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Tueday February 2nd, 2010

California, first impressions (1210 words)

California is sooo organised compared to anywhere in Europe, & we won't even mention the orient. Robot tills at the supermarket do away with queues & the shopping carts have electronically operated wheels that lock if you try to pass the boundaries of the continental parking lot with them.

Upon arriving at the Getty museum for a wonderful, well lit, informative exhibit of Rembrandt etchings, it was raining. As little as it rains here they were never-the-less prepared: getting out of the shuttle monorail from the parking lot there were museum guards handing out white umbrellas lest their guests get damp on the 100 metre walk to the main entrance. Entering the rooms dedicated to the show one wished he thought to bring a magnifying lens to study the etchings better, & what does he find? Magnifying lenses thoughtfully hanging on the wall for his use.

Other good things? Iridescent hummingbirds more like large insects than small birds. Brilliant emerald green hovering over colourful flowers & then the sun catches its head & it turns bright crimson red, magical. Their miniature hearts beat 400 times a minute & one I watched drew nectar from what seemed 100 tiny flowers on a rosemary bush in just seconds, I wonder if we humans, move in slow motion in its eyes the way the Sloth does in ours.

People have an easy & open friendliness with those they don't know. Men more than women invent interesting looks for themselves (I'll have to take some photographs) without inspiring overt prejudice. Individualism is respected.

Compared to other parts of the world the overall affluence is striking. It is not the cars that cost more than some homes, they can be found also in uncomfortable & badly organised cities anywhere. It is the public services, the cleanliness & security, the sense at all times that someone has thought of the citizen's comfort. With this comes a phenomenon I have noticed in Scandinavia where some people drive their 4-airbag Volvos with helmets on; a sense that if one is just careful enough he will live forever.

When what most of the rest of the world consider luxuries are here birthright, I think one can tend to concentrate on smaller & smaller risks. The anti-bacterial towelletes offered free at the entrances of supermarkets to cleanse the previous user's germs from the shopping cart handle, is probably supremely sensible & yet, psychologically, I think it reduces life's concerns to trivial risk.

It seems everyone here has allergies & other hyper-sensitivities to their environment though it be more sterilised than places where allergies are practically unheard of. And though I have never seen such beautiful & HUGE health food supermarkets with anything you can think of grown, cared for & processed organically, the Californian is not sick less & he falls second in longevity to the Frenchman who enjoys his food for its flavour instead of its healthfulness.

More observations? People here laugh easily though it be more as social lubricant than in appreciation of humour, this sometimes makes for a somewhat hysterical tone to a dialogue for those unused to it. But where the stony silence a serious German or dour Scot might give your failed attempt to make him laugh might be uncomfortable, the confidence with which one can expect a laugh here has degenerated the level of wit & even the category which qualifies a witticism.

If I decide to take a short walk to the nearest of the ubiquitous malls (on average, larger than some villages I have lived in) because the day is fine, the pavements wide & clean; & the cars so polite they stop long before the pedestrian reaches an intersection he must cross. Bounteous in their generosity, I suppose, because of the rarity of its demand & yet I can feel the driver's eyes on me idly curious: did his car break down? Is he one of the homeless? Or maybe just Mexican...

In the park where I walk my dog there are metal dispensers on the trees that offer plastic 'doggie bags' which a master is meant to fill with his dog's excrement. The world-wide club of dog owners whose only requirement for membership is ownership of a dog (& any member is allowed to address any other) is present & friendly. Unlike other chapters of the club however, here, the first question I'm asked is of which breed my dog is. When I answer: "I don't know, she's just a dog" I feel I should stick a finger up my nose to complete the image. Sometimes the other dog owner's confusion will be followed by disdain &, I'd swear, even a glimmer of reproach as if to say I am not responsible enough to be a dog owner if I haven't even taken the trouble to delve into my bastard bitch's genealogy. Even their own inbred, overfed & over-pampered dogs seem to raise their noses at my country bumpkin who believes all the world loves her just as she loves all the world.

I suppose we have all been exposed to California English on television but it is not clever scriptwriting meant to make us laugh, they really do speak like that. Magniloquent, figurative & euphemistic, sprinkled with just a few overused adjectives such as: ‘awesome’ & ‘amazing’. As if these adjectives weren’t already overstated they are, as often as not, backed up by other adjectives like: ‘intense’ or ‘profound’. The favourite however is the adverb ‘really’, often used as substitute for ‘very’, as if the veracity of what one said needed confirming when what is actually meant is ‘more than a little’.

