Tariq's Tumble

French has no word for home

Thinking about the etymology of the spanish word “negocio” a couple months ago, I mused that languages offer us different ways of being. This piece, “14 wonderful words with no English equivalent”, brought me back to that thought today, and reminded me of a favorite Jack Gilbert poem, “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”:

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not a language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

Reading bash history on an old server is like peeking ship’s log entries of past frustrated, midnight, code-captains. Where are they now?

Our engagement with digital technologies leave us with also sorts of expectations and delusions about our interface with the non digitally-mediated world. I was having trouble opening a door the other day, and in frustration, and expectation, I made an Apple multi-touch hand gesture at it. You can imagine my disillusionment when it didn’t open, or zoom me through it. Designers of the physical world really need to get consistent in their models with the digital world I live in.

All kidding aside though, common parlance for extinguishing human life among military drone operators is “bug splat”, like the video game.

I’m no scholar in this space, but it seems like an emphasis on the elusive “great teacher” in the triaging of a failing education system focuses too much on individuals. Well functioning bureaucracies take a range of talents, from somewhat sub-par to extraordinary, provide structure, process and resources, and consistently deliver quality results. Perhaps this is a poor analog, but I’m reminded of the idea laid out in this Quora answer about the quality of engineering talent at various technology firms.

Escaping cliche

I’ve often reflected that our generation is one both terrified of cliche and mired in it. We are starving to be unsettled, to figure out what new forms we can create as a generation seemingly born at the end of history, when every form has been hashed and rehashed already.

Reading Emerson has helped me come to terms with some of this:

When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, — when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do described described as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?…When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions.”

Some things that are cliche are vacuous, truistic, cheap, useless; others recur to the point of becoming cliche because they are statements of present truth residing and emergent within many of us, not just of some past truth experienced by those who stated it first or most eloquently. I worry though in our feverish search for what is new and ours, what is old and true could be a casualty of our desperation, that we get Gaga in an attempt to escape rehashing Beethoven.

Our embrace of truth must be greater than our fear of cliche, whether reading the great philosophers or refrigerator magnets or pop songs. We must not settle simply for what is new for the sake of being new - it must be lastingly true in a way that generations hence, someone will think a thought wholly their own, and see it reflected in what we created, and Emerson and Plato before us.

Two years out

Reflecting on the past couple years, there are a few things that I’ve learned at the intersection of the professional and the personal. I was talking recently to a bright young guy coming out of undergrad and found myself giving to him the advice that I most desperately needed a couple months ago:

1. The most important skills that come out of your first years in the working world are not so much narrow and task related as they are broad and emotional. They have to do with coping with mediocrity and monotony, with recovering from miserable days and discovering fresh stores of self, with crafting new means of motivation, with developing perspective, and appreciating the comedy and richness in the absurd dramas you’ll encounter.
    
2. If you can make it through the day, you can make it through the week. That seems obvious to the point of being a refrigerator magnet truism, but there have been a lot of days that when I woke, I couldn’t see the end of; there was only the crushing weight of the things I had to get through. But then the day ends, and the morning’s impossibility gives way to the fact that you’re still breathing and nothing is broken beyond repair. You get up and do it again, and again, and next thing you know the week is over.
    
3. Things can change remarkably quickly, in our inner emotional lives, and in the circumstances that we construct our lives in compromise with. Develop a capacity for differentiating between momentary internal crisis and real, potentially life-shattering crisis. Don’t build your happiness around small, passing events. I think the word for that is “Equanimity”. Practice it. Play a long game and ignore the noise. Few of your mistakes are likely to condemn you and no one achievement will guarantee you comfort.

