Whereas the mirror in Snow White reflected the truth to the evil Queen, the televisions in our lives, reflect lies pretending to be the truth. The ridiculousness of television advertising is a reflection shared by everyone who appreciates a fine espresso. And every Moleskin owner can recall their own inane examples. In my case, I cringe at ads that show people feeding liver pâté to dogs, while millions around the world starve. During the Christmas holidays, I close my eyes when confronted by the seasonal Lexus ad, showing someone receiving a brand new Lexus SUV, with a big red-bow on top. Joy to the World and all that. And yet, there was a time, at a much younger age, when I thought how amazing it would be to present my parents with just such a gift on a pristine snowy white Christmas morn. And I will also admit that I have in the past slipped into breathlessness when first exposed to a new Apple ad, (this one in particular gets my goat). Oh the efficiency and intelligence of the design! The clarity of the graphic user interface! It is as if it was made for me, by people who think like me, and if I purchased it, I would be even more, like me.

Then last night, staring at the television, I took a step back, an extra ontological level if you will, and asked the question – what reflection of me is being shown in these endless ads? I concluded it was a me that was always in need of something, a me that was in some way inadequate.

ThePithyTweeter: “Humans are always in need, always incomplete, always hungry!” 2 seconds ago

Yes, but that confuses two things that are not the same. Yes, the human condition seems perpetually unsatisfied. But that is a different type of lack (it may also be a difference of degree, between being incomplete and inadequate). The in-completion that haunts humanity is a lack of something non-material, born of a desire for fulfillment, love, meaning, peace, hope, connection, transcendence beyond pain and death. I’m guessing these desires can never be fully satisfied, certainly not by the material world. And so it is a slight-of-hand by marketers to suggest that if I buy, say the latest Apple computer, Jonathan Ive’s sense of fulfilment will be mine. I will escape my own angst, my own seemingly endless Arthurian trek. The faultless iPhoto-sample face photo will become my face, and I will be the fairest in the land, or at least one of the fairest, or at least not one of the ugliest. Needless to say, even when I buy the product, it never quite works out that way. I turn off the face-recognition feature in iPhoto so I don’t have to see my actual face every time I open the application.

So far nothing particularly new – ads seduce us and materialist consumption leaves us spiritually unfulfilled. Big deal. The economist Victor Lebow said as much in 1955; “[o]ur enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption.” But economics itself teaches us that there are two costs to every decision, the cost of doing it (which we agree at this point was not worth it) and the cost of not having done something else. I’m interested in thinking about the latter – “the opportunity cost of television advertising to the human soul.”

ThePithyTweeter: “What a pretentious twat.” 2 seconds ago

The German film director Werner Herzog has spoken and written extensively about a related topic – the dangers of inadequate images. Rather than summarizing his thesis, here is a quote from his book, Herzog on Herzog:

I would like to add to Herzog’s reflection, or at least amplify a particular thread within it, to say that because television advertising falsely argues that it is a reflection of how we actually are, the Herzogian inadequacy of its imagery, becomes the inadequacy of it’s reflection of us. And to the extent to which we internalize this inadequate portrait, by being exposed to it thousands of times a day, we begin to think of ourselves as that reflection, rather than who we actually are. Thus I am not me, I am an individual of a particular socio-economic bracket who has yet to buy a Lexus SUV, secure the affections “forever” of my partner with a triple diamond band, retire to a vineyard, etc., etc. And so I begin to work with the reflection, instead of myself. What strategy can I develop to maximize the utility of this chisel-jawed Apollo? I sit on my bicycle and imagine, a la the law of attraction, that I in fact already have my new SUV, that I already am, the man in the mirror.

In the original Brothers Grimm tale, the evil Queen eats the center of an apple, and offers Snow White the poisoned surface. Snow White eats the skin, and falls into a seemingly endless sleep. The seven dwarfs are unable to wake her, and so heart-broken, and assuming she is dead, they place Snow White in a glass coffin in the forest. Like our true selves, Snow White remains suspended, undead in a forgotten womb, far away from the action, until one day a Prince . . .

I wonder what could be the equivalent to the Prince in our story? What will wake us from our consumerist conformist coma? What will wake us to discover our multi-faceted, rough-around-the-edges, quirky, unfashionable, unique true selves? Could the crippling financial crisis be our Prince? Like many people I’m much more conscious about my purchases these days. In fact I consume very little other than the necessities. And the drop in my consumption has not had the drop in happiness I thought it would. I worry about the future like everyone does right now. But it’s not a worry about whether or not I’ll be able to buy my parents a Lexus SUV, it’s just a hope that I will be able to continue to think, to have conversations with friends, to learn more, to be able to communicate with you like this. The impact of the crisis has been to awaken me to how little I actually need. The ads on television now seem not my reflection, but merely the shrill screams of hawkers in a bazaar – nothing more than background noise. My television is no longer a mirror. I think I’m free of it.

ThePithyTweeter: “Yeah for you.” 2 seconds ago

Nietzsche’s aphorism that God is Dead is now so passé, so affected, that it is in great danger of soon appearing, in ironic reincarnation, on the front of a hipster t-shirt. And yet the death of the objective haunts our lives. For over 50 years, there has been a social dialogue within Western society, essentially between hip and square. This emerged explicitly in the 1960s and yielded much fruit that we enjoy today. But by the late 1970s, the avant-garde of this counter-culture became so associated with dissipation, mere critique, and a lack of sustainability, that reactionary movements dominated the 1980s in both the US under Reagan, and the UK under Thatcher. These movements too fizzled out into dissipation and bust. The mainstreaming of the internet in the late 90s, and the economic boom that it sponsored, suggested a new objective meta-narrative, a third-way, that promised to take the social liberalism of the 1960s and combine it with the economic dynamism of the 1980s. The “BoBo,” the bohemian-bourgeois, the “creative class,” was born; sandals and sushi on the other side of history. Bo-Bo died on September 11, 2001. During the Bush years that followed, America metastized. The military-industrial-complex exploded in size and influence. Imperial foreign-wars were cynically and shamelessly prosecuted for the exclusive benefit of corporate interests. All dissent was crushed as “Un-American” and fear was sown broadcast. By the end of the Bush era, the reality of America had become so foreign to Americans, that they crossed a line hitherto unimaginable, and elected their first African-American president.

