Yesterday at midnight Uncle Andy was carried off by a white whale. He was not strapped to its back, like Ahab, but nestled in its bowels, like Jonah: an Uncle of Faith, not an Uncle of Wrath. The beast came belching to a stop outside the A&W Food Emporium on Meyran street, a milky, toothless leviathan with foul breath and a timetable: it blinked its yellow eyes, opened its mouth, swallowed my brother and a few other krill, and then it was off, plunging wild and free along dark highways into the cold heart of the urban east. This morning Catalina got a text-message: PROVIDENCE MERCIFUL: ALIVE IN MANHATTAN. WILD. -A.
Tonight we sacrifice the fatted Cabernet. We crack its skull, and splash its innards on the living alter of the tongue, a sanguinary celebration of divine providence. And we are not just drinking Andrew's successful skirmish with the Chinatown bus: we drink for a whole year, a wild year, in which providence has been wreaking strange and wonderful change in our lives. We drink to experience, that looming, cetacean body that appears without warning, swallows you whole, and delivers you to a far shore, dazzled, displaced, transformed. We drink tonight to the ritual destruction of the five year plan; we drink to the forced reinvention of the will; we drink to the fluid boundary between acting and being acted upon. We drink, in a word, for Benjamin.
Was there ever a time that we weren't parents? Life before the Visitation is a dim memory. I do remember the Call. I was settling down for a quiet night of work, Catalina out of town, the cats at peace, the whole night before me: projects stacked like Johnnycakes on the back burner of my imagination. The phone rang, and I let it go, vaguely registering the beep of the message machine, burying deeper into my books, into my Fausthood, relishing the beatific solitude that visits any man prepared to work deep into the night. Later I found out: just Gabriel, who with his usual diplomacy said "Blessed are you among men. Call your wife asap." I remember breaking the news to my brother of his impending Unclehood a week later, walking the streets of Brooklyn, past blasters of stereos, vendors of hats, men with yarmulkes, women with burkas, Puerto Ricans, homeless veterans, a drunk, a trash-talking four year old. "Well shiiiit," drawls a stunned A., kicking a crushed soda can into an open gutter. A moment of disbelief. Then a warm smile, a sly look, his usual merry twinkle. "You son of a bitch." We made burritos, watched fireworks from a rooftop, looked with rheumy eyes at the wounded skyline across the river. How were we to understand all this?
Soon there was a tightening of the belt. Eight months until doomsday, all right then, let's get organized: make a list, figure out what you've got to get done, work, run, produce. But a funny thing happened. Catalina returned, she started to swell, and almost immediately, the pending life began to exert its hold. We found ourselves reading things like "What to Expect When You're Expecting", pissing away time meditating on some artist's conception of what a child looks like at 17 weeks, (a cucumber, for the record), fretting about whether our favorite teas might injure the fetus. I found myself wanting to enter this experience, to do my research, to worry: to gather twigs and can worms. I ended up searching through the strange patterns of nest-making for some clue, about myself, about the species, about the Eternal Return and the Cycles of Life.
And then there was the summer, which we planned like a condemned man plans his last meal. First a lavish two week jaunt to Buenos Aires, the Paris of the South. We went in hot pursuit of literary ghosts (Cortazar, Borges, Sabato), but when we returned, we ourselves were ghosts, wan, overspent, underproductive: tourists, unrooted. We threw down tendrils in the dome, a luxurious six weeks of doomed tomato farming, squirrel husbandry, book editing, paper writing, reading, cooking, and general disconnecting with the events that loomed large on the horizon. The madness of our return, the chaotic search for an apartment, the growing panic that we wouldn't find our manger, throwing around that cash like we had it, all of this skin-of-the-teeth, all of it just-a-little-too-late, a harrowing sequence of last-ditch improvisations. Finally! A manger. And as my eight and a half months pregnant wife waddles around with leaves in her beak, patching a few small holes here and there, we are overcome with an uncanny sense of having just made it. Breath deep. Let it come.
And come it did. And when it came, it came after so much prolonged pandemonium, so much outlandish dithering and indecision and flapping and squawking, that it came without much noise at all. Just a baby. Relax. How hard can it be?
The noise level, it might be admitted, has not vanished. We still fret. We still read baby books. We still spend way too much time trying to figure out how to optimize this experience, both for ourselves and for the child. The other day, Catalina was amazed to learn, after three months of assiduously rocking the child to sleep every night for half an hour in her arms, that just throwing him in the crib and hitting the lights worked better: he calmed instantly, like a lobster with a nose massage, no fuss, no problem. Revelation! The child is like our new coffee machine, equipped with secret gizmos that heat him up and turn him off in ways that fit the lifestyle of the Modern and/or Prehistoric Parent. But the analogy to the coffee machine runs further, alas: too many knobs, and only the sketchiest of instructions, poorly written and machine translated.
Can we figure him out? Can we somehow manage to shower this child with all the love and attention and energy he needs to grow up into a mature, productive, self-confident adult, while at the same time spending enough time and energy on ourselves that we stay faithful to our own Guiding Spirits? Figuring out the Autobrew is definitely high on the list of projects for 2009.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Friday, December 26, 2008
'Tis The Season
Monday an arctic snap sent Pittsburgh temperatures plummeting to the low single digits. Late for a dental appointment, I charged from the house with wet hair and no hat, leaped on my bike, and pedaled for 15 minutes directly into the face of gale force winds. My right ear is now, quite predictably, frostbitten to a farthewell, and as I hobble around the house in my red longjohns, rustling up grub, pouring drinks, dandling the baby, dispensing cheer, I find myself, on the one hand, hoping against hope that the old adage "frostbite in January, surgery in June" will prove wrong, and on the other, imaging the suite of Russian bear-skin hats I will need to acquire in the future to conceal my missing ear.
Uncle Andy is in for the holidays. As usual, he got himself run over right before showing up, so instead of taking the town by storm, we are committed to yet another quiet convalescent leave. He pulled in on Wednesday night, having weathered 11 hours in a greyhound. This feat proved both aesthetically and physically injurious: tired and bus-savaged when he arrived, he was chain-vomiting in the bathroom the next day, having apparently caught the same Bulgarian Death Flu that laid me and my wife low a couple of weeks ago. He is still on the mend.
