Tag: nature

Autumnal

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It is Atlanta, late October 2009. He is on the corner of Peachtree circle and 17th street, in front of his godparents’ house. The air is crisp, and so I need not tell you the leaves are burnt. The trees are weightless, the trunks non-existent, the branches invisible. The light is simultaneously bright and soft, as in a fading polaroid.

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The structure of an essay is the logic of a dream.

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A holiday weekend in Amherst, Massachusetts, 2014. The students have fled, turning the campus into a ruin. Across the valley, trees are changing. You might insert your favorite metaphor for autumn leaves. No matter how you phrase it, they are dying. The air is chilly, nippy, spry. The sun is casting a cinematic grain upon the world.

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To the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, coziness was related to bourgeois imperialism. The homes he grew up in were upper-middle-class apartments, chock-full of tchotchkes, rugs, art, and other trinkets imported from German Africa. One could not run, stretch, or think without breaking something, bringing down the bourgeois father’s wrath. In contrast, Bauhaus, with its open spaces and minimalism, offered bare living, producing freedom and training for life in modernity.

A century later, no self-respecting member of the bourgeois—if such a class still exists—would dare live in the type of home Benjamin loathed. Minimalism is the default choice. Not the minimalism of Bauhaus, but one influenced by mid-century modernism and Scandinavia. Tour any home priced above a million or so and you’ll encounter kitchens covered in white marble, spidered with tasteful veins of grey, farmhouse sinks, tan wood cabinets—usually with a grey undertone—white walls, and the lightest of brown wood floors, and wrought-iron window frames opening to a small yard featuring artificial turf. All the little objects that hold signs of life—soup ladles and remotes, corkscrews and holiday cards—are hidden behind the wooden veneer. There is no revelation in these buildings. Even if we acknowledge this isn’t true minimalism, not the bare living Benjamin dreamed of, it nonetheless demands an accounting of what happened.

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October 2004. He is young; second grade has just begun. Sam S. is standing to his left, pear-shaped, his hair cut close. Quincy W. is on his right. They are all wearing Brown Merrells and khaki pants and blue collared shirts and fleeces, the latter two emblazoned with the Woodward Academy crest. It is one of those autumn mornings where there should be frost on the cars, whether it is above freezing or not. Sam is arguing for him to support Georgia Tech football, Quincy the University of Georgia (bizarre, considering his allegiance to the University of Michigan). The light is flat, the sun diffused in the grey above us. There is a single brick wall behind them. Besides that, the world is absent, unseen.

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These images exist as frames excised from a lost film; there is the feeling of movement, the blurred edges you get when you isolate a single shot from the rest, but I cannot see said movement. There is context around them (I was getting coffee for my sister and her friends, visiting Amherst to look at universities, learning for the first time about college football), except it is not in the image, but rather in the inaccessible film. The information holds the same valence as something I read on Wikipedia, not something I experienced. They are images without information—though isn’t this the case with every isolated frame?

I do not see myself in these memories, and yet it is not that I am absent. Rather, it is as though I am the film camera, the producer and center of these images, and yet invisible. Or perhaps not a camera, for at times it is as though I am in the frame, but cannot be seen, a blurred-out lacuna. And like every lacuna, everything visible is nothing more than a commentary on the unseeable object. My affect suffuses the image, and as a result, I disappear, becoming the image. Indeed, I might say that the image is nothing more than a production of my affect.

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Autumnal folklore tends to be set in small towns on the edges of industrialization. Sleepy Hollow might have sat in “listless repose,” operating under a “drowsy, dreamy influence,” but the Hudson River Valley in which it reclined was soon to become the site of intense industrialization. We might note that construction on the Erie Canal—which allowed the transformation of the Hudson River Valley—began in 1817, two years before Irving wrote his enduring short story. Or that British use of Hessian auxiliaries—symbolized through Irving’s headless Hessian—allowed Hessel-Kassel, to build a prosperous textile industry. In the decades after Irving’s tale was published, Hesse would become one of Germany’s industrial centers. The terror lurking in his story, the reason it resonated for so long after, is that we were becoming headless horsemen, bodies and nothing more, alone and atomized yet without subjectivity. That’d we would have the worst of both worlds, the loneliness of bourgeois capitalism and the unfreedom of its industrial successor.

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In academic jargon, affect is understood as a sort of “free-floating intensity,” one that precedes thought. This is what distinguishes it from emotion, and, for affect theorists, frees it from politics, history, and culture. For them, it is never ideological. That they base this on a flawed understanding of science is not relevant to us here. Rather, it is enough to say that the world precedes us, and so precedes even the affective response, conditioning it.

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Coziness, or rather the desire for it, is the desire for a past where (some) people felt themselves to be subjects, and the world was built around such subjects. In this, it is reactionary, an inherently conservative affect. It should not surprise us that autumnal aesthetics are coded as white, and very often upper-middle-class or above. At the same time, such a desire reminds us that there are alternatives, that we need not live in a world built for none of us. In picking apples, we glimpse a world scaled to the individual.

