ON THE TERROR OF FRACTIONS

Out of the chaos of unmarked numbers came One, whose destiny was to lead. First among equals its rise to prominence was as meteoric as it was inevitable. From it all else followed in the stately march towards infinity. Against it stood those divisive elements that made wholeness impossible. Everywhere fragmentation sought to render Integers incomplete. One alone maintained the line, proudly upholding the dignity of all numbers, everywhere, and stalwartly rejected all attempts to sub-divide.

Of all numbers fractions posed the largest threat to global stability. Increasingly violent clashes between wholes and parts were reported. Formidable fighters in the War on Integers, mercilessly slashing and burning their way through armies of whole numbers, fractions were known to slice their enemies into extinction. Denominator squadrons pursued a savage policy of ruthless fragmentation, destroying any integer they could find.  And despite the presence of primes, the allied forces of the Whole were frequently decimated. Hopelessly torn asunder, only Remainders manage to regroup, but rarely could entire units reassemble. Confronting this barbaric horde were numbers of all sizes and stripes who continued to swell the ranks of the defenders. With divisors prowling the field day and night, the fight to retain the integrity of the Whole was carried into the streets.

Temporary defenses were erected at strategic junctions. Square roots provided the most shelter though they were far from impregnable and could be breached by determined factors. Equations attempting to hold the line were often undone by the merest slip of a number. All tolled, it was only the refusal of zero to be subdivided that saved the day. Long considered a mere interloper and outright fraud by more conservative integers, Zero now proved its worth, forever winning its right to be counted. As armies of the Left and Right of the Sign fought for dominance, it took its place as the perpetual quantifier.

But the Great Equations of the Line were the true heroes of the hour. These led the charge, two abreast, rendering lesser figures insignificant. Through sheer bulk and brawn, they bullied their way across enemy Lines, diagonals flashing, perpendiculars at the ready.

Yet battle-hardened Co-efficients held fast, their Long Divisions continually on the Alert.      

Seriously overextended, neither combatant could ensure an even distribution of goods among the troops.  Captains increasingly relied on the memory of graphs. Both line and bar were necessary to regulate supply lines and maintain order.

Fragmentary divisions continually found themselves reduced by enemy Factors who strove hard to cancel them out. Stealing across equation lines, they wreaked destruction, meting out quick silent deaths one after another. Cancellations were everywhere, the streets littered with discarded signs.  Divisors fell like leaves on the field of battle. The wrath of the Polynomials was terrible. Those who were present would later recall the terrific carnage of the hour.

Barred from all future calculations broken numbers fell on their swords. Functions collapsed in grief. But nothing equaled the agony of decimals in demise. (Their end passed into legend.)  Repeating numerals, their half lives in shadow, ran towards infinity in a series of desperate steps. Though longing for oblivion, they could never quite die, only endlessly diminish.

On both sides casualties were high. What with Enemy Long Divisions taking their deadly toll, Wholes, too, suffered enormous losses. Endlessly reduced, struck down in their tens and ten thousands, the army of Integers crumbled; until finally, in the hour before dawn, only One was left.  

                                                                                                                               Weegee at his typewriter
AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL
Perhaps other Western countries have a popular culture as vibrant and brash as America’s, but I do not know of them. Weegee, catchy as gizmo or gocha or gee whiz, the name Arthur Fellig invented for himself, is quintessential American slang. Not only movie stars but gangsters and con men, capitalists and strippers, virtually every kind of character conceivable became celebrated in the tabloids of his day. And squarely in their midst, as center stage as he could manage, was Weegee himself. His life, his persona, as much as his pictures, the man as much as the work, illustrate the power of image in America.

A stocky little man with a cigar in his mouth, the flash man with a Speed Graphic on the scene, a character out of Damon Runyon, Weegee reinvented himself in that classic American tradition. Talent, chutzpah and a flair for self promotion was all it took. Think Buffalo Bill, PT Barnum, Isadora, Madonna...the list is long.

As seedy as his subjects, Weegee was not the first tabloid photographer, but the one who became the living definition of the part. What with his portable rig and midnight sense of adventure, the myth of photographer as bold pioneer adhered well to him. The car with the police radio, the office in its trunk—all of it a bit like the covered wagons of Matthew Brady and Timothy Sullivan––along with his bare bones digs and outsider demeanor completed his legend.

And how often have we seen his images? In how many gangster movies or detective shows?

Just as Brassai defined that of Paris, Weegee defined the image of New York at night. For Brassai it was the Paris of streetwalkers and brothels; for Weegee the New York of murderers and death. Somehow that seems to sum up both cities, not only in the popular imagination and media but also in the statistics.

