A Few Examples Of Elegance

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Etude Op.10 #3 in E major by Chopin

Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler

I would ride your bed

and leave the yellow bark dust

on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek

you could never walk through markets

without the profession of my fingers

floating over you. The blind would

stumble certain of whom they approached

though you might bathe

under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh

at this smooth pasture

neighbor to your hair

or the crease

that cuts your back. This ankle.

You will be known among strangers

as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you

before marriage

never touch you

-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.

I buried my hands

in saffron, disguised them

over smoking tar,

helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once

I touched you in water

and our bodies remained free,

you could hold me and be blind of smell.

You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women

the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.

And you searched your arms

for the missing perfume.

and knew

what good is it

to be the lime burner's daughter

left with no trace

as if not spoken to in an act of love

as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

You touched

your belly to my hands

in the dry air and said

I am the cinnamon

peeler's wife. Smell me.

- Michael Ondaatje

Understanding Meaning: How To Pick Up A Pretty Girl

I told a pretty girl that learning to comprehend a new language by listening to it spoken by native speakers is the most difficult part of learning a new language. She agreed and was intrigued and seemed genuinely engaged with the conversation. She smiled often, touched her hair, the tip of her fingers pressing my knee. She talked about the phenomenon that almost everyone has experienced: pick any word, no matter how obscene or even sacred, repeat it over and over again, and it will lose all it's original meaning by becoming just a sound.

Then my brain broke a little bit. As I was talking I realized that when people talk they don't pause between words. There are no spaces with the spoken word, only at the end of sentences and even those aren't always necessary. This realization caused anxiety and I started to talk faster and slower, trying to figure it out. I couldn't do it, it was too much. It struck me that it's not just words that can lose meaning after repetition but it's whole sentences. I'm just producing uninterrupted sentence-long-streams of modulated sounds. How could she possibly understand me?

She told me about a book she was reading. It was called Columbine, and it was about the Columbine school shootings. Apparently, there was a student who was shot in the head and lived. He was in the hospital for quite some time as the rehabilitation process was extensive. The interesting thing about his case is that although he retained the ability to speak he lost much of his ability to string together coherent sentences. For clarification: he thought he was saying the right words in the right order to denote a certain meaning. Someone listening to this sentence however would not understand its meaning. He would say something like "grapefruit appalled desk drawer and the purple" and expect the person who is listening to understand. This doesn't happen all the time, and his language faculty is improving, but there are still times when he'll speak nonsensical sentences totally unawares.

She was wearing a loose dress that, although its hem would hang below the knee, when she sat and crossed her legs the loose fabric would slide toward her waist exposing much of her quadriceps. Nice quadriceps mind you; quadriceps of a volleyball player. She'd be holding on to the hem to prevent it slipping too far, but she talked with her hands. So there where times when, as she became particularly animated, her dress would slip as far as a small mole that occupied the very distracting gracilis region of her inner thigh.

The story, I said, about the boy who survived columbine shows how incredibly tenuous meaning is. It's really just a surface phenomenon held loosely in place by not invulnerable biological constructs within our head. Yet this non-meaning, so easily accessed by repeating a word over and over again until it's just a sound without meaning, also facilitates the incredibly complex relationships that characterize and define human society.

And this makes me somewhat uncomfortable. I would like to believe that I'm easily understood, but when do I ever test that? When does anyone test that? To test it would be to test the limits of my own understanding because it seems like that which would be difficult to communicate is that which I do not understand. We're all just blurting out streams of vocal modulations at each other and sometimes a certain understanding is reached. Then there are different levels of understanding, perhaps best characterized by the examining the difference in between belief and understanding.

Belief and understanding can be the same thing, and belief will always spring forth from understanding. The belief/understanding binary becomes interesting when you consider how much of one requires the other and then how that original requirement informs subsequent beliefs/understandings. For instance, I may believe that the earth is flat based on my understanding of the natural sciences. This understanding is of course brittle when criticized but it nonetheless produces a potentially robust belief. That belief will in turn inform subsequent understanding by limiting what I am willing to consider or it will dictate what is required for me to be convinced of new or contrary evidence (contrary to my preexisting belief/understanding).