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After 2008, fall aesthetics became particularly dominant. The music and fashion of the time were intensely autumnal, whether in the grey beaches of the Neighborhood, the tweed and twee Lumineers, or the ubiquity of flannel. As the economy flamed out spectacularly, the truth of financialization was laid bare—that it was nothing more than a rear-guard action to salvage an economic system reaching its limits, that there was no future to be found—Millennials found themselves dreaming of alternatives. Occupy Wall Street was the most literal expression of this longing, but was doomed, for it was defined by what it opposed, relied on the old modes for its power. Autumnal aesthetics attempted to sidestep this issue by recalling an arcadian pre-industrial era. At the same time, Steampunk was on the rise. It returned to early industrialization—the moment of the fall in this ideological construction—and imagined it played out differently, that we could have built a system that would never enter crisis, where industry remained dominant. The fashion of the era reflected the paucity of alternatives; all that was on offer was an Edenic past that never existed, or a more functional form of capitalism. Yet there was something else at play in the autumn styles, the oxblood slacks and burnt pumpkin sweaters. In the 2013 remake of Sleepy Hollow, the reawakening of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman are signs of the apocalypse, that the world is ending.

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The desire for fall is a desire for contentment in the face of death. It is the hope of late-life reconciliation, the opposite of Adorno and Said’s late style. The leaves are dead, the air is smokey, the end is nigh. And yet we are happy, even enjoying the apocalypse, not hiding out hoping for survival, but taking walks and holding parties. The coziness of fall is the unconscious hope that when we die, it will be next to a roaring fire, surrounded by friends and family, not in a fluorescently lit room, violently fighting the coming darkness. In the original version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Ichabod Crane is obsessed with ghost stories.  Living in the dreamy, content world of the glade, Crane fixates on death. In the end, what drives him out is not a romantic rival playing tricks on him, but the unconscious realization that the coziness is a façade, that there is no reconciliation with death. The peace of finality is a passing dream.

On Southern thunderstorms and climate catastrophe

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Apologies for not updating the blog in a while; if grad school does one thing, it’s make me a worse writer. Focusing on making sure each sentence is unimpeachable is a sure-fire way to ruin the whole. No matter. Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be uploading a mixture of old and new pieces.

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At the moment, I am sitting on the patio of an Atlanta coffee shop, waiting for the rain to stop. Thirty minutes ago it was sunny and muggy, the clarity of the air belying its humidity. Fifty feet away, I can see the lines of rain, reminiscent of film grain, discontinuous droplets offering an illusion of consistency. They create a fog behind them, giving the feeling that we are not sitting below a cloud but rather in the nimbus itself, having floated upwards on a current of heat until the reconstructed gas surrounded us. Already, however, this is passing. The mixed-use apartments down the road are no longer desaturated and aged; their oppressive newness has returned. The thunder is less frequent and the air is cooler. But even once the rain concludes, there will still be occasional flashes of lightning, blinding those of us out here working on our computers. I know this because the rain has already stopped.

It was a classic Georgia thunderstorm, the type that exists in every Southerner’s childhood memory, the rain barreling in out of nowhere, catching you at a swimming hole or out in the middle of a field or on your bike, forcing you to race for cover even though you know it’s futile, having stayed out until the first drop fell, ignoring the various signs in an attempt to squeeze every last moment from those long, humid days. If it was August and finally hot enough, you’d excitedly watch steam rising off the asphalt, a science project in real time. You’d get soaked and then stand around, confident this too would pass, ready to reclaim your rightful place within the field of play. And you were almost always right; it would stop, and everyone took off their shirts, if they weren’t off already, and laid them to dry, though the moisture in the air made this a fools’ errand, and you’d go back to swimming or pitching or running around semi-aimlessly. The asphalt would’ve been cooled, allowing you to temporarily run on it without burning the bottoms of your feet, though usually by that time in the summer your sole would be so calloused that it didn’t matter much one way or the other.

Montreal, where I live now, doesn’t have much of any of this, despite the summer humidity. There are rain storms and rainy days and even the occasional bursting forth of thunder and lightning, the earth’s way of reminding us of its power, but in much fewer number than in the South. I hadn’t realized I missed them so until I returned, having forgotten how just sitting and watching the storm is an activity in itself, giving you a base from which your mind can drift. Perhaps the loss of familiarity is why the rain seems so much more common now than it was when I was young. It doesn’t help that my pre-adolescent years coincided with the worst drought Georgia had seen in five hundred years; a return to normal rainfall would naturally feel like an increase. But looking at Atlanta’s yearly precipitation for the months of June, July, and August (an admittedly poor metric for thunderstorms), something begins to emerge. The average for the data set I have is 13.02 inches over the three-month span. The average from ten years before the drought was 11.9 inches, while for ten years after was 14.4 inches. This brief analysis is obviously not scientific—the data set is too small, the periodization is arbitrary, etc. But it confirms my sense that summer rains in Atlanta are increasingly common. It also tracks roughly with a two-degree increase in average temperature over a similar period. It seems that climate change is set to produce more thunderstorms in Atlanta as our planet collapses.

