Manifesto

For centuries, millennia even, we as a species have been contending with the realities of our own evolution and possible extinction. We have the power to destroy and the capacity to create, and we approach them both with equal fear and awe.

And so we write our lives into our work; leave a trace of our internal worlds so filled with strife and love and we return to others' accounts of the same and are reminded of why and what we fight to preserve. We have seen and been responsible for so many horrors and wonders in our short reign, that all we truly and ought to want is to see our greater selves in charge of the future.

Abstracts - "Hacks Britannica: Reviving the Olympic Tradition of Crapness"

(Background: An article published yesterday in The Paris Review by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Managing Editor at Harper's Magazine, which you can read here. Disclaimer: I have not seen the Opening Ceremony nor, apparently, will I thanks to the IOC)

Abstract

Using a blend of historio-contemporary dialogues of my own devising and interpretation, a close reading of a visual event, postcolonial theory & cultural studies, I will: demonstrate my robust yet still somehow vapid multiculturalism while employing a tempest of pedantic and exhausting jargon-filled run-on sentences to obfuscate even the simplest of my points (because an over-long parenthetical aside that uses ad hoc foreign language colloquialisms does more than suggest I'm supremely well educated, it means you too have to be supremely well educated in order to understand, respond to, or even contend with me. And because sometimes I may appear to leave a sentence or thought unfinished); I will then suggest that Danny Boyle is a hack, an over-hyped, over-diverse director of international superhits who decided, not to challenge China, but to reinvigorate the questionably loved tradition of producing a crappy opening ceremony. I won't suggest I could've done a better job, but the pomp implicit in my language will. Obviously.

I will then end my article with a clichéd, remembered image of Bill Clinton at the '96 Atlanta Games, precisely because I remembered it and nobody else did.

Suck it. 

Abstracts: A New Game

So I may've just developed a new writing game -

Read an article from a literary journal. Any of them really, though The Paris Review produces and recommends some excellent ones (more on that to come). The more scholastic the article the better.

Because -

After you read it, you write an abstract for it. Yes, yes I know, it sounds awful. But here's the twist:

Write the abstract in the author's voice, but with your reaction to the article!

It's a double-bias!

The effectiveness of your abstract depends on the authenticity of two things:

1.  Your pantomime 
2.  Your criticism (whether constructive or deconstructive). 

An effective abstract should, for now, also prompt the reader to continue on and scan the original article because, like all things academic, a critical response should be weighed against the original subject by an informed (preferably objective) third party. So... really, this is more of a game for the writer not the reader... And I apologize for that self-indulgence (though all are invited to join!). But please know, as I'm soon to post my first attempt at this game, it's meant to be entertaining. And, if it's wildly successful, will do what so many critical responses do nowadays -

Erase the need to read the source. (<-- kapow!)

Or, it'll do what too few do: Inspire it. (<-- that's the big one)

Let the social commentary begin!

True Aim

Then I notched the arrow and steadily pulled the bowstring to my ear, a full draw. A steady wind came from the west. But it is nothing to consider, lacking the force to affect the flight. Tension loosed. My eyes dart to follow the field point and synthetic feathers. In a moment isolated from time it pierces space  with the pretense of precision. Once again, high and right off into the underbrush. I curse the thought of searching for another stray. I curse my inadequacy. I curse another chance missed, another occasion squandered.

In the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad you can find this string of words,

When they are all banished, 
those desires lurking in ones heart;
Then a mortal becomes immortal 
and attains brahman in this world. 


For a long time I have wrestled with this Indic concept that announces desire as the chief bane to humanity's atonement with the world. Perhaps it is because my mind is locked down with the material and imperialistic desires of all my western forbears? Maybe. I have thought that there is a nuance behind this concept rarely articulated. Desire generally may not be the problem. The problem is when we are unaware of the nature of our own desires. This is the problem of the bow and the arrow.

I scan my target, choose a single point that is my bearing. Newly accustomed sinews draw back the bowstring and I remain convinced I am aiming for the point I have chosen. I let the arrow fly and I miss  egregiously and often, but not for lack of skill. I have had far better days. Something in my mind is amiss. I tell myself I aiming at the chosen point. My mind is focused. However, the action of my body is distracted. Upon release of the arrow my head moves up and to the right, eager to evaluate that which has not yet come to pass. Because of this preoccupation with the future, a future undoubtedly shaped by the present, I missed my mark again and again. My worlds of thought and action are incongruous. That which I claim to desire I do not truly pursue.

How often is this the case? We claim we want happiness. We clamor for peace. Yet we stray from the path presented by the most elegant stirrings in our souls and in doing so we incur strife in our own personal spheres.

The desires that hinder the burgeoning of our highest iterations are those which we are either too ashamed to admit exist (even to ourselves) or to which we are completely unaware. Our ignorance does not protect us. These "lurking desires" push our aim away from those ideals for which we strive when we are basking in the light.  They are desires that foster the actions for which we wish to be remembered.