And since no one takes the time or trouble to find the appropriate word, the word, ‘like’ is injected at the beginning to warn the listener the forthcoming description will be approximate: “Like, wow! You know?”

The words 'love' & 'hate' are used more easily than 'like' & 'dislike' & 'total' no longer means 'the sum of all the parts' but rather: 'I agree with your sentiment'. So if a southern Californian says: "I really love dolphins; they're so awesome" they will consider it appropriate if you reply: "oh, totally"

Platitudes & pat phrases abound. It is good to know for instance, that they do not mean incapacitated by tension when they say: ‘stressed out’ nor are they exhibiting irrational behaviour & loss of emotional control due to an extreme shock when they declare: ‘I’m freaking out’, or he ‘freaked’, as in: “He freaked out when I told him how really, reeeally amazing the painting of Bathsheba by Rembrandt was, you know?” the ‘you know’ being synonymous with the east end of London’s rhetorical ‘innit?’ whose true meaning is: you agree, of course; & whose purpose is a faux involvement of the speaker's interlocutor. Just as 'tell me about it' means: don't tell me about it because I suffer from the same problem, as in: "It takes me four hours to drive to work on the freeway" "tell me about it."

First impressions; an outsider's impressions... we'll see how I assimilate; how my opinion evolves; perhaps in six months I too will grow a huge bum & think the greatest manifestation of me is my car...

Sunday January 24th, 2010

India

Well, here it is as promised, the 'special page' (too long to insert as article on this page) with photos of India & a rather random travel journal.

Conspiracy theories (1190 words)

Happy New Year! I haven't updated this, my Mental Workshop, in just over three months because I've been travelling, but more on that later. I am preparing a special new page to add to these nine, written on my travels. It will probably be a week or two before it is ready to upload & I hope to see you back for it. In the meantime:

Below, a letter I just wrote to my mother after a telephone call & in response to what I am realizing is becoming a consuming concern: they are boggling her mind with stupid reality shows & crazy conspiracy theorists albeit as she describes: "well documented". She asked me to watch some of the same shows & give her my opinion of their veracity.

When she spoke of the Mayan calendar I asked: End of the world again? She laughed & I added: I don't need forewarning; if it comes I will surely notice. The Mayans, by the way, hadn't invented the wheel & were wiped out by a handful of Spanish soldiers because they fought steel & shot with sticks & stones.

(My mother is also a painter)

...because if Plato was right, & he usually was, when he said: truth, justice & beauty are the only pursuits worthy of man, then yours are neither truth nor justice, but beauty.  What's more, beauty is the easiest! I have learned that living with only a single responsibility as priority: making the next painting better than the last, never fails to satisfy.

I also learned long ago that despite my keen curiosity, no man can know everything.  And today even more than the time when I learned it, it is more true: ALL the information is now available to every man.  And you know what else? It is ALL important. There are some who will kill or even die over a collectable postage stamp, it is ALL important... to... somebody...

BUT NOT YOU- HOORAY! All the bad people who do things that scandalize you, all the big bad corporations, blood-leeching Kings, failed democracies or perhaps more to the point: successful ones, who might harm you with their conspiracies; winking corruption that poisons your waters, or assassin squads (hypnotised or otherwise!) which you will do nothing to change, are simply & unmitigatedly neither your business nor your responsibility.  Phew, what a relief, hu?

If you feel badly about battered wives; sexually exploited children; the tradition of clitoral amputation; those people just a few miles from where I sit who will kill for a rock of crack; all those who are killed unjustly in lawless countries or who die of famine- guess what? You're not going to believe it when I tell you; are you ready? THEY DON'T MATTER, not in the general scheme of things of course, they do after all matter to themselves, BUT NOT TO YOU!

We are pack animals like dogs, we have genes set to socialize. When combined with higher intelligence (above motor control & instinct, i.e. abstract reason) these genetic instructions are valuable & can be spread thin to include even a community of as many as 5000 people.  Five thousand people: a self sufficient agrarian society of cooperating individuals all of whom can be genuinely moved by the misfortune of any of its members... beyond that (at least if you are one of us: the beauty pursuers) you are simply caring more than your capacity, instead of directing the energy (intellectual & emotional) at what's important to you & those of your circle. If we all focused on caring for our own circle, we would all be better off than when each of us is concerned with too many.