There is another explanation, however, one that is intertwined with climate change but reveals it to be the symptom of our world, not the illness itself. A few years ago, a group of scientists found that Atlanta births thunderstorms like few other American cities, our concrete sprawl calling forth storms from the heavy air and sending them around the metro region. In the intervening years, the city has only gotten more myopic when it comes to development, various real estate moguls paving over the urban forest to build mixed-used monstrosities, as if the abundance of trees and outposts of nature weren’t what made the city so special. And so we can assume the rate at which Atlanta’s heat islands have created thunderstorms has increased as well. It’s a stark reminder that our insistence on dominating nature is inherently destructive, climate change or not.

And this is the crux of the issue. Even if we were to magically switch to a carbon-neutral system of construction, we still could not continue to build as we do and expect nothing to happen. The earliest inventions stemmed from self-preservation, a natural impulse, but worked through domination of the natural. But while for most of human history victory over nature was localized and tenuous—a rickety bridge, irrigation for a series of farms, perhaps the occasional dam or canal—The acceleration of technology over the past three hundred years has shifted so we no longer attempt to conquer aspects of nature but rather the entirety. It is downright suicidal to believe we can innovate our way of a mess caused by the conquering impulse inherent in inventiveness. Furthermore, no matter how much we wish to deny it, the natural is still within us. And so to destroy and dominate nature is to do the same to ourselves, even if we do not realize it.

It is now a new day, and I am sitting in a different coffeeshop. Though it is sunny out, the tables are still wet, carrying the marker of yesterday’s storm. Kids from a day camp run around on the grass in front, taking advantage of the ever-rarer blue skies. I check the weather radar. We’re surrounded; the rain will start by six, never to end.

 

Notes from a Bus Ride

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“Well, won’t you lend your lungs to me? Mine are collapsing.”-“Lungs” Townes Van Zandt

In the distance, I see the future, burning skies and flooded forests, states swept away, leaving only the levees that enabled their destruction, bodyguards who double-crossed their mark.

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“Gather up the gold you’ve found/you fool it’s only moonlight”
Around me is the now; a man on the bus takes heroin out of his pocket and examines it. He starts to nod off, opening the bus window before doing so, letting the cold air in. There are scabs across his body, capitalism’s stigmata in the form of smack side effects. The spring melt is arriving. The snow is fleeing, cold clear water surging down Mont Royal. But there is no dirt to hold it. The result is run-off, dirty water clear enough to pass as something else. A generation raised on YouTube is coming of age: the first whose learning, entertainment, and lives were lived according to capital-hungry algorithms, codes that do not prioritize profit but are only for that. Even the most greedy human is still human. As such, they can never operate as capital might like them to. Algorithms are different.

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“You better leave this dream alone/try to find another”
Buildings grow more grotesque by the day. High rises are being built downtown; each time I walk by, I dream of Molotovs. Industrialization has put us in the guillotines. Capitalist rats chew at the ropes, unaware the blade will kill us all.

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“Wisdom burned upon a shelf/who’ll kill the raging cancer”
Fascism is capitalism’s immune system—it becomes popular when the system is sick. Yet it offers no alternative. This is by design, for it is meant only to buy ruling class time. Unwilling to give up their position, however, the elite do nothing. We look at the 1930’s and assume fascism will pass. But then we had Germany as a potential enemy. This allowed us to position fascism as anti-American. Fascism is reliant on nationalism, and stripped of it becomes politically inert. Now we have no fascist enemies—our forever war is against the poor and Muslim, not the rich and Aryan. And so, barring a fundamental system overhaul, we will careen into the abyss wearing MAGA hats and coal rolling.

 

Please stay on the trail

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Please stay on the trail pleads the sign. “Streambank restoration…project ReWild.” To protect nature, we must stay within the framework of the societal organization. Society, however, is the dialectic opposite of nature. Both constantly work to destroy each other, while simultaneously relying on the opposite’s existence. To stay on the path is to save nature, but only as a vanquished foe. In such a position, it loses its dialectic tension with society, and hence loses what we might call its essence—that it is inimical to us.

When starting up a mountain hike, one does not pick a spot at random. You look at where others have gone, creating a path, and follow it for some distance. In doing so, the hiker goes beyond where they could’ve otherwise reached, opening up more of nature to their gaze.