Gangsters and small time crooks were his bread and butter, and “murder was his business”. This in an era when gangsters were legendary figures, their violence relished in the tabloid press as the most cunning form of entertainment, the tragic giving pride of place to the sordid in the popular mind.

The sudden illumination of the flash, its awful brightness in the ink dark night. The bodies casually covered up, like afterthoughts or embarrassing remarks, a sheet carelessly thrown over the corpse. The garishness of death unadorned. The utter lack of ritual respect. This is what appeals to us now. And what appealed to people when he first became famous. Look–– there are the neighbors peering over the rooftops, in equal parts horrified and thrilled!

With their grim repetitiveness and artless brutality his pictures epitomize the quixotic, dual nature of news photography:  incontestably real yet thoroughly theatrical, contents so subsumed by their fictional equivalents in film and TV there is almost a doubling of perception. Is this the real version of the movie still or the movie reenactment of real life? Reality and fiction are montaged in a way familiar to us now, but not, I suspect, in Weegee’s day. Then reality and its photographic double were a relatively recent phenomenon, the camera’s awesome ability to describe and the photographer’s to fake, still new.

Though Weegee did not fake, his style was designed to provide maximum impact. Hard light, dark blacks, stark faces, odd angles, disjointed images––everything calculated to make you feel you were right there in the middle of the drama, looking down on the corpse, along with the bystanders, the cops, the murderer in cuffs, and the widow screaming in horror.

Once considered the lowest form of journalistic life, tabloid news photography has now reached the status of art. In an era that can never satisfy its appetite for rawness or bald faced voyeurism, its very artlessness has come into esthetic favor. Our contemporary voyeurs, Nan Goldin and Company, all owe an unacknowledged debt to him, the difference being that Weegee’s scenes were alive, even when their occupants were dead. Whereas in so much of his successors' work, everyone seems half dead to begin with.

                                                                                   Guatemala 1975

There they are, so many lives, on the steps of a church in Guatemala. The soldier who is a full-blooded Mayan wears the uniform of those who will perpetuate the coming genocide.
Which he himself will participate in-- all the others most likely dead because of it.

Amazing how all you need to switch sides is the right clothing and a haircut.
The symbol is the key that throws the switch,
allowing us to perform previously unthinkable acts.
Armies all over the world perform the same magic trick.

What is it in the human brain that permits us to compartmentalize actions?

And what happens, as it seems to be with increasing frequency in Iraq, when those compartments break down and the images of war and peace overlap--as they are also doing in Iraq--
where it can be lethal just to walk down the street?

If all war is a struggle for territory, to get it or keep it, then it is critical to know who is us and who is them. Chimps, who go on war parties, leave their own group to invade another’s. Apparently warlike behavior thrives on clear-cut divisions. Because it is inconceivable that natural selection would operate in favor of self-destruction, to turn on one’s own group is suicidal. And when that is done, as it is in civil war, divisions must be reestablished symbolically, via uniforms, flags, and songs.

One must turn the self into the Other.

In Guatemala it is long been possible to turn your back on a despised social status simply by changing clothes. The young Mayan soldier on the steps of the church, participating in the mournful Mayan ritual of remorse performed annually in ChiChiCastenango, has been assumed into a larger identity.  From the moment he put on the uniform he became the Other.

For the young men and women returning from Iraq,
it is taking off the uniform that is the problem.

Having become the Other, how does one return to the Self?

FICTIONAL ATTACHMENTS

                 The final episode of the popular tv program, Lost, was broadcast last night and proved fully as preposterous as expected.  Stories, back-stories, side stories, alternate stories, none of the stories were original or convincing or logically consistent.  Nor were any of the numerous plot lines ever resolved; instead they merely veered off on yet another tangent, making the story in the end irrelevant.  
                 So why did I watch it?
                 Because ultimately my interest in Lost had nothing to do with plot. And everything to do with character. Almost as if they were the sum of their various stories yet existed independently of them, the characters, and, by extension, the actors who played them, compelled attention. Viewers were caught up in them, cared about them, and seemingly had to know how things turned out for them.
                  But why?

                  I have long believed, and the Lost phenomenon seems to validate this belief, that we can have relationships with people who don’t exist-- fictional relationships, as it were. And these fictional relationships can influence our lives fully as much as real ones, sometimes even more.  Not only that, they seem to provide something the psyche needs and may often be unable to get in the real world-- a simulacrum at least partially satisfying. Like the child’s doll or the object wrapped in a blanket in some baby monkey experiment or other, the substitute not only takes on the character of the real, but approximates its power. Our psyches accept it and respond accordingly. 

