Quotes & Thoughts

Life & Death: Materiality

2012-01-29T16:23:00.001-08:00

I was 14 when the fact of my extinction first came home to me in its full terror. The foreknowledge of one's mortality is said to be a prod to action, reminding us to seize the time, but to my 14-year-old self it was simply terrifying. Inevitably, it was accompanied by doubt in the central project of Christianity: to convince us that we are saved.

I was reminded of this recently at a Roman Catholic service for the dead that I attended. Immortality was the theme, but to me the truer heart of Catholicism is fecundity, guarded and celebrated by a religion for whom the earth's fertility is a real concern, but whose methods of ensuring a good harvest are curiously indirect. Immortality is the least of it, in this schema: agricultural religions are really about the eternal return, not personal resurrection.

The eternal return I could accept, although there's the intruding fact of our sun's demise, the earth succumbing to its eventually explosive hunger for an energy it can no longer produce sufficiently on its own. That day, we're assured, is countless millennia away, but there it is: even the success of the crops is a temporal fix. The Buddha was right.

Materiality thus always struck me as a thin plank on which to try to bridge the abyss. The earth has outlived its formative turmoil, but species time shouldn't blind us to the other forces in play. Everything is maya. That this is somewhat less terrifying than the fact of our eventual death is mainly a tribute to the provinciality of our perspective. Cosmopolitans that we claim to be, we should place ourselves accurately in the universe we momentarily inhabit, recognizing the sheer brevity of our existence compared to longer-lived phenomena. Yet we pay more attention to things that speak to our relative longevity: fast-decaying particles, moths, warm nights in San Francisco.

Materiality led Diderot to write his Encyclopedia. Men and women of his type were liberated by the casting off of faith in anything but reason, the promptings of man as man and of the universe as perceptible stuff, if we could just find the instruments. That the universal arose in this period as the capstone of a long political consolidation that would ultimately seek to subsume the local and the different is the shadow side of this liberation. Yet the local and the different also have their shadow sides, suggesting that the universal and the local are necessary complements and that their balance is crucial.

Implicit in this view is the positioning of the self as the one who measures, the observer and explorer. The centenary interest in Amundsen and Scott has understandably given the tragic, self-reflecting Robert Falcon Scott more attention. Fatally hapless, Scott is nonetheless emblematic of a willingness to risk death in order to know, by which we mean not just expanding knowledge, but viscerally, personally experiencing reality. When we speak of overcoming or subduing nature today, we think of its exploitation, but Scott's knowing was direct and intimate, and his defeat resulted in a kind of apotheosis. So while Amundsen reached the South Pole and returned alive, Scott achieved immortality.

To be the one who measures is to place oneself somewhat outside of the universe thus surveyed. I believe it was V.S. Pritchett who observed that a writer is served by another self that goes out and lives life for him, to some degree. Or a writer may, like General Grant or Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, find herself at the tether end of a life ostensibly lived for another purpose, like invading Mexico or reversing an army's fortunes, finally ready to write it down. Much is made of Lampedusa's failure to find a publisher for his masterpiece in his lifetime, but the story of Walter Benjamin's lost suitcase is sadder.

Materiality demands that we save ourselves through our works. The genetic impulse to reproduce is the most basic expression of this requirement. Working our way up the chain, we see a clear dividing line between those who crave instant gratification and others, like Stendhal, who intuit a deeper resonance in the future. Gratification depends on fashion and worldly power, while its deferral or dismissal frees one to choose one's means and terms. Materiality's immortality, unlike say that of Christianity, involves the hubris of imagining it is even possible. To opt for immediate gratification is, in this sense, a kind of lack of faith in oneself, for hubris is a cardinal virtue in a material world.

Life & Death: Immortality

2012-01-14T13:57:00.003-08:00

The plane from Kuala Lumpur spinning in the air, the horrendous English Channel crossing, cobras in the yard, the spot of tuberculosis on my lung: I took these facts of life in with equanimity, believing myself immune from death. I was afraid of the witch in Disney's Snow White, of Singapore's absurdly big and vicious insects, and of friends' betrayals and cutting remarks, always unexpected. The world passed by, often at the pace of a ship: out of the fog, Gibraltar or the Thames docks with their coal smell. The idea that any of this would go away did not occur to me.

I've read that children with fatal ailments are aware that death stalks them. It must age them to be sick, and death may look like deliverance. This is human, too, our desire for a doorway that leads us out of some sticky situation. We dislike being cornered. The villain who might confront us, who haunts our dreams, can be eluded.

This form of immortality goes hand in hand with being, the other prerogative of childhood. Without thinking about it, we live fully in the moment while the adults around us do their best to tame and socialize us, acquainting us with plans and deferrals and the need to work. We trade our pleasures in for the dubious line they hand us. Soon, we're collecting badges and other trinkets that speak to our merit and maturation.

The evidence piles up: if not mortal, we are at the very least subject to degradation. Girls prove fickle. Plants make us itch. Puberty makes us hairy and alienated. The school of hard knocks makes it harder and harder to believe in our omnipotence. With each succeeding blow, we lower by a notch or two our self-belief. And this is what it really is: a belief in the immortality of the self: against the odds, we'll keep on living.

Only we didn't really know the odds. Someone's mother died and my oldest son asked who would take her place. Surely some agency will send another? My sister's friend died after my sister's birthday party. My mother was upset, and I assumed it was because it was a breach of manners, to die like that. When the orderly came to wheel me to the operating room when I was five, I told him I had to put my shoes on, my mother having taught me not to go out without them. He let me put them on. (They expected me to be knocked out, but whatever they gave me didn't work.) "He needs to have his tonsils taken out," the doctor told my mother and me, leaning out of his Triumph convertible. It never occurred to me to wonder how they'd do it.

Still, I remember being fascinated by doctors, whose many inoculations were a source of pain. They knew something my parents did not, and were held in awe by them. What was it that they knew? In the midst of this, my friend Robin's father drove us to see a Chinese funeral - I think it was for King George VI, so a memorial. There was a big cart, elaborately decorated, and the din of music like Cantonese opera: wailing music. I knew the King from his image on stamps. He looked just fine on them.

Life & Death: Prologue

2012-01-08T19:10:00.000-08:00

A death on New Year's Day and the remarks of a Franciscan father, prompted by it, brought to mind our mortal existences. We exist, as Nabokov noted, between two voids. Quickening in the womb, we enter roughly into the rest of life. Our passing out of it is comparable, leaving the lifeless body that, from the standpoint of bystanders, we lately quit. The sight of a body in its 99th year brings home just how used up a body can be.

I say "between two voids," because this is how Nabokov wrote of it, but that depiction is just one theory. There are others, also to be noted here.

At the service for the recently departed, the priest stressed the promise of immortality at the heart of his religion. The Franciscan also mentioned this, but in more personal terms, connecting baptism with the final rites as a journey in which birth and death are stages. He mentioned, appropriately, how this woman fell in love and took joy in being pregnant with her three daughters. From those three arose eight, I thought: both men and women. This is the chain of being, which often seems to be the real purpose of a religion that's mainly intended to ensure a good harvest. That this is an aspect of life cannot be doubted, although I disagree with several of the asserted implications.

This essay is not about religion per se, however, but about the theories of life and death that I have personally considered. These theories arise from life and shed light on it. As small children, we believe ourselves to be immortal. That belief dies hard, I would say. Even as we measure our deterioration, the idea that life is more or less infinite sticks with us and its staying power, however self-serving, makes it a kind of leitmotif, the cello part against which the other theories sometimes struggle for our attention.

To give this essay a bit of structure, let me note the theories I will describe. The first two are opposites: the childhood belief in immortality and the "adult" belief in mortality, pure and simple - a material universe in which everything is transient. The third and fourth theories are really theories of life and death. Let's call the one "cohort reincarnation" and the other "cohort education." The word cohort figures in both, because it's been my sense that we end up amid people who are significant beyond their earthly presence in our lives. So my theories are intended to explain this in two ways, one marked by a process that I think of as "falling through time" and the other analogous to being sent out into life by one's parents. The third theory has many, many antecedents, while the fourth draws on Emanuel Swedenborg's view of heaven and hell.

These theories are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, one of the characteristics of theories of life and death is that, like the Japanese embrace of native and imported beliefs, each assigned a different social role, one can hold to all of them at different points.

Loss & Gain

2011-12-09T10:58:00.000-08:00

My friend, the writer Kenneth Caldwell, recently posted an essay on loss, prompted by the deaths of friends and his reading Joan Didion's latest book, Blue Nights. This led to thoughts about the Buddhist take on having: that we have a self, for example, or indeed possess anything at all. The Buddhist stress on being reflects an awareness of the ephemeral character of "all and everything." In this schema, there's neither gain nor loss. Physical laws govern our comings and goings, our outward mutations over our respective trajectories. I have lunch with Kenny episodically, witnessing his evolution as an individual. No doubt he has his own view of me from the other side of the table. At some point, one of us will slip away, flitting awkwardly through the fold of unfolding existence. That we regret these losses is inarguable. I believe it was Milarepa who, charged with hypocrisy by a disciple as he wailed over a dead son, called that death "a super-illusion." Grief is hardwired in us, especially so with the death of a child, but in the end we grieve most of all for ourselves. The Buddha's project, as I understand it, was to wean us from every illusion that posits our solidity.

I write this as a bourgeois with a household and an extended family, pater familias. That my house is two blocks from the Hayward fault provides a sense of the "thread" that the Puritans railed about, its tremors a reminder that life is provisional. My neighbor commented a few years ago that when you become older, obituaries surface as a kind of pornography. However much we may regret the deaths of others, however much those deaths may alarm us, the fact that we live on is not merely affirmative, but on some level pleasurable, Schadenfreude. Their loss is our gain, so to speak, in life's apparently zero-sum game.

I could end this here, a rueful comment on the narcissism that runs through life. According to Stephen Batchelor, the belief in reincarnation that figures in Buddhism reflects the religious assumptions current at its formation. The Buddha's position was that reincarnation might or might not be true, but death remains our problem. My own view, derived from Swedenborg, Steiner, and personal experience, is that we fall through time, finding again and again a similar cohort. I suppose this argues that Kenny and I have been lunching episodically for eons.

Common Place 5

2011-10-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

Angelica Bell and her aunt, Virginia Woolf

I edited my serialized essay, "Marriage, Family & Friendship," into a new issue of Common Place, the personal journal that I started in 2008. If you have an iPad, download the PDF, which is easier to read than the online version. If you read along to my posts on "Quotes & Thoughts," thank you. This version is shorter, removing some repetition and tightening up the prose a bit. I would now call it a speculative essay. It still has the discursiveness of the original, since I couldn't bring myself to leave any of the codas out. To me, they all relate, but the connection is not always obvious.

Coda 6: A look back

2011-10-02T19:31:00.000-07:00

An earlier version of this essay was more of a manifesto. I came to doubt that this was the right the way to approach it. I tried writing another, "Buddha's Ladder," but set it aside, because it felt derivative of Stephen Batchelor's Alone with Others. Still, I took something away from it: an interest in the Buddhist perspective that was sharpened when I read a book by Hee-Jin Kim. In Dogen on thinking and meditation, Kim considers Eihei Dogen as a philosopher, emphasizing his radical non-dualism and non-linear approach to language.

Dogen founded Soto Zen, so many of his writings pertain to monastic life. My brushes with Soto Zen are relatively few, but I've been struck by its penchant for formal rules and gestures. They seem to obscure the simplicity of his take on Zen's essence. No doubt monastic life benefits from an imposed structure and a defined way of being, but my own interest in Dogen's Zen is philosophical.

