Axis Monday

Axis Monday in the City of Brotherly Love

2011-07-18T21:46:00.000-07:00

Tuesdays With Memento Mori

2010-02-23T17:44:00.000-08:00

Axis Monday in the Former Soviet Bloc

2009-09-07T20:47:00.000-07:00

The Hill of Crosses in Lithuania:

Click here for the full-sized image.

Lithuanians have been placing crosses on this hill since 1831 or so, for various reasons: as a symbol of peaceful resistance to the Soviet Union, in honor of loved ones killed during Lithuania's various battles for independence, as a testament to their Catholic faith. No one started documenting how many crosses were there until the 1900s. The first recorded statistic is 130 crosses, the latest number is over 55,000 and still growing. The USSR tried to dismantle it a few times, and there was talk of damming the Kulvė River so as to completely submerge it, but noting ever came of it and the hill persisted throughout. Pope John Paul II even paid a visit to the site, and in 2000 a Franciscan hermitage opened up nearby.

Who would have thought what just one cross on a hill would start?

Found it

2009-09-04T12:26:00.000-07:00

Quoted in part before, but I found the video online. Well worth spending two minutes watching.

Axis Mundi, sic transit gloria mundi, memento mori, and all that jazz, it's all there:

액어스서 문디

2009-08-30T06:10:00.000-07:00

"Axis mundi" roughly translated to Konglish. (Koratin?)

The N Seoul Tower is probably the tallest building in the Seoul skyline, 777 (symoblism!) feet from base to top. Situated on the top of the mountain in Namsan Park, it stands over 1,500 feet above sea level and dominates the surrounding landscape:

Koreans seem to have an innate appreciation for the connection between the mundane and the mystical here. The Tower has, over the years, become a requisite date destination for any serious Korean couple. The base of the tower features a sit-down candlelit sort of restaurant, "couples' benches" that bend in the middle so that lovers can cuddle with ease, and a stand where you can buy locks.

Wait, what, locks? Just so. Check this out:

Those are all padlocks attached to the cyclone fencing around the base that keeps you from falling into the wilderness of Namsan Park below. As a token of their undying love, Korean couples come here and write their names on padlocks and attach them to the fence, as if attaching a symbol of themselves to the axis mundi will bestow upon their love some of the eternal nature of the heavens to which the axis points and connects.

The Benefits of Living in a Society With a Free Press

2009-07-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

"During the Cold War, the Semipalatinsk Polygon, located in the steppe of northeast Kazakhstan, was the site of a secret Soviet nuclear testing programme. Over the course of forty years, over four hundred nuclear weapons were test detonated in the atmosphere and underground. The locals were used as guinea pigs to test the effects of radiation on human populations." (No imagery in this link, I promise)

I take back everything bad I've ever said about capitalism. Though I am of the opinion that profanity is the mark of one who lacks sufficient vocabulary to express themselves, all I have to say is:

Holy Fucking Shit.

(There is a series of photographs linked on Metafilter that accompanies this, but I will not link to them seeing as how certain readers of the blog (myself included) lie awake at night in terror of this sort of thing.)

No, THEREin Lies the Source of All Our Woes

2009-07-16T19:54:00.000-07:00

Sorry for another Fox post, but I thought that that guest referring to Mr. Rogers as an "evil, evil man" was the stupidest thing that could have ever been said on Fox. It appears that this comment has not just been exceeded, but lapped.

Thoreau: the Original Hipster?

2009-07-05T07:09:00.000-07:00

The case for:

1. Despite an Ivy-League education, chose to practice the affectations of poverty. This segues directly into:

2. Wrote a book about self-sufficiency and solitude in the wilderness while regularly visiting town and entertaining guests. In other words, he wrote an entire book ironically.

3. Participated in a futile act of protest, the repercussions of which his relatives bailed him out of.

4. Spent far more time writing about and justifying aforementioned act of protest than actually protesting.

5. Neckbeard.

How to Be a Perfect Gentleman

2009-06-15T18:49:00.001-07:00

A book of unspeakable hilarity, all of it unintentional.

My favorite passages so far:

"There are those, no doubt, who will say that they have something better
to do than waste their time wondering why they like to stay in bed,
which they don't."

And for extra double-entendre hilarity:

"Carlyle defined the feeling when he said, 'To sit still and be pumped into is never an exhilarating process.' But pumping is different. How often have I myself, my adieus seemingly done, my hat in my hand and my feet on the threshold, taken a fresh grip, hat or no hat, on the pump-handle, and set good-natured, Christian folk distressedly wondering if I would never stop! And how often have I afterward recalled something strained and morbidly intent in their expressions, a glassiness of the staring eye and a starchiness in the smiling lip, that has made me suffer under my bed-cover and swear that next time I would depart like a sky-rocket!"

He is, of course, referring to conversation.

Axis Moonday

2009-06-09T22:45:00.001-07:00

Can you spot the axis mundi in this picture?

Castles in the Sky: Tiny State's Tiny Tower

2009-06-01T19:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a cute and tiny little axis mundi on a forested cliff overlooking San Marino, the smallest of the European states by population. San Marino has the oldest constitution in the world still in effect--it dates from 1600. America's is the second oldest.

There is a surreal, sublime effect of seeing the world from so far above--from a single manmade tower on a high mountainside, with no other human landmarks near it, except far, far below. The tower itself is hardly even part of our world. And it can see into the world beyond, miles and miles, almost surely into ancient Italia, by which San Marino is entirely surrounded.

It is also worth mentioning that this tower is built on the summit of Mount Titano, the highest point in San Marino, and that the entirety of San Marino is built on Titano and its nearest neighbors. The entire state is built on mountains--far above the mundane concerns of the world below.

Tuesdays with Memen-oh damn, it's Wednesday

2009-05-27T11:24:00.000-07:00

What civilization looks like twenty years after the humans have left.

MM.

Link: Nostalgia in Post Soviet Ice Cream Packaging

2009-05-19T23:31:00.000-07:00

No Memento Mori today beyond the simple statement of 'memento mori', but take a gander at this great piece about Nostalgia in the wake of the Soviet Union.

Saturdays With Memento Vita

2009-05-16T16:35:00.000-07:00

Just remember, it could always be worse.

I refer, of course, to the "Year Without Summer". I'd heard of this a while back but always assumed it was historical fiction, it's that nightmarish. Anything that can be referred to as "the last great subsistence crisis of the western world" in a non-hyperbolic manner would have to be.

The short of it is, abnormally cold temperatures brought about by a volcanic eruption so massive it altered the global climate killed the bulk of crops produced that year and caused food prices to skyrocket. After copious rioting, the ensuing winter set in, one of the coldest ever recorded. The waters around New York City froze so hard that a journey here:

View Larger Map
Could be made solely via a horse and carriage.

It was such a pivotal event in western history that it is believed to have influenced the creation of both the Mormon Church and the novel Frankenstein. Make of that what you will.

The point is, things could always be worse. Memento Vita. That's "know that you are alive," right? Also, what's Latin for "forgive my terrible Latin I've never studied the language?"

A little respite after yesterday's bleakness

2009-05-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

Tuesdays with MM, Orson Welles

2009-05-05T14:20:00.000-07:00

"Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."

-Orson Welles, F for Fake

"Seth: It was the peak of my ass-getting career and it happened way, way too early.

Evan: You're like a young Orson Welles.

Seth: I honestly see now why Orson Welles ate himself to death."

-Superbad

Orson Welles' life-story is the stuff of heartbreak. It has often been noted that the bookends of his film-acting career are a poignant reflection of this. It begins with:

"It's the sled! It's the name of the sled he had as a kid! There, I just saved you two long, boobless hours." -Family Guy

and ends with:

I could not make this up if I tried.

As for his directing career, he was thwarted at every turn by every force imaginable. Money constantly ran in short supply, studios regularly re-edited his films, and distribution issues plagued him at every turn. His revolutionary noir film, Touch of Evil, considered to be one of the finest of the genre premiered on the second half of a double-bill at a drive-in. His skilled adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Chimes at Midnight, has yet to be distributed in the United States to this day and can only be acquired by special-order from Brazil.

Chimes at Midnight, the greatest film you will never see.

F for Fake was the last film Orson starred, directed, and (to an extent) wrote. It's a wandering, postmodern documentary about a real-life art-forger named Elmyr whose Mattise, Picasso, and Modigliani paintings hung in galleries for decades. Being consistently financially screwed by the businessmen who sold his artwork, I imagine Orson saw a bit of himself in Elmyr. Elmyr's biographer, Clifford Irving, is the other subject of the film, Irving himself being most famous for a forgery as well: an autobiography of Howard Hughes.

Irving being Edited. IT'S SO META

The movie is, in a word, brilliant. It is both a documentary and a commentary on documentaries. Orson's first appearance is as a stage magician, deceiving a crowd of spectators, paralleling his role as filmmaker. He constantly reminds us of film-as-deception by showing shots of himself editing the movie together, and of the movie as it is being editing. Additionally, he so regularly and actively takes fragments of footage out of context and repieces them together that the documentary might as well be of the Kuleshov Effect as much as it is of Elmyr and Irving (comically so, at one point he's alternating between shots of a beautiful woman walking and photographs of Picasso, who is supposed to be obsessed with her).

If ever there was a day to rue being a photograph. . .

The most powerful and moving part of the film has to be when Orson takes an intermission from the story of the forgers to talk about his own life and his own early career, all the way from lying about his being a famous performer to land a stage-role in The Gate Theater in Dublin at the age of 17 to making Kane. It is here he divulges a crucial piece of information, the thing linking him to Irving: an early draft of Kane based him off of Howard Hughes, not William Randolph Hearst (or so he claims, after all F for Fake is the title of the movie).

During the bit where he talks about War of the Worlds, there's a montage of horribly cheesy flying saucers destroying national landmarks in DC. It is, without a doubt, the greatest thing ever.

What would Welles' life have looked like if he'd made the movie about Hughes? Hughes, a notorious recluse, took weeks to respond to Irving's book, which wasn't a work of fiction but a complete lie claiming to be true. It seems unlikely he would've done much in response to a fictionalized representation loosely based off of himself.

Hearst, on the other hand, did everything in his power to sabotage Orson's career, and Hearst was a powerful man. The moment Welles turned down Hearst's offer to burn the prints of Kane for a large cash sum was the moment his career began its unending downward spiral.

Would he have gone on to be an even greater God of filmmaking? Would he have megalomania that spiraled out of control and burned him out after four or so films, like Francis Ford Coppola? Who knows. Either way he makes that first movie that revolutionized the way films would be made for the rest of cinematic history, and either way he ends up part of the ultimate and universal ash. "Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much" indeed. MM.

TWMM: Russia's Canal

2009-04-28T23:49:00.000-07:00

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union undertook a massive construction project. England had Suez. America had Panama. The USSR's White Sea-Baltic Canal was just as massive an undertaking.

The massive canal starts at Saint Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland, travels up the Neva River and into the massive Lake Ladoga before it cuts overland for many miles until it reaches another massive and more remote freshwater lake, Onega, and from there it heads due north, through even more remote regions and through smaller lakes until at last it reaches the White Sea not too far from Archangel'sk, Russia's great northern port.

The canal doesn't save nearly as much time as the other two great canals of the world, but it allows purely domestic transport from Russia's second largest city to anywhere along the northern coast, without any need for routing past Germany and all of Scandinavia--and in the 1930s, finding a shortcut around Germany had its advantages.

The canal took less than two years to build and was hailed as a wonder of Soviet engineering, a triumph of the Five Year Plan.

Over 100,000 laborers, most of them conscripts against their will, died in the construction of the canal.

A popular brand of cigarettes, Belomorkanal, commemorated the epic feat for the Soviets for decades to come:
These unusual cigarettes were 'papirosas'; they were very strong and had no filters. They are still made today.

And for many years the canal, like the cigarettes, thrived; its yearly tonnage peaked in the late days of the Soviet Union, in 1985, when over 7 million tonnes passed through the canal.

But those days are over. Because the canal is too shallow, and because Russia is a shadow, and because the route is not so necessary anymore, this once-great waterway wrought by human hands at the cost of a hundred thousand lives sees hardly thirty ships a day plying its lonely route toward the vast northern reaches of an empire resurgent only when its past decline is ignored.

Tuesdays with Memento Mori: Paul McCartney

2009-04-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

Paul McCartney has done quite a good job of maintaing his joie de vivre despite his advanced age. Nevertheless he is no starry-eyed youth, and despite all the wealth and accolades his high position can provide, the work that made him famous is 40 years behind him, there are no more journeys of wonder to the Orient, no more mysteries to solve, and of course two of his ancient collaborators and friends are dead, one for almost 3 decades. He was made a Member of the British Empire by the Queen when he was just 23.

He may still tour and perform and support good causes, but he is still an old man, and the glory days of his youth are forever gone.
Memento Mori.

Forget You'll Die

2009-04-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

Apologies for those offended by the lack of a memento mori yesterday.

Sometimes joie de vivre can sweep you away and you forget that you'll ever die.

The Romans didn't want this to happen, but I think we can let it slide for once.