My Aunt sent us a Christmas card the other day. It begins as follows: "No matter what our circumstances, we all have much to be thankful for. On March 12th, in my home, I broke my right ankle on the stairs, then fell two stairs down onto the cement floor." She goes on to describe, in lurid detail, how she spent two weeks in the hospital, lost mobility in the foot, eventually returned to her job at Walmart, lost her basement to a freak flood, and is now forced to inhale the moral fetor from the new Miwok tribal casino a few miles down the road from her home. The letter ends with the sentence "It seems the Casino's do well even in a bad economy", no final period, no seasonal greetings, and no signature.
For obscure reasons, the spirit of the holiday seems to have left Benny totally untouched: he ogled the Uncle, blinked happily at the Christmas lights, stuffed gift paper in his mouth, chatted up the turkey, and sat happily in his papasan as his parents broke bread with friends, the distant dry-heaving of the uncle yet another coruscating novelty in a day of bright sparklies and rapturous rituals.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Hackwork
In 1990, the redoubtable trio of Avijit Banerjee, Cheickna Sylla, and Somkiat Eiamkanchanlai publish a five page tour de fource titled INPUT/OUTPUT LOT SIZING IN SINGLE STAGE BATCH PRODUCTION SYSTEMS UNDER CONSTANT DEMAND in Computers ind. Engng., Vol. 19, Nos 1-4, pp. 37-41. (The caps are theirs, not mine; what exactly Computer ind. Engng. might stand for in plain English is a secret known only to the editors.) In the tail end of 2008, a certain P., Professor Emeritus in the Duquesne school of business, decides to delay his retirement in response to a bear market. As employ presupposes publishing, and publishing (in operations research) presupposes a strong show of mathematics, Prof. P. launches a discrete inquiry: does anyone in the math department know anything about optimization? Soon Banerjee, Syhlla, and Eiamkanchanlai's slender gem is sitting on my desk. It bears a handwritten sticky note: 'Carl, I haven't read this, but I think we can improve on formula (5). Regards, P.'
It is a statistical fact that the average academic article is read by a total of six people. There is a reason for this: the average academic article is very boring. When you consider the fact that most academics spends months, even years preparing these things, that the articles are sent through a review process that takes just as long and sucks up energy that every reviewer would rather invest elsewhere, that the editors spend considerable resources in assessing the article's relevance, and that the typesetters invest hours trying to figure out how to fit things like pictures and equations within the narrow limits of the journal's margins, it makes you wonder: why all that work for six people? Especially when the author, the reviewer, and the editor represent three of them?
The answer, in my opinion, is that academic journals were never designed to produce beautiful things. Rather, they were designed to serve the very narrow requirements of the university system. For young faculty, an academic journal is where the battle for tenure, grants, and recognition is fought. For the university, a faculty publication record is a convenient way to tout its qualifications as a research center and thus justify charging its undergraduates $40,000 a year. For the reviewers, assessing peer work is a chance to show goodwill to the community, and increase the likelihood that their own papers will get published. The academic journal thus plays host to a cycle of petty advancement. Small wonder, then, that its contents end up being so ponderous: the academic article tends to emerge from a mind in the thrall of tenure, rather than beauty; to be read for omissions, rather than contributions; to be cited piecemeal, for specific ends, and when those ends are met, to be forgotten completely. Should it surprise us if these misbegotten creatures should have such shabby careers in the public imagination? If they manage to live at all, it is only because God is careless, and leaves traces of his smoldering presence in dry places, souls that have long ago have shut their shutters, extinguished their lights, loaded their shotguns and are waiting for death.
In The Gift, Lewis Hyde has a chapter called 'The Gift Community'. Though the focus of the chapter is on science and its practitioners, the arguments easily extend to a broader academic community. Hyde's point is that science, at least good science, is done not for lucre, or even for prestige, but as a kind of gift. The sense in which a work of science can be understood as a gift needs to understood in context, of course: the claim is not that leading scientists don't covet any of the social or material fringe benefits that their scientific success commands, but rather that these things alone don't explain the work. "In science", Hyde claims, "it is precisely when people work with no goal other than that of attracting a better job, or getting tenure or higher rank that one finds specious and trivial research, not contributions to knowledge." In Hyde's view, good science emerges from a deep and sustained sense that the Individual can have meaningful relation with the Universe. He claims that real science develops within a community whose whole ethical and aesthetic tone closely parallel those of tribal gift societies.
What is a gift society? In some ways, the answer to that question represents the entire content of Hyde's book, so I won't attempt to do it justice here. But one metaphor that can help us think about the problem is what Hyde calls the 'vector of increase'. In capitalist societies, one enters into mercantile exchange with the explicit intention of increasing one's own wealth. Personal enrichment is the essence of the transaction, and it thus doesn't make sense to suggest that one shouldn't expect it. In gift societies, on the other hand, transactions are also carried out with the expectation of increase, but there is no expectation that the increase will come back to the giver. The increase diffuses into the community, and only as a part of that community can the parties of the transaction expect to reap its benefits. The difference, then, is that in the one case the vector of increase points back to the self, whereas in the other it follows the gift.
The problem with bad science is that it assumes the form of a gift, but is accompanied by the wrong vector of increase. In other words, bad science is done for personal enrichment, not community enrichment, and as the gift goes out, floats innocently into the arena of public discourse, fat and slow moving, it gets caught in the cross-fire of self-enrichment, impaled by a vector of increase that's going the wrong way. Is an accident that journals labor under the dead weight of their contents? That an article that takes six man-months to write languishes unread in a thousand page annual compendium buried in the basement of the stacks? Perhaps this crisis of paper, this ever more torrential output of unread and unreadable results, this wild expansion of the Unknown, is connected, in some formal way, to the acedia of intellectual capitalism?
I explain all this to Zoogle. With his usual wisdom, he only looks at me with his bug eyes and smiles. Zoogle knows too much about hackwork to knock it: true, he's not reading Banerjee, Syhlla, and Eiamkanchanlai, but he's reading us, our canned laughter, our false excitement, our lullabies that are out of tune, our forced smiles. Zoogle doesn't care. He reads everything we publish, and every time he turns a page, he smiles, takes notes, jots down a few comments. Perhaps he knows that if doesn't hear the consonant 'p' at least 3000 times he'll never say it on his own. I don't know. But whatever his reasons, he's made his peace with the system, and with Zen-like calm he lets his education ride on his parents' perfunctory daily performance. Perhaps I should pay closer attention to this boy. He may have something to teach me.