In Alone with Others, Batchelor addresses what I've previously called the quantum nature of human life. As individuals who are also social creatures, saddled with biology and traditions, we live with some basic dilemmas. They can make it feel like the glass into which life flows is too small to contain it. It's not so much that the glass is half empty or half full, but that we see our potentiality flowing past us.

"Hungry ghosts," the Buddhist call this. I think it's a gloss on ego, the "self" that we put together as toddlers to defend us from a world we couldn't fathom or control. This is what A.H. Almaas's book on narcissism, The Point of Existence, asserts. Reading it, I saw that what was tearing at me was a breaking through to another self, less armored than the one I constructed as a kid. It's tempting to call this "the real self," but it's not like the ego goes away - you're just more aware of it. What gets in our way reflects these traits, which Claudio Naranjo, following Oscar Ichazo, calls our character flaws: strategies we pursued, believing they would compensate for our vulnerabilities.
In taking up this essay again, I've tried to set down my observations about three overlapping relationships - marriage, family, and friendship. I've noted that it would be helpful to have new traditions that serve us better by being closer to the reality of human existence. My sense of these new traditions is tentative. Each of us contributes to their evolution anyway by grappling with the life's conundrums. The beginning of the acceptance of another that each of these relationships entails is our acceptance of ourselves. For purposes of living in the world, we shape our behavior to fit in, but as we get older, we realize that life's river is as Heraclitus described it. This essay is about living with the implications.

Thesis 8: True friendship

2011-10-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

My eighth thesis is that friendship is mutually accepting or it's not a true friendship.

The Soto Zen essayist Uchimaya, mentioned previously, makes the point that there are limits to how well we can know another. His spiritual ancestor Eihei Dogen makes another salient point about our mutability, that we are better understood as a spectrum of behaviors, unpredictable and beyond our conscious control, however much we will it. Enlightenment is a transient awareness, he asserts, that can't be privileged over other states of being. This is why he placed so much emphasis on "Just sit!" To sit is to find the ground again, by whatever means.

"The ground" is a useful metaphor, pointing to the moment when we let go of whatever carried us away and place ourselves again in the unfolding life that in reality we've been indivisibly part of all along. Place is not quite right, since everything is in flux, but it will do. Usually, we are somewhere when we find our ground again. It becomes the vantage point, the shore from which we venture on, sometimes together and sometimes on our own. Although we cannot know the ground or the path of others, these metaphorical words are helpful to describe what we share with them, which is to be present in a world that, although we see it and respond to it individually, unfolds for us both.

True friendship is rare, in my experience. Like light, it's one thing at one moment, something else at another. The quantum theory of life governs it, so we have to accept that it isn't bound by time or space. A true friend is often in our thoughts, but our encounters reflect our individuality. We accept each other's individuality because we value it in ourselves. We leave it to the other to shape his or her own life. We accept each other's nature, however much we may want to change aspects of it.

This in itself is bucking the tide. We live in an era when perfectibility is on a lot of lips. There's a lot of complaining, too, since life doesn't work that way. Self-cultivation shouldn't aim at perfection, but at sustaining and enlivening one's existence. True friends accept that this is also the point of their friendship. There's an inherent playfulness to it.

We humans are a mix of animal spirits and various higher callings. What Dogen saw - his insistence that it all shades together - is what true friends accept in the other. They do their level best to live up to the best in the other, but they know it doesn't always happen. They may have to go off and lick their wounds, but they know the other suffers, too. Find the ground again: this is what true friends ask of each other. That's what their mutual acceptance means.

Thesis 7: Friendship anchors relationships

2011-10-01T19:52:00.000-07:00

My seventh thesis is that friendship is the core of all successful human relationships.

In elaborating this thesis, I could argue that affection is the core of all successful relationships. Yet I want to bring friendship to the fore, especially as other parts of this essay have emphasized marriage and family.
La Rochefoucauld exemplifies how with love and affection friendship can overcome the obstacles that plague close relationships. Late in life, unhappy and disillusioned, he met a woman who truly befriended him and placed the friendship ahead of other considerations. Said to be "successful with women," he was by then disfigured and outmaneuvered, his ambitions thwarted. But the mind is the true engine of our feelings, to which the tongue and pen give expression. Left with his essence, he found a friend who loved him for it.

Consider again Vanessa Bell. Married to Clive Bell, she grew to resent his familiarity with other women. Falling in love with Roger Fry, she tried out what would have been a second marriage and household, but gave it up, returning to the households she and Clive Bell originally shared. Their marriage kept going. Meanwhile, she fell in love with Duncan Grant. Her physical relationship with him, which Grant found singular enough to record, produced a daughter, Angelica Bell. Once she was pregnant, or soon after, he told her that this aspect of things had to stop. Despite the unhappiness this caused her, their relationship continued. They lived together and painted together. Their closeness seems only to have grown stronger.

Angelica Bell wrote a memoir that describes her ambivalent relationships with her parents. Gradually she came to understand that Grant was her biological father, although Clive Bell had always stood in. Ten years after writing her memoir, she wrote a new foreword acknowledging that her annoyance with all of them was expunged, that she saw them in a different light. And even in the first edition, she pointed to her daughters as compensation enough.

I recount these episodes in one extended family to note how, as the I Ching says, affection underlies all close human relationships. Marriage, family, and friendship alike are either grounded in affection or risk becoming a sea of unhappiness. In asserting this, I recognize that I'm projecting my own nature, which is more affectionate than not.

In an interview in the Paris Review, the poet Frederick Seidel said that you reach a point in life where you're unwilling not to be yourself. You write what you write, he said, and if people don't like it, that's their problem. I agree with his attitude, but feel it has to be tempered when one is together with others. I've observed that some people take pleasure in constant strife. "This is sex for them," I sometimes think. I'm not speaking here of the flashes of anger that are inherent to close human interaction, but of a chronic penchant for behavior that quells affection.

As we get older, the loosening of the mortal coil allows us a greater openness to others - a clearer sense of who they are beneath their foibles and quarrels. It's as if we can feel their hearts beating, sense the humanity that connects us. We no longer think of them as ours, as part of our circle or orbit or whatever, revolving around us. As this happens, friendships take on a different hue. We're grateful just to be with a friend when it happens. How it was, how it might be - memories and speculations may well up, but they no longer gnaw at us. We're finally on better terms with our past and more willing to let life surprise us with its possibilities. It's at this point that friendship takes center stage.
Friendships take many forms. I'm not arguing that one form or another enables closeness to blossom, but that closeness is independent of the form a friendship takes. And while affection is necessary to a friendship, its closeness really depends on mutual acceptance. This is the lesson of La Rochefoucauld and his friend, and of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

Coda 5: Modus vivendi

2011-09-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

Over lunch in May, a friend told me that, despite decades of separation and a current relationship of long standing, he and his wife are still married. This is reminiscent of Vanessa and Clive Bell, discussed previously, who stayed married "unto death" while they went their mostly separate ways. Formally, there's marriage and there's divorce. More recently, there are also domestic partnerships, a halfway house toward marriage. Meant to extend some of marriage's rights to those excluded from it, this category could end up disappearing as marriage grows more inclusive. Its existence as an alternative to marriage sets up the possibility that a married person, living separately with another partner, might embrace it in order to afford the new relationship more rights and standing.

Some might argue that this is a kind of bigamy. I don't think it is, but the notion of a domestic partnership may not satisfy the other partner, either, since at least some of the impetus for divorce is to be free to remarry.
Marriage and divorce are usually a binary pairing, a black-and-white rendition of a landscape that we know full well is resplendently colorful, textured, messy, and in flux. When you look back in history, especially across cultures, you see a lot of variation. And looking across a table sometimes, you see former partners breaking bread. I realize that time is a factor here, but when you consider both the tumult and reconciliation, life often proves to be bigger than the partners imagined. Certain ties still bind them.

We speak of no-fault divorce, but it may also be useful to speak of no-fault marriage. This is to recognize that much of what affects a marriage reflects our human dilemmas. Moreover, if a marriage is a partnership of two individuals, then we have to accept everything this implies. In particular, we have to accept the essential good will of the other, even when the situation seems impossible. This is not an argument for any particular outcome, but for modus vivendi - the ability to take a larger view of things and use one's imagination.

Empathy, if one has it, makes a mockery of any insistence that there's only one course to follow. This is the basic fallacy of a black-and-white view of life. We are, each of us, a boiling pot of desires, fears, limitations, and smarts. We slowly acquire wisdom as we age, but slowly is the operative word. Our wisdom, though hard-won, can be gone in a flash. Volatile, subject always to our natures, we make our way. Marriage and friendship alike have to deal with the carnage. There are times when we've had enough, but then we remember that we're like that ourselves.

Part of the idea of no-fault is to accept that along with the individuals involved, the nature of a marriage or a friendship (and their variants) changes over time. The form it takes matters infinitely less than the attitude of the individuals toward this. "An end that endures" is the I Ching's phrase for this "seeing the woods for the trees.

Thesis 6: Individuality

2011-09-25T18:54:00.000-07:00

My sixth thesis is that each one is her or his own person, not the property of any other. Vows cannot transcend this basic fact.

Individuality is fundamental, which is why to be works better in the long run than to have. We don't actually possess even our selves, these ephemeral would-be vessels of our possible souls, but we can be more assuredly than we can have. That's the Buddha's take, but this is also the territory of La Rochefoucauld, what the French call amour-propre. The love of two individuals dances around their singularity, which is to say their self-love and self-regard.

Individuals are not unchanging monoliths. Over time, as their lives unfold, their interests, desires, tastes, pursuits, and natures evolve. Their use of time evolves, too. So it's not just their appearances that change: they are literally not the same from point to point. Yet within themselves there is a kind of thread of identity that makes each one feel she or he has a self, is the same individual all along. We are and we aren't, which is to say that we are best understood as having an inherent uncertainty, like particles of light.

Try to possess this other and there's nothing there beyond the moment. This thought can be maddening, especially to those who see life in a binary black and white. To extend the analogy to Newtonian and quantum physics, the old tradition of marriage is rooted in the former, simplifying existence by holding to an ordered universe in which a binary view of things is of a piece. This mode of living works up to a point. The point where it ceases to work is where it runs up against the realities described above - where it becomes obvious that its narrow descriptive power and repertoire of responses are unequal to the actual human situation. The old tradition declaims its absolutes and real men and women deal with the nuances of their individual situations.

A new tradition of marriage acknowledges the quantum nature of life. It sees life's basic relationships taking place between individuals. Yes, they have responsibilities to each other and to their issue, if any. But yes, they are still individuals. A new tradition brings the nuances to the forefront, acknowledging that the real history of men and women, their intimate history, is always vastly richer than the absolutes the old tradition posits.

Most of all, a new tradition makes modest claims, not sweeping ones. It recognizes that many of the problems we face in life are wicked, as Horst Rittel called them: they can be resolved, but the solutions are ad hoc and provisional. One could say they are time- and context-bound. A new tradition brings this forward. It seeks a better understanding of how life works. It's more interested in narratives, individual histories, than absolutes.

This points to the necessity of consciously setting aside whatever properly belongs to the past. The grudges that we hold, the slights and betrayals that we count against others, are really and truly our baggage, artifacts of memory. They can become objects of identity, I suppose, but this puts the brakes on our own unfolding. We owe it our selves, our individuality, to acknowledge this and set these burdens down. To put this another way, we owe to the present an ability to be present within it, to be open to what unfolds and able to respond with immediacy. To live otherwise is to be prejudiced, and experience suggests that prejudices are seldom warranted.

Coda 4: Paths

2011-09-18T19:35:00.000-07:00

I've used the word territory elsewhere in this essay. The word trajectory also comes to mind, but path to me combines the idea of movement through time with the idea of the different territories we inhabit. Path suggests the threads or strands of our individual lives, which seem separate but are often linked in certain ways - overlapping people and places, for example, that may cause our individual paths to converge or diverge.

