Laika

How fitting that a dog went first, and that, for a time, she was between us and darkness. All our proud rockets, all our brave pioneers, and we entered space as a child might enter a basement, holding onto a dog’s tail. She was a Moscow stray. A stray, and therefore nobody’s dog, or everybody’s – yours and mine, even. A Moscow stray, distant aunt to that remarkable unbreed of hustlers and idlers – Russia’s last aristocrats.

Strays live by the old covenant. Dogs never needed us. The deadliest hunter of the African plains is not the lion but the wild dog, whose kills are efficient, coordinated, and relentless. And they chose to throw in their lot with us. What honor! And what responsibility! There is a play (a radio play by Dunsany) where mankind is put on trial. One by one the animals testify against us; only the dog speaks in our defense, with such praise as is, in its way, worse than accusation:

He is man: that is enough. More is not needed. More could not be needed. All wisdom is in him. All his acts are just; terrible sometimes, but always just.

Bacon writes (against atheism) that men are better for having a god as dogs are better for having a master: a strange and improper argument. But if our faith is as heavy as the faith of dogs is to us, we can have a sort of sympathy, and imagine how gods might know shame.

Muhammad relates that a woman was forgiven a lifetime of sin for giving a thirsty dog a drink of water. Consider how the balance is weighed; what does it mean to harm a dog? “Who could eat a dog?” is really the same question as, “Who could eat a man?” Traditionally, nobody eats a dog for its meat; men eat dogs like men eat men: to absorb their power. It is at least respectful. When dogs are twisted into brutality, neglected into savagery, beaten into helplessness, there is no respect; better to be eaten. And yet each new puppy is a fresh expression of absolute trust, never diminished. Our terrible debt vanishes in that unquenchable devotion.

In his last years, isolated in deafness, Goya gave up canvas and impasted the walls of his own house with a series of alien images, primordial and apocalyptic at once. A lone dog – all alone – sinks below the horizon, howling as she recedes over the edge of the world. We sent Laika to die; we sacrificed her. She died within hours. And then for five months, dead, in her dark, silent capsule, she circled our bright world, falling and falling as the horizon slipped away beneath her, one dead dog keeping solitary watch over the billions. Then she fell as a star falls, a burnt offering, trailing fire, scattering earth and sea with her ashes.

Even the sky is haunted.

Genteel Tradition

In 1911 Santayana was ready to leave the United States. In California (already liminal America), he said what he could not say in Boston:

The truth is that one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the backwater, while, alongside, in invention and industry and social organization the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This division may be found symbolized in American architecture: a neat reproduction of the colonial mansion – with some modern comforts introduced surreptitiously – stands beside the sky-scraper. The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.

This phrase, “genteel tradition,” became the weapon of choice for the Mencken gang. They carried it in their hip pockets like a flask of violet perfume, ready to dash over an opponent’s head. And once the scent was on you, whatever you had to say, all anyone heard was the calico whine of a high-minded Protestant spinster.

But what did Santayana mean by it? He defines the genteel tradition as a form of anthropocentrism: an anthropocentrism that emulsifies transcendentalism – the sense that the world is your creation – with Calvinism – the sense that the world is your fault. Historically he traces it to the seventeenth century and the renewal of orthodoxy.

That is where it comes from; but what is it?

The genteel tradition opposes education to life. It wants things to be done the right way, openly, and for the right reasons, or not done at all. It requires play to be exercise; thinking to be persuasion; learning to be study. It wants us to be unfettered and spontaneous, but not to run in the halls. It does not care what is avoided, unless it approves of what is done instead. Just avoiding apathy, boredom, ignorance, prejudice, and stupidity – in the judgment of genteel tradition, avoiding them is only permissible when they are avoided properly.

Wealth, learning, and beneficence, even on a grand scale, must leave them cold, or positively alarm them, if these fine things are not tightly controlled and meted out according to some revealed absolute standard.

This should sound familiar; this is our world. Santayana thought the genteel tradition was dying; instead it enjoys absolute victory. It has coopted or outlasted every challenge made to it. How did this coffin case recover and reconquer?

In his speech Santayana names Whitman and William James as models of what was to come after the passing of the genteel tradition. How badly his prophecy failed shows in how unthinkable either man is as our contemporary.