If everybody were really, really good, so good that each & every one of them cared about each & every other, human society would become immediately paralyzed & the human species would become extinct within a dozen years or so. It is just those brainless little pack-animal genes telling you that now that you are exposed on your own territory to samples of the entire planetary pack, you should care about them too. World be damned! What did it ever do for you after all?

Imagine being an insect that has only its instincts & no brain at all, flying around a light bulb because it is hard-wired to guide itself by the light of the moon. For 100 million years this has worked very well for his genus' survival but he hasn't the wherewithal to understand that electricity has been invented (or at least: discovered & tamed). It might, likewise, take another 40,000 years for human genes to understand that the people on television are not really in our territory but just images of people far away & none of our business.

Have you noticed how many of our contemporary television series are about knowing the unknowable? Supernatural & psychic powers, or amazing feats of deduction by mathematicians, forensic scientists, facial gesticulation experts etc. The conspiracy theory shows you watch are just buying-in to the trend.  Did you know there was never a recorded claim of a UFO sighting before the fashion for films about aliens in the 1950?

When the first telegraph lines were being strung across the United States just after the Civil war many complained, they said if the news happened so far away that it could only reach them by telegraph, it wasn't important enough not to wait for. 

James Stewart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis is good television time, reality TV is like video games: mind-numbing & stupid, but mostly, just plain useless. 

If the consequences of newly acquired knowledge can be firstly, just plain bad & you can't do anything about it, or secondly bad but if you do something you can make it better, or thirdly it is just plain good; take for instance: health, you go to see your doctor & he tells you your nose is going to fall off unless you stop breathing, or your nose is going to fall off whatever you do or, finally: your nose is not going to fall off if you continue breathing. Then the rule is: if it is 1- good, it changes nothing; if it is 2- bad & beyond your control, then you suffer vainly in the knowledge & 3- since you will not stop breathing even if it does make your nose fall off, you have two possible negatives & one indifferent, by which you can deduce: it is better not to acquire the knowledge.

Somerset Maugham wrote of an English aristocrat living in the south pacific as diplomat, governor or maybe banana plantation lord I can't remember, whose London Times was delivered irregularly although always months after its printing. He followed the news assiduously & was, for example, very interested in the progress of the Boer War, but rather than receive his news haphazardly or worry in anticipation for the next issue, he simply had his manservant iron the paper before breakfast & leave it laid out along with his boiled eggs on its exact date but a year later.

In the end, what difference did it make to him?

Sunday October 11th, 2009

I love you; thanks’; you’re welcome. (970 words)

Sometimes pat phrases take on a legitimate meaning of their own regardless, or even in spite of, the meaning of the words that compose them & yet their roots, the reason a linguistic custom is taken on, is telling.

In Spanish, for instance, there is no equivalent to the English: you’re welcome. The most common response to a ‘thank you’ is: de nada, which, like the French ‘du rien’, literally means: ‘of nothing’ but comes from ‘it was nothing’ or by extrapolation: ‘think nothing of it’. A gallant enough response to a declaration of gratitude but it does not allow the inference a ‘you’re welcome’ does, i.e. “it was not nothing, but you are welcome to this sacrifice on my part because I did it for you gladly.”

The same is true for the phrase ‘I love you’ which translates literally to ‘te amo’ in Spanish. It is more common, however, for people here in Spain to say: te quiero instead, which means: “I want you”. The Japanese, on the other hand, tell their beloved: taisetsu, which is the simple statement: ‘you are precious’.

Typical of Japanese delicateness, the general statement of value avoids, with Confucian modesty, the declaration by one ego for another. However, in common usage it expresses a more appropriative if unsaid: “you are precious to me” which likens it to the Spanish expression of desire: I want you, with, presumably, the underlying innuendo: because I love you.

While it is often true we think the person we love is precious & furthermore want to possess him/her, true love does not necessarily imply either. In fact some purists claim pity is love at its closest to an altruistic ideal.

If we refer strictly to romantic love we all have a fairly firm grasp of when what we feel is love & yet not only are hard-put to define the feeling precisely in words but can be confused, even when old & experienced, by the line that separates it from infatuation which is based more strictly on desire than love.

An argument might be made that the only reason for long-term monogamous love after the practicalities of predictable companionship, comfortably reliable promises of future love, the strength of collaboration or the responsibilities of rearing the young, is the need of a witness. A witness who provides a sense of continuity to our existence in the face of the pile of individual moments whose very chronology, duration or verisimilitude even we ourselves are often unable to recall.