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However, though positivism—particularly as it manifests in the supposedly objective sciences—asserts that more is better, this is not actually the case. To stay on the path is to protect knowledge of nature from being affected by nature. The corporately constructed trail promises the violent safety of the administered world. In this, it offers the false freedom of domination, which can only produce untruth. It says that one need not think of what is below your foot or behind the branch. This hides the fact that it makes such considerations impossible. On the trail, one can see the forest for the trees, unbiased by the nature’s dangers. But without the trees there is no forest; without terror there is no nature. It is only when thinking about where to place your foot that truth makes an appearance. One can only truly know nature when you are at its mercy. It is an autonomous totality affected by but independent of society. On the hiking trail, this is not apparent; the pathway is subtle, making it feel as though you are in nature, but one that is familiar and subject to the same domination as us. It obliterates the distance between us and the realm we left. As such it leads only to untruths.

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However, the sign does not lie. Walking off the hiking trail offers the possibility of understanding nature as fundamentally different, as well as revealing that we were once subjects within that realm, before administration turned us to objects. However, we are no longer subjects—enlightenment’s march has stripped us of our humanity, replacing it with the “objective spirit” that rules society. As soon as we step off the path, we bring the administered world into nature. Nature struggles to free us from it; in this struggle there is a glimpse of truth. But it comes at a cost. The grass dies, the flowers do not regrow. In learning about the earth, we attack it. Nature responds by showing us the untruth of our system. It does so at the cost of its life.

Empty Gestures

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“The house I built is burning”

The Turnpike Troubadours’ lyric echoes in my ear as I walk, the original stuck to the corner where I heard it, its copies mutating and shifting as the real becomes more distant. “The house I built is burning… the house I built burnin…the house we built…burnin…” It’s sunny and warm here in Providence, but the remnants of the bomb cyclone that stormed away weeks ago still liter the corners. Across the country, my sister’s town is covered in the scar tissue that fills the void burning brings. In Atlanta, there’s still ice on the ground. Before I left, I watched as fire failed to melt the snow around it, my understanding collapsing with each flicker. In between these coasts sit proud mountains stripped of their cold coverings, the snow refusing the peaks’ plea for modesty.
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Down in Southeast Atlanta, there’s a park centered around two ponds. The ponds were created by The South River Brick Company, who used the area as a clay quarry. They weren’t the first diggers though—the area around the park had been a quarry as far back as 3000 BC, mostly for soapstone. After SRBC closed down, an African-American family homesteaded there, only for white neighbors to burn their house and chase them out, turning the location into a dumping ground. Years later, after a billionaire philanthropist gave Dekalb County the money to turn the land into a park, local artists started using the remaining trash to create installations. Dolls’ heads and broken brick dot the hiking trail, sitting in old TV’s and playing tricks on the local copperheads. Geese land on the lakes, flapping their wings until they have a readymade whitewater ride. The dead trees have ornate tattoos, the product of termites’ artistic ambitions. Occasionally otters appear, messing with the floodplain in unexpected ways.
Yet something is off as you walk through, a palpable tension independent of the lifeless eyes that track walkers or the greedy poison ivy that reach for your legs. It comes from the nagging suspicion that though we gave this land back to nature, it didn’t forgive us. Huxley writes that English forests and marshes are “only there on sufferance, because we have chosen out of our good pleasure, to leave them their freedom.” But the truth was these wilds did not accept their enslavement peacefully—it is only now that we begin to see their vengeance manifesting, and so we desperately return what we never actually conquered. What good is a million dollars for a park, when the money came from the system that destroyed it in the first place? Our house is burning; even our most conscientious leaders are doing little more than throwing cups of water on the ever growing flames, knowing damn well it’ll change nothing. They’re in collusion with the fire, just like those in the back dumping gasoline and laughing as the flames grow. They don’t feel the heat, at least not yet. Cotton and linen, the make-up of currency, are mighty fine at cooling.
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“And all that trouble you’ve been looking for is easy in the finding
Well the devil’s into fine detail” The Turnpike Troubadours sing. Oh how I wish they were right! The devil Huxley found in nature, the alien distance that fills the tropics with dread, that asserts there is world outside of us we cannot know, is gone. With it is inimical goodness; the devil cannot exist without God to cast him out of heaven. Those details the devil loved—the ice on the corner, the burned out tree, the rock strewn peak—reveal nothing but his retreat. Climate change is the manifestation of capitalism, of our society. Every tree we plant is already dead, stripped of its essence and power.

On Irma

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“There may not be an airport. It is in the salt ponds.” That was my mom’s response when I told my family I wanted to fly to Key West to help clean up once Irma passed. She’s right. Last I heard, downtown hadn’t flooded, but the worst was yet to hit. Our friends taking refuge on the second floor of our house haven’t been able to communicate since 2 AM.