Whitman’s generous sympathies would wither in our frost. How dare such a creature of privilege – white, male, educated – presume to contain us? His faith in active humanity – in discoverers, settlers, builders, farmers – is embarrassing. He accepts where we require indignation; he holds faith where we require doubt.

Whitman is an outcast, but James is worse off. He has been brought as low as a dead thinker can be brought. We say he anticipated recent discoveries – “now that we know everything, we can admit he was right all along.” And this is safe to say, because he has no heirs. Our psychology is blithely built on the compulsive, thoughtless quantification that he travestied.

We shelve pragmatism beside hypocrisy. A judgment that can be changed is a judgment that was never held properly. The impulse of the genteel tradition is theocratic: it will have you only hot or cold, never lukewarm.

Santayana’s examples have aged badly. Aggressive enterprise has been outsourced; skyscrapers turned out to be a gimmick, not half so efficient as the anomie of the exurban office park; the colonial mansion was not reproduced, but renovated.

More importantly, women made their own claim on the future: not just assuming male roles, but dignifying female ones. Gender is the worm in the apple of Santayana’s thought. Even for his period he is obtuse about it.

The American intellect is shy and feminine; it paints nature in water-colours; whereas the sharp masculine eye sees the world as a moving-picture – rapid, dramatic, vulgar, to be glanced at and used merely as a sign of what is going to happen next.

Santayana underrated women – women as people, and women as a subject. He observes a divide down the middle of humanity, and assumes that one side mirrors the other: one left, one right; one weak, one strong; one shy, one brash; one sentimental, one enterprising.

(In The Sense of Beauty, for example, while investigating the mutuality of sex and aesthetics, he infers that, because women are the most interesting thing in the world to men, men must be the most interesting thing in the world to women; whereas [aesthetically speaking] women are the most interesting thing in the world to men and women both.)

When Santayana made this metaphor – the genteel tradition is female, modernism is male – he corrupted his view of one dilemma with the quality of caricature that spoiled his view of the other. Thus he sketches both the genteel tradition and modernism (as he names its opposite) clownishly, in greasepaint. If the genteel tradition is feminine, retiring, domestic, careful, then the opposite must be masculine, daring, upthrusting, public. On these terms there is only one complete escapee from the genteel tradition in American letters: Ayn Rand. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer; posit the genteel tradition in Santayana’s playground terms and you get Objectivism.

Every form of modernism is tantamount to testosterism. It is the one thing every species of modernism had in common, the weakness they all shared; so when the thing happened that no one expected, they were all susceptible to it, and the genus went extinct.

(I cannot say how far Santayana himself is to blame; but even if others made the same mistake, it is still the same mistake, and bears the same analysis.)

The kind of thinking that modernism valued was the kind of thinking that felt most like work: laborious, therefore masculine, straightforward without the effeminate detours of inspiration or insight, muscular and tense, measurable in foot-pounds and horsepower.

So what happened? This is hard to see because Santayana’s future is our past. It belongs to the middle distance; we cannot see it for our own shadow.

What no one expected was the computer. Suddenly, there appeared the machine that proves there is no connection between how hard thinking feels and what it is worth. The labor theory of value does not apply. Thinking feels hardest when it is most trivial. Calculation is effortful, but not difficult – even a computer can do it.

Somehow we still admire feats of memorization and calculation. What computers prove is that these feats are dead ends. Mental mathematics, total recall, musical prodigality, are not signs of a powerful mind, but of a mind that has plenty of room because nothing else is going on inside it.

In this way the computer refutes modernism. Consider painting. Look across, from the first half of the twenty-first century, to the first half of the twentieth. What do we see there? We see nothing worth doing. There are no more Pointillists, Impressionists, Cubists, because Photoshop trivializes them. There is no more Abstract Expressionism, no more Suprematism, because the possibilities of these schools are exhausted by the screensaver.

“No,” I hear, “the computer no more refutes abstraction than the camera refutes representation.” But a painting is different from a photograph: one cannot see a photograph as a painting that could have been made, but wasn’t. But a work of modernism is always something that could have been generated by computer, but happened to be made by a human being.