I have been looking up the word love to see if the scholars, both linguistic & otherwise, have managed to pin its significance down to a quantifiable definition only to find they are as challenged by the task as the rest of us. The phrase: “tender solicitude” reappears in various official attempts but is buried among some of the longest entries in both dictionaries & encyclopaedias that meander through interminable etymologies that include the seeds of chivalric love in Medieval French poetry to its influence on the English version, until it becomes a concept so vague that love’s longing is restricted to a high ideology whose true expression precludes consummation or possession & is only represented in its purity when chastely directed at a virgin or another man’s untouchable wife. The sacrifice of self-interest becomes an integral part of true love’s definition.

It is intriguing to ponder the fact our loosely shared sense of romantic or chivalric love in the west arises during the dark ages instead of either the later artistic flowering & book-printing of the Renaissance or of the earlier ancient Greeks (whose roots lie in the Orient not the Occident) who famously won the war with the Romans by losing it & being sold into a slavery that included tutoring young Romans or counselling architects & politicians; thereby winning brutish Rome with philosophy to their culture from the inside-out, & eventually passing it down to us.

It was during the centuries of Europe’s chaos, a quarter of its population decimated by the black death, its history lost, Rome’s empire buried by the Barbarians; travel restricted by crumbling roads & lack of policing. A world where the privileged were grandly swathed in golden tapestries, had surplus food & shat indoors, but were otherwise relegated to the same mean & meagre life as their serfs; it was a time that wallowed in a stagnant economy limited by lack of trade, where even kings might be illiterate, that love’s ideal takes root to flower even into our time.

A few nameless poets wrote Europe’s sentiment on frail paper during these dark years, its striving for a return to civilisation, & their few surviving fragments have coloured our sense of romance ever since.

The defining love poem of northern Europe tells of an affair between the king’s brother & his own fiancé which relies on an irresistible love potion Tristan & Isolde of the white hands, are tricked into drinking. It seems that in the cold climes of Scandinavia love is a demon that 'possesses' while the southerner’s possessive passion 'expresses' instead. Might the difference derive from Spain’s hot immersion in an impetuous, Bedouin-proud, horseman-warrior, woman-robbing, Moorish past?

In Italy the pat phrase which has come to mean the same as ‘I love you’ is: “Ti voglio bene”, but in its literal root it actually means: “I want good for you”. If Germans are Europe's thinkers, the English, guardians of its poetry & Italians of its sentiment, this wanting good for the beloved seems a subtle improvement on Spain’s sweaty: “I want you!”

Tuesday September 22nd, 2009

A graffito on a wall in Granada: ERRATUM ERGO SUM

Wednesday September 16th, 2009

Fear (500 words)

Despite writing this Blog, albeit pretentiously redubbed Mental Workshop, I seldom find time to spend on the few gems shining amid the vast wastes of blogdom’s mud myself.

While researching something else I did never-the-less, stumble upon one by a young lady still at university whose introduction touched me- I will reproduce it below verbatim, spelling mistakes included.

Its uncontrived syntax positively oozes a sincere despair & repressed passion. Its terrors are palpable & the unscalable walls that limit her choices are clearly built by her instead of imposed by life’s circumstances as she believes, & therein lay the tragedy:

Life is speeding past me. Nothing is happening the way I pictured it would, and more and more everyday its seems there is nothing I can do to 'get back on track'.

I am seriously considering moving somewhere foreign, like Italy or Syria, or Montenegro. Somewhere beautiful, and different in all aspects. I imagine I would enjoy "Culture Shock". More like a clean slate to start fresh from; a rebirthing almost.

I could very well do it. I would do it, but something holds me back. And that something, being strong enough to hold me back, intrigues me beyond belief.

That “something” that intrigues her while “holding her back” is fear; fear of the unknown, fear her decision-- being different to those around her-- will be a mistake. Fear of the unimaginable consequences of putting herself in an unknown environment; fear of making a bad decision when required to make decisions outside her sphere of understanding i.e. decisions that rely on criteria she is not yet in possession of.

I recently saw Up, Pixar’s latest &, as usual, great animation. After the show my friend & I discussed the film & when we touched on the guilt the old man felt after his wife’s death at not having provided her the adventure of life she had hoped for, my friend commented: “He had no choice, there were regular disasters that they had to attend, like when the tree falls on their house, they had to spend their travel money repairing the roof.”