Easter

2009-04-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

Rejoice in the Paschal Feast, for Christ has broken the barrier between the sacred and the profane!

Sunday is Adventurer Day

2009-04-11T22:26:00.000-07:00

To spice things up, add a human element to Axis Monday, and get me to actually post again, it's time to announce a new weekly column. Every Sunday is Adventurer Day, and I will profile an Adventurer.

Adventurers are normal men who do the extraordinary. Their deeds invariably involve defying the norms of society and forsaking mundanity to explore a less well-charted world. Their transgressive quests catapult them from initial obscurity to much stranger heights. The best achieve renown. The worst fail ignominiously. But all of them are adventurers.

Some--like Alexander, who is far too well known for this series--try to shift quite obviously into the realm of the wondrous, in his case by believing he was a god, and getting the priests to go along with it. In most cases, the adventurers in this showcase will not do something so dramatic as that. But they will show that they stand outside the normal realm of men.
---
You haven't heard of our first adventurer:

Boris Skossyreff
Flavor: Conqueror
Century: Early 20th
Feat: Singlehandedly Tried to Conquer A Sovereign Nation

No one knows quite where Boris Skossyreff was born, or when. He used far too many fake passports during the course of his career for such information to be pinned down. He was from the Russian Empire, as his name reveals clearly enough, and he was born presumably in the 1890s. The date of his death varies even more--from the 1940s all the way up to a venerable (and rather likely) old age in 1989.

For most of his life he was a con man. He passed bad checks, committed fraud, lied habitually about his place of birth. He spent time in Spanish prisons, American military interrogation camps, French detainment camps, German jails, and Siberian gulags. Par for the course for an adventurer.

But Boris was no mere ne'er-do-well.

He spent much of his late 20s and early 30s living in the shadow of the Pyrenees. Sometime in the 1930s he moved to Andorra, one of the European microstates. In late 1933, he even earned Andorran citizenship. It only encouraged further civic involvement.

In 1934, Boris showed just how much he wanted to help the Andorran government. He formally proposed an overhaul of the tiny principality's bureaucracy. Magnanimously, he suggested that several new offices be created, and suggested that he be appointed to all of them.

The government politely declined and tossed him out of their high valleys in May 1934.

No adventurer takes such setbacks lying down, though. Boris took matters into his own hands and decided to take on the corrupt state directly.

In July, Boris declared himself Boris the First, Sovereign Prince of Andorra, and regent to His Majesty the King of France, even though there hadn't been a French monarch for nearly 70 years, since Napoleon III Bonaparte's days.

Not only that, he declared war on Andorra's head of state--the Bishop of Urgell, nominal co-ruler of the mountain realm along with the French President (not King). Was Boris a devout secularist? A crusader against religious corruption? A mere opportunist?

History never gave us the chance to learn. His reign as "Prince of the Valleys of Andorra, Count of Orange, and Baron of Skossyreff, Sovereign of Andorra and Defender of the Faith" was short-lived. After a little more than a week on the job, the vast apparatus of the Spanish state descended upon him.

Why would Spain overthrow their new neighbor?

Perhaps because he swore allegiance to the French King. Perhaps because he overthrew the Andorran General Council and placed himself in its stead. Perhaps because of his new constitution--by all accounts just!, or the new provisional government, or the new courts.

Regardless, the Baron did not languish long in Spanish prison. By November he was free for new adventures, none of them as exciting, and Andorra by all appearances was behind him.

Or was it?

Mere history suggests he never returned to Andorra.
But in Russia, he became a figure of legend. Newspapers reported on his reign long after it had ended. According to their stories, Boris ruled as sovereign of Andorra until 1941, when the Vichy government overthrew his righteous state.

It's not true that he ruled for 8 years--just 8 days. But that hardly matters.

He may not have succeeded in everything he wanted. But he certainly tried to rule, and justly, and what more can you ask?

Axis Friday

2009-04-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

Obligatory. Don't need to say much about this one. Trinitarian, hierophanic, liminal. The Sacred tower, the Sacred mountain, the Sacred man:

Therein lies the source of all our woes

2009-04-06T15:36:00.000-07:00

The valiant vanguard of cultural purity, our beloved Fox News, has finally isolated the cause of our overpowering sense of entitlement as a nation:

"This evil, evil man," Fred Rogers.

I am having great difficulty wrapping my head around this. Every day I am more firmly convinced that whoever pulls the strings at Fox is one of the greatest performance artists of all time. Dadaists, surrealists, modernists, postmodernists, and The Onion alike would weep before material of this caliber.

In a totally unrelated photo, here's Fred Rogers getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom:

It's Tuesday again!

2009-03-31T10:37:00.000-07:00

Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, one of the great memento mori texts of all time, and also the only thing by Tolstoy most people get around to reading (it's mercifully short), is linked above. The free translation isn't great, but hey, you get what you pay for.

C'mon, what do you think a tower is supposed to symbolize?

2009-03-25T19:52:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/newsbeat/newsid_7961000/7961224.stm

Now THAT is an Axis Mundi anyone can get behind. Or in front of. Or beneath. Or if you're feeling particularly creative. . .

Little does the budding artist know, he is carrying on a noble, centuries-old British tradition. Though that phallus is a mere 36 feet.

Comicality aside, the phallus as an Axis Mundi is not a particularly new idea. See: the title of this post.

Tuesdays With Memento Mori: Vidiotic Interlude:

2009-03-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/

Passage, linked above, is a most unusual game. I insist you play it before reading this because, well, text doesn't do a very good job at describing the sensation of gameplay. It only takes a few minutes.

Now, in Passage you begin with your avatar at the far left of the screen. Immediately at the beginning of the game you see a female companion for your avatar, who you can run to or ignore. As you walk to the right your score goes up, and if you find some treasure chests your score goes up more.

The more you walk to your right, the more the seasons change. The landscape gets greyer and wintrier as your avatar (and the female if you got her) gets older. Eventually you die. The end.

There's no goal, there's no end boss. If you get the companion you can't access the treasure chests, but it doesn't matter, your score is totally irrelevant, a large bunch of numbers. You always die in the end. Thus the reason for posting this on Tuesday.

Tuesdays with Memento Mori: Musical Interlude

2009-03-17T23:12:00.000-07:00

Let's try something a little different today. I've embedded a song in the post, so you can listen to it right here. This song, "Losing Haringey" by The Clientele, embodies nostalgia and the inexorability of change.

Losing Haringey - The Clientele

Lyrics worth noting:

It seemed unlikely that anything could hold much longer. The only question left to ask was what would happen after everything familiar collapsed, but for now the sun was stretched between me and that moment.

[...]

I held my head in my hands, feeling like shit, but a sudden breeze escaped from the terraces and for a moment I lost my thoughts in its unexpected coolness. I looked up and I realised I was sitting in a photograph.

I remembered clearly: this photograph was taken by my mother in 1982, outside our front garden in Hampshire. It was slightly underexposed. I was still sitting on the bench, but the colours and the planes of the road and horizon had become the photo. If I looked hard, I could see the lines of the window ledge in the original photograph were now composed by a tree branch and the silhouetted edge of a grass verge. The sheen of the flash on the window was replicated by bonfire smoke drifting infinitesimally slowly from behind a fence. My sister�s face had been dimly visible behind the window, and yes- there were pale stars far off to the west that traced out the lines of a toddler's eyes and mouth.

[...]

Strongest of all was the feeling of 1982-ness: dizzy, illogical, as if none of the intervening disasters and wrong turns had happened yet. I felt guilty, and inconsolably sad. I felt the instinctive tug back - to school, the memory of shopping malls, cooking, driving in my mother�s car. All gone, gone forever.

[Thanks to SongMeanings.net for realizing that proper punctuation and lyrics sites do not have to be mutually exclusive]

This song, unlike the rest of the album 'Strange Geometry' (of which Losing Haringey is the penultimate track), is chanted more than sung; even though 'there is no way to go except back,' the voice advances inevitably at the same pace. His continuing even pitch and pace separates him from the real world, filled with life, which he is describing. It is of course when he heads somewhere he has never been before that he is transmuted into a situation of decades past.

Life floats past the speaker until he falls into a situation in which that is natural. The revelation of this photograph and the days of his youth and happiness at first is 'inconsolably sad.' Immense weariness holds him down as his past traps him.

But at last he walks away; by seeing the past exactly as it was, he is revitalized in his own life.

---
On last week's subject:

The city of Seleucia/Ctesiphon was the capital of Persia for over 700 years. Alexander's general Seleucus founded it; it outlasted Greek rule, and was the seat of both the Parthians and Sassanids in their long reigns. For a time it was the largest city in the world.

But like most cities in the Fertile Crescent, its river was its lifeblood.

And over the centuries, something so immutable as the River Tigris shifted, and Ctesiphon was left high and dry. And the largest city in the world drained away. The Arabs came, saw, and conquered, and founded a new city along the river's new course: Baghdad.

Only one structure in Ctesiphon survives today. The rest is gone, or buried in sand:

Nothing beside remains.

Memento mori.

Every Blog Links xkcd Sooner or Later.

2009-03-15T22:14:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of xkcd. Click on the picture, or just go to the website, because Blogger doesn't love big pictures.
Not only a perfect twist ending, but a gradual drawing out of the highly improbable and eventually the whimsical from the sheer mundanity of electricity generation.

Tuesdays with Memento Mori: Ozymandias

2009-03-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

In honor of Watchmen, which is the most nostalgic film ever to score a $50m+ opening, you should read this poem, which you probably have not read.

Everybody knows Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous "Ozymandias" poem, which (not surprisingly) is one of my four or five favorite lyric poems.

Many people know he wrote the poem in competition with his friend, a fellow named Horace Smith. They both took Ozymandias as their subject and title. Shelley won, not least because his is better, but because it is remembered. His work and name endures in many minds; Horace Smith is a much farther cry from being a household name.

Ozymandias
Horace Smith

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
---

Always remember that, like Ozymandias (whether in Egypt or Watchmen), all things shall come to ruin, and the glory of the world shall pass.

Axis Monday: Castles in the Sky

2009-03-09T19:50:00.000-07:00

Towers or spires are the most common manmade form of the axis mundi. However, in certain cases a castle or palace may take on the same characteristic.

Now it is obvious that certain castles or palaces--Versailles is the most apparent--hold some of the same traits as the axis mundi, just as the U.S. Capitol does today. But these are political axes mundorum. They do indeed represent the center of all things for a nation or culture, upon which all converges, but solely in that political sense. These structures, or similar ones, are also metonymous for the government itself (e.g. 'The White House today released a statement that..." and similar ubiquities).

But these two castles do not bridge the mundane and the symbolic in that particular way. These are more naturalistic axes. They form central poles less because of their history or importance than their position. Both are situated halfway between Earth and Sky.

Swallow's Nest
Swallow's Nest has no political importance. It is not particularly large (65 ft x 33 ft), nor particularly old (1911). But it is nevertheless spectacular. It is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the Crimea. And it forms a triple bridge between Earth, Sea, and Sky:

Much of Swallow's Nest's power comes from the continuity between cliff and castle. The natural rock transitions quite smoothly into the artificial stone. The castle appears to belong exactly where it is; indeed, it would be shocking if it wasn't there.

From a different angle:

This photograph emphasizes sea and sky over stone. The sea forms a nearly perfect line with the bottom of Swallow's Nest, which emphasizes the castle's liminal standing at a junction of three worlds.

The small size of Swallow's Nest--despite its great stature--suggests that it is a conduit or a bridge between the world. But the next palace is not so humble. Quite simply, it reigns from on high.

Neuschwanstein

The archetypical fantasy castle on a far-off hillside is real, and rules over field and forest from a high peak in Bavaria.

The location of the castle speaks for itself but the castle holds other secrets which make its existence even more wondrous.

This photochrom of the castle dates from the 1890s, shortly after its completion. As the photos suggest, it stands upon a high pinnacle (like Swallow's Nest) and behind it lie endless misty mountains which give way only to sky. The first photo shows Neuschwanstein as a local axis; the second, however, presents it entirely within the realm of the sacred--the extremely romanticized print leaves out everything of humanity, except the castle itself. And the castle, though made by human hands, does not seem out of place.

The castle's background shows that I am not all smoke and mirrors:

-Ludwig II, King of Bavaria--also known as the Swan King, the Mad King, and the Fairy-tale King--commissioned the palace. He did so on behalf of Richard Wagner, to whom he wrote a letter about the castle:

"It is my intention to rebuild the old castle ruin at Hohenschwangau near the Pollat Gorge in the authentic style of the old German knights' castles... the location is the most beautiful one could find, holy and unapproachable, a worthy temple for the divine friend who has brought salvation and true blessing to the world."

Neuschwanstein--named for the palace of Wagner's Swan Knight, Lohengrin--is thus not an axis because it provides a conduit or link between the worlds, but because the castle is itself a sacred object, made manifest in our world. The hierophany, the revelation of the sacred, appeared to Ludwig, and he revealed the already extant spiritual power of the mountaintop.