We are born into territories, like that of our family, but we take up our paths individually. Paths may be or may appear unavoidable, but there still seems to be an element of volition to them. In their positive sense, paths are voluntarily taken up. They may involve vows of marriage or friendship, or of "voluntary suffering" (in George Gurdjieff's phrase).

Like a path through unexplored terrain, the paths we take up in life may not take us where we expected. It is tempting to label "false," a "dead end," a path which leaves us "nowhere," but life proves the contrary often enough that I resist this terminology. Paths aren't linear. They're more like streams that sometimes disappear, only to surface later in a different form. Other paths are like rivers, always visible even if their nature constantly changes. All of them are part of our life's terrain.

Buddhism asserts the connectedness of all things. It suggests never to abandon anyone. It also suggests how paths intersect as life unfolds. The process seems accidental, but may not be. When I look back at my own life, how it unfolded makes sense in retrospective. This may be what Nassim Taleb calls the "narrative fallacy," our human trait to reconstruct our life so it adds up. Yet this narrative reflects what we see. Except in the very broadest sense, it lacks predictive power. (Pace Taleb. He sees life as a sea of randomness, and humans as blind to it. My "very broadest sense" reflects what we're prepared emotionally to stake our life on. I think Taleb would agree with this. Very few things qualify.)

The Soto Zen essayist Kocho Uchimaya says that when we die, our world dies with us. I'm not sure (to paraphrase the Buddha). There's an aspect of destiny visible to me in my own life when I look back at it. Sometimes I think of it as a cycle of plays in which the parts are divvied up among the same company. The actors looks familiar, but the roles they play differ. Perhaps karma relates to this, and the part we're assigned reflects and answers the previous play or plays, even as it is played out in real time, a different story.

Paths are not predestined, but we find them and take them up with some sense of being properly on them, some sense of recognition or intuition of their rightness. This is an inexact science, to say the least. Life doesn't come with an instruction book. We read the signs as best we can. We do our best to walk a path we've taken up, although our best may fall woefully short of what a path demands of us.

When a path involves a vow, the vow is properly a vow to persevere. This is equally true in marriage and in friendship. To persevere means, in a formal sense, to continue regardless. It doesn't mean to insist on the features of the path or the constant presence of another on it. A path is always an individual path, even the path of a marriage. Sometimes we find ourselves on it together is how I look at it. This is why I suggest relegating to family the issue and material effects that accompany most marriages. A family is a territory.

Thesis 5: The importance of friendship

2011-09-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

My fifth thesis is that friendship is the other core human relationship, on a par with marriage and potentially its complement.

The factors that lead us to marry are many and varied, so it is difficult to generalize. In my own experience, the attraction between the marriage partners obscures their differences. They then spend considerable time dealing with this. The book editor Elizabeth Snowden told me once that she felt that the first four years of marriage or its domestic prelude, sharing a household and daily existence, are spent sorting this out.

My sense is that beneath that sorting out are deeper differences that can't be fully sorted. For the marriage to continue, there has to be an accommodation. Beyond this is whatever the marriage partners cannot or will not provide each other. Part of the ripening of a marriage is often the desire for a fuller life. Individuality asserts itself, and with this comes the impulse to transcend the marriage - in effect, to enlarge it.

Part of the initial sorting out early in a marriage is the sorting out of friends. Their claims are examined and their relative compatibility with both partners examined. Some friends survive this vetting and others fall away. The friendships that are made in later life may revive the past or arise anew, but they reflect a truly individual preference.

Friendship becomes important because it's part of the territory the individual is exploring and extending - the territory of the self. The friends one makes there may be exclusive to it or they may come to relate to the marriage, too - this cannot be said in advance. What is possible to say is that the marriage can be enriched by friendship and vice versa. For this to happen, the territory of individuality has to be respected.

The other partner may envy or regret the friendship, because it speaks to differences between the married couple. One cannot be what one is not. Yet friendship makes a different point: we are who we are. This applies to the marriage, too.

Friendship is not a familial tie, although it may become one. The friend of one or the other partner may become the friend of the couple and the family, or may simply be the particular friend of one individual, ideally accepted and respected as such, but not part of the larger circle. Each couple, each family, and each friendship has to work this out for itself.

What makes friendship a core human relationship is its tie to our individuality. Friendships arise, in the end, because self-fulfillment is part of our makeup. As we get older, this aspect of our humanity comes forward. We may find it entirely in activities, but friends often figure. At this stage in life, a friendship can be profound. Among friendship, marriage, and family, the love and closeness we feel is different in each case. Each has its claims, but of the three, friendship is the least encumbered. It has no dynastic ambitions. Two friends may end up sharing certain things, like a correspondence. They may even end up living together. Still, there's a difference. The heart of it, to me, is the willingness to take the other straight up.

Thesis 4: Marriage anew

2011-09-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

My fourth thesis is that marriage needs to develop a new tradition that acknowledges its familial and dynastic aspects, its potentially long-lived nature, and its periods of vulnerability and dependence.

Much of this thesis has been anticipated in the previous discussion. Here, I want to consider the new tradition itself. Marriages evolve and the couple gets older. In the child-bearing years, the presence of dependent children makes the couple more dependent on each other. This dependence resurfaces if one or the other partner becomes seriously ill. Any new tradition should acknowledge this.

Earlier in this essay, I revised the marriage vow, as follows: Marriage is a commitment to treat as family the issue and estate, however acquired. To this I would add that marriage is a commitment to treat one's partner as family, whatever else may happen. There are instances - I've seen them in my own extended family - of long-divorced couples reuniting around an illness, because the sick person is the parent of the children and often has no one else.

Marriage is family, as I've asserted. The partners have a continuing obligation to each other. This may not be true in every instance, but even without children, longevity creates familial ties. As I write this, I can think of many exceptions - individuals who want nothing to do with an ex-partner and the ex-partner's family. That's fine. Do what you will. This is an ideal statement of a new tradition, just as the old tradition posed an ideal.

The mutual obligations of the partners in a marriage evolve over time. As two individuals, what they owe each other versus what they owe themselves changes. A new tradition of marriage accepts and works with this. It doesn't say what to do, but acknowledges that something may need to be done.
The nature and timing of marriage's evolution is up in the air. One partner may object. The new tradition of marriage says fine, but don't point to tradition to back you up. You knew going in that this might happen when you reach a point when mutual dependence is no longer an issue. Instead of seeing of it as an affront, see it as a time of growth.

Marriage, as an "honorable estate," has legal meanings and involves the couple in a legal process to undo its status and redefine its obligations. Among my hopes in proposing a new tradition of marriage is to prompt discussion of this legal context. Just as the old tradition seems out of sync with the realities of modern life, the legal framework of marriage feels rooted in another era.

If there's a pattern to the evolution of marriage, it coincides with the evolution of self, the slow or precipitous shedding of narcissism and possessiveness in favor of being, with its greater willingness to accept others as they are and allow life to unfold. Being as I understand it isn't passivity or fatalism. You still plan and daily life still has its discipline and élan. What's different is that you recognize life's contingent and ephemeral nature, valuing others for who they are, but not as "yours." This takes an act of will. When precipitous, this shift is like having your skin pulled off.

Yet it is the necessary step. Being is the only way to live with life as it really is. A new tradition of marriage accepts life on its own terms. It accepts this other who is not us as part of something larger, a family, to which we both belong.
That identity is indelible, but this says nothing about this other belonging to us. "Until death," as the old tradition has it, is about a path we each take up. How we walk it is up to each of us. A new tradition of marriage accepts the other as an individual whose life unfolds independently from ours.

As this implies, a new tradition of marriage needs to be open and capacious. The old tradition left this unstated - left it to each couple to negotiate the openness and deal with the marriage's evolution. The new tradition is more forthright about marriage's possible trajectories, willing to see it as a union of individuals who necessarily grow and change. It acknowledges what arises from the union - the sense or reality of family - and anticipates its importance.

Coda 3: On family

2011-09-11T18:26:00.000-07:00

If family also needs a new tradition, what might it look like? Family is detaching itself from marriage or extending beyond it. It's worth noting this. It means that marriage in the context of this essay should be understood as any pairing that, formally or informally, acknowledges and seeks recognition as such, from each other and from others. I want to distinguish this from what Roger Fry described as a "little marriage" - his brief but intense relationship with Vanessa Bell, an innately domestic person, although iconoclastic. We might call this an affair, but Fry aptly captured the fact that it was more. And he suffered more because of it, being attached not just to her, but to the domesticity she enlivened. That domesticity pulled him psychologically into the orbit of her family, where indeed he remained, but further from its emotional heart than he desired.

This reaches to the borders of friendship, a separate topic, but I mention it to say that the boundaries of marriage are broad, not only along the formal-informal axis, but on the brief-long axis, too. I would put the Fry-Bell "little marriage" in the friendship category, but the placement is arbitrary.

Another trend, still being fought by the forces of reaction, is the pairing of men, of women, and of older women with younger men. Paralleling this is the decision of single women to have children, often with a gay donor who participates in the child raising, sometimes with his partner. These families are common now in urban America. They are families, that's the point, and a new tradition of family has to include them.

Social transformation happens at the edges. Vanessa Bell, independently wealthy thanks to a devoted, tolerant husband and a legacy, lived as she wanted and had a daughter with the lover who, despite a world of differences, was her closest friend. In a way, she perfectly exemplifies the motive power of family, which held hers together despite its unorthodox arrangements. She also exemplifies the fluid boundary between love, marriage, and friendship. Artists and writers stake out this territory: Picasso, Stein. The poor and dispossessed also redefine life as they struggle to cope with it. Sometimes they resemble each other, these two categories, but the children of the poor and dispossessed, as they rise, often crave a conventional life. They reach a point where they feel they have something to lose and conventionality can help them secure it. (Maslow's hierarchy of needs is relevant here.)

A new tradition of marriage needs to encompass the expansion of its boundaries. It needs to enable the members of the expanded family to identify themselves as such. It needs to recognize that this expanded family, too, has ties that are indelible. This isn't a simple issue - the old tradition of family maps to other concerns, like inheritance, in its aristocratic and bourgeois manifestations. This migrated to rights and responsibilities, especially in the era of no-fault divorce. The new tradition would grant a kind of indelibility to the new range of familial relationships, absent issues like abuse that require judicial intervention. In the end, the rights and responsibilities may end up being defined across this larger collectivity, the expanded family.

Because this overlaps the legal apparatus that's grown up around the family, I run the risk of seeming idealistic and unrealistic. When I look at my own limited experience with family situations that challenged convention, I would say that what was crucial to a good outcome was the shared desire for it. That desire led the individuals involved to set aside their theoretical prerogatives and consider the outcome. And because of this - because of the familial love that each person felt toward the one most at risk - that one now has an expanded family to draw on and identifies with all of it. There were formal agreements behind this, but in the end they never really figured. Would it have been different if those agreements had never been formalized? I'm not sure, but I don't think so.

Not every marriage has offspring, but dependencies arise. For example, a partner gets sick or lapses into senescence. These are situations that tax the resources of any individual. A new tradition of family would both recognize the idea of collective responsibility and tie it to a social safety net that came into play with certain triggering events. For an advanced country, we are shockingly stupid in the way we provide supports, rarely doing so when they're actually needed. This is perverse. As a country, we are lucky to have a positive birthrate. Alone of the developed countries, we're still adding population and the ratio of young to old here isn't yet disastrously out of whack. Our support system is tied to individual families and to organizations like churches. That's not sufficient. Moreover, it runs the risk that public support will be increasingly shaped by agendas opposed to "non-traditional" families and women's rights, either because the government channels support through them or because it defaults to them entirely.

