may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
I wish Americans fucked with more foreign music. You don’t have to know the language to appreciate a good record. Folks in other countries listen to our music and don’t speak a lick of english. Music needs no translator
you’ll get an endless streaming of songs (ad free!).
I personally found myself loving 1970s Ghana, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire!
Also 1920s and 1970s Japan for sure! Cambodian music:
spectacular. Love Armenia and Mali as well. I’ve been told 70s Germany is weird and 30s
Algeria is cool but I haven’t gotten around to those yet.
Italy’s 1960s is bomb ofc but I’m biased ;)
Sunrise. The thin pocked sheets are being washed. The city’s old but new to me, and therefore strange, and therefore fresh. Everything’s clear, but flat– even the oculist’s dingy eyes, even the butcher’s, with its painted horse, its tray of watery entrails and slabs of darkening flesh.
I walk along, looking at everything equally. I’ve got all I own in this bag.
I’ve cut myself off. I can feel the place where I used to be attached. It’s raw, as when you grate your finger. It’s a shredded mess of images. It hurts. But where exactly on me is this torn-off stem? Now here, now there.
Meanwhile, the other girl, the one with the memory, is coming nearer and nearer. She’s catching up to me, trailing behind her, like red smoke, the rope we share.
The living come with grassy tread To read the gravestones on the hill; The graveyard draws the living still, But never anymore the dead. The verses in it say and say: The ones who living come today To read the stones and go away Tomorrow dead will come to stay. So sure of death the marbles rhyme, Yet can’t help marking all the time How no one dead will seem to come. What is it men are shrinking from? It would be easy to be clever And tell the stones: Men hate to die And have stopped dying now forever. I think they would believe the lie.
Last Saturday’s referendum to alter Australia’s constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice failed to pass. It is, I feel, a devastating and profoundly sad outcome that cuts to the very soul of the nation. Indigenous leaders have called for a week of silence to mourn the result, a result that can only be viewed as Australia's latest rejection of our First Peoples’ rightful place within their country, and I want to honor this request by not posting an Australian poet today.
Rather, I would like to pay my respects to the great Louise Glück. “Parable” is the opening poem of Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), a favorite collection of mine. The poem captures the state of futility we too often experience in our shared existence, a condition that can be overwhelming at times like these, when shadows appear to be falling upon all corners of the world.
Parable
First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,
in order that our souls not be distracted
by gain and loss, and in order also
that our bodies be free to move
easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss
whither or where we might travel, with the second question being
should we have a purpose, against which
many of us argued fiercely that such purpose
corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,
whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated
pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as
a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it
glimmering among the stones, and not
pass blindly by; each
further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,
so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,
like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.
Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which
some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem
to have achieved an agreement; our canteens
hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so
(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still
preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;
we could see this in one another; we had changed although
we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling
from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed
in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose
believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free
in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.
Pity me not because the light of day At close of day no longer walks the sky; Pity me not for beauties passed away From field to thicket as the year goes by; Pity me not the waning of the moon, Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea. Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon. And you no longer look with love on me. This have I known always: Love is no more Than the wide blossom which the wind assails. Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore. Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales: Pity me that the heart is slow to learn What the swift mind beholds at every turn.
Rithika Merchant is a visual artist from Mumbai, India (b 1986). Her work explores the common thread that runs through different cultures and religions. Similar myths, stories and ideas are shared by cultures all around the world, her paintings explore this concept while also featuring creatures and symbolism that are part of her personal visual vocabulary.
Nature plays a pivotal role in her work and is emphasised by the use of organic shapes and non saturated colours. Her paintings and collages are made using a combination of watercolour and cut paper elements, drawing on 17th century botanical prints and folk art, to create a body of work that is visually linked to our collective pasts.
“I would like the viewer to place themselves in my work, regardless of where they are from,” says Merchant. “The figures in my works are also deliberately free of any race, gender, or ethnicity. I tend to be drawn to symbols that are universally recognizable and not culturally specific—like the eye, the sun, the moon, and botanical imagery in general.”
We’ve all admired the elegance of Japan’s traditional styles of architecture. Their development required the kind of dedicated craftsmanship that takes generations to cultivate — but also, more practically speaking, no small amount of wood. By the 15th century, Japan already faced a shortage of seedlings, as well as land on which to properly cultivate the trees in the first place. Necessity being the mother of invention, this led to the creation of an ingenious solution: daisugi, the growing of additional trees, in effect, out of existing trees — creating, in other words, a kind of giant bonsai.
“Written as ?? and literally meaning platform cedar, the technique resulted in a tree that resembled an open palm with multiple trees growing out if it, perfectly vertical,” writes Spoon and Tamago’s Johnny Waldman. “Done right, the technique can prevent deforestation and result in perfectly round and straight timber known as taruki, which are used in the roofs of Japanese teahouses.”
