and solution

at the same time.

General. Trafficking has a bad name, 

but I remember your earnestness when I said

if those people in Vancouver didn't want to pay the cost

they shouldn't come to Portland: you said, 

"But we want them to come!"

You lit up. We want them to come.

I was thinking that today 

is your birthday and how much better the world is

how much better my world is

because you are in it: of the wild,

unreasonable generosity that opens 

the gates and makes the streets a necklace

threading the shops and the houses: the jewelry of 

a barely imagined giant

just beginning to breathe.

About that Presidency

Edited to add: This was written just before Biden officially declared -- very early days in the primary race. As my Dad reminded me, there's a lot we don't know yet, and we should view our assumptions with a lot of skepticism.

---

Here's how I see the next presidential administration, should the Democrats win it (I give them a fifty-fifty chance; maybe sixty-forty.)

The Senate will still be firmly in Republican hands. The House will probably remain Democratic. It's four more years of legislative deadlock, head-butting, name-calling, maneuvering. In office or out of it, Trump will still be tweeting like a lunatic, with a devoted following and a Fox News amplifier. He'll be slightly discredited, but he'll also be back where he loves to be, flinging dung from the outside. It will be very, very hard to get anything at all done. The fighting will not be clean. It will be an ugly four years, regardless. The Senate Republicans will resume their obstruct-the-president-at-whatever-cost approach.

What will the president's role be, then? What will be required of her?

Two things. First: she'll need to present a coherent and appealing picture of the path forward, so that people -- especially people in states that presently field Republican senators -- will want to give the Democratic Party a chance. The vision thing.

Second: she'll need to fight hard, scrappily, ferociously and continuously. It's going to be a fight from day one, an exhausting one. She's going to have to know where all the levers of power are and how to pull them. And she's going to be heading up a vast bureaucracy, the Federal Government, that will be depleted and demoralized, largely paralyzed by the legislative deadlock. So she will need high-level managerial skills, and extraordinary discipline.

Then perhaps we win the 2022 and 2024 elections. Perhaps we don't. That's a long ways out. At that point maybe we can implement some version of the Green New Deal. But that's not what we're doing right now. Right now, we're picking our champion for a brutal, four year slugfest.

To lay my cards on the table: right now my favorite candidate, by far, is Elizabeth Warren. She's become the de facto Democratic policy engine. She's laying out what we need to do, and she's doing it well. I have a soft spot for wonks, after all. I made phone calls for Dukakis. But: I doubt I'll be voting for her in the primaries. I don't think she's a particularly good campaigner. She's nearly as old as Joe Biden. I think she'd struggle to win back the midwestern states that we lost last time. And if she did win -- she's never managed anything larger than a Senatorial office. She knows the legislative process up and down, but I'm not sure how much good that will do us if Congress remains paralyzed.

Who does that leave? Well, there's Sanders. He does "the vision thing" but I don't see him as a scrapper, or a bulldog. He would keep the vision front and center, and we need that. But he's even older than Warren. Would he be able to get down into the pit and wrestle for the scraps, which are all we're going to get next time? I doubt it. Detail and discipline are not his strong suits. And as far as campaigning goes, we haven't yet seen what happens when the oppo machine gets to work on him. They'll have a lot to work with.

Biden? Well, older again. Not a particularly good campaigner either -- his previous presidential bids have fizzled out ingloriously. He tends to go on and on, and periodically to put his foot in his mouth. He does have the experience of the Obama administration, so he ticks that box. But his vision is locked in to the world of the 1970s (as is Sanders', for that matter: Biden is the 70s "Old Left" -- it was old even then -- and Sanders is the 70s "New Left.")

No. The two I look to, when I look past Warren, are Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris. Buttigieg strikes me as very like candidate Obama: someone who is able to project an aura of being new and exciting while actually being a cautious centrist. Obama won me over by running an incredibly brilliant, disciplined campaign. I never much liked his centrist policies, but his political abilities were astounding. Buttigieg may be a similar wunderkind; I don't know. He has the silver tongue, but whether he has the managerial skills, I don't know. His resume is pretty skimpy. I do think Buttigieg is the only candidate in the field who understands why anyone would have voted for Trump, and has thought constructively about how to bring those people back. We need to bring those people back. They're not going to evaporate just because they lose an election. We're going to be living together from now on, decade after decade. We can't roll the Republic back four years: we're going to have to find a way forward.