A new tradition of family needs to cut the family loose from every organization that's ever tried to kidnap it for political or religious reasons (which is often the same thing). It needs to reassert the underlying realities of human life and gear public support accordingly, sharing responsibility across a larger community of which the family is part. The key phrase here is "sharing responsibility" - not the handing over of responsibility, but acknowledgement that sometimes our human resources aren't enough. That's when families fall apart, with huge social costs. A new tradition of family would focus on this.

Thesis 3: Marriage's need for freedom

2011-09-10T22:49:00.000-07:00

My third thesis is that the acceptance of marriage's dynastic purpose is aided rather than subverted by the freedom afforded to its parties, but the aid this freedom brings has its moment and needs considerable maturity to understand and act on sensibly.

So far, I've used the word familial to describe what married love becomes when personal love is transmuted or transcended by the family's pull. To the extent that families will, consciously or unconsciously, seek their perpetuation, familial love is tied up in what tradition knows as its dynastic purpose. And while this seems like the stuff of aristocracies of one kind or another, families are nonetheless engaged in it to the extent that they look to their future as a family, concerning themselves with their children's and their children's children's lives, wishing for and often working for their success.

Accepting the dynastic purpose of marriage is a logical development of familial love. The family provides a context for the marriage, and the marriage partners start to see themselves as an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately, they end up as the elders. If they've earned it, they're respected and sought out as guides by the younger generation. There's often property and other assets to be considered. Some families are like businesses: the elders look for successors, if they can find them, to carry it on.

(Let me be clear that what I'm describing is one pattern out of many. Not every married couple even thinks of itself as a family. Not every married person wants to "get past" his or her initial desire for a purely personal relationship with another. Indeed, this transition can be difficult and even a disaster. Yet it happens. Yet it can look differently from the other side, more like a breaking through than a breaking down. My theses aren't meant to be deterministic, but to describe patterns and draw their possible implications. Thesis may be the wrong word, but let's go with it for now.)

Accepting the dynastic purpose of marriage makes the family more valuable. Whatever tensions exist between the married couple, they have more incentive to resolve them. This can be taken in several ways. Tradition argues for hierarchy: family first, often with one or the other partner "in command." Despite the lip service paid to modernity, this model persists. In its modern form, the family is invoked to stifle dissent.

To me, this is not a modern marriage. It's the traditional model trying to cope with modernity. A modern marriage accepts that its partners are individuals, with their own lives. It acknowledges the love - personal and familial - that each brings to the marriage, but recognizes that love can take many different forms. When a modern marriage accepts the dynastic purpose of marriage, it commits itself to perpetuating the family. How it does so is not and cannot be wholly predetermined. Tradition is often of little use when a couple faces a crisis that tradition suggests should end the marriage.
It's like the difference between the Decalogue, with its moral absolutes, and the Buddhist precepts, which focus on state of mind and not causing harm. There are times in a marriage when for practical reasons the partners are almost totally dependent on each other. If the marriage vow has its reasons, these are them. Our responsibilities to offspring are similar, but we recognize that there's a point when we have to let go.

A modern marriage is open ended about the means but less so about the ends. To put this another way, quoting the I Ching, it seeks "an end that endures." Not ends that can be foreseen in any detail, but with a hope for the family that is like that of a gardener, considering not just the next season, but the future of the garden itself. There's an element of cultivation to it.

That this hope may be pointless in the grander scheme of things, life's ephemerality, means little to families of cultivators. There's an element of stewardship to them, a sense of connection to an enterprise that predates them, often by a considerable amount, and on this basis alone posits their future. I can trace part of my family by individual names back to 1620, and its previous history can be inferred to its arrival in Parma early in the previous century. Within my family history, my "dynasty," are the individuals involved - the personal histories. Modern marriage accepts that individuals matter and looks for ways to enable them to live as fully as they can. The individual freedom that this implies carries risks; modern marriage accepts that they're worth taking.

The stretching out of life means that modern marriage has more incentive to do this than traditional marriage did. The freedom to live fully becomes more important as one grows older. The truism that "youth is wasted on the young" seems true in that there's a ripening in human life. That ripeness pervades individual experience. Its actual potential is to enrich the marriage, but this is not always apparent at the outset.

Tradition, Friedrich Hayek noted, is "received wisdom," evolutionary lore. The way society is set up, its norms and laws, are not "designed," he says, but handed down. This is "common law" as I understand it. It follows that traditions evolve. They're part of unfolding life. As Thoreau pointed out, they have their limits and there are times when we have to disregard them. Slavery is tradition, too, and today, no one defends it.

In writing this out, I see that a new tradition of family may need to accompany new traditions of marriage and friendship. The modern family is itself being redefined even as I write this. The dynastic purpose of marriage isn't applicable to every family that considers itself one. I would guess, though, that cultivators can be found in all of them.

Coda 2: Time

2011-09-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

I owe to Robert Grudin the idea of time as a crucial dimension in human affairs. Not that this is original to him, but his book Time & the Art of Living sets it out especially well. I want to also acknowledge a debt to Stephen Batchelor's Alone with Others.

Everyday time is ordinary time. It has dimension, but its boundaries are both contained and amorphous. It has its plans and deadlines. It's also where work happens, where we practice. We don't always or often practice with any larger sense of time in mind. When we're young, others do this for us, urging us forward in the name of where we might end up. This is closer to evolutionary time, in which our genetic makeup plays a similar role. Evolutionary time plays out in cycles, so its horizons are in a way infinite. Hence being's chain, a linked series of events that repeat a sequence in roughly the same way.

As individuals, we're born into both types of time. The everyday gives us glimpses of evolution's cycle. (In this sense, the Buddha's secular story of being protected from it rings false. You don't need to leave your palace to see time's effects. Pets are often our earliest experience of it, but every household also has its illnesses. Everybody ages. So it seems more likely to me that he left his household and marriage in an effort to solve the apparent dilemmas of existence on his own, a spirit quest that brought him back to their radical acceptance and the establishment of another family, larger, rooted in being.)

"Just sit." This is Dogen's famous summary of Zen. Sitting is placing yourself in life, within all of time's dimensions - the ordinary, time you can measure and count, and the evolutionary, geological, cosmological, time that moves steadily beyond our lived experience. We see and slowly grasp these latter dimensions of time by their traces and artifacts, but intuitively we experience them as a cycle or chain, a learned sequence, a set of theories, a mystery. Our persistent belief in a parallel world of spirits, of reincarnation or the hereafter, reflects the oddity of being adrift in a world in which this unknowable force works invisibly and relentlessly. "Just sit" acknowledges that as life unfolds, we unfold with it. We are part of life, not separate from it.

When the Buddha became enlightened, he noted that every blade of grass was enlightened, too. I take this to mean that he saw that the entire universe, including himself, unfolds. Can time run backward as well as forward? I have no idea, but the analogy to a river, to water that finds its way no matter what, seems apt. The mystic George Gurdjieff talked of shifting streams in order to make the soul immortal. He called time "the merciless" and said our souls had to acquire a coating in order to avoid its ravages. The Buddha also spoke of taking our selves out of time, an ending that ends the unfolding.

Yet the Buddha added that no one knows what lies beyond visible life, and in any case this isn't our problem. What troubles us is the fact of our ephemeral individuality, living in time as we are. We are haunted by our ephemerality. "Work as if immortal": this maxim, coined by E.M. Forster, was taken up by Christopher Isherwood, a writer with a guru. I interpret it to mean, "suspend time as a factor in order to taste something of time's expansiveness and fill your sails with its beneficial wind." Ordinary time is a place of such immediacy that it can blind us to this if we're not careful. School and work both structure ordinary time so that, without really thinking about it, we accomplish a lot.

Part of the power of organizations is to recognize these accomplishments and move us along, an escalator that can take us beyond our actual capacities, "promoted above our station." Without a critical sense, we can get on this treadmill and lose ourselves entirely in the everyday. The way that men with consuming careers act in retirement, racing to pick up lost threads, attempting to continue as they were, or simply falling apart as they finally realize their predicament, points to the dangers. We don't teach how to live with time in the same way that we don't teach how to live with death.
Death is "out there" unless we understand along the way that time will drown us. "I had a good ride," many men say as they slip under. That part at least is granted them. But my "drown" is not quite right. "Just sit" invites us to contemplate how we fit. It also invites us to wonder at the sheer expanse of life, to take seriously every aspect of it. Zen practice is more than just sitting - it's living consciously in ordinary time. Zen practice is a vow to be aware - aware of what connects everything, of the fact that we're all just passing through, time-travelers all. Compassion and responsibility start here.

Thesis 2: Marriage's transitions

2011-09-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

My second thesis is that marriage passes through what Zen Buddhism calls gates or barriers. One of these is the transition from personal to familial love.

Behind this is the Buddhist notion of practice. Gates and barriers in Zen parlance are not markers of progress, but of a depth of exploration of the same phenomenon, so to speak. Love, marriage, and friendship are practices, too. Family is one of their contexts.

When I first arrived at this thesis, I was thinking quite literally of the birth of my oldest son, a remarkable event that even now I can remember vividly. Birth reminds you that we are a species, part of the "great chain of being." It places us in the timeframe of evolution, faster moving than geological time, for example, but also subject to time's riverlike shaping. My son stared at us and we at him, meeting for the first time in one of life's sacramental moments. In this respect, acts of lovemaking are like the collisions of galaxies, each bringing a unique but overlapping ancestry, conjoined at the heart.

Marriage exists in everyday time and evolutionary time. The family is both a socio-economic unit and an evolutionary unfolding, dynastic and genetic. Against this background, the partners in a marriage work through their own and their shared desires, dilemmas, and frustrations. They acquiesce and they rebel. They age. Life unfolds and the marriage experiences the stresses and strains characteristic of our situations. Many of these are age-old. Sometimes they break us, break the marriage, break the family.

But the family can also be a refuge. Families are typically more accepting, between the generations and among siblings, than the partners in a marriage may be in the midst of its stresses and strains. The family in this sense provides both a reason to keep the marriage going and a model for how to do so. What families exhibit - familial love - is more likely to forgive, more likely to be unconditional and accepting, more likely to see ruptures as an aberration, a product of ego rather than of nature.

Behind this is a consciousness of evolutionary time that becomes clearer as we get older. We begin to understand that our own life has threads, that "heaping up small acts," as both the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching put it - continual modest effort, may get us further than repeated acts of "reinvention." Time is the unseen dimension in life, but families can bring it into higher relief. One of the purposes of marriage is to bring us out of ourselves - something that work, for example, only partly accomplishes.

Behind this, too, is individual ripening, the slow shedding of ego for being. The "great matter," as the Zen Buddhists call it, seems to relate to this. (I'm not an adept, so all I know is what I've read.) Familial love exemplifies being as much as having. In their dynastic aspects, families appear rooted in having, but when you scratch the surface, being is what persists - what families possess is more often the means to new ends.

Coda 1: Work

2011-09-04T18:54:00.000-07:00

As a coda, I want to mention work - the role it plays and the attraction it has for us as an extension of, complement to, and/or substitute for the family. Directly or indirectly, work is life's other great thread, the successor to school, first of all - that other great inculcator of discipline. And work is also the enabler of family, creating the wherewithal to achieve a measure of independence, to marry, and to support the household.

A topic in itself, work needs to be mentioned here, not least to note the social costs of economic stagnation and exploitation. One achievement of the postwar era was to quell for a time in selected countries the terror of unemployment and put family life on sounder footing for the working and middle classes. That achievement has been undermined here and elsewhere, and family life has suffered in consequence.