I, however, disagree. At the end when the old man finally lets the house that had come to symbolize his wife to him, go, he says to the boy: “It is only a house after all”, he might have said the same when the tree broke its roof. These are life’s choices & the protagonist of Up chose a life of material security & predictable comfort over pressing the boundaries of its experience of itself.

I wish the young lady of the Blog strength in her struggle with the same faulty reasoning & if she asked I would tell her: The most important part of life is living. Trust yourself; if you make the right decision now then know you will know what to do in the future & under other circumstances also.

Monday September 7th, 2009

Egon & the other animals (1940 words)

My dog Egon is a natural-born killer. I did not teach her the textbook pointer’s stance, body all atremble in anticipation as she waits for an unwary rabbit to distance itself so far from the protective briar, or warren, that it hasn’t time to get back before she outruns it.

When she was still young she chased rabbits with more enthusiasm than technique, once even following a rabbit into its cover of cacti. We arrived back home before I noticed she had about fifteen two inch thorns stuck deep all over her body including one to the hilt in her nose; indeed, the last I pulled from her was so profoundly plunged into a leg that I didn’t notice it until a couple of days later when she yelped at my touch & I wondered: “Is she retarded?!” but no, the first time was also the last, I guess it just took fifteen to teach her where they came from, until then her little walnut-brain must have been thinking simply: “Ouch, it sure is sharp out today.”

Nor did I teach her to jump like a Gazelle at every third galloping stride when running through a grassy field. At first I couldn't figure out why she did it, it was only when I noticed she runs at a normal, ground-hugging gallop when there is no grass, that I realised she did it in order to spy her prey at greater distance.

I have always had dogs & have studied different training methods & dog psychology so as to avoid anthropomorphising their reality but there is no question that where she’s lacking lips to smile with, there is a definite childish glee in her eyes & ears after she drops a rabbit at my feet & looks at me waiting, I suppose, for me to raise my ears in delight at the gift of the half-killed animal. Instead I tell her: “Thanks’ but you go ahead & eat it yourself” to which she answers: “No, hombre, I insist, today: its my treat!” & I am forced to carry the bloody thing home & dispose of it later so as not to hurt her feelings, ehem.

I don’t know why she refuses to eat the rabbits, snakes, partridges, she kills, I have seen her happy enough to scrounge putrid carrion & even roll gaily in its maggot-filled carcass (why do they do that?). She is not hungry, I never ration my dog’s food but leave a whole bag of dry food open for them whenever they want it & have found that once a dog feels secure about his food source he doesn’t overeat & I don’t take the chance of underfeeding out of misjudgement*.

But I was proudest of her agility one day when a dove swooped to a height above my own & Egon, without missing a stride, jumped like those amazing athletes that get over bars eight feet high in the Olympics &, chomp! -caught it in mid-flight.  

I discovered something else watching my dog hunt, what I always accepted was an anomalous behaviour in animals caught in the lights of an oncoming car, freezing instead of running, as being due to the animal’s instincts not being prepared to react to lights at night time; but one day Egon chased a rabbit that ran very close to me in its attempt at escape & it was just then, not a few feet from me, that it knew there was no chance it would make cover before the dog, just a few paces behind, caught him up, & do you know what he did? He froze in mid-gesture just like a deer before a car; I was so close I could see his hurried breathing. And do you know what my genius of a dog then did? She pulled to a Road-Runner, dust-cloud stop, & looked around asking: “Where did it go?”

I was telling a friend of Egon’s exploits & mentioned that though most people think rabbits are innately quiet animals the truth is they are only silent because they are just plain scared most of the time, once in the jaws of a predator they are very vocal indeed & in the last moments make up in decibels for a life-time’s silence. Egon plays with them in cruel delight, breaking a few ribs & then squashing gently & repeatedly but at intervals, to get that jolly squeaky-toy effect.

My friend asked: “Doesn’t it make you feel bad seeing the animals die?” & I had to stop & consider my feelings because though I knew it wasn’t comfortable I had made a decision on a sub-conscious level about letting her kill & about watching, or picking up the still-warm corpse.

It isn’t a question of protecting indigenous rabbits as a species. Since the farmers killed the last foxes & wolves all our birds of prey are fat & there are still so many rabbits that a large proportion of the population dies each year at the end of summer of a terrible disease that slowly inflames their eyes to blindness & turns their tongues blue. In the original ecosystem the population was undoubtedly culled to proportions where the disease wouldn’t spread to start with.