The point of this is to illuminate how once you begin to consider the subjective experience we have with meaning and understanding you realize we are nothing without others. Absolute meaninglessness is absolute isolation. Even so, did I really impart my understanding of communication and language to the pretty girl? Does imparting an idea so that others may comprehend them count as achieving some kind of transcendence? I'm not so sure. I'm also not so sure that it matters since, functionally, the level of understanding that I am able to impart is sufficient for the maintenance of a fully operational human relationship with a very pretty girl. Still, it makes me quite anxious to consider the impossibility of fully communicating subjective truths to someone else.

There are certain things that have very clear meanings. A lot of them seem to occur right at the limits of linguistic expression. Violence, sex, hunger, visual art, music. She agrees, and adds that for her strenuous exercise has a clear meaning. She says there is a point she reaches while running that is as good as sex. Sex spoken of in tandem with pleasure is has a particular focusing effect on the two in conversation. How did we even get there, I just met her less than an hour ago. There is shared laughter though it is muted, followed by the longest mutual pause in the conversation yet. Will you show me around this place, I ask.
She stands up and smooths out her loose skirt against her strong legs and asks, "Well, what do you want to see?"

I am, above all else, anxious in thought and calm in action.

Five Jokes

1)Me: Doc, I can't stop singing 'The Green, Green Grass of Home.

Doctor: That sounds like Tom Jones Syndrome.
Me: Is it common?
Doctor: Well, It's Not Unusual.


2) Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The ceremony wasn't much, but the reception was excellent.


3) I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day, but I couldn't find any.


4) What do you call a man with a shovel for a face? You call him: Doug.


5) What do you call a cow with no legs? You call her: Ground beef.

Fuck Breviloquence

Fuck Breviloquence.


Fuck it because of what it's done and is doing to us everyday. 


Big, important questions don't have simple and intuitive answers. 
The association of simple with better comes from the association between elegance and simplicity. Patrik Schumacher in Arguing for Elegence suggested that elegance is complexity resolved. The communication of a certain coherence or sense of understanding through form is elegance. It is effective for what it is and for what it communicates. This effectiveness is immediately comprehended even if the thing or idea that is being expressed is infinitely complex. 


Elegance spans a given question and connects all its parts and associations. It may not be produced with ease, in fact it almost most certainly is not, yet it appears easy. It can be faked, but when it is taken in vain as such, it will expose the faker deeply as a fraud.


It is clear where the association between simplicity and elegance comes from, and likewise where the association between simple with better comes from. Elegance appears simple or easy, and elegance is better, and so logically something that is simple must also be better. I hope that everyone can recognize the blatant fallacy that such logic presents. Even so, simplicity-as-better has infected almost every part of society so much that elegance itself is being dismissed when it does not immediately conform to the experience of the simple. 


Simple equals easy. Briefness equals easy. So, of course, simple and brief goes hand and hand. Easy communication is very attractive because it can be integrated into life so passively. It's so easy to dismiss potentially challenging ideas out of hand when they are presented simply. A simple statement that supposedly encapsulates a complicated issue has implied that the truth of such an issue is very simple and can be expressed by invoking applicable categories (e.g. That girl is a whore). The only thing that survives is that which is already dominantly embraced as truth. 


I need to include a pivoting paragraph that clarifies my argument in order to wax polemic later, so here it is: Something that is easy to understand or is brief or is written tersely or depicted minimally is not valueless. Elegance does not equal truth. Rather elegance indicates deep understanding, and when faked produces something like a lie, or at least, pretentiousness. Although, as an aside, for my purposes I understand pretentiousness more as a phenomenon that occurs when a person or a group does not fully grasp the truth they are trying to express (or they do but they are interested in inflating its importance) and so clothe their expression in faux-elegance, i.e., they appropriate the style of an established elegance so it will be associated with their expression. 


Elegance is of the truth that it expresses, and as such cannot be added afterwards. However an inelegant work can still bear truth and value. The only difference would be that it does not have the appearance of ease and effectiveness that an elegant representation would have. Short, hyperactive, disposable brevity occurs when clarity, effectiveness and impact is not considered. By its nature, if it succeeds that means it has tapped into something that was already there rather than providing any sort of different/challenging/new perspective. 


To complicate things, it is possible to accidentally stumble into elegance and provide truth through thoughtless brevity. This is not the norm. Reactionary brevity has its place and is not without its value, but it becomes problematic in a society that is not likely to fruitfully support both the onslaught of reactionary communication (facilitated more and more by technology) and the thoughtful struggle for elegance. There's no question that both are necessary to avoid creating a totally disposable culture. There is also little question as to which one is proliferating today. 