Barack Obama was the great American hope. Confident, intelligent, articulate, of mixed heritage, he symbolized for many the quintessential essence of America. For liberals he was the long-awaited Messiah, the child of their summer of love toughened by the Spartan winter of the Reagan years. For independents, he was not the establishment that had run the country into two pointless, expensive and seemingly endless wars. Only a dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon can deny the scale of the multilayered and sincere joy that coursed through the United States upon his election. But the financial-crisis, the bailout, and the subsequent unnamed-depression provided the perfect opportunity for reactionary forces, with their ideological roots in the Reagan years, their sense of entitlement in the Bush years, to fight back. There followed a series of obscenities in the public square. The US Supreme Court controversially awarded to corporations the opportunity to contribute to their political puppets without limit. The Fox News network descended into a level of discourse that passed race-baiting and irrationality with aplomb. Extreme right-wing political groups largely financed by the Koch Brothers and their fellow travellers, launched a volley of shock-doctrine tactics at both the state and federal levels. Political-hack organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity, were commissioned to astro-turf political agitation and purchase Congress for corporate interests in the midterm elections. And they succeeded. Even to those of us who continue to support Obama, it has become clear that his power, our power in this context, is fettered. It defies logic to continue to believe that we live in a functional representative democracy, when a minority that has brought us to financial ruin, should go unpunished, should in fact be richly and personally rewarded, as millions of their powerless victims face long-term unemployment and eviction. These obscenities have ripped the moral fabric of our society apart. The curtain in the temple of our democracy has been torn.

My own reaction to this reality has been tortured. On the one hand there is the natural reaction to want to wash one’s hands of the whole thing, to pursue a life of cultivated and intentional ignorance of the politics of distraction, the misleading and time-wasting hysterics of political theatre. Countering this reaction is the feeling that to live that way is to be anesthetized to one’s own time, in a way that has a faint hint of cowardice about it. On the other hand, there is the notion of becoming a partisan, to realize that history is dialectic, that politics has a huge impact on the lives of others, and one must be involved in that dialogue, to try and bend it toward justice. Countering this reaction is a vision of impotence, of one descending into caricature, of a life wasted. The attraction of the idea of “care of the self” in this context is it’s apparent non-dialectic quality, the suggestion, that it is a meditation on the age-old question of happiness and as such exists outside of our immediate political discourse and even our Abrahamic civilization. This initial perception may prove false; Foucault’s scattershot historical references do make one worry about the contents of the package. But the idea, that happiness is cultivated through care, rather than anchored in the pursuit of meaning, is a subtle difference in my mind that I find useful and that I think puts Foucault beyond Camus. To send man out into a bankrupt subjective world in pursuit of meaning, even subjective meaning, is to send him to oblivion. But to teach him how to cultivate his own happiness, through day-by-day actions, seems a practical instruction, in accordance with the actual humility of man’s momentary existence. It positions man in the center of his own short life and cuts the shackles that tie his happiness to delusional dialogues and distractions that in the end merely expropriate his frustrations.

Has the tactic of manually mapping information compiled from trusted Twitter reports been successful? In the metric that really matters, we’ll never know. The repressive Libyan government continues in power, but it does seem like its days are numbered. But in determining the usefulness of this tactic for activists in the future, we can reach for perhaps a somewhat bald conclusion, by noting the traffic to the map, and media coverage of it. At the time of writing, the map has had over 314,000 views in 12 days. It has been shown on Al Jazeera English. It has been covered in at least the following 20 news publications: the Lede Blog at the New York Times, Zeit Online, Wired, Huffington Post, Newshour, The Guardian, Global Voices, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal Blog, Kurier (Austria), La Stampa, Excite Italia, Le Post, Expresso, Prachatai (Thailand), Observa Internacionales, Mashable, The Register-Guard, American Public Media, WiredVision (Japan). Given the amount of resources used (the part-time labor of one volunteer), this is not too bad a result. Two points worth noting. The first is that the Libyan story has a particular context; a high-profile story coupled with an almost complete inability of the media to get access to it. This context no doubt produced a more exaggerated reliance on the map and social-media. Nonetheless, these conditions are unfortunately not rare. Secondly, it is interesting to note the press-coverage in non-English speaking media. It may be that because maps are more visual than text, they are able to reach further as a type of media. This might be a useful lesson for activists working in situations where language may be a barrier.

The following is a list of some of the specific things I have learned from this project:

