Physical education about the revolution

PODER, a community group from San Francisco (along with some of us from the rest of the U.S.) painted a solidarity mural in a community in Caracas (inside the complex that the mural is on the wall of is one of the new health clinics, staffed by a Cuban doctor, that's providing free health care for the people)



I painted the white spots on the soccer ball:

Thinking about a revolution

I recently finished reading The Fiction of a Thinkable World, which argues that if we are to have a successful anti-capitalist politics, we need to understand that the ideology of capitalism is inscribed in the very way we think about thinking. In order to resist the ideology that we are individual actors in a marketplace exchanging commodities and value, we need to resist the ideology (for that is what it is) that we are individual consciousnesses who receive perceptions from an external world (including our bodies), have "rational" abstract thoughts about these perceptions, and exchange these abstract thoughts with other individual consciousnesses through the medium of language. In fact, according to the neurological evidence, we think with our bodies, and our thought is not just "shaped" but constituted by our social relationships with other people.

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This week I am in Venezuela and experiencing a revolution in process. In fact, that is what the Venezuelans call it: el processo. But capturing it in words (its energy, its successes, its weaknesses, its strengths and its precariousness) just isn't going to work. I can (and probably will) write reports about the "missions" that are improving the lives of workers and the poor, essays about the use of state power to foster people's organizations, and leaflets about how it is important to prevent the Bush Administration from engineering a "regime change." But none of that will capture what is going on here. Even my experience here can't capture what's going on, because I'm not making the revolution with.

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Gödel, Escher, Bach, a book about thinking that I read in college, makes the point that translators are faced with all kinds of choices about what "level" to translate — a word-for-word translation of "he sees white mice" from German might be better translated as "he's got a screw loose" for English readers unfamiliar with the German idiom. At the highest "level," he says, you could argue that the best way to translate a Tolstoy novel is to simply read a Dickens novel. That's the level I want to bring my experiences of Venezuela back on.

Regularly expressing

So I haven't been posting very much recently ... here's what I've been doing:

http://www.burlingtoncommunityschools.org

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Perl, which stands for "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language" (or "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister," depending on who you're talking to), is one of the more popular languages for writing web applications. It is particularly well-adapted for web applications because it has very powerful tools for dealing with text(s), which is, after all, what the internet is made up of.

Perl scripts include a lot of slashes (and hash-marks, and other punctuation used in strange ways). Most often, these are to denote "regular expressions."

While regular expressions are indeed a thing of sublime beauty, I have to say I find the punctuational thrift of Perl terribly confusing.

Hanging odes

I just finished reading an account of the culture of medieval Islamic Spain, The Ornament of the World (see http://www.twbookmark.com/books/33/0316168718/ ).  The book describes a vibrant, tolerant and multicultural medieval Spain, when Islam was dominant as both religion and cultural influence, and also traces its downfall at the hands of fundamentalist tendencies from both within Islam and from Christians to the north.

Works of creativity, and especially poetry, are at the heart of this account.  Menocal traces one thread of this love of poetry back to pre-Islamic Arabian tribes, who are reputed to have gathered for a yearly poetry competition.  Winning odes were displayed on gold-embroidered banners; as the banners were hung for display, the best poetry became known as "hanging odes."
 
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One of the books I remember from when I was a kid was about a field mouse named Frederick.  While all the other field mice were gathering nuts and seeds and such to store for the winter, Frederick lazed about in the sun, admired the flowers, and acted in a generally bohemian manner.  During the winter, when the field mice huddled together in dark burrows under the snow, Frederick recreated the sunshine and the flowers for them with poetry.
 
When I was a young, bohemianish creative person I liked remembering this story for its obvious promotion of bohemianish creativity, but now I like remembering this story for its clarity about the social relations that govern creative work.  Physical labor is necessary to sustain creative labor.  In the "primitive communist" society of these imaginary field mice, Frederick is not appointed as the mouse laureate -- he must take the initiative and is subjected to reprimand for evading his nut-gathering duties -- but the value of culture, at least during the dreary winter, is affirmed in the end by the community.  The food gathered by the others is shared equally with Frederick.
 