The employers of my father's young adulthood were altruistic, reflecting the sacrifices the younger generation made on their behalf. The first 15 years of the postwar era, 1945 to 1960, were a period of rebuilding, which drove economic growth and made work inherently and self-evidently valuable. In the 1960s, this fell apart. At the same time, the shadow side of the postwar era - its apparent emptiness - triggered a reaction from the next generation, which was committed foolishly to pointless "tactical" wars by its elders. Unburdened by their elders' gratefulness for having survived and prospered, and taking prosperity for granted, the 1960s generation (and its older camp-followers) turned society inside out. Billed as a revolution, it was more of an interregnum that paralleled the real one - for civil rights - that started earlier and persisted longer. That struggle played out across life: love, work, and family.

Work lost its altruism in the 1960s, too. The social paradise narrowed and was criticized. Pundits looked to the market. Friedrich Hayek, actually an admirer of tradition, was cited along with Ayn Rand to justify dog eat dog. The era of high finance supplanted the era of manufacture in the west, Japan excepted. (Japan kept it going until 1990.) Western families began their long accommodation. Governments bought it and enabled it.

Yet, oddly, the altruism of work rises as often as it falls. New enterprises regularly take it up, even now. That the market sometimes crushes them doesn't negate the impulse. As with the family, some organizations understand that altruism is part of a social compact that creates a bond stronger than money alone. These organizations stand out today as the exceptions. Along with the economy, a lot of its would-be prime movers are broken. Their destruction is attributed to strategic errors, market failures, and bad luck, but often it looks more like the people at the top took leave of their senses, walling off the play of opinion - the intimate tension - that is intrinsic to marriages and families.

Thesis 1: Marriage continues family

2011-09-04T18:38:00.000-07:00

At some point, I'll turn this into a proper essay. As an experiment, I'm posting it in draft form, section by section. I'm also writing codas, which I'll post separately.

My first thesis is that marriage is the continuation of childhood and so is as wrapped up in family as it is in the desire for love that gives rise to it.

We are born into a family and it forms the context of our lives through our upbringing. We make friends and eventually we split off from our family in order to form another. But that act, if we pursue it, is also part of the family dynamic, which posits its continuation and views marriage, particularly from the standpoint of the parents, as a vehicle of generation. (Marriage is a "genetic conspiracy" between grandparents and their grandchildren.) In time, these families join up. The year's feast days still bring them together under one roof. Cousins meet and form a larger cohort. The elders age and die, but the family lives on.

Marriage recreates the intimate tension of the family at its heart. We enter the family by passing through our mother's birth canal and then attaching ourselves to her breasts. Long before this, we take hold amid passion and make our presence felt. Once born, we relate to our mother physically. That physical intimacy, the realm of childhood, is forcibly put aside until our hormones stir and our bodies change. At that point, we may seek lovers. Not always consciously, we may want children.

There's a hardwired aspect to this, and not everyone shares the wiring. So I should say that at a certain point, we want another (or others) with whom to share an intimate tension. Family may be both the cause and consequence of this. We do so despite the inconveniences, the unhappinesses, and even the dangers that come with it.

For my purposes here, I'm going to set the untoward aside. Marriage in one form or another is a common feature of life, so it exhibits the full range of human behavior. There are sociopaths and psychopaths out there. A lot of family life is toxic in one way or another. This is not about that toxicity. Its sense of family is more benign than not.

Yet the inconveniences and unhappinesses are real. And there are dangers, even among the benign. You can be messed with without anyone laying a hand on you, often with the best of intentions. Misunderstandings abound. We bring our natures with us, on arrival. Parents do their best, and then friends, lovers, and partners take their turns.

Oddly, though - improbably - we invite this. We bring it on ourselves, throwing our ill-suited natures into unlikely combinations that nonetheless attracted us: incompatibles attract. This too is like family, which despite the bond of blood is a genetic menagerie. Perhaps instinctively, we want to mix it up. (Personally, I give destiny some credence.)

What family has going for it is staying power. Not for nothing do cults seek to break its hold. Cults and gangs are family substitutes, but poor ones that suffice only when the real family doesn't cut it. And of course a lot of families don't. Those that do manage to transcend the self-centeredness of our species often enough to be altruistic. It's limited, as Swedenborg noted. (He condemned families for tending to restrict their kindnesses to themselves.) It's limited, but it's a start. You have to learn altruism somewhere.

Within the family, altruism is an evolutionary tactic. Hayek contrasts the altruism of the traders' host with the xenophobia and tribalism of the family, posing it as an ancient tension only resolved in the agora, that sanctioned meeting and mixing place. These days, altruism is an evolutionary tactic in aggregate. Xenophobia and tribalism persist, but the cosmos we inhabit suffers from them. Intimate tensions at the community level have a way of exploding. The family is where we first learn how to negotiate difference.

Beginnings of an essay

2011-09-02T21:27:00.000-07:00

Marriage, Family, and Friendship: my working title for the revival and completion of an essay, "Love & Marriage," that I started in 2001. (It also draws on another, "Buddha's Ladder," begun a few years later. Both were set aside.) This brief summary lays out my theses.
   My first thesis is that marriage is the continuation of childhood and so is as wrapped up in perpetuating family as it is in the desire for love that gave rise to it. My second thesis is that marriage passes through what the Zen Buddhists call gates or barriers, one of which is the transition from personal love to familial love. Marriage is ultimately about family. As an institution, it is intended to bridge between generations. My third thesis is that the acceptance of marriage's dynastic purpose is aided rather than subverted by the freedom afforded to its parties, but the aid this freedom brings has its moment of ripeness and needs considerable maturity to understand it and act on it sensibly. My fourth thesis is that marriage needs to develop a new tradition that reflects the previous three theses. Such a tradition would acknowledge the potentially long-lived nature of modern marriage. It would also acknowledge the periods of vulnerability in a marriage (the presence of young children, for example, or an illness), when the commitment of the partners to each other is a necessity. My fifth thesis is that friendship is also a core human relationship, on a par with marriage and family, and potentially their complement.
   My polemical goals are several. I want to lift the unendurable weight that tradition has placed on marriage by demanding that it fulfill every human need. There may be such marriages, truly self-complete, but they seem unlikely. I want to protect friendship and raise its stature, most of all between friends. I want to acknowledge the potential and even the likelihood of friendship overlapping the territory of marriage, but distinguish their claims and end their disputes.
   To do so brings me to the sixth thesis: each one is her or his own person, not the property of any other. Marriage vows cannot negate this. Marriage should be thought of as a commitment to treat as family the issue and estate of the partners, however acquired.
   Friendships are voluntary and self-renewing. How they relate to the familial contexts of the friends, if there are such contexts, cannot be prescribed or proscribed in advance. My polemical goal with friendships is to grant them a standing and a human importance. To pursue a friendship needs to be sanctioned by the traditions of marriage, family, and friendship. It follows that there needs to be a new tradition of friendship, too, especially among the married, but also among the would-be married, who too often rigidly and foolishly draw a distinction. Hence my seventh thesis: friendship is at the center of all successful human relationships. It is the heart of our humanity. If we're lucky, we succeed in putting our marriage on the sounder foundations of family and in making a real friend of our marriage partner. That friendship at the heart of a marriage is then more likely to accept and respect other friendships. (My eighth thesis is that friendship is mutually accepting or it is not a true friendship.)

Note: I use the word thesis here to suggest that this essay is drawing on my lived experience of the human condition and its conundrums. These are not laws or rules; life is not algorhythmic, but it has discernible patterns. There's no map, just a way in and a way out, neither very well marked.

Time for Cal to double down

2011-08-03T08:42:00.000-07:00

UC Berkeley's campanile.

You don’t have to be a psychic to see where UC Berkeley is headed. From the accessible public university of my youth, Cal is contemplating an effective privatization, turning itself into a bigger, somewhat more affordable Stanford. It shouldn’t. Moreover, this would be a failure of the imagination. It’s time for Cal to wake up and look around.

Silicon Valley and San Francisco are two good places to start. Just to take one example, HP—once a real-estate behemoth—has cut its property folio in half by embracing mobility and reorganizing work around it. Essentially, you don’t use HP’s formal work settings unless you’ve got really good reasons to do so. Otherwise, work elsewhere. Stanford, to its credit, has leveraged the same technology to make classroom lectures an option. Students can catch them later, in Tivo-like fashion, and that “later” is searchable. Stanford also leads the way in providing courses to its high-tech and biotech neighbors.

San Francisco has seen a proliferation of spaces that are accessible to startups, even of the one-person variety. The long-term lease is giving way to a more curatorial approach that redefines “service” to throw in furniture, equipment, including tools for prototyping, advisors, and investors. Then there’s Academy of Art University, which—for all the grousing about its aggressive real-estate tactics—is emerging as one of the most interesting architecture and design schools in the region. The Academy isn’t cheap, but it’s uncannily well tailored to the students who flock to it from across the planet. With savvy recruiting of academic talent, it’s upped its game pedagogically in rapid order—using the web to serve a wider cohort.

What makes the Academy a model for Cal is its willingness to experiment and innovate. This is the spirit of Silicon Valley, which is mostly MIA at the big universities, Cal especially. Fixated on falling revenues, Cal is channeling Margaret Thatcher, attacking the unionized clerks and janitors (a drop in the pension bucket) and ratcheting up the fees. Where this points is the not-so-subtle evolution of Cal from the people’s university to an elite institution that grants waivers to a select group of the deserving. Out of the picture is everyone else that Cal traditionally served: the kids who worked their way through.

So here’s a modest proposal: double the enrollment. Make use of the same innovations that Silicon Valley companies, San Francisco startups, and the Academy are using to serve an expanded cohort. Rethink the four years, so students have options that they can afford. Rethink the way the campus is used, accepting mobility and making it much more of a 24/7 place. Rethink the faculty, taking advantage of the remarkable talent that resides here and the interest of foreigners to be part of it. If visas are a problem, invite that talent to teach remotely and visit as tourists for shorter stints. Or set up remote centers in logical places, the way other universities are doing.

The most important thing is to reverse-engineer from accessibility. What can average families in California afford to pay? If enrollment is two or even three times what it is today, affordability is feasible. While Cal won’t be what past graduates experienced, it can still provide a solid education—better, perhaps, because greater access should provide students with a wider range of courses.

That California, which even in its hobbled condition is the eighth largest economy in the world, is locked into a scarcity mindset is hard to fathom. Yes, we’re in a bind if we try to perpetuate our lax ways, but isn’t the real opportunity of this moment to change? Looked at this way, it’s clear that Cal is just one piece of a bigger challenge. “It’s broken, but the mission is crucial” is the dilemma that runs through the entire public sector.

Since World War II, the University of California has enabled thousands and thousands of Californians to make their way up in the world. To abandon that mission would be tragic and shortsighted. But to think we can keep Cal going as it’s been is misguided. Those expensive habits are unsustainable. The focus needs to shift from trying to shore them up to setting them aside and putting Cal and its sister campuses on a different footing. (Rationalizing and integrating the UC, CSU, and community college systems is equally pressing and long overdue.)

If California is to revive and prosper, Cal should lead the way. By doing whatever it takes to remain a great and affordable public university, it will set the bar for other community-facing institutions—schools and clinics, for example—that are grappling with the same issues. Scarcity is not the way forward. Leverage and imagination are the way forward.

On Norway's tragedy

2011-07-26T09:56:00.000-07:00

Turid Parmann, who lives in Bergen, Norway.

I received this note from my cousin, Turid Parmann, who I visited in May 2011 in Bergen:

Friday was a terrible day in Norway. I have just taken part in a torchlight and flower procession in our little town of Os. More people took part than normally would on May 17th. Processions have been arranged all over Norway today, and also in Bergen probably more people took part than on May 17th.

Norway has changed - and will change - for the better, I think. It's so silent everywhere. People talk with low voices and move kind of slowly. I have been waiting for my own rage towards this terrorist, and it has not come. I see no rage out there and nobody talks about HIM. They talk about the terror, all the killed and wounded people and the people close to them. It's like a not-communicated mutual agreement that he is neither worth our rage nor our interest. It's very strange.