1. In contexts where protestors are likely to face serious violence, map the violence, not the protests. I do not recommend automatic mapping projects in this context because they do not have the capacity to weigh, within reason, the potential consequences of each entry mapped. I recently saw an entry on an automatic map stating that protesters were waiting at a certain location to ambush mercenaries. This is reckless.
2. Vague-ify locations, and delay updates to protect protesters.
3. Identify reliable sources. Use your common sense in this regard. Review the politics of your source. When was this source Twitter account opened? The more recent, the less reliable and the more likely it is to be an account intended to spread disinformation. How many followers does the source account have? Generally, the fewer in this context the less reliable. Who are the followers? On how many lists has this Twitter account been listed? Again the fewer, in this context, the less reliable. Who can vouch for the Twitter account as a good source? What are the tweets like? Does the person qualify his/her reports? Are they intelligible? Is the person given to exaggeration and inconsistencies? Do they seem more political than factual?
4. Remain skeptical about the reports that you receive. Look for multiple reports from different unconnected sources. Does the report make sense? Is it likely in the context? In the Libyan context, I had no illusions that my reports were as well-confirmed as those that would show-up later in the traditional media. Nonetheless, I knew that without at least some attempt to confirm reports I would become part of the problem.
5. Do not follow your sources on Twitter. Create a private list. Who you follow on Twitter is public information.
6. Develop a circle of people, either in or outside the country, who can help you with language and geography questions. The latter is especially needed when you are dealing with non-Roman alphabets, because place-names will often be translated into English differently by different people.
7. Give priority to mapping medical information and needs. Lining-up medical supplies outside the country is one of the very practical and important ways people outside a crisis can help. Inform medical organizations such as the Red Cross/Crescent (@federation) and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (@msf_usa) that you are mapping medical reports. However, as described above, be aware that even medical information can be used by those seeking to do harm and make a considered judgment.
8. Circulate to the media, at least daily, via Twitter and email, a link to your updated map, 1-2 hours before “prime-time.” There are hundreds of media-outlets and journalists on Twitter who will appreciate being kept up-to-date regularly on the latest developments. Include politicians and policy-makers in these circulations when relevant.
9. Use consistent icons to categorize your reports. For example I used the police-car icon to indicate arrests, a wheelchair icon to indicate medical information. This allows people to easily read the map and to quickly find the information they need. The ease-of-use of what you create is part of the value you are supposed to be delivering.
10. Encourage everyone to embed your map in their blogs, webpages etc. Below is an embed of the Libyan map which is located at Google Maps here: http://bit.ly/hGtqiV. I am embedding it on this page because I have received a report that the URL of the map at Google Maps is blocked in Libya. Google is reporting normal traffic patterns to Google Maps generally in Libya, which means that only the URL of this map is being blocked. If the map is embedded in webpages with different URLs it will be visible within Libya at those locations. During the course of this conflict, I am encouraging you the reader to embed the map in one of your blog pages and then tweet: “#Libya Pro-Democracy Map [URL of your blog page with map] #feb17” This will fill Twitter with alternate URLs that people in Libya can see.
11. Think strategically. What is important information? If, for example, protesters are being attacked by air, or by sea, where are the air and navy bases located that are the staging areas for these attacks? This helps the media and your audience prioritize and better understand the news reports they hear.
12. In a context where the situation is changing rapidly, find a trusted and suitable collaborator in a complementary time zone so that they can continue the work while you sleep. Civil protests can often continue for weeks and months before success. Build a sustainable process.
13. In particularly violent conflicts, such as the one in Libya, you will often be exposed to graphic and terrible imagery/video on a consistent basis. Have someone you can talk to about this. These scenes are abnormal to everyday life, so you need to exorcise your normal human reactions to them by having someone you can talk to about them. Even a short note to a fellow activist can help you process the horror.
14. Always protect your identity and stay safe. Think about the Twitter ID, email addresses and cell-phone numbers you use.
15. Back-up your map so you can restore it in the event of a hostile attack. Easiest way to do this is to click “View in Google Earth.” This will create and automatically download a KMZ file that you can view in Google Earth and have as a backup.

Feel free to ask me any questions, suggest additions, improvements, or highlight errors by sending me a tweet via Twitter @Arasmus.
View Mapping Violence Against Pro-Democracy Protests in Libya in a larger map

Although most of the bleary-eyed humans that gather at the dog-park in the early morning perceive only a maelstrom of fur running to-and-fro, a blur of legs and tails that stops now and again for the occasional crotch-sniff, shit, and a usually frustrated attempt at sexual intercourse, on some mornings the curious occurs almost unnoticed amidst the quotidien.

When my dog and I arrived this morning, a collection of the neighborhood Basenjis was involved in a discussion about the appropriate level of involvement, for a Basenji, within the political environment in which they live. I am suspicious of Basenjis. They have a certain smugness that makes me leery. Their peering eyes remind me of Caesar’s statement to Mark Anthony; “let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights: yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”

“Because of the great influence that the United States has in the world,” began the tallest of the four Basenjis (his collar indicated his name was Larry), “the individual in the United States is perpetually called upon to respond to the actions of the state with a greater urgency than if he was living in a much smaller country with much less impact on world affairs.”

You can well imagine my reaction to hearing a dog instigate such a conversation at 8AM – there was a strong whiff of sanctimoniousness about the young pup that was only reinforced by the conceited way in which he tilted his head from side to side as he spoke.

Larry continued. “This feeling of responsibility is born out of a belief that in a democracy, everyone is responsible for what the state does in his name. One cannot escape moral responsibility through abstention. And so, as one becomes aware of illegitimate and cynical warfare, hypocritical attacks on animal rights, gross social injustice and non-collar political corruption, one feels called to don the helmet and grab the spear to defend the republic.”

I went through my daily to-do list on my cellphone. “Gather tax receipts. Set up my annual health-check for Friday. Fold in those edits from my editor. Call my mother. Get back to that guy in Paris.” I flicked to Twitter.

Basenjis rarely interrupt each other. They consider it rude. So when one of the four did just that I was surprised and lifted my head from news of the latest Israeli-settler encroachment into East Jerusalem. A big-shouldered one of the four, with a lazy eye interjected.

“But the United States today is not the democracy of such ideals, but a plutocracy in fact, in which the negotiations between the moneyed corporations and everyone else, consistently conclude in a resolution most favorable to the corporations. We live as second-class citizens and few things are as pathetic as someone donning armor to defend the circumstances of his own enslavement.”

And with that, the two other dogs sitting around him overlooked the interruption and nodded in unison. The Rude One continued.

“Those who believe in democracy today must live a schizophrenic existence, alternating between a feeling of responsibility for the actions of the state in which they live and an acute appreciation of their impotence to effect even the slightest change within that state.”

At this point my dog had passed a fine specimen in the corner of the park. I pulled on the long string of blue doggy bags, reflected on the lowliness of my station, and went to pick up the shit. I could feel the approval of my fellow dog owners. I was responsible. We were responsible. How great. We’re still all picking up shit. It was pungent, and in the early morning I forgot every thought I ever had, and tried not to gag. When I returned from the garbage pail, the Rude One was still at it.