Revolution

The burden of any revolution (art, political, social) is not in tearing down what currently stands,
But in having the strength to construct in its place something that's truly better.

A Worthy Fear

Heroism is no guarantee.
I could battle the storms just to see you -
and I have -
But you didn't know,
And I couldn't tell you.

A Conversation Between M&F (2012)

She said, "Don't mistake my attention for affection."

He said, "Don't mistake my honesty for weakness."

Knowledge as Status

This kind of thing frustrates me:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303901504577460770904124192.html

Click the link and it'll take you to an article called "A House to Look Smart In: Old-School Reading Rooms Stage Grand Return; No Books? Firms Will Pick, Style"

It's an article about hedge-fund managers, Hollywood moguls, and technology executives spending a bunch of money to have someone design and stock old-fashioned reading rooms and libraries in their sparkling new houses. By a bunch I mean anything from $30,000 to $150,000 or more, even upwards of $20 million.

Here's my beef: It's openly and only a status symbol. One that suggests the presence of knowledge because it bears the accoutrements of knowledge.

It's a celebration of money and knowledge coming together, where Knowledge qua Knowledge is simply an ornament, or an affirmation of monetary success. Typically I'm all about affirmations. I love affirming things, especially difficult things like death and diversity of opinion.

This type of affirmation, however, burns me. My skin physically heats to the point of sweating, even in an air-conditioned building on a cool day.

And it's because of several things:

1. The clientele
2. The vendors (or rather, the enablers) 
3. It continues the same misunderstanding that's been rampant in quasi-intellectual society since that disastrous Cartesian Moment (I think therefore I am / Cogito ergo sum).

Allow me to explain these, in reverse order.

3.) The Cartesian Moment, a topic which Michel Foucault addresses in his 1981 lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, is a relic of 17th Century Moralism (or Rationalism, I'm not sure of the real genre). To steal Foucault's argument - which, if self-reflection achieves what it's supposed to, we would see is both true and rampantly ignored - the "Cartesian moment" obliterated the personal spiritual meaning of the "Delphic prescription of gnōthi seauton" or, rather "Know yourself." Foucault argues that "Know yourself" had two inherent meanings, both of which the Greeks understood, and which through the centuries came to mean less and less, until Descartes successfully eradicated the second. They are:

• Know who you are
• Care for who you are

By focusing only on "Knowing" who they are, people eventually come to rely on basic emotional responses to life events to inform their self-reflexive awareness. They become passionately attuned to fleeting social movements (a sense of belonging), aggressively invested in economic wealth (a sense of personal security), and catastrophically defensive when their ideas of happiness and security are challenged (a sense of longing accompanied by unhappiness). Those are my observations. I haven't read enough of Hermeneutics to know whether Foucault identifies similar traits, and I admit they are grossly over-generalized but that does not dismiss them. I call upon the reader to recall moments where he or she has encountered such people as above, and then recall whether or not that person 1.) had an emotional breakdown and 2.) learned from that emotional breakdown.

So, in other words, when people become obsessed with Knowledge qua Knowledge, they tend to ignore the more important and esoteric trait that comes from investigating, analyzing, and finding insight apart from knowledge: Wisdom. 

Their love of Knowledge dismisses the more difficult task of learning from it.

2.) The vendors, or rather the designers, thinkers and architects who specialize in providing these services. I'm angry at them out of a sense of loyalty. These people are supposed to uphold what they profess, and if they profess art, learning, insight, literature or even the belief that appearances reflect intentions, they should know better than to sell mere gestures to those things. 

Because to me, as I both admit and ignore the limitations of my authority, these libraries are simply gestures. They're suggestions. Decorations. Vestigial limbs of a neo-canonical past. They're the beacon of intent, looking to the fruits of emotional labor and relegating them to the loathsome position of the Artist in Supplication: begging for the approval of the rich and famous. They're the standing ovation to a one-way street where contemporary wealth deems itself entitled to share in legacies of greatness while forgoing the labors that founded those legacies.

An artist, philosopher, or artist-philosopher would know this, and would do one of the following three things, respectively: 

1. Reject it in form
2. Argue against it in prose
3. Both of the above, with varying degrees of success, usually posthumous

These vendors, as far as I can tell, do none of these things. They may find their work fulfilling, and for that I congratulate them. But I do not want to share their company. They are at least aware enough that they may, one day, want to share mine - and for that I also congratulate them - but the flattery will not be returned.

1.) The clientele. As far as the two former arguments have prepared you for my attack on the clientele, I'll say only this: By turning knowledge and wisdom into a status symbol, they respond to contemporary artists, philosophers and artist-philosophers in the best way they can: economically.

They have money, which means they have power. And when that power is applied to things like this, it convinces the broader public that you must have one to have the other.