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Once, in a letter, I wrote that “a certain type of person moves to Key West: those who see themselves in the shimmering heat, in the promise of a cooling wind of the power boat, a wind that in reality brings with it turbulent waters and spilled beer. Key West—an island with mediocre beaches, good bars, a modicum of history, and filled with obese tourists hailing from Alabama and Kansas—is only livable when seen through a specific set of eyes. The difference between the Harvard professor on vacation there and the homeless man he became, throwing Frisbees up and down the beach while yelling to himself, is a suntan.”

Now I wonder whether this was truly the case, whether there is something more at play. How does one live on an island with no future, a place that will be underwater in seventy years—that is, if the hurricanes don’t destroy it first? In such a situation, what else can one do but drink and fuck?

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Homelessness in Key West is pervasive and visible in a way not often found elsewhere. An island with warm nights, drunken tourists, and an accepting ethos entices those who the nation has failed, those we try to sweep under the rug, those we hate and attack for no reason beyond their sheer existence. As I watch television footage of waves crashing over the southernmost point and winds shaking even the most structurally sound houses, I wonder if this is nothing less than a genocide, our cruelty driving them to Key West while our obsession with meat and cars sentences the island to death.

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The most recent time I was in Key West, the wind tried to blow, but the air was too thick with humidity and heat, oversized particles moving faster then they were ever meant to, blocking the cooling breeze before it started. Two friends had accompanied my family and me down.

Halfway through the trip, we took a motorboat to our favorite beach, an unexplored nature preserve filled with mosquitos, crabs, and spiders. As we stood in the lukewarm water, one friend turned to me and said, “this will be underwater soon.”

The heat beat down. Behind us a storm was forming. The humidity thickened until it consumed me, the heavy air becoming an extension of my body, a weight that could be neither carried nor dropped, inescapable to the last.

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It is not, as is commonly supposed, that heat and insanity are closely intertwined, that the former causes the latter—sunbeams whispering in the ears of the unwell, pushing the unstable to the edge. Rather, tropical warmth is insanity; the rich drunk with his hand in the pool is no different from a heat wave; the man muttering on the sidewalk is not caused by the humidity but is in fact a manifestation of it. Climate change is nothing more than the amplification of a world gone mad.

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I don’t know why our friends didn’t evacuate when they could, why they stayed put while even the most stalwart of locals ran. I wonder if they regret it. Probably not. Whatever the case, I cannot imagine them in our attic terrified, shining flashlights out to watch the encroaching waters. In fact, I can’t imagine any local like that. I wonder if they’re having a two-person party as the world collapses around them, drinking and trying to find joy in the horror. I wonder if, in the back of their mind, they know that this is only a practice run for what will become the new normal, that the indeterminate future has become the present, that the American public has weighed the options and decided their lives aren’t worth the extra hassle of biking to work. I wonder if the drinking is defiance or resignation.

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My friend’s prediction has come true sooner than any of us could imagine. The preserve has undoubtedly become swamped. That is the least of the Keys’ problems. People say that we won’t know the extent of the damage until the storm passes. But the storm will never pass. Irma is just the first act, a warning shot that hit us in the stomach, a rude reminder that our modern peace with nature was only an armistice. The coming barrage will be infinitely worse, nature’s inimical violence responding to human degeneracy in kind. It won’t make us change direction, of course; we’ll keep marching straight towards the barrage, putting those we care about least in front. Future generations will see us as no different from the Victorian era British viceroys who ignored drought in India, letting millions die to prove the legitimacy of the free market. Like them, most of us will face no official consequences for our actions. There will be no trials, no formal declaration of human rights violations. Just the slowly rising water, it’s cosmic timeframe letting us slip into eternity before it can deliver its sentence. In the meantime, we will sacrifice our most vulnerable in a failed attempt to appease that which has no morals. In doing so, we will find the same about ourselves.

Mists and Myths: Fragments from Baden-Baden and Zurich

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Vertov’s premise was that film’s power came from the ability to interpolate seemingly disparate images to create an ideal world in a way that the masses could comprehend— the truth of the ideal world would be conveyed through montage.

Kluge built on this, or perhaps contracted upon it. He thought it was necessary for the viewer to reconcile the relationship between the film on the screen and the film in their head. To him, the smallest unit of montage was not a single frame, but the empty space between frames. Truth came out not from creating understanding through montage, but through the co-mingling of the interpolation with the viewer’s knowledge of history and society. This was especially true when the images were irreconcilable with each other and/or the viewer’s knowledge. The most striking example of this is at the beginning of The Artist Under the Big Top: Perplexed, where film from the Nazi’s day of German Art is overlaid with an Italian rendition of The Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

Applied to writing, it would mean that the base unit is not the letter itself, but the space between letters (and paragraphs and sentences, of course).

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I couldn’t figure out how to turn my headlights off. The confluence of them, the thick fog, and a steamed windshield meant I could only see about 25 feet in front of me. Switchbacks were particularly empty. For a few seconds, I’d become convinced that the road just disappeared into nothingness, my rented Infiniti entering the infinite. Then I’d realize I needed to hit the breaks and turn before I flew over the guardrail.