Other points of note:
-No architect designed the castle. A theatrical set designer drew the plans. Wagner himself hired the man.
-Even today, no one may take photographs inside the castle. The only way to see what the inside looks is, quite simply, to go there.
-Ludwig did not live to see the castle completed. A doctor commissioned by the state declared him insane in 1886, and the king was arrested and dragged out of Neuschwanstein. Both the doctor and the king were found drowned not long after.

Neuschwanstein is, in short, straight out of mythology, and wrought from pure archetype.

But, although it is almost without question the most fabulous (i.e. out of fable) castle in the world, and holds great wondrous power, it is still just an axis. It is a product of human design, and it must pale always before the true natural sacred, the Holy Mountain, before which Neuschwanstein is next to nothing:

Sleep and Phrygians

2009-03-08T12:05:00.000-07:00

1. A man from Vietnam caught the flu back in the 70s and hasn't slept a wink since, with no adverse health effects, not even--by all appearances--complete madness.

2. According to Herodotus, the Pharaoh Psammetichus wished to discover whether the Egyptians were truly the world's most antique people. Here's the story:

Now the Egyptians, before the reign of their king Psammetichus, believed
themselves to be the most ancient of mankind. Since Psammetichus,
however, made an attempt to discover who were actually the primitive
race, they have been of opinion that while they surpass all other
nations, the Phrygians surpass them in antiquity.

This king, finding it impossible to make out by dint of inquiry what men were the most
ancient, contrived the following method of discovery:- He took two
children of the common sort, and gave them over to a herdsman to bring
up at his folds, strictly charging him to let no one utter a word
in their presence, but to keep them in a sequestered cottage, and
from time to time introduce goats to their apartment, see that they
got their fill of milk, and in all other respects look after them.
His object herein was to know, after the indistinct babblings of infancy
were over, what word they would first articulate.

It happened as he had anticipated. The herdsman obeyed his orders for two years, and
at the end of that time, on his one day opening the door of their
room and going in, the children both ran up to him with outstretched
arms, and distinctly said "Becos." When this first happened the herdsman
took no notice; but afterwards when he observed, on coming often to
see after them, that the word was constantly in their mouths, he informed
his lord, and by his command brought the children into his presence.

Psammetichus then himself heard them say the word, upon which he proceeded
to make inquiry what people there was who called anything "becos,"
and hereupon he learnt that "becos" was the Phrygian name for bread.
In consideration of this circumstance the Egyptians yielded their
claims, and admitted the greater antiquity of the Phrygians.
----

It's actually a fairly respectable bit of scientific inquiry, all things considered.
It's not exactly experimentally rigorous, but the pharaoh at least tried to learn the
true answer. Of course, children who do not learn language early on almost never
recover and cannot live normal lives--so it is also terribly cruel. But would you
expect anything less from the pharaohs?

50th Post: Tuesdays with Memento Mori

2009-03-03T13:17:00.000-08:00

"A great verdant jungle valley with long fields of green crops opened before me. Groups of men watched us pass from a narrow old-fashioned bridge. The hot river flowed. Then we rose in altitude till a kind of desert country began reappearing. The city of Gregoria was ahead. The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cádiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore--they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of "history." And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world of "history" and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know."

-The defining paragraph in On the Road

Link Interlude

2009-03-02T16:29:00.001-08:00

http://butdoesitfloat.com/

Nod

2009-03-01T16:58:00.000-08:00

I imagine most of us are familiar with the legendary Land of Nod, to which Cain fled after breaking the moratorium on murder. Nod has engendered small amounts of controversy because Cain knew his wife after he moved to Nod, but there is no mention of any women besides Eve to this point. Biblical anti-literalists have cited this as evidence that Adam and Eve were not, in fact, the only humans in the world.

It came to my surprise to learn that The Land of Nod, besides being a place of eternal wandering, is also a Children's Furniture chain owned by the much more reasonably named Crate & Barrel.

Clearly associating yourself with Cain is the new chic. Are they trying to suggest that, like Cain, their customers' children shall be marked with a Mark that means no one may ever kill them? Or that you should eat your vegetables instead of cheaply giving them away to God?

I can't figure this out.

There is also, incidentally, a small hamlet in Yorkshire called Land of Nod.

According to Wikipedia (and I take this with hearty sodium):

"The Land of Nod is also a small forested estate situated in Headley Down, Hampshire owned by the Whitaker family. Its history dates back to the Middle Ages when the owner, Mr Cain, was excommunicated from the Church; he named his home The Land of Nod, thus making direct reference to Genesis 4:16^{[citation needed]}."

Emphasis on 'citation needed'. At least this story, even if apocryphal, makes sense, as does the name of the nefarious organization in the Command & Conquer video games. Children's furniture, not so much.

Lastly, the Land of Nod was famously located East of Eden, a book I haven't read, and won't.

Living Saints

2009-02-28T16:53:00.000-08:00

The now-legendary Captain Sullenberger, who famously landed a plane in the Hudson and saved everybody aboard, has one flaw.

Fortunately, it is the sort of flaw that makes saints even more endearing.

He failed to return a library book on time. The book was on the subject of professional ethics.

But, since he had a very good excuse ('the river ate it'), the library kindly waived the fees.

I have no doubt that, were these the Middle Ages, he would have become a folk saint by now. He sort of already has.

Old Gods and New

2009-02-27T16:09:00.001-08:00

The Prophet spoke.

He spoke of dark omens. He spoke of corrupt officials. He spoke of greed, of waste, of hard times for the people. The people who roamed without aim, who had lost their homes and livelihoods, who feared for the health of their families.

But always, the Prophet brought hope. This is why the people followed him. He reassured the people that they were strong, that they had persevered through past troubles, that they carried an inner strength that could see them through the darkness, and that they had abandoned the Old Gods for his messages, his leadership.

There would be hard times ahead, but the Prophet promised he would do everything in his power to ease their suffering, to insure the health of their children, to recover from the malaise exacerbated by the terrible reign of the Old Gods.

But that he could only do so if the people helped themselves, if they forewent lives of leisure and educated themselves in these troubled times, if they could bring themselves to endure the consequences of their wanton excesses.

Then it was the opposition’s turn to speak.

They had sent their youngest, freshest representative, Jyn-dall, to ease the terrified citizenry that they no longer had anything to fear from the Old Gods: the Hand of Marquette, the Bag of Limbs, the Life Right, Rounalragone, and the Society of the Owners, all mysterious and unknowable beings, all who guided the decisions of prophets past.

Jyn-dall had taken long, slow strides toward the speaking box. Perhaps a man of gravitas who commanded authority could have done such with respect, but one so young and ambling invited scorn and disdain with this action, before he had but opened his mouth a priest by the name of Matthew was heard to invoke the name of the almighty to ward himself.

Jynd-all spoke as the former Prophet, in a falsely affected rural manner, despite his education at Oxford. Fucking Oxford, he was a fucking Rhodes Scholar, don’t you dare tell me that’s his natural voice. Anyway, he spoke of baffling miracles: the harmless volcanoes, the floating transports, and the conflation of the Old Gods with all deities, that somehow their errors impugned the entire divine race. He contradictorily reasserted, as the worshippers of the Old Gods always did, that the citizenry should not allow any deities of any sort to interfere with their lives. This despite his personal overseeing of the worst storm and flood the citizenry had seen in generations.

This confused jumble of apologies and blame could not have been spoken at a worse time. The priests would not have it. His fellows who had worshipped the Old Gods alongside him decried his nihilism. Those who were not his comrades made mock of his speaking after the Prophet; that it was like watching an angelic choir precede a band of filthy minstrels. His lone supporter, the Bag of Limbs, was heeded by few but his most devout followers, as his reputation had suffered since the whole Oxycontin thing.

Meanwhile, the Prophet continued unabated with his plans for Iraqi troop withdrawal.

Embarking on a Mission to Increase Illusion

2009-02-25T08:30:00.000-08:00

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence [...] illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

Ludwig Feuerbach,
Preface to The Essence of Christianity

Tuesdays With Memento Mori

2009-02-24T00:10:00.000-08:00

And Ivan Albright:


The Picture of Dorian Gray	Into The World There Came A Girl Called Ida

Axis Monday: The System of the World in a Cartoon

2009-02-23T22:49:00.000-08:00

(The above cartoon is by Alex Gregory and first appeared in the New Yorker on 18 February 2002. You can order merchandise here)

According to the explanation on the linked website, the people are Hollywood types in a hot tub.

Allow me to explain this obfuscated cartoon for you. Yup, this essay will be a rather unartistic ekphrasis on wonder. Haven't had one of those from me in a while, despite the promise in the header.

Unsurprisingly, the cartoon's obfuscation comes from its imagery, which is so terribly simple that you dismiss it outright.

All the human elements of the picture, both the people and the objects of their design, are crowded into less than a quarter of the image. The rest is dominated by three objects: the palm tree, the distant mountain, and the endless sky.

The quick and simple lines of these three carefully chosen objects reveal the meaning of the cartoon's captions. Mr. Gregory cleverly tears down the dichotomous wall between the two seemingly far-flung demes of Hollywood Glamour and those Muslims who see the world through a purely religious lens.

The religious see the world in terms of archetypes and revelations of the Sacred. They understand that man and his material world is just a tiny corner of all that Is. Hence the wise relegation of earthly things to the corner of the cartoon.

But although Hollywood does not see the world in the same way, the stories film tells accept that view of the world as though it were true. Campbell explained how the ubiquitous quest narrative is composed of equally ubiquitous archetypes. Hollywood's most traditional--and successful--tales all are versions of this one story, the same story which is shared to some extent or another by all the truly religious of the world.

Thus, the human element of the cartoon is by far the least important. Consider each of the other three images in turn.

First we have the endless sky, which takes up well over half the cartoon. It is self-evident, and corroborated in the literature of every culture which has yet come up in the course of Axis Monday, that the sky is the Sacred Realm, and it is either the emanation of all holy things or that from which they emanate. The world of the Sacred cannot in any way be understood by man; hence the seeming blankness, the pure white, of the inimitable sky in the cartoon. It is only natural that Mr. Gregory's cartoon juxtaposes the incredible force and power of the sacred with the smallness of man.

But Mr. Gregory spoons out the irony in droves, because despite the words of these moguls, only one of them truly understands all the implications of what they say. Only the third figure (of course it is the third. There are three sacred objects, three profane humans, and one prophet, who is third in the line of humans) looks skyward, and because this character faces away from us, we know nothing of her. All we can presume is that she does not speak. She alone stares upwards at the endless sky and understands that she is miniscule in comparison. The others are absorbed in their material objects and their banter. The others look at each other. She looks at Heaven.

The second symbol, of course, is the Holy Mountain. The Mountain is that natural point, the horizon, where the sacred meets the profane. It is vastly distant and vastly high, as evident in the picture. Humans can perceive it but, by and large, they cannot reach it. It is that liminal threshold between the worlds. Once in an aeon a man may stand upon the Mountain (few mortals indeed summited Olympus, by far the most obvious example; even today few humans have seen the heights of Ararat, next week's signature topic). Moses spoke to God upon Sinai's height but he ventured there alone. Innumerable other examples available on request. All great religious acts occur on or in the shadow of the Mountain. Thus it is ineffably remote from the conspicuous consumers, who tell stories in accord with the Mountain even as they themselves deny its veracity and efficacy.

But it is, of course, the palm tree which brings the entire piece together.
So many small elements here:

The palm is the symbol of many of the countries of the Middle East, notably Arabia and its city Mecca where Islam was born.

None of the four people in the picture look at the palm. Not even the fourth woman: her level gaze makes clear that she has eyes only for her compatriots. None of them have room for it in their lives.

Most important of all, note that the palm reaches from level ground, past the line of the Holy Mountain into the Endless Sky. It alone, of all the objects in the picture, reaches both the Sacred and the Profane.

The Palm Tree is the AXIS MUNDI.

The Sky is purely sacred. The Holy Mountain is the unapproachable barrier between the worlds. But the AXIS MUNDI, here represented aptly by the palm tree, which through its connotations with Araby evokes the MASJID AL-HARAM, is the only force capable of connecting the worlds. It is the hierophany, the divine revelation of the sacred to the human world, the vibrant and living proof that something exists that is greater than humanity. The Axis Mundi is the very center of the System of the World.

Every religion person knows this, in not so many words. At some point in the history of every religion, a great event has happened which revealed the sacred to man. This hierophany unveils the Axis Mundi, eternal, unchanging, hitherto invisible. And two worlds, at that one holiest place, become one.

Here it is the palm. The "Islamic fundamentalists" of the caption understand implicitly that the world of the Sacred is vast compared to the Earth. The Hollywood folks think they understand this, and thus think the fundamentalists should like them. They think they must be kin.

But all of the figures in the cartoon, save the one who is clearly silent, turn their backs on all three indicators of the sacred: the Mountain. The Sky. The Axis.

It's a great punchline. These earthly moguls truly do not understand why the most extreme among the Islamic faithful do not like them. They think they know the sacred, but all they see are dancing shadows on a cave wall, even though Truth surrounds them.

