The Up And Down of It
A few days ago Rafe told me about the songs he sings to his infant son, Simon. An unforeseen pleasure of the paternal condition, Rafe first learned all sorts of diddies and nonsense songs by heart to raise Simon’s older brother.
At some point, Rafe will need to tell his children things that are not silly and infantile, will need to decide what knowledge he thinks they should know and what beliefs he thinks they should believe. And he will want society to do the same. He will not, for instance, want his children to attend a school that teaches creationism rather than evolution.
From parent to child embodies (or locates) where the complexity of expertise and memory and education overlap, an overlap I failed to speak to in my last post. There I referred to George Steiner (an expert in literature) but Sarah, also an expert, pointed out some basic flaws in Steiner’s assertions, if not mine.
Other than what follows, this week’s notebooks are full of drafts I wrote trying to untangle all that, trying to find the threads of culture at a time when the overlaps either require a new kind of expertise or a recognition that culture itself is an old-fashioned, perhaps meaningless word.
In any event, that is work for scholars, not me. I’ll just get back, now, to the usual fare.
Amsterdam-ia
One of the pleasures of cycling and Amsterdam is getting blown away by a 12-year-old girl. The reminder that you are no longer young and fit rather than old and easily winded is less the pleasure than recognizing that even though she would crush you on a straightaway sprint her real advantage is her Dutchness. She knows the light, the paths, and the angles. She can start early, shorten every shortcut, and finagle traffic with aplomb. Her environment and her knowledge of it offer her speed and independence. Her expertise about the signature rules of home makes her stronger than muscle, faster than myth.
At The Bottom Of The Internet
One terrible liability of our age is that just the opportunity to speak tempts us to imagine ourselves speaking at a podium. Puffed-up egos threat thinking today as much as the online echo chamber that confirms everyone’s worst ideas.
Nothing loves hubris and stupidity so much as a microphone and the internet is a world of microphones.
Notes On Education
What if school, rather than teaching everyone that their job was to get rich, taught everyone how to most enjoy life on fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year?
Keep in mind that in the most developed of economies, something like that is what you need to be happy and that much more does not add to your happiness. Also, know that if you earn more than twenty-five thousand or so you are in the global 1%. Wouldn't it make sense, then, to educate ourselves for a wonderful middle-class existence and build an economy accordingly? Sustainable, equitable, and with the inbuilt peace of an enormous middle class? Wouldn’t that serve the planet more than pretending life only counts if you can afford a Bezos yacht or to fly private?
Today, Or Some Day Like It
The deep state, always just powerful enough to make Mr. Trump's life impossible, can never quite muster the strength to reveal its handy work. Tilting Ohio and Florida for in the 2020 election would have been a smart way to steal the election but instead, the libs went to the trouble of grabbing Minnesota, Arizona, and Nevada. Either they were too stupid to do the obvious or that’s how you do something widespread and totally undetectable.
Similarly, the power to keep Mrs. Clinton and the criminal Biden family out of jail while Mr. Trump was in office demonstrates resounding strength from the liberal FBI and the hippie CIA. If he were less greatly powerful himself you would not know of their crimes. If those de-fundable organizations were not so in sync with the left everyone not named Trump would be in jail already.
How the deep state ever let Mr. Trump into power in the first place is a mystery. You would think such a force would have just rigged things for their girl.
To indict him now with all the liberties afforded a citizen, including a trial by jury, almost makes the Illuminati undeserving of the anti-semitism directed its way.
muntrem, e.r.
Here is a fact of life: the longer you delay putting out your creative work, the more pressure you feel to make it “good.”
The Pornographic Imagination
For Camus the Minotaur is boredom – the boredom, the devours vitality of young. For Picasso, it is more sinister and complex. The Minotaur's presence makes the world claustrophobic. Its brutish head is inescapable. Roles have been reversed: the Minotaur is striking back. Because we have failed to transform the animal within our labyrinth, the animal within is conquering us, unleashing vengeance.
This is from an essay called “Creativity And The Minotaur” in Ben Okri’s A Way of Being Free, a slim book worth reading.
Look at the passage again and think of the phone as the Minotaur, devouring the vitality of the young, making the world claustrophobic as a form of vengeance.
We need upgraded ways, it would appear, to wrestle with the animal within.