It is a statistical fact that the average academic article is read by a total of six people. There is a reason for this: the average academic article is very boring. When you consider the fact that most academics spends months, even years preparing these things, that the articles are sent through a review process that takes just as long and sucks up energy that every reviewer would rather invest elsewhere, that the editors spend considerable resources in assessing the article's relevance, and that the typesetters invest hours trying to figure out how to fit things like pictures and equations within the narrow limits of the journal's margins, it makes you wonder: why all that work for six people? Especially when the author, the reviewer, and the editor represent three of them?
The answer, in my opinion, is that academic journals were never designed to produce beautiful things. Rather, they were designed to serve the very narrow requirements of the university system. For young faculty, an academic journal is where the battle for tenure, grants, and recognition is fought. For the university, a faculty publication record is a convenient way to tout its qualifications as a research center and thus justify charging its undergraduates $40,000 a year. For the reviewers, assessing peer work is a chance to show goodwill to the community, and increase the likelihood that their own papers will get published. The academic journal thus plays host to a cycle of petty advancement. Small wonder, then, that its contents end up being so ponderous: the academic article tends to emerge from a mind in the thrall of tenure, rather than beauty; to be read for omissions, rather than contributions; to be cited piecemeal, for specific ends, and when those ends are met, to be forgotten completely. Should it surprise us if these misbegotten creatures should have such shabby careers in the public imagination? If they manage to live at all, it is only because God is careless, and leaves traces of his smoldering presence in dry places, souls that have long ago have shut their shutters, extinguished their lights, loaded their shotguns and are waiting for death.
In The Gift, Lewis Hyde has a chapter called 'The Gift Community'. Though the focus of the chapter is on science and its practitioners, the arguments easily extend to a broader academic community. Hyde's point is that science, at least good science, is done not for lucre, or even for prestige, but as a kind of gift. The sense in which a work of science can be understood as a gift needs to understood in context, of course: the claim is not that leading scientists don't covet any of the social or material fringe benefits that their scientific success commands, but rather that these things alone don't explain the work. "In science", Hyde claims, "it is precisely when people work with no goal other than that of attracting a better job, or getting tenure or higher rank that one finds specious and trivial research, not contributions to knowledge." In Hyde's view, good science emerges from a deep and sustained sense that the Individual can have meaningful relation with the Universe. He claims that real science develops within a community whose whole ethical and aesthetic tone closely parallel those of tribal gift societies.
What is a gift society? In some ways, the answer to that question represents the entire content of Hyde's book, so I won't attempt to do it justice here. But one metaphor that can help us think about the problem is what Hyde calls the 'vector of increase'. In capitalist societies, one enters into mercantile exchange with the explicit intention of increasing one's own wealth. Personal enrichment is the essence of the transaction, and it thus doesn't make sense to suggest that one shouldn't expect it. In gift societies, on the other hand, transactions are also carried out with the expectation of increase, but there is no expectation that the increase will come back to the giver. The increase diffuses into the community, and only as a part of that community can the parties of the transaction expect to reap its benefits. The difference, then, is that in the one case the vector of increase points back to the self, whereas in the other it follows the gift.
The problem with bad science is that it assumes the form of a gift, but is accompanied by the wrong vector of increase. In other words, bad science is done for personal enrichment, not community enrichment, and as the gift goes out, floats innocently into the arena of public discourse, fat and slow moving, it gets caught in the cross-fire of self-enrichment, impaled by a vector of increase that's going the wrong way. Is an accident that journals labor under the dead weight of their contents? That an article that takes six man-months to write languishes unread in a thousand page annual compendium buried in the basement of the stacks? Perhaps this crisis of paper, this ever more torrential output of unread and unreadable results, this wild expansion of the Unknown, is connected, in some formal way, to the acedia of intellectual capitalism?
I explain all this to Zoogle. With his usual wisdom, he only looks at me with his bug eyes and smiles. Zoogle knows too much about hackwork to knock it: true, he's not reading Banerjee, Syhlla, and Eiamkanchanlai, but he's reading us, our canned laughter, our false excitement, our lullabies that are out of tune, our forced smiles. Zoogle doesn't care. He reads everything we publish, and every time he turns a page, he smiles, takes notes, jots down a few comments. Perhaps he knows that if doesn't hear the consonant 'p' at least 3000 times he'll never say it on his own. I don't know. But whatever his reasons, he's made his peace with the system, and with Zen-like calm he lets his education ride on his parents' perfunctory daily performance. Perhaps I should pay closer attention to this boy. He may have something to teach me.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
GBC '09
Zoogle has begun his official winter training regime as a sponsored contestant in the Great Baby Crawl, 2009. No one actually expected him to begin preparing so soon, but it is beginning to seem that the only thing that could be more surprising about this boy is if he failed to delivered his steady stream of developmental surprises. Here he is, at the ripe age of three months and change, and already he's got those great piggy thighs in fighting form, grinding into the ruana at first contact, digging desperately for a toe hole in the llama hair, his back arched, his rump high, his face clenched in furious concentration, churning and pumping and grinding in heroic pursuit of forward motion until, at last, the body exhausted, he dissolves, a quivering, shrieking mass of tears and sailor talk.One of our crack surveillance agents caught this barbarous spectacle on camera, and you can watch it here . The sounds track is as interesting as the footage: listen as the Crawling Coach showers the lad with just the right mixture of irony, ridicule, and encouragement. What soul could fail to flourish under these conditions? The stock holders are still waiting to see if the coach will prove her salt and lead this little guy to victory, but early signs are promising. The boy has a natural sense of form. He has the drive. Grit, talent, and a coach who's hard as nails: what more goes into the makings of a champion? True, there are few wrinkles. The hand part still needs a little work (right now he's just driving his nose into the carpet) and he needs to improve his psychological game (ending every practice session in tears is hard on both the athlete and the coach.) But most observers agree that Z. has a very real shot at the title.
In every venture of heroic dimensions, of course, there is a cynic. Some guy who stands in the corner of the room and mumbles out the reasons the plan might fail. In Z.'s case, two troublesome questions have been posed: the first is whether or not, in purely Newtonian terms, his body mass invalidates the possibility of self-propelled physical motion. Mostly people point to the NFL and say bah, but others aren't so sure. The second question is whether Z. will be able to make the transition from his Greek-style nudist training regime to the onerous but unavoidable clothing regime of the public games. At the moment, when the diapers come off, the legs get going, but while the diapers are on, he is a rag doll, limp as my spinach souffle. There may be something of a Ferdinand in that boy (Ferdinand being the wonderful bull who preferred to smell daisies than fight picadores, and was retired to blissful pasture after enraging an arena of bloodthirsty sportsfans.) But these are the chances we take. Who invited the cynic, anyway? Take it from me: the smart money for GBC '09 is on Z. Pigglesworth Toews. (See www.madoffspigglefund.com for betting opportunities.)