(This definition applies to more than painting – Serialism, Brutalism, Oulipo – but less than everything that has been called modernist. I draw the line here.)

If we mute the caricature – if we correct for Santayana’s error – what is left then? The idea of a genteel tradition will stand. But what of the accompanying diagnosis? Do we have that divided mind? Certainly we have inherited the division as Santayana made it, and as others elaborated it: we find ourselves obscurely constrained to destroy the genteel – even under other names, like pretentious or inauthentic – wherever we encounter it, like the tribe of Amalek.

But the things the genteel tradition wants and provides are good in themselves. There is sufficiency and even bounty in it. It preserves what might be lost, incubates what might be stillborn. But for the sake of these good things the genteel tradition sacrifices things that may be better. It smothers everything it touches with an anxious sobriety: it would leave us in marmoreal disgust before it let us enjoy too meltingly. This I oppose. I side with ecstasy, rhapsody, and multitude, if only from a distance.

Dream Places

There are some things we can trust, even in dreams. One of them is the dream version of a real place. Little as they resemble the places they represent, in the dream we recognize them, and across dreams we return to them, and find them as we left them. Often they are on a larger scale than their models. For places known in childhood this is explicable. Imagination magnifies and interpolates the facts until they match the impression we retain from when we were small in a place and looked up to it. But all my dream places are magnified, whenever I knew them. Perhaps cinematography is to blame. Many who grow up watching black and white dream in shades of gray; my dreams are wound up to the geographical key of New Zealand. True, I return to dream places which are born of dream stuff, and have no anchor in experience; but dream places, when they are born of real places, retain a cord of connection with them. The change that a place undergoes in becoming a dream place is not lawless: there is a topology, with invariants. The shape of a coast or the path of a river may change, but the waters remain. The dream place has the same palette as its model; no new colors appear. Trees never appear singly, always in stands. New buildings are found, and new features of old buildings, but always of the same stuff as the real ones. Roads widen and narrow, but never change their course, nor whether they turn or go straight. In order of instability the elements of dreams are events, things, people, and places. This is a lesson in the mechanics of imagination: even when anything can happen to anyone at any time, it must still happen somewhere.

Paths

The far-voyaging French explorers of North America kept running into one another. One explorer could hardly enter a village without finding another in residence or having just left. They could leave one another letters and expect them to be delivered. In Paris a man could disappear; in the wilderness he had to guard his reputation.

Think of traffic as a force. The canal is the artificial version of something natural – the river; likewise, the road is the artificial version of the path. Roads are permanent; paths, unless anchored by permanent settlements or fenced off by property lines, shift freely. The paradox of the wilderness is that the more open and unobstructed it is, the more traffic converges along optima conditioned by the difficulty of the terrain, the availability of resources, and the use of waterways. In the wilderness all ways are highways.

When we consider ancient or prehistoric peoples and their connections we should not imagine of a web of short links between evenly spaced nodes, news and goods moseying from village to village; we should imagine them swept up into a handful of gigantic, continental paths: stable in their broad geographic sweep, changeful in their fine, local structure. Call them fractal: at ten thousand feet, there is one path; lower there are ten paths; on the ground there are hundreds of paths, routes and reroutes circumventing any obstacle with the ingenuity of flowing water.

The existence of paths on a continental scale does not imply a continental consciousness. In their scale these great paths would have been invisible to those who used them: like the Silk Road (the last great path), each path would have been cut up by jealous middlemen, until one end of the road was a myth to the other.

One can imagine, if not document, a vision of universal history hanging on a set of Great Paths, where it is not migrations that leave paths behind them, but paths that guide migrations. Paths have always been before us: from our beginning, the human race spread not by spilling over from one valley to the next, but by processes that, scaling the lines of least resistance, became the salients of our advance. The ascent of man was not just something that happened; it was a single phenomenon, having its own structure – structured in paths.