Such proliferation is likely stemming from the dominant culture; the normal that is unchallenged by thoughtless breviloquence.Dominant truths are problematic because they are passively accepted as "the way things are" and we subsequently produce ourselves to be people in line with them. So as long as nothing of the dominant truths are challenged people will keep reproducing them no matter how they may be limited by them. For instance, long form journalism is most widely read when it is to do with popular entertainment and are begun with titles such as "Why the Star Wars Prequels Were Better Than The Originals". There is nothing inherently bad with an article such as this, but it is an example of what the fetishization of brevity has done to the landscape of journalism for one example, or entertainment for another. If it can't be said briefly it doesn't matter what's being described or argued. 


I know what I've written here is neither elegant nor profound. It is a part of a whole not yet completed. Once done the blog itself will serve as an effective object that, if examined, produces an accurate description of a person. That person is me, although this is not a diary. It is a record of critical introspection, but presented as subjectively as possible. I am struggling to express honestly my experience and relationship with the society in which I live. I am going to attempt to write entirely without deference to a particular style in favour of achieving a mirror like quality reflecting the self within the social. I know that this is impossible to do perfectly. This impossibility therefore necessitates a very large and long-term project. I am struggling with every entry to produce parts of what is hopefully going to be an elegant whole -- an effective object, easily accessible because of its form (a blog) and bearing truth or accuracy because of my persistent struggle. 


When the scale and goal of this project is considered I feel defeated and small. I should stop now. I should have never begun.

This Is Not a Blog

If I am clear enough, and push for honesty in every sentence, eventually this blog will be an accurate description of who I am. Eventually there will be enough here to see through the self-consciousness and into what kind of person I am. I don't like the end of that last sentence. I don't want you to be able to sum me up into a kind. 


To clarify: if I am put into a category then there are certain truths about me that are assumed based on that category. As a girl at a magazine rack it would be telling if I was leafing through Vogue. It would be even more telling if I was leafing through The Economist because that is, for anyone, a narrower category to be put into -- reader of The Economist. Someone who reads The Economist must have an attention span, must be thoughtful, or at least desire to appear that way. And a woman no less. That's a category within a category -- woman readers of The Economist. Then, what if I picked up a Vogue and looked at the pictures, put it back, picked out The Economist and left with it. Leafs through Vogue and buys the Economist. A step further: "subscribes to The Economist but buys Vogue off the newsstand" (Barney's Version).


I stared straight at a girl's ass for an uninterrupted 120 seconds today. This was while I was walking home from school. She was wearing those very tight tights; black with a bright sheen at the crest of each cheek. In spite of the tights doing there best to contain her, there was still a slight bounce corresponding with each step that she took. 


I have certainly taken good hard looks at tits and ass before, but never have I concentrated so directly for so long. I'm not really sure that I've ever concentrated on one aesthetic that long before. It felt very similar to when you say one word, any word, over and over and over again out loud or in your head, such that it loses all it's meaning. At first it was sexual, but that faded surprisingly quickly. It didn't disappear, it always framed the way I was viewing that shining supple orb. It stayed sexual but it was no longer a meaningful ass. I didn't care to touch, or see more. It became pure movement, like the repeated word becomes only sound. For a moment there, through what began wholly as an exercise in female sexual objectification, I believe or felt that I understood, art. That's not at all clear.


The limits of my ability to articulate an emotion-laden idea are about to be tested: movement is always filled with purpose, it is always something we can do, and be told to do. I can tell you to shake your arm and you can shake your arm. But most movement we do unthinkingly in the service of performing many tasks. Like words, both written and spoken, are so tied up with meaning that we often don't consider how we actually connect meaning with them. The relationship is incredibly complex but we do it without thinking much of the time. However, when we actually look at the lines of the letters in the words we are writing, or hear the sounds in the words we are voicing, or stare  uninterrupted at movement before us, the meaning fades away. 


What are we really left with? Animal nothingness maybe. I'm beginning to think that's what the transcendental appeal of art is. That is to say that art is transcendental because of its ability to get the recipient of it to acknowledge their animal nothingness without imposing some kind of mechanism meant to induce our survival instincts. Allowing us to distance ourselves from our deepest self, and look at it without meaning, just clarity. 


Boy who derives meaning and art from concentration on female form.