These teahouses are still prominent in Kyoto, a city still known for its traditional cultural heritage, and not coincidentally where daisugi first developed. “It’s said that it was Kyoto’s preeminent tea master, Sen-no-rikyu, who demanded perfection in the Kitayama cedar during the 16th century,” writes My Modern Met’s Jessica Stewart.
At the time “a form of very straight and stylized sukiya-zukuri architecture was high fashion, but there simply weren’t nearly enough raw materials to build these homes for every noble or samurai who wanted one,” says a thread by Twitter account Wrath of Gnon, which includes these and other photos of daisugi in action. “Hence this clever solution of using bonsai techniques on trees.” Aesthetics aside — as far aside as they ever get in Japan, at any rate — “the lumber produced in this method is 140% as flexible as standard cedar and 200% as dense/strong,” making it “absolutely perfect for rafters and roof timber.” And not only is daisugi‘s product straight, slender, and typhoon-resistant, it’s marveled at around the world 600 years later. Of how many forestry techniques can we say the same?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Source: The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All(Copper Canyon Press, 2016)
By perfectly fine I mean: not at all morally blameworthy.
By aiming I mean: being ready to calibrate ourselves up or down to hit the target. I would contrast aiming with settling, which does not necessarily involve calibrating down if one is above target. (For example, if you're aiming for a B, then you should work harder if you get a C on the first exam and ease up if you get an A on the first exam. If you're willing to settle for a B, then you won't necessarily ease up if you happen fortunately to be headed toward an A.)
I believe that most people aim to be morally mediocre, even if they don't explicitly conceptualize themselves that way. Most people look at their peers' moral behavior, then calibrate toward so-so, wanting neither to be among the morally best (with the self-sacrifice that seems to involve) nor among the morally worst. But maybe "mediocre" is too loaded a word, with its negative connotations? Maybe it's perfectly fine, not at all blameworthy, to aim for the moral middle?
Here's one reason you might think so:
The Fairness Argument.
Let's assume (of course it's disputable) that being among the morally best, relative to your peers, normally involves substantial self-sacrifice. It's morally better to donate large amounts to worthy charities than to donate small amounts. It's morally better to be generous rather than stingy with one's time in helping colleagues, neighbors, and distant relatives who might not be your favorite people. It's morally better to meet your deadlines than to inconvenience others by running late. It's morally better to have a small carbon footprint than a medium-size or large one. It's morally better not to lie, cheat, and fudge in all the small (and sometimes large) ways that people tend to do.
To be near the moral maximum in every respect would be practically impossible near-sainthood; but we non-saints could still presumably be somewhat better in many of these ways. We just choose not to be better, because we'd rather not make the sacrifices involved. (See The Happy Coincidence Defense and The-Most-I-Can-Do Sweet Spot for my discussion of a couple of ways of insisting that you couldn't be morally better than you in fact are.)
Since (by stipulation) most of your peers aren't making the sacrifices necessary for peer-relative moral excellence, it's unfair for you to be blamed for also declining to do so. If the average person in your financial condition gives 3% of their income to charity, then it would be unfair to blame you for not giving more. If your colleagues down the hall cheat, shirk, fib, and flake X amount of the time, it's only fair that you get to do the same. Fairness requires that we demand no more than average moral sacrifice from the average person. Thus, there's nothing wrong with aiming to be only a middling member of the moral community -- approximately as selfish, dishonest, and unreliable as everyone else.
Two Replies to the Fairness Argument.
(1.) Absolute standards. Some actions are morally bad, even if the majority of your peers are doing them. As an extreme example, consider a Nazi death camp guard in 1941, who is somewhat kinder to the inmates and less enthusiastic about killing than the average death camp guard, but who still participates in and benefits from the system. "Hey, at least I'm better than average!" is a poor excuse. More moderately, most people (I believe) regularly exhibit small to moderate degrees of sexism, racism, ableism, and preferential treatment of the conventionally beautiful. Even though most people do this, one remains criticizable for it -- that you're typical or average in your degree of bias is at most a mitigator of blame, not a full excuser from blame. So although some putative norms might become morally optional (or "supererogatory") if most of your peers fail to comply, others don't show that structure. With respect to some norms, aiming for mediocrity is not perfectly fine.
(2.) The seeming-absurdity of trade offs between norm types. Most of us see ourselves as having areas of moral strength and weakness. Maybe you're a warm-hearted fellow, but flakier than average about responding to important emails. Maybe you know you tend to be rude and grumpy to strangers, but you're an unusually active volunteer for good causes in your community. My psychological conjecture is that, in implicitly guiding our own behavior, we tend to treat these tradeoffs as exculpatory or licensing: You forgive yourself for the one in light of the other. You let your excellence in one area justify lowering your aims in another, so that averaging the two, you come out somewhere in the middle. (In these examples, I'm assuming that you didn't spend so much time and energy on the one that the other becomes unfeasible. It's not that you spent hours helping your colleague so that you simply couldn't get to your email.)