It exhausts me to say it and so I say it wearily, but this is not the case.

Revelations and epiphanies - real ones - are not a privilege afforded to "wealth." They can come from anywhere and everywhere, and they usually come from gestures to something even broader than knowledge. 

They come from gestures toward Love. Real, undefinable love. It surprises and terrifies, comforts and admonishes. But it is constant, ethereal. It is, in almost every instance, the driving force behind the pages hidden in these libraries. 

I say that because I've learned to say it. And I've learned to say it because I've observed its interactions among the people whom I say I love. And when I write things like this, I see many of their faces behind my own words. 

It is because I love them that I write, so if they read my words and they take offense to them, I ask them to remember this, my exhortation:

gnōthi seauton

There is truth in these words. It does not come easily. Neither does Love. If you would fight for the love of another, fight for the love of yourself as well, and you will know truth.

-M.N. Shiplet

**Note:
For a great example of someone who understands both aspects of gnōthi seauton, see Anne-Marie Slaughter's recent article in The Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All". Particularly her wholesome support for the finding in Bronnie Ware's book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, in which the most frequent regret was: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."


This, of course, on top of her adamant belief that leaving Washington for her family was the right choice, a choice for which I have the deepest admiration.

What pettiness is this?
What miscommunication?
I said my peace clearly,
And believed it was understood.

But a political decoy appeared:
Attacked from within the party,
using a superior's name as its fire.

What motive is this?
What goal to be achieved?

Make an example of me --
Defensive cowardice, I see it.
I beat it with a worded glance:
To make a point.

I wish it weren't necessary
Maybe I could help?
As if I weren't helping in the first place.

The conversation was rigged,
But I knew your weakness.
It was simple:
You forgot to look for mine.

If you had, you'd have seen
A simple futility in the moment that occurred --
The wedding airstrike --

I want to be the best,
And I'll bend the rules to make it happen.
Flimsy as they are.

This is my public confession.
Because I have nothing to lose.
My hands are my own.
They were given to me:
I asked boldly for what I already had.
I couldn't see it by myself,
So it was given to me.
There is always more, some unknown depth.

I don't hold my fate.
It plays into too many other hands.
I can shape it.
I can stop asking why.
I can leave it on a sidewalk.

Without too much to bear,
The deeds become themselves:
Freely formed and left to float
As trust upon the breeze.
The treetops envious.
They see up close,
What I can choose to see from above.
There is death in this vision.

So I confess:
I cannot say what would show
That which cannot be told.
The rhythm is too subtle.
The language too diverse.

Simplicity is eternity.
A binary system that makes us choose.
Laughing because it knows death cares about the journey too.
Which is why I say it and it isn't beautiful.
There are no Greeks. No French, Germans or Irish.
No sexes. No sexualities. Races or bigotries.
This is only my confession.
It was given to me.

Selective Memory 

My imperfect mind pushes you into abstraction. 

To think of you as you were then as how

You are now strains my grasp on what is. 

My senses betray my feelings as I 

Grope for an image of you that can 

Be placed in the past with gladness

Instead of regret. And I make 

Amends with myself as I 

Remember as I choose. 

But this morning something 

Slipped through the sieve. 

I stood by my window and 

Watched the midsummer 

Sunrise shine life over the 

Earth and my thoughts were

Only of You. 

Insights from the Trail

Went for a run in the woods this morning. Here’s what I saw:

It’s possible to step lightly and quickly enough to leave no trace, in dirt and sand, even when they’re wet.

It’s also possible to come within a few inches of a foraging robin, simply by running barefoot (if you’re both quick and silent).

Stone could teach us a hefty lesson in stubbornness, only to turn around and astonish us with its volatility. Between grip and slip, in situ and in-molten-flight, stone has us beat (until we demand it be self-aware).

A 45-foot tall tree, with a trunk 4 feet in diameter, is not only impressive, but tragic. Its strength is obvious, but its stability is hidden and therefore forgotten. These trees stand ageless and serene, but only until they become an obstacle and their wood deemed less desirable than a tree of similar stature from across the country.

A freight train may shake and scar the earth as it passes, but a hawk’s shadow through the canopy sends fearful chills of admiration down my spine.

In less technologically “developed” countries, one must be either very powerful or very stupid to care as little about leaving a trail as mountain-bikers.

Nature has mastered the art of tension between silence and cataclysm. Humanity has mastered the art of drowning out those tensions in favor of numbing itself to those cataclysms. 

That’s all for now. It was only a 4 mile run.

“Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.”

—	Ernest Hemingway, via The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 21 (1958) These particularly haunting words would become even more so three years later when Hemingway takes his own life, like his father before him.

From a Work in Progress

…And so the window shatters, and our eyes downturned, we hear the twinkling glass and we see the still-rocking stone, and we come to a stop, whispering a curse to the breeze for its chill…