We are very few people in this country and at times like this, we are very close to each other. Nobody seems to be afraid, either. I'm impressed by the prime minister and the other ministers, by the Royal family, and by the politicians of all parties. The young leader of the Workers Youth League, the AUF, has shown a strength and wisdom that is more than impressive. Interviews with many of the youngsters who survived the massacre at Utøya have been heartbreaking and have left me with enormous respect for their strength and attitude.

I think that what will change is that we will be more aware of what we say, mean, and write about other people and groups that we are not familiar with - and perhaps fear. In the past, I myself have failed to comment on statements about people that are obviously not based on correct information. Like many others, I have become sort of lazy over the years. My tolerance of those statements has disappeared during these last three days. I also think that politicians will be more aware of what they say. Particularly one of the bigger political parties in Norway has been flirting with racism and Christian fundamentalists. I don't think that will pay off in the future.

The values of democracy, openness, tolerance, and justice have become very clear to all of us during the last few days, and no one will take that away from us.

The procession this evening in Oslo - of about 150 000 people – started spontaneously on FB. Lots of artists turned up to hold a concert. When the gathering began, one man started to sing our national hymn, "Ja vi elsker," and an enormous chorus followed it. (“Ja vi elsker dette landet” means “Yes, we love this country.) Crown Prince Haakon commented that, "Today the streets of Oslo are filled with love!" And lots and lots of people agreed to that. It's almost as unbelievable as the terror on Friday.

From tomorrow, the intention of all of us is to turn back to "normal" as best as we can. That's probably the best medicine. I almost wish you were here to experience this extraordinary atmosphere that is not filled with anger and fear. Sorrow, tears, love, and hope are more the describing words.

Turid Parmann lives in Bergen, Norway and is a partner in Galerie Oz in Os.

Saltworks redux

2011-03-31T22:27:00.000-07:00

The Saltworks site (photo from Save the Bay)

I heard Peter Calthorpe, planner of the proposed Saltworks development, debate David Lewis of Save the Bay. This was at SPUR on 29 March 2011. Calthorpe is an effective presenter, and he gave the project a surface plausibility. He often referred to his own expertise, as if to self-certify the truth of his opinions. When pressed on the affordability of the housing Saltworks will provide, though, he waffled, glossing over the fact that this is waterfront housing, not worker housing. He also denied that Saltworks is sprawl, but then noted that it would provide townhouses, a suburban housing type that's only a step up in density from tract homes*. A big point that Lewis made is that Saltworks' development would take the pressure off of affluent enclaves like Atherton and Menlo Park that refuse to add density along the CalTrain corridor. Calthorpe denied that the corridor can be redeveloped at sufficient density, but Lewis questioned that assertion, which is the linchpin of Calthorpe's justification for a project that makes no sense at all environmentally. Preserving and reclaiming the bay edge is a miniature version of the National Seashore project a generation ago - does anyone think that was a bad idea? The Saltworks site is the last large tract of reclaimable bay marsh, as Lewis pointed out. What is being proposed is like Foster City, but that was then, this is now. It's certainly not worth building 12,000 mostly market-rate housing units in this location if, with the slightest display of political will, they could be developed elsewhere along the West Bay's transit corridor. (As Lewis explained, Atherton and Menlo Park currently refuse to countenance added density in their parts of the corridor.) If nearby worker housing is so crucial to the companies in Redwood City, as Calthorpe avers, perhaps they could redevelop their own sites there to provide it.

[*: It would also provide higher-density housing, but Calthorpe stressed townhouses as a "missing product" in the urban mix. There's a reason for that.]

Classicism and Fascism

2011-01-09T19:18:00.000-08:00

Adolf Ziegler, "Four Elements" (1937)

This painting is one of 10 or so that culminate the "Chaos and Classicism" show at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. The description of the painting includes a photo showing it hanging in Adolf Hitler's Munich apartment.

To look at the painting and realize that to do so is to share in some sense the gaze of its original owner is disturbing. It reminded me of a side trip to Potsdam I made in June 1999. Driving down from Berlin, we went past a beautiful lake. "The Wannsee," the driver told us. It was on its shores that the Holocaust was planned. The Nazis' taint is palpable, and I felt it in this painting. Would I have if the photo had been omitted?

Living the Predicament

2010-12-28T22:04:00.000-08:00

"After great pain a formal feeling comes." - Emily Dickinson

A dying Tony Judt quoted Dickinson, and it was picked up in David Wootton's TLS review of the BBC radio series, A History of the World in 100 Objects. He defines formal feeling as "a sense that, just as every word in a poem has its place, so history is not merely a record of destruction and death, but something to which we can, in some puzzling fashion, give meaning." Earlier, he writes, "Finding our place doesn't only mean finding where we come from, or who we are. It means working out how to live the predicament of life." I'm still working it out.

Painting's Journey

2010-12-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

Harriet Backer, "Blue Room," National Gallery, Oslo

"Art itself often contributes to our tendency to put what we see into words."

While in Oslo in the early spring of 1997, I spent three consecutive days at the National Gallery - a pilgrimage I've made episodically over the years when visiting my family there. Returning to Berkeley, I wrote a short essay on what I saw. I found it recently and took another look at it. The essay, now a bit longer, is posted in the archive of my website.

Vespa Looks East

2010-11-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

"Total global demand for scooters is 44 million. Europe accounts for 1.7 million; the US is about 700,000; South America another 3.5 million; and all the rest is Asia. So the future is clearly Asia." - Roberto Colaninno

"The rest" is about 40 million scooters, but Vespa - a brand that almost parallels my own life (it came into existence a year before I did) - is at this point a luxury item. When it started - I looked in vain for a famous photo of an Italian family riding one, a kid standing on the running board and another seated in front the handlebars - Vespa was the pride of Italian proles (until they could afford a Fiat). So how much of that 40 million does Vespa have a shot at? The math still works in their favor: Just 10% of Asia would match their sales everywhere else.

The quote is from Paul Betts's interview with Roberto Colannino in the Financial Times, Monday, 8 November 2010, US edition, page 16. Colannino (below) brought Vespa back from the dead. Now he's trying to revive Alitalia.

Edward VIII

2010-11-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

Widely regarded these days as a fascist, Edward VIII, better known by his post-abdication title, the Duke of Windsor, chafed under the buttoned-down regime of his father, George V. I had this photo above my writing desk for more than a decade, because you have to admire the panache, surely the model for David Bowie at a certain age. Yes, he hobnobbed with Hitler (who reportedly thought he'd make the ideal Quisling king for a post-invasion Great Britain), but everyone should count his or her lucky stars (retrospectively) that he fell in love with Mrs. Simpson, lost the crown ("Lose the crown!"), and left GB to his stammering but far abler younger brother, George VI.

Pope Benedict

2010-09-19T00:34:00.000-07:00

I clipped this photo from the front page of the Financial Times. On the FT's salmon-pink newsprint, it looks like a painting. Even here, the question "What time is this?" comes to mind, looking at these ancient white folk, symbols of their institutions. The trappings are intact, but nothing is really immune now to the great upheaval, in which everything established is suspect. Benedict gamely plays out the role he must have sought. He apologizes, but it does no good. In The Leopard, the Prince tells his priest that buying time is the only point. The world has changed, so a prince does what he can to buy his children safe passage. The Pope may have a longer view, but the Queen? Harder to know. Neither shows any sign of letting go.

Jane Austen

2010-09-12T14:22:00.000-07:00

Until yesterday, I'd never read anything by Jane Austen, but I greatly admire the mid-1990s film of Persuasion from which the still above is taken. After watching it, I found a copy of the book on my shelves, finishing it around noon today. It's wonderfully written. Around the time the film was made, my cousin Bente lent me a copy of Trollope's Dr. Thorne, which I read overnight, having to give it back the next day and depart. She deemed it the best of Trollope, and I'm inclined to agree. Concision is a virtue it shares with Persuasion (or I'd never have finished it in time). This wasn't Trollope's long suit. Austen reminds me of Sei Shonagon, the 12th-century author of The Pillow Book. That book is alive with satire; short, vivid accounts of what she saw and heard; and strongly held but nuanced sympathies and antipathies. Their worlds were different, but each found herself in circumstances that permitted very close observation of the "set" to which they belonged - societies of men with which women negotiated. The Pillow Book sets down its author's observations from life, while Persuasion transmutes what Austen saw into imagined characters and situations. Both books give us a sense of the women behind them.

The Gulf disaster

2010-08-30T22:05:00.000-07:00

"I hit a cloud so concentrated that 20 hours later my mouth and tongue still feel they've been burned by a hot liquid." - Drew Wheelan

The cloud is the toxic residue of the Macondo blowout. In her riveting report in the London Review of Books (5 August 2010, pages 28-31), Rebecca Solnit clarifies why we should be horrified not only by what happened, but also by the extent to which the oil industry has masked the damage and kept scientists and the press at bay, using the Coast Guard as its instrument. Even the cleanup is being done by prison labor, despite the ravages the blowout has had on a local economy. In 2008, we thought we voted the oil industry out of office. This report will make you wonder.

Trading places

2010-08-21T20:39:00.000-07:00

"Sixteenth-century English traders in the Levant realized that there was a high degree of tolerance of religious and cultural difference." - Lawrence Rosen

The donkey pictured here is actually from Alpujarra, south of Granada, another part of the Islamic world that was tolerant of differences at its cultural zenith in the 12th century, during the Hispanic proto-Renaissance that brought classical learning back into Europe. The quote is from a review ("Trouble with a Dead Mule," London Review of Books, page 22-23) by Lawrence Rosen of James Mather's Pasha: Traders and Travelers in the Islamic World (Yale 2009) Mather's thesis is that the loosely organized partners of the Levant Company, focused on trade rather than the furthering of English interests, were adept at fitting in to the Islamic cultures of cities like Istanbul, Aleppo, and Alexandria. What they found there was more open and sophisticated than what they left behind. A few stayed on, although most returned to the England they remembered.

The Boit's vases

2010-08-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

"Their rims damaged from their travels, the vases are the only objects to have survived and now flank their painted doubles in Boston." - Ruth Bernard Yeazell

When the Boit family's vases, depicted in John Singer Sargent's painting of the Boit daughters, arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1986, "they contained a cigar stub,a paper airplane, a pink ribbon, a tennis ball, sheets of geography lessons, a letter about the repeal of Prohibition, an Arrow shirt collar, an old doughnut, an admission card to a dance at the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead, Massachusetts, three badminton shuttlecocks, many coins and a feather." The painting appears to reflect Sargent's encounter with Velazquez's "Las Meninas," which he copied while visiting Madrid in 1879. (The painting dates from 1882.) The quotes are from Ruth Bernard Yeazell's review of Sargent's Daughters (MFA 2009) in the London Review of Books, 5 August 2010, pages 20-21.

No regrets

2010-07-20T20:53:00.000-07:00

"English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words, too. - Sarah Palin

Ex-Governor Palin was replying to media gripes about her "coined word" refudiate, which makes me regret that William Safire isn't here to savor it. It sounds like a Bushism; Palin is more prone to incoherence and babbling. (Her daughter Bristol's decision to marry the father of her child may be occasioned by a reality show in the offing, but it has a certain logic. I hope they call the show "Palin Family Values," to remind others that refudiating can be taken back.) As for Sarah Palin's sense of the latitude of English, I agree: refudiate is pretty funny, and I hope it catches on. Meanwhile, if moderate Islam wants a mosque in Lower Manhattan, go for it.* Or we can test Robert Grudin's theory,** designing the Freedom Tower to resemble the minaret at Mecca.