This and other things from pep talks and graduation speech babble. [edited]

Lies of Effusion

Lies of effusion can be as insidious as those of omission; in fact they are corollaries to one another in the economy of attention. They are the sort of lies that come about when the degree of the perpetrators earnestness and expertise, or enthusiasm, puts dog shows, say, on the same footing as presidential debates. They give things more study and attention than they deserve, sometimes giving to the inane and insignificant that should be reserved for the profound and important, and other times lending incredible importance to things that are only somewhat important. This crystallized for me watching sports commentary the other day. We should be taken aback by the idea of “sports analysis” or “celebrity commentary” as sold to us by the networks, because they purport to mine the depths of things that are not that deep. Commentators lend themselves the gravitas of people who analyze things that are actually hugely complex and important, like national politics. And we are complicit in this.

Fashion ≠ Style

There is a distinction in my mind between “fashion” and “style”. Fashion has always described, for me, the necessarily ephemeral creations of fashionistas and impresarios, and the acquisitive, novelty-seeking drive of the public that subscribes to them; it is contrived, dalliant, capricious, insecure. Style in turn, is that which emerges consistently in the tastes and choices of individuals even as fashions change; it’s not completely static, but it is slow moving, nostalgic, celebratory, confident.

In this sense, I think many people have a sense of fashion. The most fashionable are mavens at catching and acting on cues in the dizzying currents of popular culture, and have the access and means to pull this off regularly. They’re consumate consumers; they get the message on what they’re supposed to buy before everyone else, and we celebrate them for it.

Far fewer people, I think, have a sense of style. This is harder to measure, but one way of thinking of it might be to look back over the fashions you sported when you were 16 years old and see if there are coherent, purposeful, emergent strains that appear again in your wardrobe at 18 and 22 and 24 and 30. There are people out there I think, though I’m struggling for examples as I write this, who have a sort of consistent stylistic lexicon that comes into conversation, certainly, with the fashion of the day, and with factors such as age and weight, but isn’t dictated by it.

This crystallized for me recently when I took note of an impeccably well dressed colleague and thought at first “my, she is stylish”. Then, over the course of the next couple months, I realized that everyone was wearing what she was wearing, I just hadn’t been paying attention. She wore the fashion of the moment better than most and maybe got the “buy” message earlier. I had to wonder if her wardrobe would be 100% turned-over a year later, whether anything would remain to suggest a common thought or sensibility running through it all.

As for myself, I quit the exhausting exercise of fashion some years ago, realizing that most of us buy our aesthetic identities from one of several stores, and that those who put in a lot of effort have similar results to those who just grab some shirts off a shelf, within any given aesthetic niche (i.e. the difference between most stylish half and least stylish half of H&M shoppers is not huge as they’re drawing from a very limited possibility set). The only real differentiator in this game is spending power, but you can only buy a couple months of exclusivity.

It is also worth noting how some sub-cultures that pride themselves on individuality and difference in their aesthetic and other choices, and as a result seek out rare and/or novel forms, manage to look remarkably similar in general, even as they differ in the particulars (i.e. it doesn’t matter that yours is the only pair of those vintage turquoise skinny-jeans at the thrift-store, or maybe even in existence - I’m familiar with your look, my hipster friend).

It’s really frustrating when you go into a store where you’ve found things that fit your style in the past and there is a host of bizarre seasonal colors and cuts and designs sure to have the longevity of a Hollywood marriage. My reaction more often than not is, “Oh well, guess I won’t be buying clothes this year”. Better to go thread-bare than betray your style.

My favorite blazer is four years old, my choice dancing shoes the same, and I buy three of anything I love because I know that the sustained, engineered unsatisfaction and the consumption ethic it drives, will sweep the few that have style resonance aside. This same tide will bring these things back 20 or 15 or 10 or even 5 years later, pretending it’s new, or exalting its “vintage” quality - neither will be quite true, but I need some shirts to wear in the meantime.

Here are some hallmarks of my style that have re-emerged consistently since I was 16:

I like well cut jackets with high collars and buttons and square shoulders.

I like jeans that settle well at the tops of shoes and fit well at the waist, rather than sagging. I don’t like baggy jeans, nor particularly skinny ones.

I like wingtips, and slim, low-profile shoes.