Tuesdays With Memento Mori

2009-02-17T06:46:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare’s lesser-known Memento Mori Speech, the funny one

Shakespeare’s famous mortality speech, about being and not, is perhaps the most well-known line in the entirety of English drama. This is not his only memento mori speech, however; he has another in Measure for Measure. It’s quite funny.

CLAUDIO
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling!--'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

HAHHAHAHAHAAAHAHAAHHAAHA-wait, what? That’s not funny! Out of context, it isn’t. Here’s the context: Claudio has been condemned to die by the cruel and lustful Angelo. Isabella, Claudio’s sister, has just met with Angelo to beg for her brother’s forgiveness. Angelo has told Isabella that, sure I’ll let Claudio go free, if you’ll have sex with me, that is.

Isabella, in a huff, marches to the prison to inform her brother that he’s going to die.

ISABELLA.
Why,
As all comforts are; most good, most good, in deed:
Lord Angelo, having affairs to heaven,
Intends you for his swift ambassador,
Where you shall be an everlasting leiger:
Therefore, your best appointment make with speed;
To-morrow you set on.

CLAUDIO.
Is there no remedy?

ISABELLA.
None, but such remedy as, to save a head,
To cleave a heart in twain.

CLAUDIO.
But is there any?

ISABELLA.
Yes, brother, you may live:
There is a devilish mercy in the judge,
If you'll implore it, that will free your life,
But fetter you till death.

CLAUDIO.
Perpetual durance?

They have this continuing exchange where Isabella dances around the terms of Angelo’s proposal, only saying that it will bring unyielding, unrelenting shame to their family. Finally, she spills it. This is the ensuing exchange, uncut:

CLAUDIO.
Thou shalt not do't.

ISABELLA.
O, were it but my life,
I'd throw it down for your deliverance
As frankly as a pin.

CLAUDIO.
Thanks, dear Isabel.

ISABELLA.
Be ready, Claudio, for your death to-morrow.

CLAUDIO.
Yes.--Has he affections in him
That thus can make him bite the law by the nose
When he would force it? Sure it is no sin;
Or of the deadly seven it is the least.

Hm, yeah, well, maybe having sex with a greasy old man isn’t so bad. . .This is where we have the mortality speech. This guy is with increasing desperation begging his sister to fuck some scuzzball so that he can go on living. This is his line right after the mortality speech:

CLAUDIO.
Sweet sister, let me live!
What sin you do to save a brother's life
Nature dispenses with the deed so far
That it becomes a virtue.

ISABELLA.
O you beast!
O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!
etc. etc.

CLAUDIO.
Nay, hear me, Isabel!

ISABELLA.
O fie, fie, fie!
Thy sin's not accidental, but a trade:
Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd:
'Tis best that thou diest quickly.

[Going.]

CLAUDIO.
O, hear me, Isabella!

And she walks out on him. The scene is one of the finer pieces of black comedy I’ve read in a play. “You’re doomed.” “Really?” “Yes.” “Really Really?” “Yes, but-” “But? But?!” “Well, if I bang some old guy you can go-” “Do it!” “What?” “Bang the old guy! Please! I don’t wanna die! WAAAH” “Piss off.” “No, don’t leave me, PLEASE!”

The sacred and the everyday

2009-02-15T13:40:00.000-08:00

Note: Brevity was never David Foster Wallace's strong point, this is heavily edited. Full speech here.

Kenyon commencement speech, 2005

"The most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. This is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance.

The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

The traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.

If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us.

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."

-David Foster Wallace, suicide victim

Tuesdays with Memento Mori

2009-02-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

In 1969 the Woodstock Festival became the liminal moment for an entire generation of youth.

Here is that farmer's field today, which in 1969 for a few days held over 500,000 people:

Memento Mori.

Axis Mundis

2009-02-08T15:47:00.000-08:00

My posts have digressed more and more away from the idea of the blog, so I'm returning to square one: the Axis Mundi. More specifically, the physical one.

Joseph Campbell once said that an effective rule of thumb for determining who controls a region is to ascertain what the the tallest building is. In the middle ages, the tallest structure was always the church, from the Hagia Sophia to the village parish. In the industrial revolution, the tallest structures became the buildings of the state. Now, the tallest buildings are the skyscrapers, the centers of finance.

Campbell had an unfortunate tendency to overgeneralize, but in the case of the Axis Mundi of the of the French, he is 100% correct. As for the Axis Mundi of the Irish, he's utterly, dead wrong.

The Axis Mundi of the French world is the easiest.

What were you expecting, a giant metal frog?

The Eiffel Tower from its construction to this day has been the tallest structure in Paris. Aside from a few transmitting towers and a bridge, it is the tallest structure in France. It is interesting to note how vigorously the French have defended their Axis Mundi from any possible contenders. The Tour Montparnasse, the lone skyscraper in the city limits of Paris (and still shorter than the Eiffel), was so hated that laws were passed forbidding any future skyscraper construction within the city limits.

The Axis Mundi of Irish Catholicism, and by extension most of Irish history, has been St. Patrick's Cathedral. Though not the tallest, the largest church in Ireland has been deaned by Jonathan Swift. Handel's Messiah saw its premiere in this building. The city with arguably the 2nd largest population of Irish in the world, New York, has its own.

St. Patrick's, lookin' feckin' majestic an' all that bollocks

A comically oversaturated image of St. Patrick's in New York.

It's interesting to compare the two by height. Dublin's dominates its landscape (the picture's a bit misleading, it's in a city), as Irish Catholicism dominated the country up until only the last generation or two. New York's is a midget, lost in the ocean of buildings and people that comprise Manhattan.

Still, the height issue does have some significance. An observational tower is the tallest building one has access to in Dublin today. The second-tallest? The pub atop the Guinness Storehouse. And many hackles are being raised by Bono of U2's plan to make his new recording studio the tallest building in the entire country.

Pax Romana Redux

2009-02-08T15:40:00.000-08:00

In March 2007, Switzerland invaded Liechtenstein.

In the middle of the night, 171 Swiss soldiers crossed into Liechtenstein. They penetrated over two kilometers into the country and met no resistance. They entered through a dark and unprotected forest.

After getting 2km into Liechtenstein, the commander of the Swiss guard realized what was happening.

Why did Switzerland invade its tiny and helpless neighbor? To seize its resources? Destroy the liberties of a helpless and tiny principality?

No. The Swiss company had gotten lost in the dense Swiss forest and taken a wrong turn. They had crossed the border by mistake.

They had accidentally launched an invasion.

The Swiss company, heavily armed with rifles but no ammunition, promptly turned around and hastily beat feet back to Swiss soil.

One of the soldiers explained their mistake: "It was all so dark."

How did Liechtenstein react?

They did not even notice until Swiss leadership called them up in the morning and told them, at which point they laughed it off.

One Liechtenstein authority said that "it's not like they invaded with attack helicopters."

---

Also in March 2007, two British vessels--inflatable boats--accidentally crossed into disputed waters in the Strait of Hormuz. It still remains unclear whether they truly entered Iranian waters.

The Navy of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard seized them and held them in Tehran for two weeks, and relations between the U.K. and Iran became tense.

But, on Easter Sunday, Iran released all the sailors unharmed. According to President Ahmadinejad:

"For the occasion of the passing of Christ, I say the Islamic Republic government and the Iranian people — with all powers and legal right to put the soldiers on trial — forgave those 15. This pardon is a gift to the British people."

Cows with Names Produce More Milk

2009-02-03T23:38:00.000-08:00

A new study by the Newcastle University School of Agriculture shows that cows whose farmers name them and call them by their names regularly produce 500 more pints of milk a year than cows without names.

Farmers in the study found the results unsurprising; one said that treating cows as individuals was "vitally important."

Farmers emphasized that the cows are part of their families and each one has her own personality.

It now appears that, like us, cows want to be recognized not as cogs in a machine, but as individual beings. It makes them happy and more productive.

Somehow, this story awakens my sense of wonder at the world more than almost any other I have posted.

Tamerlane's Revenge

2009-01-29T15:17:00.000-08:00

Timur the Lame, aka Tamerlane, conquered much of India, Persia, and Central Asia in the fourteenth century.

Here is a timeline of events after his death.

February 19, 1405: Tamerlane dies. His body is returned to Samarkand and buried.

Timur's lavish tomb, the Gur-e Amir, still stands. 1895 photo.

1405, after entombment: A sign is carved into his tomb which warns that whoever disturbed the tomb of Timur bring "demons of war onto his land."

June 19, 1941: Mikhail Gerasimov exhumes Timur's remains for study.
June 22, 1941: Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union.

[N.B. Timur was given an elaborate Islamic funeral and reburied in November 1942; the battle of Stalingrad ended in Russian victory not too long thereafter]

Axis Monday II: Living on Babel

2009-01-26T15:35:00.000-08:00

Via BLDGBLOG:

Because "it takes too long to come down to ground level each day to make it worthwhile," a crane operator on the Burj Dubai – the world's tallest building – is rumored to have "been up there for over a year," the Daily Telegraph reports.
His name is Babu Sassi, and he is "a fearless young man from Kerala" who has become "the cult hero of Dubai’s army of construction workers." He also lives several thousand feet above the ground.

Their December article covers a good deal of the symbolism behind this story and is worth a read. Most intriguingly it discusses the mythologization of the construction worker, and uses the true life example of this man living atop the Burj Dubai to hint how real people become transformed into heroes immortalized in folklore.

In this case, the axis mundi transmits that legendary status directly. The Burj Dubai is certainly the profoundest symbol of Dubai (along with its artificial islands, more on those in the future, perhaps), and in a lesser sense of the secular Middle East and the world.

The unique status of the building thus imparts mythological status directly to its sole (?) inhabitant. No one cares if somebody lives in an unfinished three story tenement, except for the Law. But if you live thousands of feet above the ground, literally dwell in the sky, higher above the natural ground than any other human being--it would be shocking if the situation did not impart mystical power to this figure.

The gods which swept Europe and the Middle East as they left nomadism behind as a general rule displaced and replaced terrestrial gods, the Gaias and Earth Mothers of the world (This hypothesis is somewhat controversial and I surely will address it in great detail in the future, but for now take it at face value). These new gods as a general rule came from and lived in the Sky. Mt. Olympus is both indicative and obvious. The gods lived atop the Sacred Mountain--the axis mundi of Greece.

Mr. Babu Sassi, this cult hero of blue-collar Dubai, reigns from his throne in the sky in just the same way.

Quotations on Tea and the Moment

2009-01-25T23:47:00.000-08:00

"He took his first sip of tea--always the best one." -Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age

"It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere. I didn't know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the tea that we were smoking; Dean had bought some in New York. It made me think that everything was about to arrive--the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever." -Kerouac, On The Road

Two Word Summary of 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'

2009-01-20T20:44:00.000-08:00

WARNING: The following post contains significant spoilers for the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The summary below gives away every moment of the entire film, so take caution.

Memento Mori.

End spoilers.

This has been the first edition of the new weekly Axis Monday feature, "Tuesdays with Memento Mori." Look forward to a fuller edition next week!

More Notes and Quotes from the Moment

2009-01-20T08:22:00.000-08:00

A headline from CNN.com:

Also from CNN.com:
"This is America happening," said Evadey Minott of Brooklyn, New York. "It was prophesized by [the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.] that we would have a day when everyone would come together. This is that day."

Don't hear about prophesy every day in America.

Two million people on the Mall--a full .67% of the population of the United States gathered in this one place to watch the Moment.

By Constitutional decree the inauguration must occur at noon.
Can you even imagine it raining on such a day as this?
Truly that would be an ill omen.

From foxnews.com:

"Bush -- following tradition -- is leaving a note for Obama in the top drawer of his desk in the Oval Office. White House press secretary Dana Perino said the theme of the message -- which Bush wrote on Monday -- is similar to what he has said since election night about how Obama is about to start a "fabulous new chapter" in the United States, and that he wishes him well."

From CNN:

Obama is using the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used for his inauguration. It has not been used since Lincoln's first inauguration in 1861; it's making a special trip out of the Library of Congress for the event.

Axis Monday I: The Inauguration

2009-01-19T21:42:00.000-08:00

I'll keep it short since everybody else is talking about this, but it fits right in with the purpose of Axis Monday, so I unfortunately am required to address the inauguration.

This will be the first in a series of Monday posts which celebrate the Axis Mundi. It seemed a fittingly liminal place to start.

Behold the glory of the Capitol, the Axis Mundi of the nation, bedecked for its greatest recurring festival. Even more exciting than Sundance.

The dome pierces the sky; it is in every sense the axis mundi, the heart of the world.

For years the federal Height of Buildings Act prevented any D.C. building from trumping the Capitol's height; a few other federal buildings now rise higher (mostly Cathedrals and Basilicas) but no private building stands taller.

And tomorrow is the hierophany, the revelation of the sacred, at this very space.

Let's talk about the word inauguration for a moment.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

1569, from Fr. inauguration "installation, consecration," from L. inaugurationem (nom. inauguratio) "consecration, installment under good omens," from inaugurare "take omens from the flight of birds, consecrate or install when such omens are favorable," from in- "on, in" + augurare "to act as an augur, predict" (see augur).