*: It was this proposal that Palin wished to "refudiate."
**: In Design and Truth (Yale, 2010), Grudin argues that the World Trade Center towers were attacked because Osama Bin-Laden was incensed that their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, made use of Islamic motifs; he was also put out about Yamasaki's work in Saudi Arabia. Grudin's larger point is that bad design has consequences.

Form-based codes

2010-07-19T20:20:00.000-07:00

"A form-based code homogenizes the city's form. Sometimes, the change of form from neighborhood to neighborhood as a result of architectural evolution is something that's one of the best assets of a place. It's not based on a vision or a master plan - it's based on making easy regulation. The result for architects is that they become the decorators of forms that are imposed." - Bernard Zyscovich

The quote (slightly modified) is from "Brave New Codes" by Nate Berg, Architect, July 2010, page 53. The topic interests me. As a graduate student, I spent four months at SAR, John Habraken's research institute in Eindhoven, which had developed a quite sophisticated form-based code geared for the (to me incredibly diagrammatic) nature of Dutch housing at the time. The San Francisco architect Joseph Esherick once told me that the Swiss have a code based on building envelope, and this was more or less Habraken's idea: to give it limits within which designers could do whatever they wanted. (The Dutch limits were quite constrictive.) Mr. Zyscovich, a Miami architect, is probably right that "easy regulation" is a selling point for the code. Still, it could be an improvement over the current situation in San Francisco, where the Planning Department (I'm told) insists that working drawings reflect concept drawings, a complete misunderstanding of the design process. A form-based code would at least remind these officials where their authority ought to end.

The Fisher Collection

2010-07-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

"Wandering through the fourth and fifth floors, I kept thinking, what motivates wealthy collectors?" - Kenneth Caldwell

Kenneth Caldwell's remarkable blog, Design Faith, features his review of the first Fisher Collection exhibit at SFMOMA, the repository of some 1,100 works of art that Donald and Doris Fisher collected over the years. Caldwell's take on the Fishers is that they played it safe, but less so late in life. Donald Fisher died of cancer in the spring. Two days before he died, they agreed to loan their collection to SFMOMA for 100 years - like the Hong Kong lease, but renewable. The art adds heft to the museum's existing collections, Caldwell says, so it can document the period more thoroughly. He finds SFMOMA a better venue for it than the Presidio, where Fisher initially tried to build his own museum. The collection isn't singular or idiosyncratic enough (my words, not Caldwell's) to warrant a longer journey. It's a pleasure reading Design Faith. I hope Caldwell gets pleasure out of writing it, too. It reads like he does.

Charles Spencer King, 1925-2010

2010-07-05T12:03:00.000-07:00

"Sadly, the 4x4 has become an acceptable alternative to Mercedes or BMW for the pompous, self-important driver. To use them for the school run, or even in cities or towns at all, is completely stupid." - Charles Spencer King

Spen King, who died on 26 June, led the team that developed the Range Rover. According to his obit in the NY Times, he also designed aluminum engines for the Triumph Stag and TR8, "powerful convertibles in the English sports car tradition." As Bill Baker, ex-Rover, said, "He was a go-fast and turn-tight type guy." He was hit by a van while on his bike - riding it because a detached retina kept him from driving. Not likely to RIP.

Saltworks: Not Smart

2010-07-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

"Are there dumber places to build? Possibly. But a project on this site can't be considered smart growth or transit oriented development." - David Lewis

"Big Developments Expose Green Divide" is the headline of Jonathan Weber's rundown in the NY Times of Peter Calthorpe's latest crop of "Smart" developments in the Bay Area. They include the Saltworks in Redwood City, turning the Cargill salt ponds into 12,000 housing units; Alameda Point, which adds 4,500 new housing units to a former Naval Air Station; Treasure Island, with 8,000 housing units, and Hunter's Point. Of the four, the Saltworks is the most egregious. Lewis, executive director of Oakland-based Save the Bay, questions the logic of considering a wetlands site, remote from any kind of transit, for "smart growth." Given the number of infill sites available in the Bay Area, he asks if mega-projects of the kind Calthorpe is touting are justified. There's considerable local opposition, arguing that too much is being crammed on the other sites. Calthorpe replies that big sites are necessary "to create complete mixed-use places. The regional and long view is critical to environmental health. Too often, we take the short, local view." This local viewer wonders if some of this isn't just another form of sprawl?

The Saltworks site.

Post-Olympic Athens

2010-07-03T22:18:00.000-07:00

"The Games are just empty buildings, we have no use for them. But they have become monuments, so we can handle them and live with them. We are used to living among ruins. They are just ruins, they were never anything else." - a film-maker called Aristotelis

The quote is from an essay in the London Review of Books, "The Colossus of Maroussi," by Iain Sinclair (27 May 2010, pages 30-33). One of its theme is the prevalence of stray dogs in Athens, and how they were rounded up and killed before the Olympics in 2004. Written by a resident of London as that city approaches the 2012 Games, it's a cautionary tale, told with knowledge of the current state of the Greek economy, for which the Olympics did nothing. England could be next, he implies. Chicago and New York should thank their lucky stars.

Drew what he saw

2010-06-26T20:28:00.000-07:00

I read about Melchior Lorck in a review* by Marina Warner of Erik Fischer's projected five-volume catalog, the fourth volume of which was just published. This drawing was made when Lorck, his Flemish patron Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, and the rest of an embassy from Flanders to the court of Suleiman - ruler of the Ottoman Empire - were under house arrest in Istanbul. The enterprising artist found a vantage point and started drawing. Among the details is a couple making love on a rooftop terrace (above, middle left). Eventually freed, the embassy was successful. Lorck's portraits of Suleiman are in a Mughal style that was popular at court. The Mughals were the other power, along with the Hapsburgs, with which Suleiman had to contend. Warner argues that the presence of the artist with a high-ranking Ottoman companion in a panorama (below) Lorck drew of the city was meant to advertise Suleiman's self-confidence to western viewers.

*: Marina Warner, "A View of a View," London Review of Books, 27 May 2010, page 15-17. (Readable by purchase or subscription. The LRB is worth getting.)

State of the Nation

2010-06-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

"Forced to investigate conditions in the US, and to enlist the help of defense lawyers there in establishing otherwise unreported data, extraditees have come to understand that practice after practice is accepted in America which, in Europe, could risk the prohibition of a trial, or subsequently cause its nullification, or bring an end to conditions of imprisonment it stipulated. Within a system of criminal justice that for all of us, from a lifetime of watching procedural dramas, seems more familiar than our own, there are profoundly disturbing features which do not accord with the assumptions we continue to maintain, despite the actions of the previous administration, about the constitution of the United States." - Gareth Peirce

The quote is from an essay in the London Review of Books (13 May 2010) on the question of allowing suspected terrorists to be extradited to the US from the European Community. The way the US legal system deals with suspected terrorists violates the European Convention. It's clear that America's use of absolute isolation, which consistently makes prisoners vegetative or insane, violates the US constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. And this isn't the only violation. The real scandal here is the failure of the Obama administration to repudiate and correct any of this. On this issue, we're still in the Bush/Cheney era. Nothing has really changed.

Valley of the Prudes

2010-06-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

"It's their rules. We're coming to their dinner party at their house." - Robert Berry

Berry, quoted in an article by Julie Bosman, is the illustrator of Ulysses Seen, "a Web comic version" of James Joyce's Ulysses. Not surprisingly, the work features some nudity. When Berry's publisher, Throwaway Horse, proposed to port it to the iPad, Apple demanded that it be blanked out. The result, as shown in the New York Times, is a re-sized image. (Apple rejected other solutions.) "We basically had to lose all of her body and just tighten in on her face," Berry said. It's odd but somehow fitting that a Victorian prudishness has broken out in Apple's command-and-control world - ideal for the China market, of course. I wonder what they'll do with Manet, for example?

Euroskepticism

2010-06-09T22:33:00.000-07:00

"For years, almost nobody paid attention to Edward Hugh, who repeatedly predicted that the euro zone could not survive. It was the height of policy folly, he warned, to think that aging, penny-pinching Germans could successfully coexist under one currency umbrella with the more youthful, credit-card-wielding Irish, Greeks, and Spanish." - Landon Thomas, Jr. in the New York Times

As Thomas recounts, the "gregarious blogger" Edmund Hugh found an audience among academic economists and a "cult following" among financial analysts. He "was writing very clearly about the imbalances in Europe and the likelihood of a crisis long before it was on the radar screen of economists or analysts," according to London-based researcher Jonathan Tepper. Yet Hugh posts whatever interests him, "even the sociable behavior of bonobos," Thomas writes. "With the Internet," Hugh says, "I feel that I can do what I like. This makes me feel I can really do something."

Donald Windham (1920-2010)

2010-06-05T23:26:00.000-07:00

"If revenge is a dish that tastes best cold, then Donald Windham has certainly fixed himself a satisfying frozen dinner." - Robert Brustein

The quote, from a review in the Times of Donald Windham's published collection of letters from Tennessee Williams, appeared in his obituary in the same paper. My friend Kenneth Caldwell compares obituaries to films, and there's something to that. Windham's is illustrated with a photo from 1949 by Karl Bissinger that shows him in the company of Williams, Gore Vidal, and others. It captures the cosmopolitan spirit of New York City in that era, a liberating magnet for those stifled elsewhere. In an article in his wonderful blog, Design Faith, Caldwell discusses Dominick Dunne and, briefly, the last years of Truman Capote, when he began retailing the nominally private lives of his friends. Naming names put Capote beyond the pale, but his doing so anticipates the current moment, when celebrity has become sufficiently debased that it's no longer possible to identify who's being dragged through the mud unless you make celebrity your obsession. "Nothing is hidden" is a signature phrase of Dogen, founder of Soto Zen. That seems to be true. He also believed that our human condition is a constant mix of enlightenment and delusion. It's funny, in this regard, that someone like Williams would worry about how he came across. All too human, as Nietzsche used to say.

Libraries

2010-06-05T00:50:00.000-07:00

"Libraries are in trouble" - ex-journal publisher, East Coast university press

I heard this in a recent conversation on the impact of e-books and e-journals on publishing, bookstores, and libraries. Libraries don't get talked about as much, but - at least in Berkeley - they still receive a hefty public subsidy. My informant said that library purchasing budgets have been gutted. "They're turning into living rooms," she said, wondering aloud if people won't ultimately choose to access that digital content in their own homes. That will leave urban libraries to the homeless. They may prefer something more practical.

The British elections

2010-05-12T23:06:00.001-07:00

"Like the headmaster and two prefects." - George Bartlett

A comment made by the son of an old friend after viewing the debate between Gordon Brown and his young challengers. Now the prefects are in office. Brown looked happy for the first time in months, leaving No. 10.

Medical life

2010-05-06T22:03:00.000-07:00

"You must bring your medical documents with you to the consultation." - a Berkeley clinic's instructions to patients

Having spent the day corralling the various documents, I wondered why the clinic - and others like it - are running a decade or more behind in the way they transact business. If my design firm did things like this, we would cease to exist. I was told this evening that Kaiser does otherwise. If so, more power to them. Yet there's no reason why the clinics in a community like Berkeley couldn't organize themselves as a synthetic health-delivery organization, using off-the-shelf software and technology. All the doctors know each other, but the fax is as far as they go. It's amazing. It's also deplorable.

Design debate

2010-04-10T22:18:00.000-07:00

"People are passionate about design and architecture and the internet has generated a whole new way to discuss it. Design websites have a high level of debate compared to sites on other subjects." - Marcus Fairs

Mr. Fairs is the impresario of dezeen, which draws a million visitors a month. Making a comparison to print would be even more dramatic, given what passes for debate on the pages of the leading design and architecture journals. Just finding a writer on architecture as good as Catherine Slessor is pretty hard these days. There are still a few print-based critics who maintain the tradition, like Trevor Boddy (of late) and Chris Hawthorne. Architect's Journal and the Architectural Review provided a real debate a generation ago, when they had AD as a prod. They still do, but not so consistently or frontally. (The quote is from Nicole Sweingley, "Click to chic," Financial Times, 10-11 April 2009, "House & Home," US edition, page 1.)