“From the attempt at health-care reform, the bail-out, the corporate bankrolling of rabble-making media and compliant politicians – it seems apparent that the average American today stands in the same relation to his state as the average Indian once stood in relation to the British Empire. We are perpetually sold the American Dream, much as the great people of India were once told of their good fortune to be subjects of a foreign Queen.”

I’ve learned not to discount coincidences in the animal kingdom. They are often the result of a communication that one does not at first observe. For example, at the very mention of Old Vic, Harold, the fat-headed English bulldog came over and after what seemed like a gentle invitation to sniff, slobbered saliva all over the Rude One.

The Rude One stood there stoically, like a porn star in a bukakke film waiting for the camera to be turned off. Through the bulldog-saliva he continued.

“I am not making the equation between the American plutocracy today, and the British Empire, to incite a rebellion similar to that which brought the latter to an end.”

The English bulldog turned and plumply sat down nearby to observe the proceedings. He casually turned toward the Rude One, lifted his arse and farted. The Rude One rubbed a paw across his face to remove the saliva and continued.

“Our present is much more hopeless than India in the 1940s. The corrupting influence of corporate power on the hard-won rights and freedoms that ought to adhere in a democracy seems likely to only grow in breadth and in depth. One cannot help but think of the recent U.S. Supreme Court case unleashing the financial war-chests of corporations on our elections, as yet another beat in the quickening pace.”

There are a large number of lawyers in Washington DC which raises the frightening prospect that constitutional law textbooks are to be found throughout the city, even now, within easy reach of the average Jack Russell. I say this because at the very mention of the recent Supreme Court case, two French poodles, a miniature Schnauzer, an Irish Wheaten, a Chinese Shar-Pei and a Mexican Chihuahua all gathered around the Basenjis.

The Chihuahua dove right in even before it had found its seat in the widening circle. “Yep, yep, across the world, the great power of unregulated capital grows day after day and our ability to freely determine the terms under which we govern ourselves contracts in suspiciously equal measure.”

He turned his nose towards the Shar-Pei.

“Even China, the oft-cast great determiner of the coming century, will inevitably fall beneath the rod of global corporations engorged by access to its markets and those of India, and Indonesia.”

The Shar Pei sat silently, his eyes rolling slowly towards the English bulldog.

The Wheaten took up the baton, in a brogue that turned the heads of all the ladies.

“The ‘Government Affairs’ departments of corporations that today trade beef for pork in the restaurants of Washington DC will tomorrow do likewise in Beijing, Bombay and Jakarta. I can see no brakes, no checks-and-balances, no barriers that might impede this march. I see no great social awakening in the centuries ahead as China and India take time to learn the lash of the whip, for three centuries of the whip in the United States has failed to provoke any effective counter-reaction. Even that measure of social-security we won in Europe today is being gutted by the requirement that we bend the knee to the international financial markets.”

I must say I was surprised to see one of the French poodles intervene, because, well, I think everyone will agree that  poodles are seldom interested in politics. Nonetheless, one of the tall svelte French hounds stepped forward with a natural elegance that reminded me somewhat of Kristin Scott Thomas. The other stood there motionless and vacant.

“These international markets, unhinged from any regulatory body that would protect non-market values such as democracy will always sniff out the poor and the desperate jurisdiction and reward them for lowering their standards for health, environment, dog-biscuits, safety, and in the end, equality. Now mind you, I say all of this while at the same time acknowledging the great benefits that corporations bring to life on earth. Never in history have so many been lifted out of poverty as in the last 20 years, due in great part to China’s embracing of capitalism.” At this point the Shar Pei turned to look at her, his eyes dropped to her tail with that look that even dogs clearly perceive to mean nothing other than: “great ass.” She continued obliviously and turned her nose in the direction of the English bulldog; “I just reject the idea that we have to choose between a vibrant economy and a democracy.” The English bulldog adjusted himself again. And farted.

It was some measure of how interesting all of this was becoming to me that I ignored the various pings of my cellphone notifying me of to-do items, calendar appointments and morning emails. So engrossed had I become, that I did not notice that my own dog had since circled the park and now walked from behind me into the center of this impromptu congress. His languid walk was in such contrast to the heightened and almost shrill air that was consuming the participants, that he stopped the conversation cold. He sat in the middle of the group. Silently. He repositioned his legs, which were often stiff in the mornings due to arthritis. He stared at each in turn.

“This then is our predicament,” he began. There was a silence that soon become awkward. The dogs began to stare from one to the other.

“We sit here torn between impotence and a refusal to surrender. Existentialism,” he nodded towards the French poodle (she seemed flattered), “sits like a box of Christmas decorations ready to bedeck such frustration in baubles and tinsel so that we may think of it as noble. But even amidst the joy of Christmas morning, every Christmas tree knows that it is dying. That it has been hacked from its mother.”

Good metaphor, boy!

“There seems to be no answer other than to start with that which we know to be true – that even as we sit here we are each of us passing, and that all things, will in turn follow each of us to the grave. Much as those who are nervous about speaking in public are encouraged to imagine their audience wearing business suits, it centers us, does it not, in such times as these to imagine the inevitable truth that everything we know will pass and, in the extreme, that even the great and beautiful Mother Earth on which we shit, will at some point in time leave nothing but a cosmic echo of where she once existed.”

Two dog-treats when we get home. At least.

The wide-open almost teary eyes of every dog were at this point transfixed on this mysterious old one with his peculiar accent and smelling of the most pungent piss they had ever experienced. Feeling now that the fat silence confirmed that they like he stood in the same awe before this imagined moment, he continued.

“I rise from such dark depths like a Newfie from the sea gasping for air. The affairs of state, my status as a member of what is called a democracy, are in that moment clearly secondary. My essence is that I live, that I breathe, that I inhale, that I experience what it feels to be alive. All these affairs, that the bounty of youth affords you time to consider, are but adjectives. To allow them to consume you is to allow them to become you. You must always remain wild and un-collared in your heart.”