Sunday, December 14, 2008
The Gift
The spirit of Scrooge runs strong in my family. Not that I grew up on cold gruel, lumps of coal, and sealed chimneys, exactly: my memories of childhood Christmas are warm and vivid, our tree a chaotic pastiche of popcorn chains, glass bulbs, blinking lights, and stuffed angels, the scent of cinnamon steaming from the gluehwein, the piano and the recorders and Oh Little Town of Bethlehem sung bravely and shyly by a family that guards its voices, the strong rumballs, the gospel of John, Midnight Mass, the sleepless night, the dawn rising, the stockings full to bursting, lavish gift exchanges amid hugs, kisses, profuse thanks, a rich breakfast.
But I also remember that at some point there was a shift. The spirit of Christmas Cozy gave way to the spirit of Christmas Efficient. Midnight mass was pronounced "too inconvenient"; the 8 species of holiday cookies were condensed into three; we abandoned the advent calendars; the holy candles were lit intermittently, if at all. When the seasonal rallying cry eventually became "let's make this a gift-free Christmas", everyone knew that the Shadow of Toews had at long last blotted out the holiday, and that those golden days of Ritual and Feast had become a permanent, irretrievable part of the past.
Scrooge works in mysterious ways, however. Since leaving home almost 20 years ago, I have tenaciously defended my tradition of Holiday Crotchetiness. I rarely return home, I usually work Christmas day, I exchanging few gifts, and I bake no cookies. Indeed, my sociopathic currents run so deep they have weathered the usually fatal assault of a Relationship: most years I manage to wiggle out of the holiday festivities and pack Catalina off to Colombia alone, while I, cackling in my Scroogehood, hole up at home, swill beer, work feverishly. But this year something happened. Last Saturday I found myself catfooting it home with a Christmas tree slung over my back, a unilateral and spontaneous purchase that had me berating myself for frivolousness even as it warmed my heart and brought back a flood of memories. And as Marijuana is to the Heroin Addict, so the Christmas Tree is to the Reluctant Celebrant: not so bad in its own right, but a small step in the wrong direction that opens up the transition into worse. Need I mention that I also bought a set of Christmas lights? That we are researching cookie recipes? That debate is raging as to whether Santa's reindeer prefer cake or carrots?
Exactly what is going on is hard to pinpoint, but my suspicions cluster around a small group of Probable Agents, a loose-knit, street-hardened band of Spiritual Insubordinates whose mug shots litter the gallery of my reflective memory. First among them, of course, is Benjamin, who for all his apparent innocence is as hard boiled a rabblerouser as ever Wailed Upon a Midnight Clear. Children need amusements. Pretty lights, tales of elves, cookies, rituals: all these are to capture the hearts of the young, bind them to our customs, imprint their young, flexible minds with patterns of behavior that will seem native and natural once they calcify into adulthood. I as a young man was assimilated by the Borg. Now it is my turn to assimilate my son. If I do it well, he will assimilate his own children, and the collective will endure, with its vast arsenal of pageants, rhythms, patterns and relations intact for many years to come.
A second suspect is a book I recently picked up. It is called The Gift, and was written by a certain Lewis Hyde, grad-school drop out, free-range poet, and winner of a McArthur Grant, whose lucid, offbeat writings are beloved by writers, artists, and academics alike. In The Gift Lewis is writing about the relation between art and the free-market economy. Approaching the issue more as an anthropologist than as a revolutionary, Lewis examines societies in which it is the Gift, rather than the Commodity, that forms the basis of community cohesion, and explores some of the social, spiritual, and material tensions that arise when the gift is stripped of its ritual significance, or understood as a transfer of capital. Art, In Lewis' view, is a Gift in the sense that the energy and attention that go into its production are in most instances contrary, or at least unaligned, with the hallmark accretive impulses of capitalism. "When I speak of a labor...I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior than work." Work is the Spirit of Christmas Efficient, Labor is the Spirit of Christmas Cozy. And as it is precisely because the Gift lies at the heart of vibrant community, a healthy planet, and a sustainable identity, that the implications of non-giving, or of wrong-giving, are so far reaching.
I am not proposing that buying a Christmas tree has the power to re-immerse myself in the nurturing ambiance of other-centric, expectation-less exchange. But I do feel that perhaps the tree is symptomatic of a deeper, more gradual change in my view of how Giving holds the world together, and why it is that our "no gift" Christmas was such a horrible idea. For years we held off on children because we felt we didn't have enough time to give, that it would require resources of energy and patience that we had earmarked for ourselves. Then the child came, and instead of finding ourselves flat and empty, we found that the world responded by lavishing us with gifts. Our house is rich in laughter, good food streams from our kitchen, our friendships are strong, our work advances. Benjamin is an object lesson in the counterintuitive, sometimes uncanny economics of the Gift.
Other examples abound. My sister keeps a marvelous blog of her adventures in Turkey (interested readers can find it here .) As I know from writing this blog, finding the time to sit down and produce intelligible prose is not easy, especially when, like my sister, you are teaching full time, traveling like a maniac, navigating difficult relations and learning a foreign language. Her writing is a gift, without which I would have no idea of what she was experiencing, how she was growing, or how we were diverging. It helps bind a diffracted family. My mother does something similar with her pictures, her letters; my brother has a genius for catchy beats; my father weaves magic on the piano. These gifts, which trickle out sporadically, aimlessly, spontaneously, are not presented to anyone in particular: they emerge from spirits in abundance, and devolve, in an emotional trickle-down, to anyone within a certain radius. As in the potlatch of the Kwakiutl, there is some ineffable reward that attends the giving; there is Wealth in wealth reduction, Time in time-waste, Love in self-reflection. These are gifts that aren't counted, can't be priced, and whose engendering spirit renews the soul.
Which is not to say that I have stopped counting altogether, alas: the only two gifts under the tree at the moment are both for little Benny, of course, who, in his three short months of life, has received more letters, packages, emails and phone calls that his two parents combined. The old Spirit of Scrooge raises his hoary head, scratches his armpits, shakes off a few fleas: what's this, one new baby and suddenly everyone forgets about ma and pa? Bah humbug.