Gardening

2010-04-10T22:06:00.000-07:00

I could never look after it myself. That's why we have four gardeners to look after the estate, which includes 15 acres of woodland we've been restoring; an Italian garden; an orchard of peaches, apricots, and apples; and a herd of alpacas. - Sir Bob Worcester

Sir Bob, once at McKinsey, labors on, feeding money to his castle in Kent (described above) and his houses in London and the Caribbean. He hails from Kansas, and always wanted a castle. Not like you or me. (From the home section of the Financial Times, 10-11 April 2010, US edition, page 3)

Venice & China

2010-04-05T18:24:00.000-07:00

It was at this time of rapid industrialization that Venice became the victim of its earlier extraordinary success. Its victories at sea, its conquest of the Terraferma, its command over the northern Italian balance of power combined in enabling it to absorb the effects of the ongoing world contraction without having to reorganize and restructure its governmental and business institutions. - Giovanni Arrighi

Reading this made me think of China, which sails on, apparently the exemplar for a new age. It also made me wonder if Taiwan won't emerge in the end as the seed bank of the more robust form of government China will need - the only one, really, in all of Greater China, now that Hong Kong has been co-opted by its parent (despite heroic rear-guard efforts by its democrats). Singapore is what China looks toward, a corporatist state. It may work for a city, but can it work for China? M. Braudel (Arrighi's source) has his doubts. (The quote is from The Long Twentieth Century, Verso 2010, page 186.)

Public vs. private

2010-04-04T11:31:00.000-07:00

In 2009, the average state or local public employee received $39.66 in total compensation per hour versus $27.42 for private workers. For every $1 in pay and benefits a private employee earned, a state or local government worker received $1.45. - Wall Street Journal

As the Financial Times noted earlier this year, federal workers make twice what private workers make, on average. The ratio for state and local workers is less, but those governments are also in much worse shape than the feds (since they can't print money). The pension overhang alone is vast and unsupportable. Meanwhile, my own city of Berkeley is proposing to address its fiscal crisis by laying off garbage collectors, who - as I far as I can see - work hard for a living. I don't think they're the problem. ("The Government Pay Boom," WSJ, 26 March 2010, page A18.)

On the radio

2010-04-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

It is the very intimacy of radio that tricks you into believing that these academics speak to you and you alone; it also helps that you can't see them, so that you might in fact be closeted under some vast and capacious duvet with weighty somethings being whispered in your ear. - Will Self

At Christmas, my second son - the broadcast journalist and producer John E. Parman - told Bill McClung (of Berkeley's University Press Books) and me that radio is a much better medium than the Internet, in his opinion: faster to build an audience and easier to monetize. A few days before, he noted to me that when you have the radio on, it stays in the background, but if you hear something that interests you, you focus in. I think this is the way most listeners hear it, but I find I can't tune it out. Still, I agree with John. As a medium that predates TV and should have fallen away long since, it persists. (Quoted from "Diary," London Review of Books, 25 February 2010, page 34.)

Two forms of capitalism

2010-03-28T17:09:00.000-07:00

"In the course of the competitive struggle that set the one against the other, the Venetian and Genoese regimes of accumulation developed along divergent trajectories, which in the 15th century crystallized into two opposite forms of capitalist organization. Venice came to configure the prototype of 'state (monopoly) capitalism,' whereas Genoa came to constitute the prototype of 'cosmopolitan (finance) capitalism.' The ever-changing combination and opposition of these two forms and, above all, their ever-increasing scale and complexity, constitute the central aspect of the evolution of historical capitalism as a world system." - Giovanni Arrighi

The current conflict between Western-dominated financial capitalism and its nationalist-mercantilist rivals is not really new, even if it's different. History suggests that each system provides a limit to the other, and also encounters (or gives rise to) its own unique problems. The political infantilism of today's nationalist-mercantilist states could be one. Unfortunately, the US shows signs of falling in with this new order, at least to the extent of forcing cosmopolitan capitalism to find new bases of operation. (The shortened quote is from The Long Twentieth Century, Verso, 2010, page 153.)

Postmodern hyperspace

2010-03-13T18:24:00.000-08:00

"Managers of the global corporations are seeking to put into practice a theory of human organization that will profoundly alter the nation-state system around which society has been organized for over 400 years. What they are demanding in essence is the right to transcend the nation-state, and in the process, to transform it." - Richard Barnet and Ronald Miller

I read this quote in Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century (Verso, 2010). The term postmodern hyperspace is from Frederic Jameson. As Arrighi explains, it refers to the parallel systems that global capitalism creates in the midst of nation-states. This isn't new, he notes, citing the trade fairs of the Middle Ages, which undermined Medieval institutions, and Genoa's control of commerce at the zenith of Spanish imperial power. It made me think of Google's dispute with China. This is being discussed in terms of the freedom of access implied by the Internet, but it may actually be the latest example of "friction" between parallel systems. (The quote appears on page 82.)

China envy

2010-03-09T21:44:00.000-08:00

"One of the reasons China is so successful is that Aaron Peskin isn't there. They're far more capitalist than we are these days. They want to get things done. Here, things don't happen." - Jeffrey Heller

In the early fall, I spent half a day touring San Jose, CA with an urban design professor from a leading Chinese metropolitan university. We came back to Berkeley and had a late lunch, in the course of which he noted how important an example San Jose would be for secondary and tertiary cities in China, "which are about to make the same mistakes that San Jose made a generation ago." It's not the pace of development that matters, but the quality of the result. As China makes its way up Maslow's pyramid, development is less about raw numbers, which is why Shui On's Xintiandi project in Shanghai - mixing new with restored old - is being widely emulated. SF is not exactly at Maslow's peak, but it's high enough up that we can legitimately ask why its glacial, nominally consultative entitlements process still produces crap. In a city where relatively little gets built, wouldn't it make sense to set the quality bar higher? Yet we don't. Projects like the Infinity and One Rincon Hill earn a pass because "they're not that bad." If that's our criterion, why all the agony? Maybe it would be better if SF's buildings were subject to recall. (The Heller quote is from the SF Business Times, 5-12 March 2010, pages 21-22.)

Obama's m.o.

2010-03-06T15:44:00.000-08:00

"For all their differences of style and speech, Obama and Daley shared a basic approach to politics as a constant negotiation of interests and ideals - Chicago's brand of Realpolitik. Both had advanced by capitalizing on the prevailing power structure, not by dismantling it." - Evan Osnos

This quote is from a profile of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in The New Yorker (8 March 2010, pages 38-51). It sheds light on Obama's m.o. His problem has been that Congress lacks a Daley - the people in charge are pygmies on stilts (to quote Einstein). So Obama has to fill the gap. Either he'll learn to lead, in his own fashion, or he'll be gone. This is a bit like JFK, who sidelined Lyndon Johnson by making him VP, then had to compensate (or try to compensate) for his absence. That must have been painful for Johnson. I wonder if Obama's first year has been equally so for Daley?

Las Vegas

2010-03-03T22:30:00.000-08:00

"Walk on the Wild Side"

This song, with choral accompaniment, was playing as I ate dinner at a big new hotel in Las Vegas. Listening to it, I was thinking that if Hell has choirs, this must surely be part of the repertory.

Chinese Capitalism (2)

2010-02-24T21:31:00.000-08:00

"Dereliction in the rustbelt, super-exploitation in the sunbelt: the treatment of labor is pitiless in either zone." - Perry Anderson

Perry Anderson also reviews Ching Kwan Lee's Against the Law (California, 2007), on labor protests in the Manchurian rustbelt and the Guangdong sunbelt. "Its first half is a study of the destruction of the proletariat that built China's principal industrial base, as the great state-owned enterprises were scrapped or sold off, leaving their workers jobless and often near-penniless, while officials and profiteers lined their pockets with what was left of all they had created. The second part explores the emergence of a new working class of young migrant laborers from the countryside, about half of them women, without collective identity or political memory. They have low-wage jobs, but no security; toiling up to 70 or 80 hours a week in often atrocious working conditions, with widespread exposure to abuse and injury."

Chinese Capitalism (1)

2010-02-24T21:14:00.000-08:00

"Not many economists would think to dedicate their work to a couple of imprisoned villagers and an executed housewife." - Perry Anderson

UCLA History Professor Perry Anderson reviews Yasheng Huang's Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (Cambridge, 2008) in the London Review of Books (28 January 2010, pages 3 and 5-6) "His central finding is that the apparently unbroken rates of high-speed growth [in China] have rested on two quite different models of development" - the pre-1989 liberalization, which brought momentary prosperity to the countryside, and its post-1989 reversal, which shifted funds and foreign investment to the cities, one of which Huang describes as a "forest of grand theft." Those millions of villagers who migrated to the big cities in the 1990s were pushed to do so by poverty back home.

Vox Populi

2010-02-22T22:23:00.000-08:00

"A lot of fuss about the Prince of Wales, with a group of architects writing to the Guardian claiming HRH's objections to the Chelsea Barracks design is an interference 'in the democratic process.' This is hypocritical rubbish. Architects have always had scant regard for democracy and as often as not have the planners in their pocket; anyone who stands up to them gets my vote, including the Prince of Wales." - Alan Bennett

I have some sympathy for Bennett's viewpoint, although I find Prince Charles too enamored of genre buildings. (Peter Davey had an article in Architectural Review some years ago that showed how what the Prince values could also be achieved in a modernist idiom.) Are architects undemocratic? I think it's more accurate to say that urban-scale development is often so - and tipped against the immediate interests of the community, although architects will argue that they're defending a better future. I do sympathize with the Prince's interest in tradition. The legal theorist Friedrich Hayek believed that it's a safeguard against the kind of casual, cooked-up tyranny that politicians go in for when their vote is in play and money can be made dispensing it. I tend to blame them first. However puffed up they may be, architects are usually somewhere down the line. (Bennett's diary, well worth reading, appears quarterly (?) in the London Review of Books; this one is from 7 January 2010, pages 34-35.)

Density and Urbanity

2010-02-20T19:53:00.000-08:00

"Does 'new urbanism' say that we have to fight suburban sprawl by putting 400-foot buildings everywhere in San Francisco?" - Sue Hestor

Hestor is commenting on 555 Washington, a tower proposed for SF's Pyramid block that's up for reconsideration by the city's Planning Commission on 18 March. She has a point - a crucial one in my estimation. For too long, Smart Growth advocates have invoked sprawl at the urban edge to justify girth at the edges of the CBD. That gave us Rincon in SF, an area rife with mediocrity (some of it designed by Heller Manus, the architects of 555 Washington). Now the pressure to bulk up is shifting north, threatening the mostly lowrise area that borders the Pyramid block. To his credit, Chronicle critic John King sees the tower as a reason to first revisit the planning assumptions that have governed the area since the 1980s. That would give SF the opportunity to rethink how it approaches density, hopefully connecting it to urbanity and not assuming that density is urbanity by definition, as Smart Growth advocates tend to do. Berkeley has the same pressing need to revisit this issue. (Hestor was quoted by Tim Redmond on 11 February 2010 in an online San Francisco Bay Guardian post kindly sent me by Kenneth Caldwell.)

About Quotes & Thoughts

2010-02-20T12:40:00.000-08:00

I started Quotes & Thoughts while visiting my daughter in a valley near Orgiva in Alpujarra, the region south of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, about an hour seaward of Granada, Spain. Q&T has lived as part of Common Place, the first issue of which has the results of those days, during which I wrote incessantly, prompted by some copies of the London Review of Books that I'd brought with me. This is its continuation. - John Parman