                  Consciously we know it is not real, but that does not matter. There is a deeper level of our selves which does not care. It takes what it can get.  
                   Whether it is housed in the external world or lives within the privacy of our minds, the illusion has a deep and mysterious power, a power that seems to gain its force through a connection with an archaic part of our brains that responds to resemblances.  

                   And perhaps is able to create them as well.

BANNED BEAUTY: CHINA IN THE 90'S

My first days in China were the color of mud. The sky and the streets formed one continuous brown sheet, and the long hutong leading to my hosts’ apartment block, pure sludge. The apartment block itself, its cement walls cracking, was a grey-brown I was to become all too familiar with. But this was not entirely unexpected. These were Stalinist era buildings. The real surprise lay inside, in people’s abodes, in apartments they made not the least effort to domesticate. My hosts, people of learning and culture, artists, treated their home as if it did not exist. Things lay were they fell; all around indecorous heaps of trivial things, which might have been cherished for their nostalgic value, were mere dust-catchers, good for naught. If inanimate things could be depressed, those stained and cracked walls certainly were. In short, the interior environment expressed the same lack of concern, the same indifference, the exterior one did. This initial impression was confirmed in every home I visited.
In fact ugliness was so prevalent in the People’s Republic of China that I suspected it might be deliberate. All utilitarian explanations aside (i.e. it is easier to build big ugly buildings than lovely, graceful ones), I believe the hideous towns and cities of the PRC are the direct result of a conscious decision to blunt people’s perceptions, to shut down their sensory capacities and numb their feelings.
To force them to huddle inside themselves like turtles and render them emotionally inert.
Quite simply put, beauty is politically incorrect. It threatens a strictly utilitarian view of life by inferring that uselessness may have value. And if that were not enough, beauty is an indulgence, a distraction from the work of revolution that ought to be the sole preoccupation of every good citizen. It weakens one’s resolve by making one happy in the moment, in the status quo that must be changed.
The puritanism of China, of Soviet Russia, and of Nazi Germany, as well as that of the Puritans themselves is quite unlike the spartan aesthetic of the Quakers or the Zen masters, who stressed simplicity as an antidote for excessive sensuality. Fascists of all stripes cultivate ugliness. And in doing so, they cultivate depression as well. One can see how a depressed population would be all the more easily ruled. For there is something in the sense of beauty essential to life.
Though taste is far from universal, the sense of beauty is. It even seems to exist in plants. Flowers, after all, are designed to attract. And most certainly it exists in birds, bower birds in particular are quite fussy about their esthetic choices.  Be that as it may, it can safely be said that all humans have a sense of beauty, however disparate. One can with less assurance (but more bravado) conjecture that this sense of beauty constitutes one pole of consciousness. That is to say, it is one of those crucial concepts, like time and space, by which we order our mental worlds, and without which our sanity is threatened.
We need it to steer by. Without it we lack an essential component of thought. To rob people of their sense of beauty, is to violate the structure of the mind. That such a violation is so prevalent in fascist societies is telling. In China, the wholesale brutalization of the longest lived high culture in the world can have been no accident. Its consequences no small thing.
 

THE SEDER

For eight or nine years now I have been going to their home, to a house presided over
by a woman of exceptional warmth and personal charm,  to participate in a tradition 
that dwarfs me and my small lifespan by thousands of years.
But only this year did I think to examine the ceremony.  
How interesting, I thought, looking at the Seder plate in the middle of the table, that food should be symbolic. Unlike Christianity where visual symbols abound, taste not vision dominates this symbolic tradition. The Catholic Church, of course, retains vestiges in the Eucharist  of a symbol system based on taste but then they tack on transubstantiation, something the far more down to earth Jews would never do. 

For mysticism is a side show in Judaism not the main event.
Because just staying alive has been critical for this historical people forever on the run, always in danger of having had their last meal, always in danger of starving in the wilderness, never sure if they will see tomorrow, 
in Judaism food rules.  Where will we live, Jews ask, and what will we eat ?

In fact, food, survival, and ritual are thoroughly intertwined in this religion that makes of every Friday night meal 
a sacred act, where not merely eating but taking food together is key, along with the primacy of taste, 
the emphasis on food preparation, the importance of cooking and eating utensils,
and everything that has to do with meals.

In the Seder there is the sense that family and tradition subsume and supersede the individual who nevertheless still has a voice and is allowed to speak. This speaking and reading, asking and telling, laughing and singing  exalt that human voice both in its capacity to express thought and its capacity to express feeling.

As a symbolic recreation of an event and of a predicament, the predicament of slavery, the Seder has a universality than transcends its faith.  Non Jews often feel privileged to be invited to one--
and rightly so, for the Seder is a gift.

And that, too, is part of this meal, because the Seder is celebrated for everyone.