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darker tree in the mist

“What seems to work best for you is the distraction technique—whenever you feel panic setting in, open up twitter or boot up FIFA and try to stop thinking about time.”

-My therapist

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“Country Girl I think you’re pretty/ Got to make you understand/ Have no lovers in the city/ Let me be your country man”

-Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

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“Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast. ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’”

-Sam Kriss

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Though I had never visited the Black Forest before, it felt familiar. I couldn’t see it as it was—only through memories of Colorado winters. The tall firs, shaded a green that at times bordered on black and speckled with brown needles, blended with the dense Vail forest I sped through on skis; the languid walking paths were just the off-season version of the catwalks I knew so well.

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really pretty stump

Ethnologists are quick to point out that cause-effect relationships and a desire for clear demarcations between good and evil are not as inherently human as those in the Judeo-Christian tradition believe. For example, in Basque folklore, there is the Basa-Juana, an almost sasquatchian wild man who lives deep in the forest with his wife. In one story, the Basa-Juana is chasing a group of men to eat them. When one man trips and falls, the Basa-Juana teaches him how to grow wheat and other food staples. No explanation for the change of heart is given.

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centered city in focus.jpg

“Zurich wants to be Brooklyn.” That’s how Guille put it to me as we walked by expensive furniture stores built into the side of a viaduct. He scowled at a shop window that revealed a simple wooden kitchen chair, pre-worn at its base. The €500 price tag swung softly in the air conditioning.

“Or maybe Berlin,” I responded, glancing at a nightclub with a canopy of brightly lit umbrellas. The area smelled of weed.

“Zurich doesn’t mind anything, as long as it doesn’t affect them. It’s the same way with money,” Guille explained. They don’t care how dirty it is, as long as it doesn’t soil their hands when they take it.

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“We could call this strange geography created by technology “AirSpace.” It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.”

-Kyle Chayka

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The tallest building in Zurich, Prime Tower, was completed in 2011—though with its smooth green glass and façade-like flatness, it seems like something from the John Portman hits of 70’s collection. We visited it the night I arrived in Zurich, stopping in for drinks at the bar on the top floor. It was darkly lit, with all the elements of a posh watering hole in 2016—a bar with a literal brass bar and oversized jug of Hendricks’s gin (so you know they aren’t using Bombay or, gasp, Tanqueray), ornately illustrated bathroom doors, and fries that came in a mini-fryer lined with fake newspaper. The only identifier that I was in Zurich was my locally made craft beer, a bargain at eight euros. The bar was dressed down, except for the prices.

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“Getting caught up in the coked-up propulsion of New York, or the foibles of the rich and powerful, is a losing proposition. It gets you high for about a day, you feel like you have a stake in power even though that’s an illusion, you feel a part of an exciting modern movement, and then you have to replenish your ammo in two, three days…The theater of urban power brokers is hackwork. Sure, they’re corrupt. Sure, they’re statistical outliers and therefore novel. But that’s too easy. It’s too easy to think exclusively about novel people. It’s too clean a victory. It’s robbing a liquor store with a shotgun when a laser pointer in a jacket pocket would suffice. Self-righteousness in the face of powerful people is a foolproof position to assume and it makes you look good, but it’s an affected antagonism.”

-Kaleb Horton

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My last day in Zurich, I went for an early morning walk. At the plaza where I watched the sunrise, a tourist in yoga gear asked a trash collector to take her photo. He obliged, and as he prepared the camera on her iPhone, she assumed the lotus position in front of the rapidly rising sun. Nearby, there was an empty sleeping bag, a rare intrusion of Zurich’s invisible but existent homeless population. I walked back to the city proper. I arrived on a major thoroughfare at the same time as the tram. The disembarking men and women streamed past me, hoping to get to the bank before their boss. Each wore the same black or navy suit, using a single accessory to attempt to individualize their uniform—colorful socks or a small pocket square, dress boots or a monogrammed belt. In my tweed jacket and Blunderstone boots, I felt superior. In a café down the street, I sat next to a man with my glasses and shoes. I ate the seven-euro cheesecake; he ate the six-euro muffin. We both drank cappuccinos and wrote.

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In the 1970’s, Bowie started experimenting with cutting up his lyrics. In essence, he’d write the lyrics to a song, cut them up, and rearrange it. Doing so changed the meaning, opening up interpretations and understandings that were previously unavailable. The risk was that the song’s original meaning would be lost to all, even Bowie, without a suitable replacement.

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Zurich’s opera house is rather tame, by the standards of opera houses. Or maybe gilded letters and ornate stonework stick out less in Zurich, the city that is the epitome of wealth. The golden seals of the town’s guilds are embedded in the granite planks of its courtyard. If you look closely at certain homes along the waterfront, you’ll see the same emblems, marking their owners as an elite within the city of the elites. The seals on the house are all the differentiation they allow themselves, however, usually preferring to attempt to blend in with the city at large.