Country folk, those who live nearest nature, have the least empathy for it. It wasn’t long ago & despite the government efforts that the last Spanish wolf & the last Spanish bear were killed by furtive hunters. One of my neighbours opened a conversation with me asking if I had ever eaten the ‘little birds’ (pajaritos). I asked which little birds he referred to knowing it wasn’t sparrows, & he answered more loudly: “The little birds, the birds that are small” holding his hand close to my face with its forefinger & thumb at a short distance from one another, to help me comprehend the concept of ‘not big’.

I made no comment & he went on: “Last Sunday my family & I ate four dozen” & I asked: “Aren’t they a protected species?” Despite the long-standing ban, northern countries have had crop problems for millennia because the Mediterranean countries kill the migrating birds en mass as soon as they hit the European shores from Africa. And Jose Antonio answered with a proud smile: “Of course! They are a luxury.” I asked how he hunted them & he explained they are too much trouble to hunt: “I go out in the morning & paint the branches of the trees with rubber cement & then go back at night & pluck them from the bark like fruit."  

It took a little while but wasn’t that difficult to make Egon understand that ducks, chickens, geese, sheep & goats, were off-limits & she didn’t need to know it is because they belong to neighbouring farmers-- though I had to rescue a bloodied, if not badly hurt, turkey from her very jaws one day when a frenzy of bloodlust made her deaf to my orders. But I might just as easily have taught her all killing was forbidden.

As far as the ethical question of killing for pleasure instead of procuring proteins, if I took pleasure in slowly torturing a rabbit to death & then abandoned it when it was no longer able to gratify me with its desperate death squeaks, it would be unquestionably inhuman of me. And so it is of my dog but since she is not human she is under no obligation to behave humanely.

A sentient being feels an automatic empathy for other living beings, there is a kind of recognition of life by life even in a psychopathic killer, he doesn’t after all, take pleasure in hitting a rock, he must feel something for other life even if only to enjoy ending it.

But though we be sentient beings most of us have removed ourselves far enough from the question that when we see minced meat in the supermarket we think: hamburgers, not: gentle cow with big watery eyes. The same goes for a dog, he isn’t reminded of his own life’s fragility the way we humans are when he sees a live rabbit, he only sees food.

As far as the sense of injustice of being out in a field doing rabbitty things while minding your own business when suddenly a huge dog comes out of nowhere & eats you, I can see that between them, the rabbit & the dog, the rules are clearly understood & the rabbit dies without resentment, it is merely nature in action.

The fact I am happy to order rabbit in the restaurants in town but not willing to clean them before preparing them at home & that my dog also decides not to eat her kill, does not mean they are not eaten. Nature’s living demolition team move in immediately, from crows to ants, & leave naught but bones & fur within three days, it is just that my dog & I except ourselves from the process.

The question still remained of why, when she brings a rabbit to me, do I watch her kill it? I feel squeamish when I do & with each gleeful squeeze of her jaws, there is a voice in my breast that silently implores her to make a finish once & for all. And yet I watch.

I remember a story I read as a child, the reminiscence of boyhood by a man who had been around ten in 1945. His father & he were survivors of one of the nuclear bombs & when they looked out on the vast devastation after the fact, he, the boy, cried uncontrollably & hid his face in his father’s side. His father reached down to his shoulders, lifted him straight, turned him around, held his head level with his hands & ordered him to open his eyes & look.

The story apparently had some little impact on me as I remember it after all these years. Even as a child I had understood the author’s father’s intention, they stood at the edge of the biggest event in their country’s history, their culture’s, their family’s & their own- the child had as much right to his experience as his father had & the cruelty would have been to shield him from it even if he mightn’t fully understand it until adulthood.

In a word: it is cowardly to selectively hide from reality, to choose the milky-smelling puppy & reject the carrion-stinking dog. It is sentimentality in its least attractive form to uhh or ahh at a sunset while refusing to look down at the mud you stand in, pretending only beauty exists or even, that only beauty is beautiful.

Thursday September 3rd, 2009

A note about price:size ratio in paintings (420 words)

If a painter gets so stuck in the routine of painting-making, or becomes so satisfied with his work that he falls into the rut of essentially painting the same painting over & over again limiting himself only to changing the subject but not varying the brushstroke, he can equably price his paintings by the square centimetre because the time, effort & talent it takes him to cover a canvas’ surface can be measured in its own breadth & height.