A woman in a pair of pink pajama pants, with the word “Dartmouth” festooned across her not insubstantial backside, bent down and plucked the Chihuahua from the circle. This rude awakening broke the mood and seemed to remind each in turn that the day was upon us. My dog walked nonchalantly towards me, stopped and stared, waited. He sniffed the leg of the bench and almost imperceptibly tried to lift his own. All I could see was a faint trickle of piss. I put him on his leash, turned off my phone, and we headed home, slowly.

I find myself feeling awkward, which is a good thing, because it means something new is happening. About two weeks ago I discovered the teachings of an intelligent and sincere Benedictine monk, David Steindl-Rast. The level at which he interprets religious traditions, confirmed a line of thought that I’ve left untended for a while.

As best as one can determine anything through the use of one’s senses, I have observed effects that suggest to me that I have a spiritual component. I would not describe the evidence as absolutely confirming the fact, but more like the evidence suggesting that exercise is good for me. When I think of myself in a spiritual way, when I make decisions taking how it affects my spirit into account, or I engage in a spiritual exercise, whether it is meditation, visiting a place of contemplation, regardless of the religious tradition, or simply walking in a forest, I feel better, much better. When I do not take that sensitivity into account, I feel worse. That’s the phenomenon.

I am quite willing to accept the idea that my reaction is simply a learned response. I am willing to accept that it is merely the internal manifestation of a behavior implicitly prescribed by my culture, i.e. that the image of the Buddha, or a quiet church in the middle of the day, or the silence of a forest, is so commonly thought to induce a sense of peace, that it does – a placebo effect if you will. Assuming that that is true, it is barely relevant. I am going to die soon. This prioritizes the good, once it doesn’t cost too much, over the perfect.

My perspective is that the well-known religions of the world are interwoven with the fallible and corrupting influences of their having, over centuries, become tools with which the powerful control the less organized. And you can see this in every religion. At some point, the spiritual practice leaves the womb and becomes tainted with the political desires of a temporal power. But within each of the world’s religions, there is an awareness of man’s spiritual capacity and how that needs to be managed, and most exciting, how it can be grown. Thus, beneath all the mumbo-jumbo, there is a very useful skill. It is as if all the medical doctors in the world were also religious priests, who, in addition to knowing the workings of the human body, also babbled on about absolute nonsense. Before we rightly throw away all the mumbo-jumbo, I would like to identify and preserve that medical knowledge for future use. Similarly, before throwing out the superficial trappings of commonly practiced religions, I’d like to go into their most refined learnings and ask – what in there is useful? What did they know about how the human animal works? For example, all mystic traditions suggest that a human being can enjoy a higher and more sustainable level of happiness when he ceases to weigh every event in life against his own egotistical desires. When I’ve practiced this idea, I experience an enjoyable peace. So I am going to do it again. Interesting and useful insights like this, that do not require one to believe in six impossibilities before breakfast, can be found in the more universalist writings of mystics within every religious tradition in the world. They represent centuries of work-product by some very intelligent individuals. It is simply ignorant inefficiency to cast-out these notes because of a refusal to apply one’s own intelligence in such a way as to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I started this note by saying that this line of thinking felt awkward, and here is why. I support the New Atheist agenda to spread the light of rationalism into the dark corners of religiously motivated ignorance, whether it be the lunatic-fringe in the American Evangelical Christian tradition or the religiously sanctioned misogyny of fundamentalist Islam. But, as described above, I also believe man has a spiritual component. This is sometimes difficult for my fellow atheists to accept. But even more so, the idea that the great demon of organized religion might have anything of value for a rationalist buried within its hulking mass. As I try to make this point in conversations, perhaps less fluently than I have hopefully managed to do here, I find myself coming away frustrated that secularists are usually as guilty of interpreting religion at the same imbecile level as those they perceive as backward.

There is a great danger in denying the spiritual aspect of man. By doing so we deny him the tools to manage a potentially dangerous desire that those of insincere intent are only too willing to exploit. The primary nefarious actor I have in mind is consumerism, which today offers to feed man’s undiagnosed spiritual needs while starving him at every step. As has been observed by the famous thinkers of the Left, having satisfied our basic needs for food, shelter and a modicum of security and health, corporations in the developed world can now only grow by creating new needs in an already fattened population. They do this largely by targeting man’s unsatisfied spiritual longings with disingenuous offerings of Elysian peace and transcendence beyond the limitations of our individual capabilities. The luxury-goods industry offers the least subtle examples. It promises to transform us, in effect, into gods, if only we buy the most expensive cars, jewelry, cologne, clothes, etc. I see this as the great evil in the society in which I live. It enslaves us, divides us, makes us profoundly unhappy because of what we sacrifice to pay for these baubles, and moves us further away from a more sustainable happiness. And it is not even the fault of corporations, they are merely the drug dealers of a vice we refuse to refuse. But if we do not recognize our spirituality, if we do not entertain it as a variable which must be weighed, we rob ourselves of even the language with which to diagnose our own addiction.

Alas, it has been my experience that the discovery of spiritual treasures cannot be a social exercise. Humans in groups seem incapable of avoiding the wrestle of egos, the insistence on one-upmanship. I am as guilty of this as anyone else. I differ with the words of Jesus – wherever two or three are gathered, the spirit is invariably not among them. Maybe this will change for me someday, I hope it will, but for now it seems impossible to grow uncorrupt flowers of spiritual refinement in a social environment. It seems to me that it can only be done in the private cloister of one’s own mind, in a place beyond words. I think the range of tools found in the mystic traditions of the world’s religions may afford some that are of use. But the process of discovery is a solitary one. All that is common is the need.

I’ve been frustrated by food writing for quite some time. In a single sentence, my frustration is that food writers don’t write in such a way that helps their readers to learn.

The internet has been a huge asset to food lovers everywhere and it has continued the trend, started by media outlets such as the Food Network, towards an ever more popular appreciation of food. This in turn has led to an increase in the quality of food and a more widespread understanding of the sociological, political, economic, ethical and cultural environments in which food as a human activity finds context. But the manner in which food writers write leaves a greater potential for growth untapped.