My goal with this blog is to provide a journalistic account of a single life. It is a complex thing being described and so there will be no master summary or thesis once the project ends. Instead it is my desire to provide enough information through these writings to create a truly accurate description of a person. 

A Man Is Not A Wolf

This is my first post. 


It is only through situations of immediate peril or unusually taxing physical demands can we get in touch with our animal nothingness. This is the true difference between humans and other animals. Even the smartest animals that exhibit characteristics not too unlike our own are, at rest (or normally), in touch with their nothingness. This holds true in all but the most outlying examples.

I am not saying an animal, especially a ‘higher’ mammal, cannot experience depression, sadness, happiness, etc. I am saying that they do not produce themselves socially in response to, or in concert with, thousands of years of social development.

A wolf is a wolf, unhappy in chains. A man is a man convinced his chains are freedom. But no human is truly free, nor would they want to be totally free because we are truly nothing without one another. And by this I do not mean nothing in the idyllic pro-community, popular sense of the word. Rather, I mean nothing in the sense that there is literally no thing left without our groups. Purpose can only ever be derived through our relations because otherwise there are only actions preformed in the service of survival. And even if survival was adopted as the underlying purpose of life then we are still left only with each other to express this purpose. Again, it is impossible to separate the subsequent creation of culture once we are together because we are only distinct when we have formed a self, and a self can only be formed if there is something to build with. I am saying that we can never be human without relation because relations are the somethings that we build with. It is all that is available to us.

For example: no person can be born without a mother, and they cannot survive infancy without a caretaker. This is basically true of all mammals, though it is not true of the animal kingdom in totality. This is the basic foundation upon which all people must develop. Since everyone was raised by another, and that caretaker was raised by yet another, and so on, no person can come into life ahistorically. What makes human different from other animals that effectively learn from their caretakers? The answer is that no human can defer to their animal nothingness in times of stasis. The human mind is arguable never 

at rest because of our capability to remember, abstract, and record complicated histories. This quality of the mind makes us unable to access our animal nothingness at will. We will only shed this quality and defer to animal nothingness (that is, if we are able to shed it all) when that animal nothingness itself is threatened, i.e., in times of immediate peril or unusual physical taxation (e.g. pain, intense exercise). This is perhaps why, for illustration purposes, animals are given to sudden bouts of violence and aggression when solving problems such as mating selection. They have only deference to their animal nothingness when they seek solution and so they act in a way that immediately threatens the other animal’s animal nothingness. Conversely a Canadian human when seeking solution defers to contemporary cultural norms of the day, which themselves have been formed by influences ranging from liberal theory, capitalism British and French Imperialism, Protestantism, post-modern and modern thought, the Enlightenment, the Catholic Church, Christianity, the Roman Empire, Judaism, Plato, Aristotle, and so on. When the complexity of the relationships between these influences (and many more influences) is taken into consideration there seems to be an inexhaustible source of cultural and societal influences available for deference. From this I would conclude that we will never make our own decisions because we could never be free of such influence (nor, perhaps, would we want to be). To be liberated from such a huge source of cultural and societal influences would be the same as being reduced to nothing other than our animal nothingness, or in other words, it would be to live in a state where there is no real distinctness, since there is no relation to the past there is no self.

That is not to argue that emancipation from blind circular production of the self. Rather it is to say that it is because of this circular production that a human must exhibit that we can distance ourselves from moral and ethical obligations that are based on inherent meaning to life. There is no level of the self that bears basic truth. The only truth at our most basic is that of survival (even that can be overwritten by our ‘higher’ self as certain circular experience has led to suicide, for example). So if we concede that the revelation of a basic structure of reality (which leave humans with survival as their only universally applicable meaning to life) should dictate our moral or ethical obligations as humans, then the only ethical or moral obligation a human would have is that of survival. This would mean murder, neglect leading to death, assault hampering survival, and anything else that directly affects survival would have to have ethical or moral consideration for humans. This is not to say how these ethical or moral considerations would fit into what kind of practical structure; it only goes so far to say that humans must give special attention to matters of survival, naturally. It seems as though that by acknowledging our basic nothingness we can at least shed some of the weight of circular influence and recognize that no one conception of the good life or worldview can lay claim to any authority over a person’s life unless that person wants it to. There is no natural argument that can prove a particular law or set of morals represents the ultimate truth of life. This is because there is no meaning except to live in relationship to others.