If, on the other hand, the painter changes his approach to his canvas according to the subject’s exigencies, or uses larger brushes to cover a larger canvas, in the end the amount of detail contained in a painting will be determined by the subject & remain the same within a range of sizes, the pricing therefore becomes largely contingent on ‘finish’ instead of square centimetres.

For example, if you compare the work involved in painting a portrait life-size to one that is one & a half times life size, if the ‘finish’, the level of detail, is the same with the only difference being the size of the head & the canvas it is painted on, it is fundamentally the same amount of work & I, at least, will offer such a range of sizing for the same price. If two people ask me for a portrait of the same proportions on the same size canvas but one wants only a bust while the other wants bust & hands, the latter can be considered twice the work (& in artistic terms: a composition at least twice as complicated & ultimately: expressive) & the price will go up.

Thursday August 27th, 2009

Strange tales (730 words)

Jacob & Leah begat Judah (Yahuda) who founded the Israelite tribe called by his name, which means: to praise (Yahweh) in Hebrew. Judah, his three boys & the popular wife of one of them made a shockingly dysfunctional if very touchy-feely family with uncommonly ambiguous morals.

Judah’s elder boy was called Er (evil when read backwards), & he married Tamar, while Judah’s second son, Onan, remained single & his youngest, Shelah, was still a child. The scriptures are sketchy with the details but some rabbinical authorities interpret the reason for God’s anger with Er as being due to Er intentionally avoiding getting his wife, Tamar, pregnant because he didn’t want her to lose her attractive figure.

God’s ire with Er reaches such a point that he simply kills him & Er isn’t mentioned again. At this point Judah entreats his remaining adult son Onan, to impregnate Tamar in his brother’s stead to insure familial inheritance rights through the patriarchal bloodline into the following generation.

Although Onan takes on the onerous burden of sexual relations with his dead brother’s wife willingly enough, he also is disinclined to inseminate her in order to insure inheritance rights for his own future sons.

Onan uses coitus interruptus as his preferred contraceptive method but when his father finds out he has been spilling his seed anywhere but in Tamar (occasioning the word onanism to eventually become synonymous to masturbation) he gets as angry as God had with Er & with the same consequence: he kills his second son, Onan*.

Judah promises to marry his last son to Tamar as soon as he grows up but is wary of keeping his promise having come to the supremely rational conclusion that with two sons murdered in anger, the fault just must be Tamar’s.

She waits & Shelah ultimately grows to marrying age before Judah breaks his word definitively.

Eventually Judah’s wife dies & he decides to go to Enaim to avail himself of the services of a prostitute but Tamar disguises herself cleverly with a veil & tricks the old man into thinking he is having sex with a stranger instead of his daughter-in-law.

The price was agreed at a single goat & she asks for his staff & seal as guarantee against later payment.

When Judah is told Tamar has become a prostitute (I wonder where she got the idea that her main value was as a receptacle for semen?) he decides to burn her alive as punishment for the shame her immorality brought his family name; but when he sends the goat he owes to the woman of Enaim, it is Tamar who presents him with his ring & he is forced to recognize she is the more righteous of the two. Finally he takes her into his home & honours the twins she later bears with his name. She, for her part, bears no grudge towards those responsible for her double widowhood, her abandonment by the family she married into, her fall from respectable marriageability into becoming so morally soiled by her 'infertility' she has no recourse but harlotry; nor for her father-in-law's plans to execute her or her lack of right to decision as she is passed around by the men who promised her father they would care for her when he handed over her dowry.

Thus she exculpates the sin of not providing inheritors to the men who refused to seed her while Judah finally has his genealogical line assured (perhaps these are the roots of the old adage: if you want something done right do it yourself) & they live happily ever after under the eyes of God. As far as I know they killed & ate the goat without further intercourse.

footnote:

* Not to 'honour & obey thy father' is not a capital sin but is the fourth & fifth commandment according to the the New Testament & Talmud respectively. The Christian tradition follows St Augustine's interpretation which divides the commandments into three for the relationship between man & God, the next five: between man & man while the last two govern personal thought. In Judaism it is the first of the tenets that deal with man's relations to man, the first four dealing with man's relationship to God. Although metaphorically, the son is to the father as the father is to God. Return