My understanding is, and my own personal experience seems to support this opinion, that the brain learns by adding new information to a structure that it already knows. Imagine then, if you will, a process whereby I take a child, that has lived in cave for all of its short life, outside for a few seconds everyday over several years. I show him the sky at 10AM and say “this is day.” I take them outside at 11PM, point to the darkness and say “this is night.” The process goes on ad infinitum with the child gathering snapshots of varying degrees of light and darkness, and associating them with either day or night. Obviously, the child at some point is going to encounter problematic periods, such as the break of dawn or twilight and it will try its best to categorize these periods as either day or night. This crude example is an attempt to illustrate what I call the “Sampling Approach.” It takes quite a long time and even if the child can remember all of these samples, its learning is still quite rough. By contrast, suppose if I explain to the child the process whereby night becomes day, how the sun rises in the East, makes its way across the sky and finally sets in the West. When the sun is in the sky it is day and when it is not it is night. Armed with this 5 second conversation, the “Reasoned Approach,” the child can leave the cave, look at the sky and not only determine whether it is day or night but also determine based on the sun’s position what time of day it is. It can clearly distinguish the nebulous period of dawn from that of twilight.

Much of food writing follows the Sample Approach. For example, I love sushi. I’ve probably eaten more than my fair share. I’ve read about it, watched hundreds of people on television eat it, but I still have only a vague idea as to what makes for truly excellent tuna. Of course it should be fresh, and the color is important, and I can tell what I think is a better texture. But no one has ever sat me down and said something to the effect that; “when you taste tuna, first look at it closely, you are looking for _[?]__, then when you taste it, better tuna should be more like __[?]___.” Instead I just read and see one food commentator after another saying “that’s awesome tuna” but with no instruction as to what are the tell-tale sensations that denote that quality. Now of course I could go and do a food course. But food writers are already talking to the finest chefs in the world, they eat in the best restaurants – why can’t they ask these chefs what their criteria is for determining high quality sushi, compare it with what other chefs say, and then tell me? (Needless to say, I have a suspicion that the reason this does not happen, is because a lot of people in the food industry are simply faking it. I eat therefore I write). It is in the interest of good chefs to elaborate how they measure quality. I can get bad tuna in lots of places, but if you teach me what good tuna is, and you are one of the few who has it, I’ll visit your restaurant. Leave me in ignorance and I’ll plod to the place around the corner. Bad restaurants live, good restaurants die. I keep on plodding.

I’ve expressed this opinion before and one of the responses I get is that there shouldn’t be an elite that tells people what is good and what is not good food. This completely misses the point and fails to engage my point in the reasonable center in which it is being advocated. I am not proposing that an elite tell people what is good (e.g. “Tuna from the Tasmanian Sea is the best”) but that people be given tools that they can use to measure what is good (e.g. “good tuna should have no smell and a light red luminescence due to the presence of ___ which declines as the tuna ages”). Once I have this structure to work with, I can then eat tuna and decide do I like what others consider to be good tuna? I can begin to tag my experiences eating tuna with useful metadata that helps me to grow in my knowledge and enjoyment of the food I am eating. I can begin to sort restaurants and chefs in an intelligent way. I can begin to refine the rule, interconnect it with other rules (e.g. fresher tuna is better with a more subtle sake) etc.

Now what would be thrilling about the net-effect of a move from the current Sample Approach to what I’m calling the Reasoned Approach is the impact that it would have on our food culture. Imagine if hundreds of thousands of foodies armed with these Reasoned Approaches ignited an ever-improving eco-system of better and better restaurants. Imagine how these reasoned approaches bubbling up to the surface, in a process akin to what we see in the world of open-source software, would create a cultural inheritance that could be added to, day after day, year after year and generation after generation. It would very quickly drive charlatans into the light and recognize and reward the true chefs, the true keepers of the flame of quality, nuance, honesty and integrity. In a traditional culture, these rules are passed from one generation to the next. A few bright-line rules delivered to me squarely in a vineyard during my youth helped me to appreciate wine more than years of watching quaffers on television. Because of the wonderful diversity of our culinary traditions in the United States, in this culture that role of observing, documenting, preserving and communicating falls to the food-writer. The challenge of course is that this will require food writers to do more work. Their writing must move from impressionist stories that feature food to reasoned arguments as to why the steak, tea, wine or stout, at a certain restaurant or bar is on the better end of the spectrum. But this discipline will over time give them an admirable cogency that will benefit them individually as well as the rest of the community.

And so, to the extent that anyone is listening, I’d like food writers to think about this. And more than that I would like them to start adopting a mental process when they begin to write of asking – what tool can I give the reader to help them appreciate better steaks, better cupcakes, better wines, Indian Pale Ales etc. Start your articles, books etc. by stating the standard, and then tell me how this particular experience compares to that standard and why. Feel free to describe two standards, or variations due to geography. But give it structure. I am not (and I feel I may have to repeat this) calling for “thou-shalt-nots” but I am asking for “it’s-often-better-ifs.” Structured in this way, the articles will begin to accumulate over time into a body of work that I think any writer looking back on his life will proudly be able to say – “that’s my contribution, that’s how I tried to help.” The alternative notion, that somehow everyone is remembering an opinion here on a particular set of facts, and another one there on a different set of facts, and another tip from this friend of mine who went to Napa once, is just a delusion. It’s an Emperor’s-Clothes scenario that better minds ought to leave behind. No one is remembering any of that unstructured random information in a useful intelligent way. It’s just not how our brains work. People have busy short lives. Food writers should try to help to make them more enjoyable. The net result will be better food for everyone now, and those to come.

Where he would die was a life-long obsession for Arthur Sand. He was at this point, half-way through that length of time that he knew, or at least had once read in an orphaned copy of the Economist at the airport in Atlanta, was typical for a Caucasian male in a developed country. He kept a record of the possibilities, and, on occasions of unbearable tedium such as standing in-line waiting for a flight to board, he would unfurl his map of ideal places to die and spread it before his mind’s eye. With relish, he would smoothen the imaginary creases, taking a moment to briefly review the folds for any signs of wear.