Romans were big on foretelling the future through birds and other omens. Tomorrow is a day of many omens, a sacred day, which shall set the future for a long time to come.

Will the omens be favorable?

Obama has made them so.

President Obama's journey by train to the capital these past few days has also been wrought with symbolism: deliberate parallels to Lincoln, but also the simple motif of the grand journey. Mr. Obama cleverly saw that a symbolic gesture of this sort would inspire the country more than wasting a few days in the city. He undertook a quest fraught with liminality, and tomorrow becomes actualized.

When is THE liminal moment?
CNN knows:

I don't make this stuff up, folks.

When Obama takes the oath, he shall--for those few moments--pierce the boundary between the earthly world and the sacred realm. He shall be a conduit, for a mere moment, of everything this country believes in.

All such times are transitory. The oath shall pass; its power shall linger through his inaugural address, and then his power shall fade and he will again become a mere man.

No matter what else transpires, it will be the greatest moment of Barack Obama's life, and it shall henceforth always have a hold on him. A second inauguration, should he prove so fortunate, lacks these same trappings. This is the first. This is the one that counts. For him more than other recent presidents, because of the burden placed on him and the hopes of the people.

Come what may--the inevitable failures and disappointments, the utter impossibility of fulfilling his promise--for this one moment he shall be everything, he shall be Perfect.

And once the speech finishes and the balls begin, life will go on for him and for everyone, and the door to the sacred will seal once more.

A Rose By Any Other Name Would be a Tulip

2009-01-16T16:10:00.001-08:00

I can't help but feel a certain measure of respect for people who carve themselves into what they desire to become. It always ends in disaster, but to live if only briefly as an image with a false name to enhance your glamor has some appeal. Norma Jean Baker and Archibald Leach carved themselves into two of the greatest movie stars in history. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Iusef Djugashvili, and Lev Davidovich Bronstein became three of the most infamous revolutionaries to ever live. All five are seen below and instantly recognized:

It is only natural that most who live these lives do not live them happily: What human can survive for any length of time as an ideal? And to have your name thrust upon you, as in the case of poor Adolf Hitler Campbell, who has recently been taken into custody from his family. . .

I digress. I post this in followup to the below post, and I don't believe people go far enough. All leaders should be as the Popes, renaming themselves as they deem appropriate. The mayor of Pittsburgh doesn't go far enough, he should append "the great" or "Steelersareawesome" to his middlename. Furthermore, Steelerstahl isn't redundant enough, it should be Steelerstahlacierχάλυβας鋼鉄강철açoстальacero for now, and once people get the hang of that it should be expanded to encompass twenty more languages, then a hundred.

Oh yes, an addenda: the title of the post. A rose by any other name smelling as sweet is one of the most universally loved lines in Shakespeare. What most people don't know is that it may have held an ironic meaning. The Rose was, at the time, a theater that headquartered the acting company that rivaled Shakespeare's (and one that he had actually used himself from time to time prior to the Globe's construction). Elizabethan theatres, as you may know, had no toilets. Furthermore, the ground level was densely packed and standing room only, and Elizabethans seldom bathed. A Rose by any other name most certainly didn't smell so sweet, and the theory goes that this line was intended to demonstrate Juliet's naivete, not be some profound declaration to be taken at face value.

Pittsburgh Mayor Changes Name to Support Team

2009-01-16T10:33:00.000-08:00

Lest he curse the Steelers with bad luck in their upcoming game against the Ravens, Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl is temporarily changing his name. This prevents their opponents from having an unfair advantage.

It is unclear what he is temporarily changing his name to; Stephen J. Dubner of Freakonomics suggests Steelerstahl, which is even better because of its redundancy--'stahl' is German for steel.

Never say that names lack power.

Eclectic Ephemera I

2009-01-14T22:47:00.000-08:00

New Feature!

I've had portions of this list for several weeks now (hence the outdated Christmas links) when I still thought of calling this feature 'A Hodgepodge of Ballyhoos'. But that is too whimsical and this blaag is about wonder before whimsy (although whimsy certainly has its place... I daresay I personally rank it third among feelings, after wonder and nostalgia)

But nevertheless this feature shall consist of little titbits of intriguing know-how from the Internet or elsewhere, things that don't quite merit a lengthier discussion but which nevertheless are striking. Take a gander:

[The idea for this feature is definitely NOT cribbed from the excellent and more cleverly named “Instantiations of Nift” on Scott Siskind's blog. Of course not.]

Originally this feature was slated to appear on Sundays, which is more fitting considering basic Abrahamic mysticism and hermetic philosophy. Numerology based on this original intent dictates that there shall be seven items per week.

Bonus: A traditional Sami storehouse in northern Finland. I am absolutely certain that the frightful image of Baba Yaga's house, with its walking chicken legs, came from Russians who headed too far into the northern, liminal forests and saw some of these frighters.

1.A (somewhat lacking) history of the letter g. Even I couldn't tell you why our most fundamental but least penetrating symbols change like this over time. The vagaries of endless history, I suppose. Perhaps the Greeks couldn't quite remember how that Sidonian scribble looked... and since then it's been all about creative typography, I suppose. Here is a great article on the same subject from a Freemasonic perspective.

2.In other circumstances I'd call it nationalism, but Nova Roma transcends such base urges. The entire micronation is solely based on nostalgia. This is wonder in its most clear and basic sense. But it's still weird (For the record, SCA is not nostalgic. It is wistful).

3.“Why did the chicken cross the road” may be the first joke most children learn. They hear it and repeat it, never realizing that it is the most common of all postmodern, intertextual jokes. The joke, like all jokes, defies expectations—but by turning a humorous setup into a mundane result. By nature it disappoints. By nature it isn't funny. And by nature it doesn't make sense unless you already understand the idea of a joke, and the sorts of jokes this one references. Hence the deep irony that it is the first joke children learn. They assume it's funny, because they know that it is a "joke." But it isn't, that's the point, and this is utterly lost on them.

4.Literary plurals for animals have a long history (They are called 'terms of venery,' to be proper).

Birds have the best. Parliament of owls, murder of crows. Thus writers turn something so mundane as a couple of pigeons hanging out into the charming and expressive. Very fey. You can see a great list here. Here's some other good ones:

a. A piteousness of doves, an exalting of larks, a pandemonium of parrots, an ostentation of peacocks, an unkindness of ravens (Hey Schuyler, look at that unkindness flying overhead!), a kaleidoscope of butterflies, a fever of stingrays. Some of these may be spurious, but who cares?

While we're on the subject, I formally propose that a bunch of giraffes are not a herd; they are a hullaballoo. This word perfectly fits their nature.

5. At this week's SAG meeting, which ultimately dragged out for over thirty hours, a lengthy discussion broke out over whether they should extend the prescribed meeting length by three hours.

The discussion to extend the meeting by three hours lasted eight hours.

I find this much more hilarious and whimsical than they did.

6. This one's a bit more on the 'creepy' side. A woman's husband recently died. She buried his cellphone with him and still calls him regularly just to chat. In fact, she had his number inscribed on the stone. She also still covers the bill.

7. According to the Wall Street Journal, the United States strongly considered bailing out Christmas. After all, Santa Claus is 'too big to fail'. Proof that even the stodgiest, most matter-of-fact paper in the country still has time now and then for the marvelous. Witness also that NORAD, one of America's most powerful military organizations, manages to find time each year to track Santa Claus for the sake of children's happiness.

Cheers,
Pseudo-Hermes

The Jumbamatron

2009-01-14T15:18:00.000-08:00

For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models.

Jean Baudrillard

The Crises of Our Great Leader

2009-01-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

"Religion to medieval man was not so much a theological system as a solid psychological matrix surrounding the individual's life from birth to death, sanctifying and enclosing all its ordinary and extraordinary occasions in sacrament and ritual. The loss of the Church was the loss of a whole system of symbols, images, dogmas, and rites which had the psychological validity of immediate experience and within which hitherto the whole psychic life of Western man had been safely contained."

-William Barrett
Irrational Man

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

-Albert Camus on "The Myth of Sisyphus"

All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought.

-Immanuel Kant "Critique of Pure Reason"

"Life has no meaning a priori . . . and its validity is nothing other than this meaning that you choose"

-Jean-Paul Sartre "Being and Nothingness"

Guidance

2009-01-08T16:42:00.001-08:00

Apostolic Names in the US

2009-01-08T14:05:00.001-08:00

One out of every twelve male children born in America in 1880 bore the name of one of the Apostles.
Nowadays, barely one baby boy in forty bears that honor.

The following chart, using data which I gathered from this site shows how trends in Apostolic names (plus Jesus) has changed in the last century and a quarter. The rank is pretty simple; John was the most popular name in 1880, etc. The number columns show how many babies bore that name per million.

Totals: 77890 baby boys per million bore one of these names in 1880.
60,405 in 1950.
25,400 in 2007.

An important caveat: this list does NOT include non-English versions of these names. The only spelling variant is for Philip, which may be spelled with one L or two. But Juans, Jeans, Johanns, Ioannises etc. are excluded. So if you'd like you can consider this Apostolic Names among WASPS rather than in the USA as a whole.

Also note that Nathaniel only appears in the Gospel of John; he is usually equated to Bartholomew.

I won't analyze what these changes say about the changing nature of the US--I suspect that demographic changes are the most important factor anyway--but consider the other trends this brief survey reveals.

1. 50% more boys bore the name John in 1880 than bear the name of all the Apostles combined in 2007.

2. A handful of apostles are doing better now, notably Andrew, which has jumped 17 ranks, and Matthew, which has jumped over 100 into the very top tier. Jesus has also gotten more popular; this is almost certainly because of the Hispanic version of the name. Nathaniel has done OK too.

3. Andrew was the 10th most popular name of 2007, with 4200 boys. Thomas was the 10th most popular name of 1880, with 11000 boys. Think about that for a second. The 1880 U.S. Census established the U.S. population at a hair above 5o million. Now it's over 300 million. You would think that the number of children bearing the 10th most popular name would increase, not drop by more than half. In a nutshell, this shows how much more diverse America has become... even in the fairly trivial matter of names. The name pool is much, much larger nowadays.

4. Bartholomew has completely dropped off the list... it has not appeared in the top 1000 most popular boys names in over 100 years.

5. James stayed just about the same for the first 70s years of the study (Note again, confirming #3, that the absolute number of babies with the name dropped by 2k/million even as the rank jumped from 3 to 1), but then dropped off sharply in the modern era. How curious.

6. Unsurprisingly, basically nobody is EVER named Judas.

On the female side, the name 'Mary' was the single most popular name for girls from 1880 through 1950. It has sharply dropped in popularity since the 1970s. At the name's peak in the 1880s, over 3% of newborn girls were named Mary. Only John was a more popular name, but it didn't last quite so long.

It is worth mentioning that although Apostolic names have declined dramatically in popularity, Biblical names as a whole still maintain their currency. The #1 boys' name in 2007 was Jacob; Michael was #2. Girls seemed to have escaped their Biblical roots, for the nonce: the second most popular name, Isabel, is Biblical, but much more indirectly; it comes from Elisheva, who was Aaron's wife. The most popular girl's name, Emily, is Roman in origin.

What do you think these trends signify, if anything?

Complex Flags

2009-01-06T14:43:00.000-08:00

Before Christmas we chatted about the Swiss flag, and how its colors and dimensions are not rigidly defined. Can you imagine that in America?

The American flag is more complexly symbolic than the Swiss flag, but American schoolchildren all learn its meaning early in life. And Betsy Ross is venerated like a Catholic saint (with similarly dubious miracles). Consider also the host of proscriptions around the American flag. Rules for its proper use and care, how high it may be raised, how to dispose of it, etc. are all codified in the official U.S. Flag Code.

Keep in mind that, according to flag etiquette, the American flag must never be stepped upon; not only that, it may not even touch the ground. The flag is reserved for the heavens alone; the sublunar earth disgraces it, even though that ground is part of the nation the flag represents. Could the Flag Code state any more clearly that the flag is the symbol of a nation composed not of people and land but foremost of the symbolic and the sacred?

Ponder also that the latest attempt to pass a constitutional amendment against flag burning failed in the 2006 Senate by one vote. It passed the House by a large margin. Many state and local organizations have requested such an amendment, despite repeated Supreme Court rulings against similar local statutes. The logic for such an amendment makes sense in its way; in a textbook case of metonymy, schoolchildren (and, more sporadically, adults) pledge allegiance to the nation by pledging allegiance to the flag. The flag is the nation; burning it, argue the proponents of the amendment, is tantamount to treason. To those who believe this, burning the flag is a direct assault on the nation--and therefore transcends the guarantees of free speech.

All of these complex rules and regulations, and the strong emotions the American flag engenders, proves one thing beyond all doubt:

It is that rarest of cases where symbolism is so powerful that it fully actualizes in the earthly realm.

A Whimsy On Magic

2009-01-04T15:57:00.000-08:00

What comes to mind when the word “magic” is heard? Merlin putting the sword in the stone? Harry Potter waving his wand? David Blaine tricking stupid people into thinking he can levitate? Magic, noun-the art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation, gesture, or other means. When we hear “magic” we think of the seemingly supernatural effects we are incapable of, not the seemingly supernatural effects we deal with on a day-to-day basis. Magic is alive and well and integrated into our everyday lives.