But I also remember that at some point there was a shift. The spirit of Christmas Cozy gave way to the spirit of Christmas Efficient. Midnight mass was pronounced "too inconvenient"; the 8 species of holiday cookies were condensed into three; we abandoned the advent calendars; the holy candles were lit intermittently, if at all. When the seasonal rallying cry eventually became "let's make this a gift-free Christmas", everyone knew that the Shadow of Toews had at long last blotted out the holiday, and that those golden days of Ritual and Feast had become a permanent, irretrievable part of the past.
Scrooge works in mysterious ways, however. Since leaving home almost 20 years ago, I have tenaciously defended my tradition of Holiday Crotchetiness. I rarely return home, I usually work Christmas day, I exchanging few gifts, and I bake no cookies. Indeed, my sociopathic currents run so deep they have weathered the usually fatal assault of a Relationship: most years I manage to wiggle out of the holiday festivities and pack Catalina off to Colombia alone, while I, cackling in my Scroogehood, hole up at home, swill beer, work feverishly. But this year something happened. Last Saturday I found myself catfooting it home with a Christmas tree slung over my back, a unilateral and spontaneous purchase that had me berating myself for frivolousness even as it warmed my heart and brought back a flood of memories. And as Marijuana is to the Heroin Addict, so the Christmas Tree is to the Reluctant Celebrant: not so bad in its own right, but a small step in the wrong direction that opens up the transition into worse. Need I mention that I also bought a set of Christmas lights? That we are researching cookie recipes? That debate is raging as to whether Santa's reindeer prefer cake or carrots?
Exactly what is going on is hard to pinpoint, but my suspicions cluster around a small group of Probable Agents, a loose-knit, street-hardened band of Spiritual Insubordinates whose mug shots litter the gallery of my reflective memory. First among them, of course, is Benjamin, who for all his apparent innocence is as hard boiled a rabblerouser as ever Wailed Upon a Midnight Clear. Children need amusements. Pretty lights, tales of elves, cookies, rituals: all these are to capture the hearts of the young, bind them to our customs, imprint their young, flexible minds with patterns of behavior that will seem native and natural once they calcify into adulthood. I as a young man was assimilated by the Borg. Now it is my turn to assimilate my son. If I do it well, he will assimilate his own children, and the collective will endure, with its vast arsenal of pageants, rhythms, patterns and relations intact for many years to come.
A second suspect is a book I recently picked up. It is called The Gift, and was written by a certain Lewis Hyde, grad-school drop out, free-range poet, and winner of a McArthur Grant, whose lucid, offbeat writings are beloved by writers, artists, and academics alike. In The Gift Lewis is writing about the relation between art and the free-market economy. Approaching the issue more as an anthropologist than as a revolutionary, Lewis examines societies in which it is the Gift, rather than the Commodity, that forms the basis of community cohesion, and explores some of the social, spiritual, and material tensions that arise when the gift is stripped of its ritual significance, or understood as a transfer of capital. Art, In Lewis' view, is a Gift in the sense that the energy and attention that go into its production are in most instances contrary, or at least unaligned, with the hallmark accretive impulses of capitalism. "When I speak of a labor...I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior than work." Work is the Spirit of Christmas Efficient, Labor is the Spirit of Christmas Cozy. And as it is precisely because the Gift lies at the heart of vibrant community, a healthy planet, and a sustainable identity, that the implications of non-giving, or of wrong-giving, are so far reaching.
I am not proposing that buying a Christmas tree has the power to re-immerse myself in the nurturing ambiance of other-centric, expectation-less exchange. But I do feel that perhaps the tree is symptomatic of a deeper, more gradual change in my view of how Giving holds the world together, and why it is that our "no gift" Christmas was such a horrible idea. For years we held off on children because we felt we didn't have enough time to give, that it would require resources of energy and patience that we had earmarked for ourselves. Then the child came, and instead of finding ourselves flat and empty, we found that the world responded by lavishing us with gifts. Our house is rich in laughter, good food streams from our kitchen, our friendships are strong, our work advances. Benjamin is an object lesson in the counterintuitive, sometimes uncanny economics of the Gift.
Other examples abound. My sister keeps a marvelous blog of her adventures in Turkey (interested readers can find it here .) As I know from writing this blog, finding the time to sit down and produce intelligible prose is not easy, especially when, like my sister, you are teaching full time, traveling like a maniac, navigating difficult relations and learning a foreign language. Her writing is a gift, without which I would have no idea of what she was experiencing, how she was growing, or how we were diverging. It helps bind a diffracted family. My mother does something similar with her pictures, her letters; my brother has a genius for catchy beats; my father weaves magic on the piano. These gifts, which trickle out sporadically, aimlessly, spontaneously, are not presented to anyone in particular: they emerge from spirits in abundance, and devolve, in an emotional trickle-down, to anyone within a certain radius. As in the potlatch of the Kwakiutl, there is some ineffable reward that attends the giving; there is Wealth in wealth reduction, Time in time-waste, Love in self-reflection. These are gifts that aren't counted, can't be priced, and whose engendering spirit renews the soul.
Which is not to say that I have stopped counting altogether, alas: the only two gifts under the tree at the moment are both for little Benny, of course, who, in his three short months of life, has received more letters, packages, emails and phone calls that his two parents combined. The old Spirit of Scrooge raises his hoary head, scratches his armpits, shakes off a few fleas: what's this, one new baby and suddenly everyone forgets about ma and pa? Bah humbug.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Hühnesuppe
We live right on the border between the part of town your can't afford to live in, and the part of town you don't want to live in. Coming back from the post office today I see a billboard at the local hospital that says "This is the hospital for people who don't like hospitals." I presume that what this means is that, contrary to federal law, they don't report gunshot wounds. After all, who likes hospitals?
Catalina was down today with a touch of the same Bangali death flew that had me clutching the porcelain god for mercy last week. I stepped to the plate and took over Zoogle duties in the morning. Around 2 o'clock Zoogle and I both had cabin fever, so we decided to make a run on the market, get ourselves a little chicken, see if together we couldn't produce a little of that famed Toews' Hühnesuppe for the missus. So I plop Z. in the carseat, and feeling a little waggish, I decide to leave all baby accessories at home, just head off, Vater und Sohn, into the vast unknown, alone and without resources. (For those who have never attempted this, incidentally, let me highlight the magnitude of the consequences should the wee one get hungry. It is an act of recklessness on par with Tchaikovsky's swilling of tap water in a time of cholera, or Byron's relentless bedding of prostitutes in a time of galloping syphillus.)