Typically, he would start his purview in the regimental chapel. Brass plates and torn flags. “Robert McKinley, born, Galway, Ireland, 12th Regiment, Irish Fusiliers, died Bengal. David MacCauley, born, Edinburgh, Irish Guard, died Natal, South Africa.” During the weekend mornings, before the artisans gathered in the market outside, he would stand alone in the three-naved chapel. The floor was covered with remnants of medieval gravestones, names slowly worn away by visitors. “Connor de Burgh, 1714, late sheriff of this citiye, a widow’s son.” How beautifully still, summer light flowing through the large stained-glass rose-window. So many soldiers lying in such calm silence. It seemed unlikely. The stone knight lay in full-repose, clutching his petrified sword. What did these dead men feel here in the loamy deep rich moist soils of home? Did they replay memories of India? Visions of magnificent Afghan warlords seen for the first time through the sights of their muskets? Did a pair of green eyes beneath a veil in Peshwar now and forever haunt their thoughts? How could they bear it then, to be buried here within earshot of all they knew, remembering all that they had found?

Calling groups 2 and 3.

He ran his finger across the dry paper, delighting in the thoughts of geography and adventure that trailed his gaze, like seagulls following a trawler at sea. Fiji. Self-conscious hesitation. Lapping, peaceful blue turquoise waters. He was not himself, but someone transmuted and free. He was nothing, owning nothing, receiving no communications and was clothed as befit the purpose of the day rather than for any care for typical customs or modesty. He was human with them, and after all these years, he was now sure that they too were so with him. They sat surrounding. His aged and failing mind would play with the words of his mother tongue, long since resigned to use merely as a type of music. E-l-a-b-o-r-a-t-e. P-o-l-y-d-a-c-t-y-l. He would laugh at puns that only he could understand, some more humorous than others. Now they laughed too. Men emerging from the sea between his eyelids. A-m-p-h-i-b-i-a-n. The taste of fresh sea-urchin soaked in Vanderford’s orange juice. V-a-i-n-g-l-o-r-i-o-u-s. Perhaps he had helped these people in some way during his life. Perhaps they had come to love him. Perhaps, on this day, they would flood the small harbor with dugouts, bellow into a great conch-shell and scatter on the sea the ashes of one who had known the full bargain of their friendship and family. The sea!? No, not the sea – how irreversible! No, in the palm-grove on the bluff, where one can look out to sea and watch the world from afar. Perhaps catch a ship forever on the horizon. And yet, amid more than his fair share of beauty, he was so far from home. He felt disloyal to the graves of those from whom he had begot.

22B

He was certain that one location was surely so awful, the manner of the passing there so ignoble that it could not be endured. The horror of it in fact had given birth to his map. Manhattan. In his life, he had lived there for a while and indeed quite liked it, with mixed feelings, as with anything. It was one of the few places in the United States where he felt he did not have to apologize for thinking. And yet, perhaps born out of this peculiarity, it seemed now to his older mind a town full of conceit, smugness, and the typical adolescent pretensions and affectations of those who do not yet realize they are about to die. It happens in a kitchen in an atomistic apartment with a large and intentionally de-personalizing number. 5603. “Oh, the man in 5603 died,” she would say returning to bed on a Saturday morning, firm-breasted and young, reading the obituary. The television would almost immediately quench their memories of him with a warning on the importance of being regular. Days before, he had been lying on the floor, unable to move, listening to them fuck while he waited. “J G Wentworth. Mattress-discounters. Cialis. This is unlike any computer we’ve ever made before. In a sense it’s not a computer at all. It’s you. Get the channels you want, when you want them. Have you been injured in a workplace accident?” He had never felt sufficiently at home in that apartment to want to change the kitchen-cabinets. And now those cabinets were the only witnesses to his departure. Too much fucking beige.

Please turn off all electrical devices at this time.

Would America ever do? Perhaps the Rockies, but he had never been. He had seen photographs and films and the vast expanses of pristine untouched nature seemed sufficiently beautiful to warrant his last breath. Upwards, peaks, clean, majestic, undisciplined, devoid of advertising. Perhaps there was a sunlit glade, the seasons passing quietly by. The nights still and filled with constellations, tales of Araby? Perhaps a camper would light a fire nearby and read aloud from Thoreau or Whitman. That would be a pleasant evening. Maybe? America, – such a strange land. Imagine being tied to its disappointments forever. No doubt they would find some ingenious double-talking way to screw it all up. I couldn’t bear to have to watch them beggar themselves with progress and be unable to leave. A drill-bit mangling through my bones, some plaid-bellied foreman bending down to toss my skull aside. Farting. And yet perhaps they wouldn’t, or perhaps the mountains would endure nonetheless as they had always done.

“Please fasten your seatbelt sir.”

“Oh I’m sorry.”

The plane taxied to the runway. Across the aisle there was a woman from India. She had a child with large brown eyes. She was beautiful.

The isolated mountains of Provence. Manon de Sources. Home of the Cathar heretics, the lethal pot-shot taking camaraderie of the Croix de Lorraine. Sunlight pouring through the open door of the farmhouse imperceptibly nestled among the cypress trees along a golden ridge.

The woman’s husband sat beside her. He was tall and disinterested, with that stern look that stupid people wear when they are trying to appear commanding.

Shelves lined with books and old friends. A wrought iron-bed. Fresh tomatoes left by the door by a friend. Tuesday. Ever the optimist. The birds outside in summer. He knew there was a half a bottle of rosé left in the fridge. Last week a letter, a paper letter.

The mother’s face was sweet and gentle. He thought what a waste for a woman like that to spend a lifetime with a man like him.

At this point this felt best. His spirit gently flowing from him, through the memories of laughing dinners on the terrace and out into a countryside devoid of modernity and soaked in history. He would feel the cloth sheets, old paper, warm stone, friendly timber, transcendent blue-green glass.