A young man has met with an elusive old hermit on the streets of London. This hermit, a bearded and disheveled beggar, is supposedly going to train him in the arts of the occult. He says to the hermit, “teach me some magic.” The hermit asks for a fiver. The young man rolls his eyes and gives him a five-pound note, which the hermit uses to buy fish and chips. The now-angry young man exclaims “Aren’t you supposed to be teaching me something?” to which the hermit, contentedly munching on his fish and chips, replies, “I just traded a piece of paper for vital sustenance. How is that not magic?”

But, you say, currency has an agreed-upon value. There’s nothing magic about that. Wrong. That is the very definition of magic. Magic is evoking physical actions from people via shared belief using seemingly inert materials. There are actual cases of people being condemned to death by local priests/witch-doctors/shamans and subsequently dying. Much in the same way that the communal belief in the power of a curse can kill someone, it is our communal belief in the strength of our economy that helps make it strong. Why should I provide you vital sustenance for that piece of paper? Because I know I can trade it to someone else. Alright, I'll accept that, but why should I put my pieces of paper in the local bank? At any given time a bank owns, at most, 10% of its assets in hard currency. It is the belief in the strength of the bank that allows it to exist, if we didn’t believe our money was safe we would withdraw it en masse only to find it wasn’t there (which happened during the Great Depression).

Not only this, but the physical presence of these pieces of paper has a nigh-supernatural effect have on our behavior. I think to Abbie Hoffman’s infamous 1973 prank of scattering hundreds of dollar bills on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. These wizards of finance, many of whom so wealthy they could bathe in such bills and set fire to them every day of the remainder of their lives, trampled one another to grab them. Trading was shut down, and visitors were not allowed into the NYSE again until a glass barrier had been installed.

And that is not the only form of magic that we encounter on a daily basis. Performance, too, is itself a form of magic. Think back to our earlier archetypes, Merlin and Harry Potter using their robes, incantations, and wand gesturings to effect change. Is this not precisely what a performer does? Performers put on their magic garments (costumes/uniforms), intone the magic words (sing poetry, speak rhetoric), and gesture appropriately with their magic wands (props, musical instruments) to effect enormous change within their audiences.

Think to the last concert you attended where the band managed to get the audience jumping and screaming. Think of the historical orators who could take ordinary docile men and women and whip them into a lynch mob or an army capable of conquering Europe. Think to the godlike power of theater* and its extension/enhancement, film, in its ability to evoke involuntary spasmic breathing (laughter) or involuntary tear-duct malfunction (people can be made to feel empathy for images on a screen!)

By moving and speaking the performer brings about a seemingly magical change in another. No, we cannot hit someone with an enormous blast of psychic power by putting our hands together and screaming “KAMEHAMEHA” (though this would be hilarious to witness in an actual fight), but most societies have at some point through oratory and nationalist rhetoric persuaded their citizens to needlessly endanger their lives by charging into battle against opponents they have no quarrel with to enrich a handful of people they will never meet. Which sounds more absurd to you?

*-a theme explored in plays as early as The Bacchae. The connection is made explicitly in The Tempest, where the magic of Prospero (seen below) is directly linked to the magic of the stage.

Why is God's Ass Hanging Out?

2008-12-21T04:16:00.001-08:00

The Sistine Chapel. One of the most famous, awe-inspiring works of visual art in the Western Canon. Everyone and his uncle is familiar with the famous portrayal of God creating Adam, seen here:

The far less famous image of God, seen directly below the act of creation, details God's departure. I couldn't for the life of me find it individually via Google, this is as close as I could get:

The image in question is on the far left. For some reason, God's robe is quite immodest and covers none of his gigantic baboon-like ass. Talk about your inversions of the sacred! Seeing as how Michelangelo was forced to paint this thing against his will, I like to think of His Butt-Cheeks as a kind of middle finger to the Pope, sort of a "Hey look! I'm painting the Father of Creation with a big, fat, pasty ass and there's nothing you can do about it!"

Another thing I wonder about Michelangelo is, did this man ever see a naked woman in his life? I do not ask this in jest, check out this heavily color-corrected-in-Photoshop Last Judgement:

Now, we know from Michelangelo's biography that he was gayer than Mardi Gras. But for an artist who strove to bring into being the ideal human form, he seems to have forgotten that half of all human forms are a good deal curvier than the other half. Check out the women in that painting. In this low-res version, can you even tell which ones are female? Did Michelangelo have any idea of what a woman looked like? Did he care?

Armed Burglars Demand Man's Eggbeater

2008-12-19T01:59:00.000-08:00

Via Yahoo:

TAMPA, Fla. – It really must have been a special item. According to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, two men entered a man's home early Sunday and demanded his eggbeater. One suspect was holding a pistol while the other brandished a knife to the resident's neck.

Police caught the men outside the home and they are being held in Orient Road Jail. One suspect also faces a charge of aggravated assault.

Police found the eggbeater in the man's left pocket.

The first line sums it up. To us, this story just sounds odd, stupid even. But nobody breaks into a house just to be odd.

Somehow this eggbeater had powerful symbolic value to one or both of the robbers. The hardboiled detectives on the case have yet to figure out why, but it stood out to the criminals as an object of very special significance. It was sacred--worth risking their freedom over, even though it means nothing to the world at large. Perhaps the judge will go over easy if one of the robbers proves a Benedict Arnold.

They have seen a hierophany, the revelation of the sacred. We have not. The sacred is relative. What to us is scrambled to them is crystal clear.

No word from the victim on whether he's steamed that they almost poached something from him. I hope he looks at the sunny side of the situation: at least he got it back!

This story is so much better than it would be if the eggbeater had been made out of gold, or if it had belonged to Khrushchev. That sort of symbolism would be far too obvious.

No word on a possible sentence, but I don't think they'll fry.

Why do you think the eggbeater was special? Whip up your best story below!

Chicken Songs from the Space Age

2008-12-17T08:49:00.000-08:00

From Kottke.org

I would just like to point that we have been on top of this for weeks

Space: The Final Frontier

2008-12-16T13:11:00.001-08:00

NASA, the government's great symbolic vestige of the cold war,is once again under scrutiny. Thanks to the shuttle program's impending conclusion and the psychological consequences of the financial crisis, the future of manned space flight is increasingly uncertain. Mix in the fact that the Obama administration is looking to check books across the federal budget while NASA's leadership is working overtime to ensure hefty cuts and it is hard to have any faith in what was once the premiere example of the American can-do attitude and the power of collective action.

The symbolic weight of NASA has been waning for generations; what was once an agency that inspired pride and held the fascination of an entire nation is today the stand-in for wasteful government spending. Libertarians and progressives alike are quick to pounce on NASA as a emonstration of federal largesse, but when you break down the budget numbers, it seems that NASA garners an undue amount of attention:

Perhaps instead of representing the dream of exploration, NASA has come into its own as the federal agency that is the easiest to understand. Try to level a critique at the treasury department and you soon find that even they aren't sure about the limits of their power or where all the TARP money goes. Point to NASA and you see a gigantic, money-burning rocket.

Despite the grandeur of space, even the most exuberant Trekkie can see how flat the dream of exploring space can seem in the modern day:

The plan, based on President Bush's 2004 "Vision for Space Exploration" and authorized by Congress, has been vigorously promoted by Griffin. The key elements include the completion of the international space station, the retirement of the shuttle, and the construction of a spaceflight system featuring two new rockets and a new crew vehicle that would be capable of journeys to the space station, the moon and beyond. -WaPo

The "Vision" read more like defeat with vague promises of future exploration as the only silver lining. Hot on the heels of the Iraq war, few saw Bush's proposal as anything more than a rhetorical swing for the fences. Commonly enough, Obama eloquently defined the underlying sentiment throughout the United States:

“NASA has lost focus and is no longer associated with inspiration,” he said. “I don’t think our kids are watching the space shuttle launches. It used to be a remarkable thing. It doesn’t even pass for news anymore.”

All this from a man who ran his campaign on the words "Hope, "Change," and "Yes We Can." As the new president, his solution seems to be delaying the Constellation program (an uninspiring shuttle replacement aimed at taking us into earth orbit on the cheap) -undoubtedly a savvy financial move in the short-run, but where is the inspiration candidate on turning the program around?

All this bad news has neatly coincided with the final demise of the plucky but still inspiring Phoenix Lander (40k+ twitter followers), a firm demonstration of NASA's ability to run a successful research mission and PR campaign at the same time.

If there truly is a new mission to focus on public works, create hi-tech jobs and reinstill trust in the power of the federal government, what could be an easier demonstration than building up NASA? People love space, people love competition and nothing could be more exciting than crushing Chinese plans to go to the moon with an infinitely more ostenatious launch to Mars. Few things scream power like a bigger rocket.

At least consider doing it as a Mad Men tie-in!:

Listen to those drums beating for progress!:

Girl Talk Soils Apple

2008-12-14T22:08:00.001-08:00

Girl Talk's "No Pause" reworked featuring Yael Naim:

BANANA

2008-12-14T17:27:00.000-08:00

Behold the wild banana:
The wild banana belongs on Axis Monday for a very simple reason: it is wondrous!

Rather, the wild banana tastes and looks really gross. But it is wondrous that man has wrought the spirit of nature into a form so much more suitable for him. Without icky seeds.

A Children's Guide to Credit Default Swaps and the Current Economic Situation

2008-12-14T15:38:00.000-08:00

Billy wants to buy a pack of baseball cards. However, baseball cards are a dollar and Billy doesn't have a dollar. So Billy goes to his best friend Jamie and says, can I borrow a dollar? Jamie says, sure, but only if you pay me a dollar and a nickel back. Billy says okay, because he plans to sell the cards for two dollars. Jamie writes an IOU because he only has a quarter. Jamie isn't sure that Billy can pay him back, so he decides to sell a credit default swap. Jamie goes to Sally and says, I owe Billy a dollar and Billy owes me a dollar and a nickel back. Can I give you a penny a day in exchange for you signing your name on the IOU I gave Billy? Sally doesn't know Billy, so to her this proposal looks like a bargain. Besides, Sally just got ten dollars for her birthday so even if Billy can't pay back she can easily cover Billy's debt.

Repeat this process 70 trillion times.

Billy and the 69,999,999,999,999 other kids open their card packs. Most of them are worthless, and not all the children manage to sell their cards for two dollars as planned. These children now are not only unable to pay the Jamies of the world a dollar and a nickel, they can't even cover the interest on Jamie's loan. The cardshop owners of the world go to the Sallies of the world and ask for their money. The Sallies of the world had enough money to cover ten credit swaps, but because they used that as a rationale to take on several hundred, they are now totally broke. The Jamies of the world profusely apologize and swear they had no idea that this could have happened.

So, to summarize: Billy has no money, Jamie has no money, the cardshop owner has no money, and Sally has no money. They all do the logical thing, which is to ask their parents for money and promise to be good with it this time.

If that was confusing, fear not, it is all handily explained in the following cartoon:

Simple Flags

2008-12-13T15:59:00.000-08:00

Consider the Swiss flag.

It is unusual in two respects. First of all, its simplicity; few flags except the maddeningly confusing and uninteresting tricolors are so unadorned. Second, it is square. Only two sovereign nations have square flags; the other is the Holy See.

You would think that the square, as a more perfect geometrical shape than the rectangle, would be predominant. Nations naturally wish to portray themselves as enduring (sometimes as immutable). The rectangle is not the shape that best portrays that. Note the perfect symmetry of the Swiss flag; rectangular flags lack such perfection.

I have found only one plausible answer to why nations do not use square flags, and even that is just a guess: square flags do not blow as well in the wind. Is this important for purely aesthetic reasons--the majesty of a waving flag--or for symbolic ones as well?

A barren flagpole in itself means nothing; however, a flagpole with a flag waving at the top of it becomes a localized Axis Mundi. Thus, a nation's waving flag asserts its control over the heavens. It lays official claim to the realm of the symbolic (and no nation shall long endure without vesting itself in symbolism, which builds loyalty).

I won't go into the symbolism of the Swiss flag (it should be obvious), but consider that the earliest known precursor to the current flag featured Jesus himself suffering on the cross. It is also worthy of note that although the dimensions of the current cross relative to itself are established by statute, the exact red hue is not so prescribed, so different flags vary.

It is extremely curious that the Swiss allow any variance in this matter. Flags are probably the single most visible symbol of a nation, both at home and abroad, and their symbolism or historical significance usually is very strong. The Swiss flag embodies not only its Christian roots but its origins as a federation of cantons; the flag is the nation's history. But you can fool around with the color a bit. A strange levity to grant; I will discuss it in more detail with regard to the American flag in a future post.

One group fooled around with the color a bit more than usual. The globally known and aptly named Red Cross:

The Red Cross has officially stated (when they refused to recognize the lengthily named Red Star of David as an official Emblem of Red Stuff International) that the flag is not deliberately Christian, but a direct inversion of the Swiss flag.