We come screeching into the parking lot and as I try to barrel through the double glass doors with the child in the carrier, my way is blocked by two elderly Krumpelfrauen standing in the middle of the passage, arguing in German about the proper use of the handcart. Though it is raining, and cold as hell, I bide my time. They eventually see me, nod curtly, and allow me to pass. I smile.
With the baby-clock ticking, I have only a few moment to choose my route, my groceries, and my checkout line. I make commendable time in the fruit department, instantly spotting organic Braeburn apples at $1.69, choosing six at random, and, with leaderly coldness, squashing all further interest in matters vegetative. There is the matter of salad fixings, however.... Just as I swoop on a head of purple cabbage and prepare to sprint to the meat counter, a young black man with crooked teeth, who has hitherto been unobtrusively stacking cucumbers, takes a look inside my car seat and says, in a heavy foreign accent, "great baby." I agree. He tells me his name is Daniel, comes from Sudan, and would like to have ten children. "Because when you are old, it is like having ten versions of yourself," he explains. I don't mention overpopulation, I don't mention Darfur, I don't mention that I don't have a bottle, but I do mention that Benjamin is too young to respond to his playful teasing, so he shouldn't take it personally. "No, yes, too young. Of course. No problem. Maybe when he grow up he come here work with me." We smile, I pocket the cabbage, we're off.
At the meat counter whom should I encounter but the Krumpelfrauen. This time they are discussing the price of veal, and trying to understand it in terms of Kilos instead of pounds. My sprachlust gets the better of me, and I astutely announce, in strongly accented but intelligible German, that they, in fact, are German. "Ja", they reply, smiling. Ja. I smile back. "Schönes kind", says the one, and I agree, he is a beautiful boy. And we talk about the vaterland and the family and the difference between this dry amerikan wurst and the real, juicy, blood-and-guts german sort, when out of left field the lady comments, "er sieht ja ein bischen ueberfuttert aus", which, loosely translated, means it looks like you've been feeding your little piggy too much corn. I etch a german smile on my face, and with clinical dexterity explain the benefits of being fat when one is young. She nods sagely. And then from even further out in left field: "Er ist denn gestillt?", which I misunderstood to be "Er ist denn gestollen?", which means "He is of course stolen, right?" And when I ask how she knew, she says yeah, you know, from the mother. At which point my confusion my have been quite palpable, for her partner quickly steps in and, in perfect English, explains that while gestohlen (from stehlen) does indeed mean stolen, gestillt (from stillen) means breastfed.
Past the cheese, then, ducking below the dairy cabinet when I see the Krumpelfrauen coming the other way, deftly resisting the olive bar, and I'm done, chickenfleisch, a few onions, a couple of potatoes, and all the other secret ingredients that go into the Welt-famous Toews Huhnesuppe splayed out on the checkout counter. One slow-poke lady in front of me, don't look but there are the Frauen in next line over, come on dude, do you really need to change your drawer? Of course he does. Five minutes tick by as the Chuck the Checkout Guy counts his quarters and Zoogle sings increasingly frenzied arias from Don Giovanni. On the way out I dodge the Krumpelfrauen one last time, wave goodbye, hit the car at a dead run, gun the engine, and I am back at the house just as Zoogle passes into a hypoglycemic coma.
Catalina ended up making her own damn Weltberuhmtetoewshuehnesuppe, naturally.
Catalina was down today with a touch of the same Bangali death flew that had me clutching the porcelain god for mercy last week. I stepped to the plate and took over Zoogle duties in the morning. Around 2 o'clock Zoogle and I both had cabin fever, so we decided to make a run on the market, get ourselves a little chicken, see if together we couldn't produce a little of that famed Toews' Hühnesuppe for the missus. So I plop Z. in the carseat, and feeling a little waggish, I decide to leave all baby accessories at home, just head off, Vater und Sohn, into the vast unknown, alone and without resources. (For those who have never attempted this, incidentally, let me highlight the magnitude of the consequences should the wee one get hungry. It is an act of recklessness on par with Tchaikovsky's swilling of tap water in a time of cholera, or Byron's relentless bedding of prostitutes in a time of galloping syphillus.)
We come screeching into the parking lot and as I try to barrel through the double glass doors with the child in the carrier, my way is blocked by two elderly Krumpelfrauen standing in the middle of the passage, arguing in German about the proper use of the handcart. Though it is raining, and cold as hell, I bide my time. They eventually see me, nod curtly, and allow me to pass. I smile.
With the baby-clock ticking, I have only a few moment to choose my route, my groceries, and my checkout line. I make commendable time in the fruit department, instantly spotting organic Braeburn apples at $1.69, choosing six at random, and, with leaderly coldness, squashing all further interest in matters vegetative. There is the matter of salad fixings, however.... Just as I swoop on a head of purple cabbage and prepare to sprint to the meat counter, a young black man with crooked teeth, who has hitherto been unobtrusively stacking cucumbers, takes a look inside my car seat and says, in a heavy foreign accent, "great baby." I agree. He tells me his name is Daniel, comes from Sudan, and would like to have ten children. "Because when you are old, it is like having ten versions of yourself," he explains. I don't mention overpopulation, I don't mention Darfur, I don't mention that I don't have a bottle, but I do mention that Benjamin is too young to respond to his playful teasing, so he shouldn't take it personally. "No, yes, too young. Of course. No problem. Maybe when he grow up he come here work with me." We smile, I pocket the cabbage, we're off.
At the meat counter whom should I encounter but the Krumpelfrauen. This time they are discussing the price of veal, and trying to understand it in terms of Kilos instead of pounds. My sprachlust gets the better of me, and I astutely announce, in strongly accented but intelligible German, that they, in fact, are German. "Ja", they reply, smiling. Ja. I smile back. "Schönes kind", says the one, and I agree, he is a beautiful boy. And we talk about the vaterland and the family and the difference between this dry amerikan wurst and the real, juicy, blood-and-guts german sort, when out of left field the lady comments, "er sieht ja ein bischen ueberfuttert aus", which, loosely translated, means it looks like you've been feeding your little piggy too much corn. I etch a german smile on my face, and with clinical dexterity explain the benefits of being fat when one is young. She nods sagely. And then from even further out in left field: "Er ist denn gestillt?", which I misunderstood to be "Er ist denn gestollen?", which means "He is of course stolen, right?" And when I ask how she knew, she says yeah, you know, from the mother. At which point my confusion my have been quite palpable, for her partner quickly steps in and, in perfect English, explains that while gestohlen (from stehlen) does indeed mean stolen, gestillt (from stillen) means breastfed.