Although this is tempting reasoning when you're motivated to see yourself (or someone else) positively, a more neutral judge might tend to find it strange: "It's fine that I insulted that cashier, because this afternoon I'm volunteering for river clean-up." "I'm not criticizable for neglecting Cameron's urgent email because this morning I greeted Monica and Britney kindly, filling the office with good vibes." Although non-consciously or semi-consciously we tend to cut ourselves slack in one area when we think about our excellence in others, when the specifics of such tradeoffs are brought to light, they often don't stand scrutiny.
Conclusion.
It's not perfectly fine to aim merely for the moral middle. Your peers tend to be somewhat morally criticizable; and if you aim to be the same, you too are somewhat morally criticizable for doing so. The Fairness Argument doesn't work as a general rule (though it may work in some cases). If you're not aiming for moral excellence, you are somewhat morally blameworthy for your low moral aspirations.
A suggestion for more effective deterrance of nuclear war was first made by Roger Fisher in the March 1981 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
There is a young man, probably a Navy officer, who accompanies the President. This young man has a black attaché case which contains the codes that are needed to fire nuclear weapons. I could see the President at a staff meeting considering nuclear war as an abstract question. He might conclude: “On SIOP Plan One, the decision is affirmative, Communicate the Alpha line XYZ.” Such jargon holds what is involved at a distance.
My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.
When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.“
Reposted from 2016 to add some updated material on how easy or hard it is for someone to start a global nuclear war. Herewith some excerpts from "How to Start a Nuclear War" in this month's Harper's Magazine:
Serving as a US Air Force launch control officer for intercontinental missiles in the early Seventies, First Lieutenant Bruce Blair figured out how to start a nuclear war and kill a few hundred million people. His unit, stationed in the vast missile fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Montana, oversaw one of four squadrons of Minuteman II ICBMs, each missile topped by a W56 thermonuclear warhead with an explosive force of 1.2 megatons—eighty times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. In theory, the missiles could be fired only by order of the president of the United States, and required mutual cooperation by the two men on duty in each of the launch control centers, of which there were five for each squadron.
In fact, as Blair recounted to me recently, the system could be bypassed with remarkable ease. Safeguards made it difficult, though not impossible, for a two-man crew (of either captains or lieutenants, some straight out of college) in a single launch control center to fire a missile. But, said Blair, “it took only a small conspiracy”—of two people in two separate control centers—to launch the entire squadron of fifty missiles, “sixty megatons targeted at the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea.” (The scheme would first necessitate the “disabling” of the conspirators’ silo crewmates, unless, of course, they, too, were complicit in the operation.) Working in conjunction, the plotters could “jury-rig the system” to send a “vote” by turning keys in their separate launch centers. The three other launch centers might see what was happening, but they would not be able to override the two votes, and the missiles would begin their firing sequence. Even more alarmingly, Blair discovered that if one of the plotters was posted at the particular launch control center in overall command of the squadron, they could together format and transmit a “valid and authentic launch order” for general nuclear war that would immediately launch the entire US strategic nuclear missile force, including a thousand Minuteman and fifty-four Titan missiles, without the possibility of recall. As he put it, “that would get everyone’s attention, for sure.” A more pacifically inclined conspiracy, on the other hand, could effectively disarm the strategic force by formatting and transmitting messages invalidating the presidential launch codes.
When he quit the Air Force in 1974, Blair was haunted by the power that had been within his grasp, andhe resolved to do something about it. But when he started lobbying his former superiors, he was met with indifference and even active hostility. “I got in a fair scrap with the Air Force over it,” he recalled. As Blair well knew, there was supposed to be a system already in place to prevent that type of unilateral launch. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon took comfort in this, not knowing that the Strategic Air Command, which then controlled the Air Force’s nuclear weapons, had quietly neutralized it...
Today, things are different. The nuclear fuse has gotten shorter...
A large number of humans have been prenatally genetically modified to live and work in a nonterrestrial location (they require subzero temperatures for comfort, need a different atmospheric gaseous composition, etc). Then the planet they were destined to live on is vaporized by a supernova; there is no equivalent alternate planet in the known universe.
Now they need another location, so all of them are transported to a partially-suitable planet which will then be terraformed to their requirements. This will require thousands of years, during which they will enter cryo-sleep, waking in groups at intervals for habitat maintenance until the external world is suitably modified.