This seems somewhat controversial. Wouldn't the inversion of a flag's colors imply the inversion of the symbols that flag stands for? And Switzerland stands for peace. Of course, the Red Cross does not concern itself with peace but with war (or rather of helping people who suffer because of it). Likewise, Switzerland is a nation of peace with one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world. Perhaps then the Red Cross (based in Switzerland) is onto something: the nation sponsors peace with militarization; the organization inverts it by accepting the reality of war and bringing peace into it.

Of course, even though the Red Cross denies that it has Christian roots, it still bears a cross on its flag, adopted from a country which itself bears a cross which in its earliest forms featured a dying Christ emblazoned. Symbolism, even buried and denied, never perishes. If it did, we would not have a Red Crescent (which could be argued to basically invert the flag of the Ottomans). Why not make a Red Star of David as a similar near-inversion of the flag of Israel (which does officially recognize the symbol)?

The Red Cross states that doing so would dilute the internationalism of their symbols, and that is certainly true. Perhaps the protests by certain nations, including Syria, against the Red Star had something to do with it. Why did they protest? Because nations know that symbols have power, and a symbol's meanings, whatever an organization may claim, never lose their original meaning. The Red Cross and the Red Crescent are both implicitly religious symbols and always will be. For that reason alone, the logical third member of the trio cannot join them, despite the very practical and beneficial nature of the organization in question. The sacred trumps the profane as nations fight wars solely over symbolism.

Never think those wars are not important.

Songs of the Space Age

2008-12-13T12:53:00.000-08:00

You, Me and the Cellphone

2008-12-11T13:48:00.000-08:00

Advertisers, P.R. reps and marketers are probably the first people to grab the latest book by Naomi Klein or leave the kids with their vegan cook/babysitter as they head off to see "Flow" or "The Corporation."

It is hard to imagine a group of people more inclined to pick up the latest hip, typographically-nuanced and limited-release polemic against the bourgeoisie. Certainly the rest of us aren't getting the daily press releases.

On the other hand, it's not hard to imagine the perverse thrills they must get from slipping self-aware gems like these into national ad campaigns:

Lyrics:

Oh, my baby don't be so distressed
We're done with politesse
It's time to be so brutally honest about
The way we know we long for something fine
When we pine for higher ceilings
And bourgeois happy feelings

And here we are in the center of the first world
It's laid out before us, who are we to break down?

[Chorus]Everyday we wake up, we choose love, we choose light
And we try, it's too easy just to fall apart

While the instrumental has been playing across the country for months, the ad producers clearly felt as if the the irony was lost on the general population (but in our defense, we didn't know we liked this song until they showed us). In this commercial, they decided to rub their cleverness in our faces.

The song goes on to list the casual liberal's litany of vices: "Plastic bottles, imported water/ Cars we drive wherever we want to/ Clothes we buy, it's sweatshop labor/ Drugs from corporate enablers." Apple, who rebranded themselves as a consumer products company, should be more cautious about garnering too much inquiry into their eco-bourgeois credentials: despite pledges to 'green' their product line-up, Apple still regularly lags in the environmental rankings:

But still, breaking down the Apple commercial is just tongue-in-cheek fun. For some other companies, it is harder to see what is done out of sincerity and what is done out of jest:

But maybe buying cellphones is the greatest humanitarian act of all:

It may sound like corporate jingoism, but this sort of economic promise has also caught the eye of development specialists and business scholars around the world. Robert Jensen, an economics professor at Harvard University, tracked fishermen off the coast of Kerala in southern India, finding that when they invested in cellphones and started using them to call around to prospective buyers before they’d even got their catch to shore, their profits went up by an average of 8 percent while consumer prices in the local marketplace went down by 4 percent. A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated the effect even further, concluding that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent.

Text messaging, or S.M.S. (short message service), turns out to be a particularly cost-effective way to connect with otherwise unreachable people privately and across great distances. Public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.

-NYTimes Magazine

Zadie Smith on Contemporary Literature

2008-12-11T11:57:00.001-08:00

The best essay this year on the top rated book Netherland:

But in practice Netherland colonizes all space by way of voracious image. This results in many beauties ("a static turnstile like a monster's unearthed skeleton") and some oddities (a cricket ball arrives "like a gigantic meteoritic cranberry"), though in both cases, there is an anxiety of excess. Everything must be made literary. Nothing escapes. On TV "dark Baghdad glitter[s] with American bombs." Even the mini traumas of a middle-class life are given the high lyrical treatment, in what feels, at its best, like a grim satire on the profound fatuity of twenty-first-century bourgeois existence. The surprise discovery of his wife's lactose intolerance becomes "an unknown hinterland to our marriage"; a slightly unpleasant experience of American bureaucracy at the DMV brings Hans (metaphorically) close to the war on terror:
And so I was in a state of fuming helplessness when I stepped out into the inverted obscurity of the afternoon.... I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers. The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space between the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to the pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.
To which one wants to say, isn't it hard to see the dark when it's so lyrically presented? And also: grapefruits?

-Zadie Smith, NYRB

Wars of the Future

2008-12-09T17:34:00.000-08:00

(This is an expansion and elaboration on the comments of the ID4 post)

America, the nation that has been the world's leading superpower for most of living memory, the nation that has not had ground warfare on its territory since the 19th century, and, the nation that compared to Europe, suffered very little during the World Wars of the 20th century, continues to fantasize about its own destruction like no other on Earth. Countless films like Independence Day, Transformers, War of the Worlds, etc. revel in orgies of destruction at the hands of singly evil-minded invaders.

These fantasies aren't recent. They see their origins in a subgenre of fiction, "future war", that developed in the late 19th century. These frequently racist stories taking took place usually 20 or so years into in the future, featured hordes of foreigners seeking to conquer the United States and Europe only to be driven back by white superiority and heroism. These stories frequently featured extensive descriptions of the catastrophic destruction of major landmarks of the time, most commonly the Brooklyn Bridge. (This is covered far more extensively in Howard Bruce Franklin's War Stars if you're interested.) Though thankfully stripped of their racist elements, modern-day incarnations of these nationalist apocalypse narratives retain a common essence: invading force cripples the world (ie the US) but is defeated in the end by the pluck, grit, and determination of a few valiant Americans.

The most famous of these future-war stories, War of the Worlds, is the one that most thoroughly subverts the genre. But wait, you say, I saw that movie, isn't it about Tom Cruise learning how to be a good father? Yes, the movie is about that, but the original story isn't. The original story has never been faithfully adapted. It is a bleak tale of humanity's humiliation and subjugation at the hands of merciless, faceless invaders that ends with humanity winning by a fluke. The rah-rah heroism of Spielberg's adaptation is one of the many flaws of that film. But even the role-reversal imperialism of War of the Worlds fails to address the ultimate problem with these stories, with far more problematic implications than nationalism.

When the enemies are aliens or otherworldly creatures, it is easy to overlook the fact that these stories tend to end with genocide. It is a relief to see that our future enemies in today's incarnations of these stories are no longer Chinese, Africans, and other ethnic minorities. The 19th-century future war are a terrifying display of the ubiquity of the racism of the era. In the same way the aliens/invaders are subjugated or even out-and-out exterminated (WotW, ID4) in the modern versions of these stories, the original versions frequently advocate actual genocide against non-white ethnicities. The most famous of these would have to be "The Unparalleled Invasion" by Jack London (yes, the Jack London) where, in the climax of the story, the entire Asian race is exterminated via bacteriological warfare. This depicted as a good thing.

To my knowledge, only one story, Ender's Game for all its flaws, addresses the inherent genocide of these stories, but not explicitly. In Ender's Game the genocide is the ultimate expression of the novel's underlying philosophy, that morality is dependent entirely upon intention (more on that argument here).

We conceive of ourselves as good and inviolably sacred. We must eradicate evil, or those that would threaten us. Even someone as revered as Saint Obama holds this opinion: during the presidential debates he said, verbatim, "We will crush Al-Qaeda and kill bin Laden." Crush and kill. Opposing ways of life cannot coexist. This is why the natives of the continent were so brutally driven from their land. Their way of life could not be made compatible with ours. We were the ones with the numbers and the guns, so we prevailed.

This is why September 11 shook us so badly, the catastrophic destruction of a national landmark exactly in the manner of our fantasies. "It's like something out of a movie," any number of bystanders were heard to have said that day. This is why a single terrorist attack could yield so much political leverage.

The stories of future wars are the secret fear we have that someday we won't have the numbers and guns. That someday the might of another nation or people (even if they are alien) will prove our way of life will be the wrong one, and that we may no longer continue existing. We always win in the end in these stories, and that is why we love them. They validate us.

Symbols in the Absolute Most Obvious Sense

2008-12-08T22:52:00.000-08:00

[N.B. Per the name of this exploration, Axis Monday shall feature its lengthiest and most in-depth discussions on Mondays. Conveniently (and all unknowing) Demosthenes fulfilled this need for me with his labyrinthine Manifesto]

The most obvious symbols, in a very literal sense, are the letters of the alphabet. They are arbitrary drawings which our culture has imbued with meaning. This is no revelation to you, nor should it be. Naturally, we are so used to these symbols that they hold no great wonder for us anymore. See? Check it out:

Totally uninteresting. Letters, nothing more. A morass of meaninglessness, a quagmire of the quotidian (I'm pretty pleased with that alliteration). Now reverse it.

Suddenly two letters, written in a somewhat stylized manner but still very clearly recognizable as letters, unlock a whole new world of meaning.

Every one of you knows that these two letters, written in this way, mean "prescription." I dare say most of you would make the same association (with less certainty) if I merely wrote

RX

Or more so for

Rx

?

I'm curious; let me know if I am wrong.

But I also bet that none of you could tell me why 'RX' means 'prescription.' Of course, this has no effect on your actual understanding of the symbol.

[For those interested: nobody seems to know exactly where RX acquired this connotation. In the absence of truth, I shall accept the most whimsical theory: that the symbol somehow looks like the Eye of Horus.
I enjoy such a spirit of imagination. Other theories involve Latin mumbo-jumbo and are much less interesting. All are dubious.]

Although the origins of the symbol are lost, it retains its meaning.

That covers the profane.

Onto the sacred.

Reverse the letters again. Superimpose them upon each other. And two mere letters, images which bring particular phonemes to mind, transmute into the most powerful image of Orthodox Christianity.

The Labarum!

In hoc signo vinces. En touto nika. In this sign you shall conquer.

Constantine the Great reputedly saw this sign in a dream before the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. And, so the story goes, he adopted that very sign as his personal standard. And won the battle against Maxentius, and became Emperor, and ended Roman oppression of Christianity. Years later, on his deathbed, he converted.

Thus, the first two letters of Christ's name became the de facto battle standard of the late Roman and Byzantine Empire, and a powerful religious symbol as well. The symbol has two names: the labarum (etymology unclear), and more simply the Chi-Rho (the two letters; basically, the XR).

We could talk about semantics and semiotics and how symbols acquire meaning, and perhaps we shall in the comments, but my point is simpler.

Some of the symbols we often see are abstract, e.g. the American flag or the crescent moon and star(s) emblazoned on many Islamic flags. Others are more literal: the other great Christian symbol, the cross. A stylized picture of a man, indicating a men's restroom. The elements that compose these symbols are fairly obvious to those who know them.

But the fusion of two letters, symbols in themselves but related in an indirect or forgotten way to the new symbol, can merge to form a greater whole. From a convenient scribble to save ten letters, to a triumphant sigil embodying one of Christianity's greatest epiphanies.

A Manifesto

2008-12-08T18:28:00.001-08:00

Celebrate naiveté! Embrace earnest emotion! The post-ironic backlash against cynicism and sarcasm has fully descended. To keep up the Presidential theme, it seems fair to declare this trend in full effect after all the fawning over "Change" and "Yes We Can," especially amongst younger crowds and the web-savvy. To start a blog aspiring to find the "the wonderful in the mundane" or "the mundane in the wonderful" seems like an excellent opportunity to cash in on the great upswelling of sentimentality.

But the internet has long been at the vanguard of this new culture: the earliest and most successful blogs like BoingBoing.net and Kottke.org have long dedicated themselves to curating the best new niches of heartfelt, bite-sized webtainment. To start another such blog in this day and age is becoming cliché.

BoingBoing describes itself as "a directory of wonderful things," while Kottke coopts the nostalgic language of cottage capitalism at his "home of fine hypertext products." It is no longer surprising to see BoingBoing hoisting the banners and raising its army of emotion-heavy but content-light readers to fight the latest in technological injustice: the rally against DRM or the rally for closing the digital divide! While many of the causes seem weak in comparison with real social-ills, the emotional power invested in them is strong.

Meanwhile Kottke documents the incestuous constellation of wonder-lovers. He regularly regularly points to Gladwell, the TED conference, This American Life, McSweeney's, Wired (all that it entails) and back to BoingBoing; before long a reader is surrounded by twitter feeds, unrealized intellectual ambitions, the comedy of the quotidian or the latest quick technological fix that will change the world. An individual wearing thick glasses (just like ours!), toiling in obscurity to document every appearance of the axis mundi in Czech movie posters (1960-1985) on their flickr account is hailed as the great artiste of the Long Tail economy.