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As a teenager I remember always seeing a book called "Albion's Fatal Tree" on the small bookshelf that sat just to the right of my father's seat at the kitchen table (the same seat I would take over after my parents went to bed, and I would stay up late reading and listening to the all-night jazz show).  The title and something about the design of the book always fascinated me, but every so often when I would pick it up the academic-ness of its contents would always put me off -- it was a collection of 5 longish essays on crime and society in England during the early days of capitalism.  The title references the explosion of crimes punishable by hanging during the eighteenth century.  To quote the back cover, "From one point of view eighteenth-century England, with ... its polite arts and culture ... appears as a stable, self-assured civilization. ... This book explores these contrasts: a settled ruling class which could only rule through forms of judicial terror; a population deferential by day but deeply subordinate at night."
 
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Maria Rosa Menocal, who wrote the Ornament of the World, is a professor at Yale.  Yale is a hugely rich institution in the middle of a struggling, blue-collar city.  It is the alma matter of both Bush presidents, as well as John Kerry.  Its institutional hostility to recognizing the value of labor extends even to its own graduate employees (who are overwhelmingly from white middle-class backgrounds), who have fought an uphill and so far unsuccessful battle for union recognition for well over a decade.  The Muslims, Jews and Christians celebrated for their "culture of tolerance" in Menocal's book are overwhelmingly men of power; the fundamentalists who tear down their sumptuous, cultured palaces and ultimately their polity are poor.

Can't stand the heat

We've hit our second real hot spell here in Vermont -- not as humid as the first one in early June, but longer, as it has lasted several days now and is projected to continue through the weekend. It reminds me why I so dread the coming of summer: heat, mosquitoes, blinding sun, allergens making any exposed skin itch when I'm in any area with much vegetable growth (like, say, our backyard). Now is the time when I abandon any foolish notions I had during the spring of intentional gardening, and just let the yard become whatever the weather, efforts of spouse and kids, and profligate growth of weeds and wanted plants alike will make of it. Life takes whatever niches it is given, and fills them as full as it can. Crabgrass has already buried my nice stone path on the front corner of the lawn.

Despite the heat, I actually had a pleasant morning today with S, while his older sister was at soccer camp. We went down to the big municipal beach on Lake Champlain before it was open to car traffic; there were a few stray campers from the nearby campgrounds, but we pretty much had the beach to ourselves. S made ephemeral art of sand and driftwood -- we had watched "Rivers and Tides" last week, and S was so taken with the Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy, who makes art installations out of materials he finds on the land, that he was in fact repeating phrases from the movie as he walked around the beach. "I am giving it to the sea," he announced proudly at one point, though the tide of the lake was unlikely to swallow his pieces of driftwood balanced against each other in the same dramatic fashion as the Atlantic enclosing Goldsworthy's stone cone, or carrying off his monster beaver house. No, S's driftwood sculpture from this morning is more likely to be simply knocked down by the waves of children and adolescents that swarmed the beach once the SUVs and camp buses were allowed to drive down into the parking lot.

While S constructed, I read about Antarctica. In the summers, the cold seas around Antarctica are abundant with untold billions of living things, but they are clustered into only a relative handful of species, each one filling one of the few niches that the stark environment allows for life. The blue whales, largest animals on earth, sit atop a three-step food chain: algae photosynthesize the sun's energy, krill eat the plankton, whales eat the krill. Or used to sit atop, before the expansion of commercial whaling into the Antarctic in the early 20th century. Harvesting of the huge rorqual whales in the Southern Ocean was no heroic adventure, no contest with the universe. The whalers of the nineteenth century, throwing harpoons into the much smaller right whales from small boats, were simply no match for these huge beasts; only with the coming of mechanized harpoons, complete with explosive devices, and floating factories to process the blubber into oil, did the killing of blue and fin whales become possible, let alone profitable.

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The other night, as we sat by the lake drinking beer and feeding mosquitoes, a friend asked me if I thought the world's ecosystem would be done any great harm if we could find some way to simply eliminate that species. I have no formal knowledge of the life sciences beyond 9th grade biology, but I suspect that ecosystems are complex beyond human understanding, that the ultimate effects of any given action are simply impossible to predict. Heat, humidity and mosquitoes, I suppose, must just be lived with.