So far, so good. But now suppose that after the terraforming machines have been going for a few centuries a cohort of colonists awakens to discover that their new planet, thought on preliminary survey to contain only primitive plants and beasts, is actually host to what appears to be a sentient creature. And that sentient race is obviously being forced to adapt to climate change at a rate exponentially faster than normal planetary evolution.
Are the humans ethically justified in continuing to terraform the new planet to their own needs if the process entails the genocide of the aboriginal inhabitants?
The story is The Keys to December, an 8,700-word (you can read it in an hour) novelette by Roger Zelazny, an acclaimed science-fiction author (Hugo Award x6, Nebula x3). I first encountered this story a decade ago in the compilation The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth (Simon and Schuster, 2001).
A brief review is here, along with the names of several other books that include it that might be available from your library if Doors of his Face is not. If you insist on reading it online, the fulltext is here (in a somewhat awkward font).
“The land is so harsh and the passes so numerous, that only the best of friends or the worst of enemies would visit you”.
Ladakh (meaning ‘land of the passes’) is a cold desert in the Northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. It is divided into the mainly Muslim Kargil district and the primarily Buddhist Leh district. The people of Ladakh have a rich folklore, some of which date back to the pre- Buddhist era. As the Himalayan farming season is short, Ladakhi only work for 4 months of the year. All ages can join in and help. During the 8 winter months work is minimal and festivals and celebrations are almost a continuous affair, giving them the opportunity to display Goncha, the traditional dress.
At first sight, it might appear that society has taken a markedly positive moral turn over the past 20-or-so years. The example of the Conservative Party’s embrace of gay marriage alone shows how far we now are from the failure of Conservative prime minister John Major’s ‘back to basics’ campaign to restore traditional moral values in the early 1990s. Cultural and political trendsetters champion any number of apparently progressive moral campaigns: against female genital mutilation, child abuse, poverty, inequality, or any imaginable form of discrimination on the grounds of race, sex or disability. On the face of it, we seem to have the good fortune to be living in a new age of tolerance, born of a society confident and firm in its moral values. One of contemporary society’s most prominent features is the wide level of support for non-judgementalism; namely, the idea that we do not have the right as individuals to lay down the law as to how others should live their lives. This moral-sounding sentiment reaches right to the top of society. Earlier this year no less an eminence than UK Supreme Court judge Lord Wilson of Culworth declared that marriage was ‘an elastic concept’ (ie, as empty as a rubber band), that the nuclear family had been replaced by a ‘blended’ variety, and that the Christian teaching on the family has been ‘malign’. The one (ironic) judgement that today’s non-judgemental morality is happy to make is to judge the judgemental and castigate strict moral codes as malign and abusive.
This residuum of people who still cling to traditional ideas of morality and concepts like duty are routinely denigrated by the right-thinking as intolerant ‘bigots’ or dismissed as reactionary religious rednecks. Society’s apparent moral confidence is betrayed to a degree by its own level of intolerance towards the supposedly morally intolerant and overly judgemental. Would there be a need for today’s moral crusades against child abuse or FGM to be quite so shrill and knee-jerk were they reflective of a society genuinely confident and secure in what is right and what is wrong? A morally confident society might not need to be on such a high-state of moral alert against the dangers supposedly posed to the social fabric by cases such as the black Christian couple in Derby whom Derby Council denied the right to be foster carers because of their belief that homosexuality is a sin.
Francisco Goya was felled by a mysterious illness in 1792. He didn’t die, he just fell. The illness made him dizzy and disoriented. Goya stumbled; he teetered. He was nauseous. Voices sounded in his head. He was frequently in terror. His hearing began to fail. Soon, he was completely deaf. By all accounts, he was temporarily insane at points. Then he recovered, though he would never regain his hearing.
Before the illness, Goya had been a successful painter for the Spanish court. He was good, but unremarkable. After the illness, Goya became the extraordinary artist whose paintings — like The Third Of May 1808 — are among the most celebrated works in the history of art. In the late 1790s, Goya began working on a series of prints known asLos Caprichos. The Caprichos are commonly interpreted as satire. Goya was making fun of society’s corruptions and stupidities. Goya himself described the Caprichos as illustrating "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual.” The most famous print from the Caprichos is number 43, which bears the inscription: “El sueño de la razon produce monstrous,” or, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” You’ve likely seen the print. It shows a man, presumably Goya, asleep with his head on a desk. He’s been writing or drawing something. Behind the sleeping man are a number of creatures. Some of the creatures are owls. There are also bats. A lynx sits at the foot of the desk looking directly at the sleeping man. Goya’s fascination with monsters and the edge of reason stayed with him until his dying day.
In his early 70s, Goya had another bout of illness. This second illness caused Goya to begin his final series of paintings, known as the Black Paintings.