Past the cheese, then, ducking below the dairy cabinet when I see the Krumpelfrauen coming the other way, deftly resisting the olive bar, and I'm done, chickenfleisch, a few onions, a couple of potatoes, and all the other secret ingredients that go into the Welt-famous Toews Huhnesuppe splayed out on the checkout counter. One slow-poke lady in front of me, don't look but there are the Frauen in next line over, come on dude, do you really need to change your drawer? Of course he does. Five minutes tick by as the Chuck the Checkout Guy counts his quarters and Zoogle sings increasingly frenzied arias from Don Giovanni. On the way out I dodge the Krumpelfrauen one last time, wave goodbye, hit the car at a dead run, gun the engine, and I am back at the house just as Zoogle passes into a hypoglycemic coma.
Catalina ended up making her own damn Weltberuhmtetoewshuehnesuppe, naturally.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The Company Party
For months Joanne the Irascible Secretary had been asking when Benjamin was going to make an appearance in the office. My responses were always guarded. Partly, this elusiveness was due to the fact that arranging a family outing downtown, in the middle of the work week, with a wife and a child and all the attendant prodding and swaddling and cooing and coaxing, the traffic, the parking, and the general pandemonium, had become an Enterprise of such gargantuan dimensions that I felt it beyond my powers. But partly too it was because the grandmotherly Joanne is batty as a spring loon, and some primal protective impulse suggested keeping kids in one place and madwomen in another.
I have, I should admit, a weird relationship with secretaries. In some way it is a lot like Fellini's relationship with clowns: they are sources of sociological fascination, epistemic angst, metaphysical curiosity, and spiritual disquiet. I ride the crest of their goodwill with an abiding sense of escape, and as we exchange pleasantries, discuss deadlines, find forms, or curse the copier, I watch them for signs that the my reprieve has ended, opinion shifted, sins been exposed and all the goodwill gone. At the root of this pathological conception lies, doubtless, a kind of class consciousness: having always pegged my identity to that of the underdog, there is a sense of guilt that goes with 'having a secretary', even if she's doesn't work for me personally and even if I don't ask her to do anything. Men who have secretaries are men who wear fat yellow power ties, close big business deals, cheat on their wives and have dysfunctional relations with their children. Perhaps it is the nagging conviction that in spite of my best efforts to live la vie bohéme, I'm linked at some deep and irredeemable level with exactly the sort of the blind, upward guppy-thrust of the bourgeoisie that I have always detested. No one sees this motley, unwilled double life quite as nakedly as the Secretary.
Whatever my relation to some Secretary-in-the-Abstract, however, it had become obvious to me that my relation to Joanne was fast deteriorating, and that my days of grace were numbered. So last week, when after another tense conversation in which she made very little eye contact and seemed deeply entranced with some icon in the upper right hand corner of her screen, she happened to mention the Departmental Christmas Party, I seized the opportunity for redemption. "Hey, Josie," I ask coyly, "would it be OK if I brought little Benji to that party?" Her eyes light up, her mouth dissolves into a smile, she looks me in the eye for the first time in months, and says "that would be lovely" with such warmth, energy, and obvious goodwill that I'm convinced my days in the doghouse are over.
Absence being the better part of prudence, however, I keep a low profile for the next couple of days. In spite of this precaution, I find myself growing increasingly nervous that something has gone wrong. Some small voice in my gut is whispering words of warning, telling me that my good credit had slipped, the karmic debt collectors are after me, and that merely sacrificing my son will no longer cut it when it comes to appeasing the primal pagan deities of the secretarial underworld. My doubt reaches the point that I almost decide not to go. But though the day of the party dawns gray and miserable (like most other days in Pittsburgh), and I get cold just glancing out the window, at the last moment I summon my resolve. Wide eyed Benny in tow, and Catalina out parking the car, I enter the party.
Math company parties are not the same as Company company parties. Company parties in real companies involves gimlets, toothpicks, swanky music and at least the possibility of embarrassment. The aforementioned deal maker in a yellow tie watches patiently as the boss hits on his wife. Deals and promotions are worked out in between paté runs. In a math company party, on the other hand, there is barely conversation, let alone dealmaking. The food consists of one vat greenbeans, one vat potatoes, and two vats chicken (one thick cut, one thin cut, just for variety.) There is no alcohol. Stanislav's wife makes her famous creampuffs, of course, which everyone formally praises. A half dozen forlorn graduate students stand in the hallway talking among themselves and trying to look involved.
Joanne is seated on her swivel stool when Benjamin's left cheek crests the sill of the door. She rises like an Egyptian priestess, dignified, semi-smiling, fully conscious of her ritual function as she moves toward the offering. Her hair is a grumpy red cactus, parched and spiny, the only one of its species for miles. Earrings that could double as clappers in the village bell oscillate wildly, trying to find some native frequency in the bedrock that separates them. Her fingernails are lacquered lollipop red, her eyeshadow is visible from ten paces, and her blouse is decorously loose. "May I?" she breathes in the husky voice of a Pittsburgh lifer. My brain is reeling, my hands trembling. With trapped-animal cunning, I blurt "hang on, give this little guy a moment, he just got up from a nap." The God-head moves back, stunned, confused. And I, I stand by the counter, a faithless Abraham, my Isaac unoffered and my covenant broken, I stand by the counter breathing the cool air of the outcast, feeling my Cain-hood spread and darken, stand and watch the gawdy angel of death beat a howling retreat to her cubby hole, and my spirit shivers, and my heart is at peace.
It occurs to me that I may need to see a shrink at some point.