Then there's Kamala Harris, whom I suspect I will end up supporting. She has administered a large bureaucracy, as AG of California. She is very smart. She hasn't always done the vision thing terribly well, but she has surprised me lately by her boldness: she seems to have been biding her time, but she has emerged as a genuine Green New Dealer. And she has incredible discipline. She will stay on point, totally focused, for as long as she needs to. She's young enough to be able to pound her way through four years of exhausting fighting. And for what it's worth, I like her, for the same reasons I liked Hillary Clinton. I like that she chose the difficult and murky ways of the inside paths to power. She's understands that it's all trade-offs, if you're going to try to make things happen in the real world. You do the work, and you let people call you names, and you smile.

So there we are. At the moment of going to press, I'm for Harris. I guess like Warren better, but I like Warren mostly as a wonk, not as a fighter or a figurehead. She serves as a wonk as well in the Senate -- or better -- as she would in the White House.

In any case, I will support whoever the Democrats choose. The party is the only thing that really matters, in American politics, and the sooner we understand that the happier we will be. I like the Democratic Party better than I have ever liked it, in my long years of grudging support: so there's that.

Forgetting the Sky

It's not just that joy is joy
though that would be sufficient
it's that joy makes all the rest of life align
sensibly

therefore
a life not focused on 
putting oneself in the way of joy
is not the right one

regardless of whatever else 
may be right about it.

Noted
there is no forcing it
joy comes on its own schedule
at its own hest
as it will; but

Walking hunched, head down,
brooding on wrongs suffered committed & ahead
is sad in itself but more importantly
it is the way to miss joy
which tends to approach

in that space behind the left shoulder, 
where an affectionate spouse would kiss you in passing,
or where a cat would ride if it were accompanying you
on a dumpster dive; where the fringe of an epaulet
might tickle.

for any and all these things it is required
to let the shoulders ride back
and let the sternum
be prow:

We won't spend much time afloat
said and done,
and forgetting the sky is our first
and worst mistake.

The Glorious First

A cannon shot in 1794
began a wave that beat upon the shore
and back again, a surge of marbled gray
that ran against the quays of Malabar
and twisted, tangled, ran once more away;

you remember that year
my darling, centuries after, when one small wave
rocked against our hands in seeming play?
The sea was shining then as once before
under the filtered sun at the closing of the day.

Painstaking Letters

Suppose some fluttering thing -- marred by suspicion
but carrying in its claw, neat-folded to its breast,
a scroll of painstaking letters and awkward 
illumination, suppose it is here after all, 
in the cage of my chest, and that is what these furtive
movements and shuddery stillnesses, what these moments
of nausea and grating crumbles of delight, what these
dizzying lurches mean?

I have not fed the birds, but still they come, and still
they grow beside my heart, and still they clutch
messages from some far time when each stroke of the pen
cost someone's blood and overturned a trough. The grinding of
some azure stuff, the mixing of a walnut ink: and all the while
murderous fleets standing off beyond the rocks,
signalling disaster. Still. They wrote; they had to.

Give this message to this one messenger,
(wet-winged, drenched in the throb of the heartspace)
and tell him to come home when he can;
tell him the wind still breaks in unseen foam
over the crest of the hills.

Soon, Quixote

Accelerating my Spanish is succeeding well, and my second run at Tormento has been a great success: I sprinted to the end out of real curiosity to see how on earth Pérez Galdós was going to end it. Looking around for the next read, I find Don Quixote looming ever closer. Perhaps not the next undertaking, but soon.

Don Quixote sits queerly in my mind's attic. I read it in translation at age seventeen or eighteen, my first year at Evergreen, when I read so many of the classics that have stayed with me, and I thoroughly disliked it. Its sexism and casual acceptance of violence -- which were probably no worse than in any other 17th Century book -- displeased me. In those days I was ferociously idealistic, and I roundly disliked snark and satire. (I never have developed much of a taste for them: but if anything would dispose me that way, it's been the government of the last couple years.) My heart was with bold dreamers such as William Blake, or sad ones such as William Butler Yeats. And anyway the damned book went on and on: nearly a thousand pages of small print, and yet things never came to any point, that I could see. Somebody would get beaten up and everybody would laugh. What fun.

It was really the only classic, of the many I read that year, that I failed to connect with. I was a generous reader, for my age, but Quixote defeated me. I couldn't figure out a way to like it. I remember confessing this to my favorite Professor, who thought a bit and said that when he disliked a classic, it generally meant that it had something to teach that he was reluctant to learn. I thought, and think, that was probably true. And I retain my unfashionable reverence for classics. So I've always had in the back of my mind the project of taking another run at Quixote.