I like crisp, tailored fit, long sleeve shirts, occasionally with subtle stripes.

I like earth tones and muted colors - brown, cream, tan, white, blue, black, grey, pink, with red as an occasional accent.

I like to layer.

I like fitted, long-necked sweaters, with button or zipper closure. And thermal shirts.

I like brimmed hats, especially fedoras, but rarely wear them because they compress my hair.

I like moderately sized sun glasses, preferably aviator style.

I like simple, mostly-natural fibres, especially soft, elastic cotton or coarse linen.

I like my facial hair short (no ironic mustache for me) and my head hair long and curly.

Space and Race in Urban America

And one begins to suspect an awful thing: that people believe that they deserve their history, and that when they operate on this belief, they perish. But one knows that they can scarcely avoid believing that they deserve it; one’s short time on this earth is very mysterious and very dark and very hard. I have known many black men and women and black boys and girls who really believed that it was better to be white than black, whose lives were ruined or ended by this belief; and I, myself, carried the seeds of this destruction within me for a long time.

- James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt”

Reading Baldwin’s remarkably lucid and powerfully articulated “White Man’s Guilt” I am reminded, thematically if not in terms of quality, of a piece I did in undergrad. I was writing about apartheid era South Africa, but also, I’ve since realized, about home, about the American inner-city (DJ Eurok put it well in his epic poem “This is DC”: “This is DC, you might think that you own it, a piece of South Africa on the Potomac.”) :

Black consciousness activist Steve Biko explained once to his white liberal companion, Donald Woods, as he took him through the streets of a black shanty-town:

“[if you survive childhood] you grow up in these streets, these houses. Your parents try, but in the end, you only get the education the white man can give you. Then you go to the city, to work, to shop. You see their streets, their cars their houses. And you begin to feel that there is something not quite right about yourself, about your humanity, something to do with your blackness. Because no matter how dumb or smart a white child is, he is born into that world, but you, a black child, smart or dumb, you’re born into this,and smart or dumb, you’ll die in it.” (Cry Freedom)

In his account of the black child’s encounter with the white world, Biko crystallizes conceptions of two distinct physical spaces. One, containing “these streets and these houses”, is characterized by squalor, violence and poverty. The other, containing “their streets, their cars, their houses” is characterized by manifestations of wealth and privilege.

Biko asserts that, when confronted with the contrast between the two spaces, a black man associates the “inhumanity” of the conditions in his space with his blackness. Further, when Biko comments on the different worlds that black and white children are born into, he refers not just to a world of privileges, but also to a disparate set of physical spaces which neither is likely ever to leave, other than “to shop” or “to work” in the case of the black child. In this sense, physical space was woven into the very fabric of what it meant to be black or white.

Social commentator and urban design critic James Kunstler shares the insight of the fictionalized Biko from “Cry Freedom”, reminding us that the design and condition of our cities tell us who we are, where we’ve been and what we aspire to. The same is true of a city’s subdivisions, wards and neighborhoods like the one in DC where I grew up.

The failing infrastructure of the city that was let to fall down around us; the regal, decayed old houses in Anacostia; the public housing tenements that rose up alongside them - bleak, square and imposing as they were; shops with glass two inches thick separating black patron from yellow proprietor; the eerie absence of sit down restaurants or palatable, green, public gathering places; these things told us that we’d inherited the discards of more worthy people, that they’d abandoned this dying history to pursue another, separate from ours.

If our city had a Kunstlerian message for us, it was this: we were tiny, divorced from history and nature, and going nowhere. As Baldwin put it, all of this suggests most insidiously to a malleable young mind “that they deserve their history”, and their present. It left generations of us throwing our lives after the ugliness, and a lucky few of us, searching for our true deserving.

Could it be that sports are critical to the illusion of common culture and purpose and destiny in this country? Perhaps they provide a common lexicon, a sort of “pidgin”, that mill workers and hedge fund bosses use to communicate across the divide? Just a thought. Anyway, wishing I knew more about sports.