I have, I should admit, a weird relationship with secretaries. In some way it is a lot like Fellini's relationship with clowns: they are sources of sociological fascination, epistemic angst, metaphysical curiosity, and spiritual disquiet. I ride the crest of their goodwill with an abiding sense of escape, and as we exchange pleasantries, discuss deadlines, find forms, or curse the copier, I watch them for signs that the my reprieve has ended, opinion shifted, sins been exposed and all the goodwill gone. At the root of this pathological conception lies, doubtless, a kind of class consciousness: having always pegged my identity to that of the underdog, there is a sense of guilt that goes with 'having a secretary', even if she's doesn't work for me personally and even if I don't ask her to do anything. Men who have secretaries are men who wear fat yellow power ties, close big business deals, cheat on their wives and have dysfunctional relations with their children. Perhaps it is the nagging conviction that in spite of my best efforts to live la vie bohéme, I'm linked at some deep and irredeemable level with exactly the sort of the blind, upward guppy-thrust of the bourgeoisie that I have always detested. No one sees this motley, unwilled double life quite as nakedly as the Secretary.
Whatever my relation to some Secretary-in-the-Abstract, however, it had become obvious to me that my relation to Joanne was fast deteriorating, and that my days of grace were numbered. So last week, when after another tense conversation in which she made very little eye contact and seemed deeply entranced with some icon in the upper right hand corner of her screen, she happened to mention the Departmental Christmas Party, I seized the opportunity for redemption. "Hey, Josie," I ask coyly, "would it be OK if I brought little Benji to that party?" Her eyes light up, her mouth dissolves into a smile, she looks me in the eye for the first time in months, and says "that would be lovely" with such warmth, energy, and obvious goodwill that I'm convinced my days in the doghouse are over.
Absence being the better part of prudence, however, I keep a low profile for the next couple of days. In spite of this precaution, I find myself growing increasingly nervous that something has gone wrong. Some small voice in my gut is whispering words of warning, telling me that my good credit had slipped, the karmic debt collectors are after me, and that merely sacrificing my son will no longer cut it when it comes to appeasing the primal pagan deities of the secretarial underworld. My doubt reaches the point that I almost decide not to go. But though the day of the party dawns gray and miserable (like most other days in Pittsburgh), and I get cold just glancing out the window, at the last moment I summon my resolve. Wide eyed Benny in tow, and Catalina out parking the car, I enter the party.
Math company parties are not the same as Company company parties. Company parties in real companies involves gimlets, toothpicks, swanky music and at least the possibility of embarrassment. The aforementioned deal maker in a yellow tie watches patiently as the boss hits on his wife. Deals and promotions are worked out in between paté runs. In a math company party, on the other hand, there is barely conversation, let alone dealmaking. The food consists of one vat greenbeans, one vat potatoes, and two vats chicken (one thick cut, one thin cut, just for variety.) There is no alcohol. Stanislav's wife makes her famous creampuffs, of course, which everyone formally praises. A half dozen forlorn graduate students stand in the hallway talking among themselves and trying to look involved.
Joanne is seated on her swivel stool when Benjamin's left cheek crests the sill of the door. She rises like an Egyptian priestess, dignified, semi-smiling, fully conscious of her ritual function as she moves toward the offering. Her hair is a grumpy red cactus, parched and spiny, the only one of its species for miles. Earrings that could double as clappers in the village bell oscillate wildly, trying to find some native frequency in the bedrock that separates them. Her fingernails are lacquered lollipop red, her eyeshadow is visible from ten paces, and her blouse is decorously loose. "May I?" she breathes in the husky voice of a Pittsburgh lifer. My brain is reeling, my hands trembling. With trapped-animal cunning, I blurt "hang on, give this little guy a moment, he just got up from a nap." The God-head moves back, stunned, confused. And I, I stand by the counter, a faithless Abraham, my Isaac unoffered and my covenant broken, I stand by the counter breathing the cool air of the outcast, feeling my Cain-hood spread and darken, stand and watch the gawdy angel of death beat a howling retreat to her cubby hole, and my spirit shivers, and my heart is at peace.
It occurs to me that I may need to see a shrink at some point.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
The Break
In the last five days Zoogle has changed from Marlon Brando into Dorian Gray. His endless rolls of tummy chub have evolved from undulating hills into a luxuriant sloping tundra, i.e. the coherent, well-proportioned pot-belly that is the trademark of any man in serious pursuit of sustained overindulgence. His face, which was once a pear (photo left), has become a heart (photo right), with high, ruddy cheeks and bright eyes reflecting a spirit that has sampled, and is confident
in its ability to continue to sample, the fruits of Life's basic abundance. And his hair, once wispy and fine, is now a coarse, tangled mass of snaggle-heaps, little fibrous thickets that shoot up irregularly across the scalp; in short, the hair of a man who is losing his hair, and is sufficiently rich in Life's graces that he doesn't give a damn.
Like many of the slow changes that we never notice (the ebbing of a water line, the death of a relationship) I imagine that the transformation did not, in fact, occur within the last five days, but has been happening for a long time, finally becoming substantial enough that we took note. Of course, the trigger for such sudden recognition could be a shift in reality, or it could be a shift in perception: in this case, there are a couple of reasons our perceptual apparatus might be more open than usual. On my end, the semester just ended (modulo final exams), and as usual, there is a concomitant rush of energy, a simmering, excited lull in which I hash plans, connive, dream, and unfold. The world seen through the filter of Another Beginning is very different from the world seen through the filter of Another Day at the Grind. The end of the semester also means that those among Catalina's fellow graduate students who were not hijacked by a baby are now applying for jobs, a potent reminder that, if the five year plan is to hold, she has only 12 more months in which to finish planning, reading for, and writing her thesis. When the life of the mind must be seized in small snippets, summing up to no more that two or three hours of good, focused time per day, the organism reasonably responds by employing its sensory minions more efficiently.
Of course fate gives with the left hand and takes with the right: in what should have been a grand week of explosive advance, I was struck with a violent stomach flu, Zoogle has been cranky and irritable, and Catalina has been reeling under the responsibility of simultaneously caring for an infant and invalid. So while both our eyes were open enough to see that Zoogle is changing, the wife is currently roaming the house like a Zombie, I am prostrate in bed with brain fever, chills, and serial vomiting, and Zoogle, mercifully flu-free but cranky as hell (teething?) continues to lord our home and actions like Max WildThing.
In a curious sense, however, it almost seems to me that the Perception Broadening properties of a good Breaking Open are identical to those of a Breaking Down. It is exactly in these selve oscure, when the body and the spirit have given all that you thought that they could give, that you discover yet another streak of energy, yet another glimmering of willpower that allows you to drag your broken, feverish body from the bed at 7 in the morning, to feed the cats, to tend the child, to ruminate on a set of measure zero, or to behold with bleary, ecstatic eyes the wonders of the natural world.
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