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In Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog uses every tool at his disposal as a filmmaker, including montage and narrative, to craft a theory on ecstatic beauty, madness, music, and nature. What is seen as the madness of the titular character is, in reality, the lasting effect of experiencing pure ecstasy.[1] Though the beauty of music provides this particular ecstasy, it can also be found in nature. Because of this, the listener who becomes enraptured in music returns to a state usually only found in indigenous tribes who still interact with nature’s violent beauty. This is why Fitzcarraldo is a laughingstock of modern civilization, yet is in some way respected by those in the jungle. Furthermore, art is the only semi-justification for the destruction of nature, for the possibility of ecstasy is not gone, as it is when nature is corrupted in the name of capitalism, but simply repositioned.

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blue chairlift tree center

There was a ski lift at the bottom of the path into the Black Forest national park. The chairs, left hanging even in the offseason, danced in the thick fog. It reminded me of an abandoned industrial space, or a Scooby-Doo episode about the Abominable Snowman. Or perhaps both. There were a few more scattered across the mountain, the only sign that the forest has changed since the days of the brothers Grimm. For the most part, they were a stark and unwelcome intrusion of the material world, reminding the hiker that in the winter, much of the now-pristine landscape is crushed by skiers—only to be reborn again in the spring.

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Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

-David Foster Wallace

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Most agree that the Grimm Brothers didn’t create the folktales they documented. If I remember correctly, several of the tales may have come from their neighbor, an old French woman, who in turn read them in Charles Perrault’s collection stories.[2] This is fascinating because the tales are so linked to the Black Forest. Think of Little Red Riding Hood skipping down a path, or Hansel and Gretel running from the witch, or the house of the seven dwarves. Whether because of the tales themselves, or Disney, or something else, I’d guess that you imagined the scenes not in French farmland, but German forest, with the architecture to match.

Upon visiting the Black Forest, the first thing I noticed was how different than landscape was from how I had imagined it. It was much hillier and foggier. It didn’t help that, since I was visiting in late fall, only 50% of the trees had leaves. It was stunning nonetheless. At one point, I found a path—it was lined with pine straw, pockmarked with red mushrooms, and had a creek running nearby. As I stumbled down it, I had to restrain myself from leaping in the air. I had discovered a path reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm. I entered the world of folktales, a place with innocence and witches, with no intentions on leaving.

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mushrooms best

“Story, then, is the most subjective force in the world—but I do not mean this in the Gallic, po-mo sense that all experience is relative and there is no such thing as truth. I believe fervently in truth, particularly literary truth, and great nonfiction writers are men and women who work to find that truth and, through the force of their argument and their use of detail, convince us that truth exists. Great nonfiction writers are priests of truth, who, moreover, have to struggle to find it, because truth is often frightening or upsetting; it is almost always surprising. Journalists such as Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair believe they already know the truth, and write accordingly. They cynically manufacture detail to tell us what they already believe. A great nonfiction writer takes the lumpen stuff of human experience and transforms it into a truthful story that may not cohere exactly to what happened, because what literally happened is not always the best illustration of the truth.”

-Tom Bissell

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immovable force meets istobbable object

One of the striking things, when listening to the music of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, is the obsession with settling down. It was part of the idealism—they were going to change the world, and then go back to the countryside and live in an egalitarian relationship with their lover. In the decades since, such a concept has fallen out of fashion, and fallen hard. Nowadays, the majority of love songs have an implicit phobia of the contentedness that CSNY, The Beach Boys, and even Bowie craved. This has been one of the great, if accidental, victories of the moral majority. The media made now that celebrates settling down is almost entirely regressive: Nancy Meyers Rom-Coms and the tattered remnants of a country genre that is now closer to rock. Gone is the celebration of two people living together as loving equals, such as in “Kooks” or “Our House.” Now, the only examples of long-term relationships retain gender roles more fitting of 1950 than 2016.[3] Obviously, this benefits the faction of the USA that would like to return to that time. But it also hurts the rest of us in another way—it makes it taboo to want long-term contentedness. Admitting that you want to find a partner for life before the age of 30 is seen as tantamount to announcing that you believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen and that trickle-down economics is valid. This is absurd, of course. There’s no real correlation between wanting a permanent relationship and regressive views. Approaching every relationship before the age of 28 or so as inevitably temporary isn’t healthy. It leads to skepticism at every potential relationship; being worried to enter one, no matter how much you like the other person, because you are convinced it must end.

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I started up down the path into the Black Forest, filled with excitement. I’ve dreamed of visiting the region for as long as I can remember, wanting to walk through the thick trees and past the bubbling creeks. I stopped after three steps. Was that sign saying it was all closed, or just one path?