What a beautiful child.

The plane began to increase in speed. He secretly loved how the acceleration forced him back into the chair and then that ecstasy at takeoff. The lift beneath the wings. The moisture flickering violently on the window as if nature herself was shocked by such obscene acceleration. Suspended now, in the air, between points, beyond choice or control. He was smiling. His mind was silent. He closed his eyes.

She smelled of jasmine and something else.

“Can I stay?”

He leaned against the jam of the door. Tweed against timber. Behind him darkness. Despite all my thoughts, now was the moment of choosing. My heart was beating loudly in my chest. I looked back at the room, the artifacts of my domesticity. In that second, somebody else in me said yes. The barrel of the gun over his shoulder, kissed the doorway as he slipped inside. The door closed and locked.

We sat in the darkness, by the fire. His face wrapped in shadow. Periodically the embers, finding some fresh unconsumed part of the log, would momentarily cast a greater light that tried in vain to penetrate the shroud. I searched how to make conversation without questions. The silence grew uncomfortable. I reached to the table for the knife, and some bread.

“Thank you.”

The wind was picking up outside. I searched the trees, darker shades of black set against the navy sky, for unfamiliar patterns. I knew that he had not found my door by accident, that he had been brought here by desperation and opportunity, that there would be others. The walls blinkered my view. I thought to get to a vantage point, from the windows upstairs, but I could not leave him.

He ate the bread without butter. Dirt trapped under his fingernails.

“Are you healthy?”

“Yes.”

My grandfather’s clock marked the hour, unconscious of the need for silence. Staring into the fire, each avoiding the gaze of the other. Time passing. He sat hunched over in the darkness.

I remember kneeling beside my mother in the church as a boy, sitting vigil at midnight mass as Christ waited in the garden for them to take him. So unusual, to a boy, seeing all those villagers there, kneeling in the darkness. A single candle, a black cloth draping the cross. Even the priest is silent. All I can hear is breathing, I cannot tell whether it is mine or that of others around me. Two-hundred of us. My mother’s fingers pass quietly across each rosary bead. Her lips moving slightly as she prays in her mind. She seems to begin each prayer with my inhalation. I could feel him among us. Fingers through beads. Waiting through time. I must be slipping in and out of consciousness, perhaps I am sleeping and awakening.

I became aware again of where I was. I got up quietly and went to the kitchen to fill the teapot. I realized too late that there was now nothing between him and the stairs. The familiar sound of water filling a teapot. I returned. He had not moved. The flames reoriented as I nestled the vessel among the embers. I could see a white bandage peer from beneath his over-sized coat.

“Let me see that.”

It began to rain outside. I untied his rags.

“It was just some barbed wire on the hills.”

In that moment I knew the path he had taken to my door. I knew the way he had come, why and who he was.

“Were you followed?”

“I don’t think so.”

There was no moon outside. The water in the teapot began to boil. I reached for the old tea-caddy and stirred in two spoons and lifted the pot off the fire.

“It’s fresh, but I should scald it.”

I poured the boiling tea over his hand. The blood and dirt mixed with it and poured among the ashes. He bit into his bearded lower lip and said nothing. I reached into the closet for old rags lost among knitting needles and fairytale books. One of the needles fell to the floor. He stared at me briefly and then looked into the fire as I wrapped his hand in a fresh rag. He tilted his head wistfully as if studying how the flames consumed the remaining wood. Surrendering. I tied the knot. He looked at me, thanked me, and motioned to get up and leave.

“Stay.”

It didn’t rain for three months in the summer of nineteen eighty four.

“This is how the Romans built drains,” he said.

His hands were leathery and he smelled like history. I smelled it again in the Cathedral at Rouen. They too were our people. He handled a large rectangular cuboid shaped stone. An igneous rock, with crystals glistening in the sunlight. His biceps flexed as he held it. Sinews. It made a sound as it hit the side wall of the long drain that stretched across the landscape like a scar. Schtumpf! The Romans never reached here. Then we came.

“One like that on either side, and then a flagstone across the top. Before the cement pipes, that’s how they did it. And it’s still useful when you come to a bend, a rock that can’t be destroyed or a whitethorn tree.”

You can’t cut a whitethorn tree. They are protected by legend, the love of the local people. Hunched heads over warm jars of hot sweet tea whispered stories about those that had cut them. It was how the people of the Goddess Dana got home at night. That’s what they used to say. The light bark caught the moonlight.

He moved forward two or three feet and repeated the process. Schtumpf! Gradually, under the golden sunlight, a secret underground waterway snaked through the heather.

“Layer pebbles, then small rocks and then bigger rocks and then topsoil. Then seed it and where once there was wilderness, you’ll have rich blue grass. Then milk. Then beef.

There was not a single cloud in the sky. A curlew flew over head. He bent back to look up at the small shadow cross in blue.

“She’s free. I’ve never seen a pair. I suppose there has to be another.”

Rain. Several cars were lined up at the traffic light. I sat in the passenger seat and stared vacantly at the glowing hue of their brake-lights. I would need a new grey pants for my uniform. School was starting again in a week. The last two years. Time to get serious. A large concrete block of apartments, some 13 stories tall. Entire families lived in each of those, supposedly. Why? A Citroen pulled-in to the side of road to get out of the way of traffic.

“They had great engineering, ahead of their time, but it meant no one could fix them.”

Airport. Just like Columbus. Ferdie and Isob. I was surprised that the yellow taxi-cabs looked just like the ones in the movies.

“What number on Madison?”

“1376. Thank you.”

Everything smells different. I might be inside a television. That strange feeling of knowing something you don’t, and how to talk to people you’ve never met before. You couldn’t get lost here if you tried. Everything is sign-posted. Highway. Faucet. Garbage.

“And you have a beautiful view of the city from here.”

“Thank you.”

The tea was weak. Have I ever been this high?

When the wind blows through blue grass it turns silver in the moonlight.