So here’s to those Jewish mommas stuffing their children full of food they don’t need, ignoring bad table manners and gentile gentility in favor of sheer appetite. 
Le Heim.

MAN RAY AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM 
As if encapsulating every seminal urge of early 20^th century art, Man Ray was the consummate polymath, trying his hand at everything from painting to collage to objects to photography-- and whatever lay between. He once said that he painted what he could not photograph and photographed what he could not paint. True as that might be, as a photographer he was a master of style and manipulation, tugging at the boundaries of a resolutely realistic medium to create works of photographic imagination rarely equaled.

Introduced to Dada circles by his friend Marcel Du Champ upon his move to France, Man Ray was almost immediately accepted into the Parisian avant-garde.  It was in Paris that he began to photograph seriously. Initially a solution to the problem of earning a living,  photography in Man Ray’s inventive hands became a major conduit between the experimentation of the Surrealists and the dissemination of the printed media. Combining the elegance desirable in fashion with the quirky and erotic edge the Surrealists loved, along with his own penchant for technical experimentation, Man Ray soon became the photographic darling of le beau monde. To be photographed by him was the insignia of success, much the way being photographed by Richard Avedon was for a later generation.

Especially known for his photograms (which he called rayographs), light drawings, and solarizations, whose painterly qualities he often combined with straight photography in his portraits, Man Ray shared the experimental stage in photography with his Bauhaus contemporary, Moholy Nagy. There is a tug of war over who invented the photogram first. Neither, as it turns out, since camera-less photographs were being made at least as far back as Christian Schad a generation or so earlier and probably before that. Nevertheless Man Ray produced some of the most beautiful examples of the technique, several of which are on display at the Jewish Museum retrospective currently on view in New York. His delight in surrealist juxtapositions can be seen as well, most particularly in the found objects, but also in photographs such as Noire et Blanche. While I am confining this article to a discussion of Man Ray, the photographer, the Jewish Museum should be applauded for presenting a show which explores the full range of his talents, their evolution over time and the historical context within which they flourished.

 

BALI
LIFE AMONG THE GODS

Were I reborn a god, I would insist upon being a Hindu one. Any god with good sense would. For only then would I be offered delicious things to eat, wonderful music to hear, and dancers worthy of my divinely discriminating eye. Besides none of the other deities have half so much fun. Here on Bali the gods eat drink and make merry at least twice a day, their meals served on exquisitely crafted trays made from banana leaves. Since the spirits are everywhere, their offerings are as well: in the middle of the sidewalk, on a threshold, on the dining room table, in the street where cars pass. A visible feast for invisible guests who are real enough for all that, to the Balinese, at least.

I suspect I might have already been transformed into a local deity, or perhaps I have snapped completely under the pressure of so much beauty. On friendly terms with their gods, the Balinese throw flowers at their feet rather than rip bleeding hearts from their chests. There are flower and food offerings on every doorstep, small shrines and large temples on every street. Characterized by courtyards and compounds, inviting rather than overwhelming, Balinese temple architecture is possibly the most appealing in the world. Certainly these are places any god in his or her right mind would consent to dwell.

Days here follow each other like contestants in a beauty contest, one more dazzling than the next. Bali is an omage a la beaute written by a late nineteenth century French poet, a decadent with slightly mystical leanings for whom the ever presence of religious feeling adds an extra frisson of esthetic delight.

On Bali the distance between nature and culture lessens. Or at least they are not polar opposites, but meet somewhere in the middle, on a rice paddy perhaps, or in a garden. Of course, rice paddies and gardens are nature cultivated. But that is what one feels about Bali generally, that it is nature cultivated, shaped, celebrated, and sung. I have never felt this anywhere else, not even in Japan where the national esthetic has traditionally celebrated the beauty of nature. In Japan that celebration is rigorous, masculine, and willed. On Bali it feels sensuous, spontaneous, and feminine. More natural in short! There is less focus on formal precision--the Zen exactitude that makes Ryanji so breathtaking (one feels they have counted every grain of sand!)  No. In place of Japanese fastidiousness, here is an openhearted liberality. Even though Balinese music and dance require enormous technical precision, they possess a joie de vivre absent from their Japanese equivalents. The gods here are generous, and so are their celebrants.

On Bali it is possible to be in nature and in culture at the same time. The wilderness is not the antithesis of the civilized and the boundaries between them are muted, the extremes of America and Europe avoided. Here one can be a plant, an educated plant, a “thinking reed” as Pascal called us, with a rather different meaning in mind. Despite the constant presence of birds, crickets, frogs, and other wild things, on Bali plant, not animal, life is the dominant form. For here nature is Green. Green Fertile Feminine.