So now, as I cast about in Spanish literature -- in a situation strangely like that of my seventeenth year, confronted with a new wealth of classics on every side, but uncertain of my guides -- I go browsing among lists of imprescindibles libros en castellano, and what I find, again and again, at the head of the lists, is -- Don Quixote. 

So -- soon, I think. I find, when I turn the lamp right on it, that I have acquired a sense of incapacity, which startles me: a sense that I would not be able to read 17th Century Spanish. Where I came by that nonsense, I don't know, but I'm highly displeased to find it creeping up on me. Of course I can read 17th Century Spanish. If you don't know a word, look it up; if you don't know a phrase, google it. For heaven's sake. I've read in far more obscure and difficult languages than that. 

So -- soon, it's Quixote. A couple more middling-hard novels first, I think. But soon.

Thinking Projects

I'm thinking projects, which has not been how I usually think. I usually think systems, and that's usually the way I want to think. Get the systems right and the results come of their own accord. I'm not able to read in several languages because I ever made a project out of them. I just studied some and read some every day, and now I know them. I'm in good physical shape, not because I ever set goals for my fitness, but because I walk and exercise every day. It's the right emphasis. But it's not the only emphasis. And some things just hit a holding pattern, or stall out, without milestones and end goals.

So I want to back off from the daily-routine approach, for a moment, and think in a project-oriented way. I've got three projects going:

• learning Spanish
• writing my diet book
• maintaining my massage business

All three are either stalled out (diet book and massage biz) or in a holding pattern (learning Spanish.)

Spanish. Okay, the issue here is that I've been doing this for many years -- reading maybe half an hour per day, learning a couple words per day and adding them to Anki flashcard decks -- and while my Spanish does gradually get better, that's actually a ton of time to have invested to still not be at the level I'd like to be. (Which is, to be able to translate written Spanish into written English, skillfully and rapidly enough to make it possibly a paying side-gig.) I think I must be just *barely* over the break-even point. If I double, or even increase by half-again, the time I put in -- and if I do some writing as well as reading -- I might be able to get where I want to be in a year or two. But right now, it's absorbing a lot of my disposable time and not yielding any rewards beyond its own pleasure. (Which is considerable, mind you. I like doing it.) I may be in the position of someone saving for retirement at the rate of ten dollars a month. It's the right way to do it -- put some aside every month -- but if  it won't yield the desired result within the span of human lifetime, the scale is wrong. It's not enough of an increment over steady-state. So what I need is:

• an alteration of the daily system, obviously, to step it up,
• a timeline with milestones
• a way to evaluate my progress

The timeline I can just make up: a year and a half. And the end milestone is also easy: I can take a qualifying test at one of the online translating companies, and just see how I do. Intermediate milestones are a little harder. I'll have to ponder that. Also I should investigate subject-matter expertise: what's wanted that's hard to get?

So: I will take one of those exams in July 2020.

As far as the daily routine goes: I'll double the time reading. Right now I mostly read on the train to and from work, which probably amounts to about half an hour of reading per day; and I learn two words per day. So I'll add forty minutes of reading in the morning, and make it four words per day. In addition I should start doing some translation exercises, with some kind of checking in with a reliable literate native speaker. (I have a hazy memory of a website that provides that sort of exchange... with an "eight" in its name? Duolingo had a translation component, but it didn't have any checking worth a damn.)

---

I wrote the foregoing two or three days ago, and it's been surprising to me how deeply I've responded to having an intellectual project again: I hadn't realized how much I've missed feeling that I was building a skill.

---

I decided, by the way, that there is no salt problem. I don't actually eat as much as most Americans and I don't think it makes much difference anyway.

---

I bought a little 8-inch cast iron skillet, and have been using it nightly. It brings me great joy. So suited to its work, so reassuringly solid and real and durable. The cheap light nonstick pans I've been using wound my spirit. I'm not sure why it's taken so long for me to finally try cast iron: I think I had exaggerated ideas of how difficult and elaborate seasoning them would be. In the event, the skillet I bought was supposedly preseasoned, and I just started using it, with plenty of oil, oiling it up again after I cleaned it: within a couple days it has become more nonstick than my ailing, supposedly nonstick, lightweight chemist's confections. Sometimes I make things more complicated than they have to be.