But where are we left with all this conviction? Political correctness (or "liberal dreams as rules, not feelings") led to the intellectual policing of a properly tolerant society. It failed in its mission to lead us toward Barney the Dinosaur's utopia of diverse harmony. Instead it became rotten and gave way to hardened, fearful realists and the snide commentary of South Park.

Irony quickly stepped in to help us maintain emotional distance from the farce of "correct liberal thought," but clutching to the comfort of sardonic wit like a well-worn comfort blanket has gone out of vogue.

The new task before us is twofold: we must go forward with our hearts on our sleeves; finding examples of virtue and beauty for show and tell. But we also have to address the limits of idealism without complete dismissal -believing in ideas while holding them to the fire and embracing the most embarrassing criticisms.

The need is to overcome the pride inherent in cynicism without succumbing to the coddling, fuzzy warmth of Panglossian feeling.

We ultimately need a new definition of wonder in this new mold; one that loves the profane as much as the sacred --the grime as much as the sheen. We will no longer have to catalogue the wonderful and the mundane because they will be the same.

The low hanging fruit is gone; the blunderers who have come before may have been misguided and unfocused, but they have already scoured the commons. We will have to aspire to greater heights because the wonderful and the mundane is ultimately profound --and it is here our predecessors have all stumbled.

So be warned, for:

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true. -Demosthenes

Mythologizing JFK

2008-12-06T23:37:00.000-08:00

This classic Internet film perfectly showcases and parodies what I was discussing below.

The following line sums up the mythologization of any president, and captures the spirit of what Obama has been doing:

"Even though I'm better than you, I am not."

Presidents must simultaneously deify and humanify themselves. JFK and Obama have succeeded on both counts, and this film takes that to its logical extreme.

I don't need to say anything else, except that if you haven't seen this video before, shame on you, and go watch the one about George Washington.

All Your Myths Are Belong to Obama

2008-12-06T18:16:00.000-08:00

Via Kotaku:

Out of all the things one could talk with President-Elect Obama, someone apparently brought up this: "All your base are belong to us." That's right, the funny English phrase from Zero Wing turned internet meme. In a one-of-us-one-of-us thread over at Scifi site Tor.com in which Obama's geekatude is being discussed, one commenter recounted a story from a friend who claims to have interned for the Obama presidential campaign:
The job involves getting him something to eat, maybe playing a little basketball with him, and basically chatting and getting whatever he needs between important things. During the conversation, apparently Zero Wing came up.

You know, the Sega Genesis video game. I don't know how.

And apparently, my friend made the off-hand comment of "All your base are belong to us".

And Obama leaned forward in his chair, quirked his eyebrow a bit, and responded "What you say?"

Presidents are not normal people. You do not meet them on the street; you do not have anything significant in common with them. They are utterly beyond the reach of normal men.

Even Obama, who presented himself as an everyman, and in many ways is one, is still the instrument of a vast political machine; he has his 'handlers,' though he may resent them; he is a Democrat, the chosen son of the vast and faceless apparatus of government. The transformation of a man from a long-shot candidate to the world's most powerful human being cannot leave him untouched; by being elected, he has left his mortal vestiges behind.

Like the Greek gods, presidents are beyond approach. They are very like humans, but of a higher order, with vastly greater power. Therefore, just like the Greeks did with their gods, we mythologize Obama. Every subculture seeks to make him their own (Except the Republicans).

The story from Kotaku shows exactly how this is done. The rumor establishes Obama firmly as part of the nerd culture--along with the better supported stories that he is a Trekkie. The veracity of the rumor does not matter. This is how subcultures identify with the unapproachable divine--they create a myth and thus make the divine a patron of their particular beliefs, and thus more accessible.

Apollo, god of reason, light, wisdom, music, the cave, wolves; Athena, wisdom, olives, war, the eponymous city. Each god's domains relate, but not closely. Study the evolution of the myths of these gods and you will see how greatly they vary over time and from place to place, as each era and culture makes a deity their own.

It is our natural instinct to make Obama the president of whatever group we most identify with, whether or not it's true.

Obama, patron god of change, the American Dream, African Americans, post-racialism, internationalism, basketball, grassrootsism, and geek chic.

We make him not the country's president, but our president.

The Freedom Tower - A Lasting Symbolism

2008-12-03T22:49:00.000-08:00

Behold the Freedom Tower!
(Artist's conception, obviously)

9/11 destroyed a powerful symbol of America's dominance, even as the events that followed destroyed America's actual dominance.

The Freedom Tower, originally intended to be completed and dedicated on September 11, 2011 (Anniversaries hold power), has been delayed; its current height above ground is 13 feet. So it won't be done quite on time. Nor will it be the tallest building in the world. That honor goes to the still uncompleted Burj Dubai, a triumph of the same architectural firm.

[Look at that picture and tell me that it won't be the new Axis Mundi for the secular Arab world (the non-secular Arab world will keep the same Axis Mundi it has always had). Also, crazy Brits have BASE jumped off it (Man triumphing over nature? Over the sacred? Over rent-a-cops? You decide).]

To the point: The Freedom Tower does not seek the ephemeral title of world's tallest building. Only three structures held onto that title for more than a hundred years: Lincoln Cathedral, Strasbourg Cathedral, and the Great Pyramid (which held the title for a rounding error short of four thousand years).

Who knows how long the Freedom Tower will be the tallest building in NYC and America? But even after it is surpassed, it shall bear a more powerful symbolism than "I used to be the biggest kid on the block." It's The Freedom Tower. And it will be 1776 feet tall.

Funny how that works.

P.S. The Empire State Building was a profound sign that the Depression would not destroy America. Perhaps this Freedom Tower shall say the same thing in 2013.

Revelation of the Sacred Aliens

2008-11-22T22:25:00.000-08:00

Consider the following.

This poster has so many levels to it, I don't even know where to begin.

It is a prime example of the sacred revealing itself in the mundane. Not much more mundane than a movie poster.

What strikes you about the poster? Aliens—creatures from the sky, the incomprehensible sacred vault of the heavens, attack America!

Where do the aliens arrive?
At the Empire State Building, the highest single point in America's largest city, widely perceived as its greatest, its true capital, one of the world's capitals people worldwide consider the greatest city in America, or even the world. At the least, it is the tallest building in America's largest city—a record New York has held uninterrupted since it first claimed it in 1790.

But what about the Twin Towers? Those were taller than the Empire State Building! They don't count simply because they were twinned. Tall, yes--but as a symbol of man reaching toward the heavens, only a single spire has the full effect.

The Empire State Building is that spire. And it has been a symbol of New York City and America since it was built, a symbol of hope constructed during the Great Depression. When it was built, it was the tallest building in the world.

New York State and the Building share the same moniker—the Empire State (The State had it first).

The ESB was and is much more than a mere symbol of America's power. It is the most powerful of all symbols—the AXIS MUNDI!

The Axis Mundi.

The spire, tower, needle which connects mortal man to the Heavens above.
Thus, the ESB is a fully realized Tower of Babel. It is the very heart of New York City, and of America.

And when man tries to show that he is good enough to reach God, Heaven gets ticked off.
In this case, Aliens get ticked off (as they are wont to do).

That's why the poster features a massive beam of light connecting the axis mundi of America, its proudest monument, with the alien warship—foreign, incomprehensible, beyond anything we know. The blast of light symbolizes the portal that the axis mundi creates between the profane and the sacred. In this case as in all cases, the sacred is beyond our power to control or understand.

Of course, it is no coincidence that the film was released on and is named for Independence Day. July 4th is a sacred day in America—secular, but sacred. But this is obvious and played a prominent role in the film's marketing.

Anyway. That's why the aliens chose that particular building on that particular day to kick our ass!

Not much needs to be said about the next image, except that it is awesome, and most of the same principles apply, but note that the White House is not an Axis Mundi. It is, however, in the realm of differentiated space. But that's a topic for another day.

The Shield of Achilles

2008-11-19T00:30:00.000-08:00

Let's ease into things with the obvious. Call it a crash course.

Since this blagadingalong will feature Ekphrasis in a variety of forms, let's begin with the single most famous example of it. If you don't know what Ekphrasis is, that's okay. That's not important just yet.

Look at the following image of the shield of Achilles.

It's pretty, isn't it? But this shield is an interpretation of another work, and a reference to it. I'm not so postmodern as to call this shield a text. Nevertheless, it shares a similarity with postmodern texts in that it exists not as a thing in itself but as a comment on another text.

That text, of course, is The Iliad.

More specifically, the text is:

[Hephaestus] wrought also two cities, fair to see and busy with the hum of men. In the one were weddings and wedding-feasts, and they were going about the city with brides whom they were escorting by torchlight from their chambers. Loud rose the cry of Hymen, and the youths danced to the music of flute and lyre, while the women stood each at her house door to see them. Meanwhile the people were gathered in assembly, for there was a quarrel, and two men were wrangling about the blood-money for a man who had been killed, the one saying before the people that he had paid damages in full, and the other that he had not been paid.

Each was trying to make his own case good, and the people took sides, each man backing the side that he had taken; but the heralds kept them back, and the elders sate on their seats of stone in a solemn circle, holding the staves which the heralds had put into their hands. Then they rose and each in his turn gave judgement, and there were two talents laid down, to be given to him whose judgement should be deemed the fairest.

About the other city there lay encamped two hosts in gleaming armour, and they were divided whether to sack it, or to spare it and accept the half of what it contained. But the men of the city would not yet consent, and armed themselves for a surprise; their wives and little children kept guard upon the walls, and with them were the men who were past fighting through age; but the others sallied forth with Mars and Pallas Minerva at their head- both of them wrought in gold and clad in golden raiment, great and fair with their armour as befitting gods, while they that followed were smaller. - Iliad, Book XVIII

I grabbed this version straight from Wikipedia. You can see it in the original Greek, or in English, on Perseus Project. I was going to paste you the excerpt from there but it was much longer and I am dreadfully worried about being too verbose.

This famous passage takes place after (spoiler alert!) the death of Patroclus, who wore Achilles' armor. Thus, Achilles needed new armor, and Hephaestus made a new shield just for him even though it wasn't even Christmas! (Not for another 1100 years, no less!)

Notice how the text describes the shield in such vivid detail that you could duplicate it yourself. That's exactly what the shield above is. It is not a shield, but an ekphrasis. That is, it is a work of art that describes another work of art.

Technically, it is an ekphrasis of an ekphrasis! A work of art--this piece of ceremonial/decorative armor--describes another work of art in a different medium, that famous passage from The Iliad, which itself describes another work of art--the real Shield of Achilles! But I suppose that makes the shield an ekphrasis of an ekphrasis on a work of art that does not exist. How very twisty-turny! I love it!

Anyway, I'd like to provide you with another ekphrasis on the text describing the Shield of Achilles. That is, I will present a work of art--in this case a photo--that embodies in a different form another work of art--a poem.

Here's my interpretation of the Shield of Achilles:
Before you get all huffy about how clever I must think I am... don't! I am hardly the only one to interpret the Shield of Achilles in this fashion. Many 4th-century Athenians whose names you know subscribed to this same interpretation, so we're in good company!

That's all for now. We will revisit the potent image of the Shield of Achilles again in the near future but from a different angle. Let me know what you think about the Shield of Achilles, the most famous example of ekphrasis in literature... and a potent passage of wonder which describes the System of the World (foreshadowing...)!

Welcome!

2008-11-17T20:05:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Axis Monday. I'm your host, Hermes Trismegistus. Don't let the Pseudo fool you: that's been put there so you don't think it's really me. Actually I'm not me, or him, but that's another subject altogether, and I assume if you are here you know who I am. (Pseudo?)-Apollon more like. I promise that will be the last in-joke on this blagadingalong.

That's right. This blagadingalong is about many things. But it is not about irony or in-jokes. Axis Monday will feature stories about Wonder. I hope that what that means shall become clear in time. What now is muddled--from your conception of these concepts, to these jumbled words on a screen--shall come into clearer focus with time and experience, both yours and mine.

To business. My purpose (if I may be so bold as to declare that I have one!) is to draw out the mundane from the wonderful, and occasionally vice-versa. The latter is triter and hence I shall avoid it as much as I can.

I intend for this blagadingalong to be quite illustrative. Thus it will include many illustrations.

A brief note about identity and the distinction between what things seem, and what things are:

Axis Monday seems to be a blog. However, Axis Monday is NOT a blog. It is a blagadingalong. How are they different? The word 'blog' is extremely unpleasant sounding. Euphony is the single most important characteristic of a word. Since the world 'blog' is neither pretty nor particularly descriptive (It's short for 'weblog', a term which no one in the world has ever used except to define the word 'blog'), I shall not use it, and instead defiantly use a word that is even less descriptive and nonsensical. Blagadingalong has a great advantage over blog. It is whimsical. I suspect the subject of whimsy shall surface later on whether I like it or not, but for now content yourself with this: 'Blagadingalong' sounds silly. 'Blog' makes me frown, but 'blagadingalong' makes me smile. That's all you need!