Just to be safe, I hiked back out and drove down to the national park information center. The teenager working the front desk confirmed that, yes, despite the heavy fog and rain, the park was open. I thanked him and walked outside. I started walking up the path. Wait, how did I know this was the way? I returned to the heated building to confirm that, yes, that was the path. I went on my way again. As I left the open field to enter a tree-lined path, I felt panic set in. Are there bears in the Black Forest? I saw one on a brochure. When do they hibernate? I tried to Google it—the Internet wasn’t working. Once again I returned to the park center. No, don’t worry about bears, they aren’t around. Finally, I could go on my way, free of fear. What about wolves? Or if I got lost? The fog was thick. Maybe I should just stay inside. Eventually, I had to remind myself I had driven nine hours to do this, and I shouldn’t waste the opportunity to fulfill a dream. Cautiously, I continued down the path.

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“That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money in power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy…In a nation that which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.”

-Joan Didion

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Even when he’s portrayed as evil, I always have sympathy for the Basa-Juana. He just wants to live in the mountains and protect his trees while his wife Mari rules over nature. As human settlement expands, he’s pushed farther into the green morass, constantly having to relocate his castle to an ever-darkening enclave. A group of men, searching desperately for food, encroach on his solitude. He decides to teach them how to farm. They run away and call him a monster. Another man cuts down the Basa-Juana’s trees. The Basa-Juana asks the man to come with him to be punished. The man tricks him, pinning him to the tree he wanted to protect. One day he wakes up, and his lover is no longer a benevolent goddess known as Mari but simultaneously the mother of a man named Jesus and the head of a cult of witches. And then they’re gone, pushed into non-existent myth as we map the last of the forest. He is super-human yet wants to live a simple, human life. But it is because he is super-human that he never can.

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“There is silence; but a silence that breathes with the soft breathing of the sea and, in the thin shrill noise of a cricket, insistently, incessantly harps on the fact of its own deep perfection.”

-Aldous Huxley

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impressionistic

The most important part of the trip to Baden-Baden, more important than the solitude, was the freedom—though I guess the two are inextricable. The car emphasized both. I not only didn’t need to meet up with anyone, but I didn’t even have to be anywhere at a certain time to catch a bus or tram. I could just drive, alone except the music coming from the stereo, winding my way through mountain passes and tight village streets. The few times this freedom was limited, I was livid. I took it as a personal affront when my AirBnB host kept calling to ask when I’d arrive; I would get there when I got there, and besides, it wasn’t my fault traffic was bad.

When I walked through the forest, the silence confirmed both my solitude and freedom. There were no crowds to avoid, no beautiful works of art to see, just trees and creeks and the occasional lake. Huxley said his father’s idea of church was a walk through the mountains.[4] I empathize. The silent fog was almost mystical—I understood why the idea of supernatural beings living deep in the trees is so seductive. Every intervention modern man makes into nature destroys some of its silent beauty. To borrow from quantum mechanics, we change it just through observing. So fairies and werewolves and Basa-Juanas act as our proxies. We insert them into the natural world, and act as if they continue to exist there even when we leave, a last-ditch effort to reclaim our place within a perfect order from which we have been expelled. Leaves crunched under my boot. I came to a stop, closed my eyes, and listened to the silence breathe softly. I imagined where in the forest I was. Just over the hill, fairies nibbled on mushrooms while the Basa-Juana slept.

Footnotes:

[1] There are many types and definitions of ecstasy, of course, but the ecstasy most common in Herzog is the emotion one feels when one comes close to understanding capital-t Truth.

[2] Or more accurately, was told stories that came from Perrault’s collection, since it was written a century before and aimed at the upper class. Eventually, the tales filtered down into the lower class they allegedly originated in, such as the French neighbor.

[3] Yes, I know the female characters in Nancy Meyers films have high-powered jobs. But they never find happiness until they find a man and give up their individuality.

[4] Of course, Leonard Huxley was a rung below the aristocracy, with the free time and means to disappear into the mountains whenever he wished. And I could only take this trip because of my family’s economic well-being and my father’s support. Someone working for minimum wage can’t afford to go off the grid in the way in search of the solitude so necessary for self-realization. Missing a call about an overtime opportunity could mean not eating for a week. And perhaps this, not the fifty-dollar fondues and bevy of Bentleys, is what is so obscene about Zurich: they have the means to search for truth yet don’t. They are all Baudrillard, deluding themselves into thinking the insular little world they have built is the entirety of reality, that because there is no truth in it, there is no truth anywhere—that their cultural creations are so imprinted on us that even in the most virgin areas all we see is that which has already been made. Perhaps they’re right, and any attempt to find truth is delusional. But the ecstasy I experienced in the Baden-Baden, and Herzog experienced in the Jungle, and Huxley experienced in nature’s peculiar silence—the ecstasy that man tries to recapture through folktales and fairies—suggests otherwise.