April Fools

On the net, an effective April Fools’ joke works like contrast dye – you discover, by following its path, who does and does not read the stories they pass along. April 2nd is a good day to unsubscribe, unfollow, and defriend. We owe to April Fools’ Day some great moments: say, table syrup or the spaghetti harvest. But surely there is already enough deceit and treachery in the world. Why dedicate a holiday to it? It has the significance of certain seeming-perverse religious performances, honoring the hostile gods of death and ruin, recognizing them in turn lest they obtrude themselves out of turn. If we must be fools, if some god of fools will not be spurned, then let us dedicate a day to his honor. And the holiday inoculates us: being an April fool is painful, but it forearms us for when we are made fools out of season.

All The Lonely People

“But tell us, why would you stay?”

“This is my home,” he said, glancing around the café at empty tables, seeing the man with an open computer and the pretty-plain barista who were eloquently ignoring each other. “I may be the only one who knows it, but this is my home.”

He sat at his little round table. (What he let himself think of, sometimes, as his table.) He sat with a man and a woman, his guests. They did not look like people who belonged at his table. They did not look like people who belonged anywhere, except in magazines. They were too well-dressed, too well-coiffed. Everything they wore was contemporary, everything in the latest style – walking fashions. When they first walked in, they reminded him somehow of actors in a costume drama.

On the table, centered between three coffees – two of them cold and untouched – his laptop sat closed, fan blowing softly. If he opened it now, he knew, he would see nothing – nothing but the winter-scene desktop and the carefully arranged dock. He would not see again what they had shown him there, a few minutes ago, stealing his screen with a snap of the fingers. He would not see this city as it would look ten thousand years from now, under its dome, its old buildings stasis-locked beyond decay, its new buildings smooth, swooping, imperishable. He would not see the thin ribbons of dark green park that had once been streets. He would not see The War. They called it that – just The War, against The Enemy, waging ten thousands years from now.

“We don’t like to let it come to this,” said the man, “but you need to understand. Our records are very detailed. We know all about you. We know what happened to your parents. We know about the divorce. We can read your emails. We have your instant messages laid down in diamond dust. Your friends were her friends. They took her side. Nothing is holding you here.”

“So what? So I should give up? Run away? Run ten thousands years away to fight for people I have nothing in common with against an enemy who never did anything to me. This is my time. This is where I belong.”

Now it was the woman’s turn. “Understand, we know. We know everything that happened to you from the day you were born to the day you died. It is a matter of historical record that your life was meaningless. From now you will always be alone. You will never love, you never be loved. You will never meet anyone, you will never make a friend. You will never go anywhere. You will never accomplish anything. There was a phrase we learned in orientation…”

“ ‘Waste of space,’ ” the man supplied.

“That was it. Yes.” She drawled it. “Waste of space. You were a waste of space.”

He grabbed his laptop and stood up. “Fuck you. Fuck you both. Fuck your war and fuck your human race. I hope—”

“We’re not finished,” the man said, and snapped his fingers.

His legs went numb under him. He flopped back into the chair and hugged the laptop to himself.

“Now, here, you are worthless,” the man said. “But you are invaluable to us.”

“Valuable,” the woman said. “He means you’re very valuable.”

“They mean the same thing, I think,” the man said. “Invaluable and valuable. Like inflammable.”

The woman shrugged.

“We’re recruiters,” he said. “You know that already. But only certain very special people meet our standards. We need people who will not be missed. We mostly used to do corpse shuffling. Take a genetic sample, send it downstream, get a body back, swap it out for the original moments before an accident. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. Too many people come into contact with the bodies. It’s only safe when the injuries are too gruesome or the body count is too high. And then some of them say no, even after we save their lives. All our efforts go to waste. I spent—”

The woman interrupted. “We found a better way. It turns out that people like you are more common than we thought. People who at a certain point in their lives just give up, shut off. People who can be lifted out of history without affecting anything. We come to them and we make an offer. Come with us, ten thousand years downstream, and we will give you a purpose. We will give your life meaning. Ten thousand years from now all the silent and lonely people who ever fell through the cracks of history are gathering to fight the last battle of the last war. All you have to do is say yes.”

“I won’t say yes. Why don’t you just take me? Snap your fingers?”

“Your weapon needs your consent. All you have to do is say yes and it will take you where you need to go. It will teach you what you need to know. It has been prepared especially for you. No one else can use it. It was made with your records. It knows you more completely than anyone has ever known you. It loves you perfectly and unconditionally. It is totally devoted and infinitely patient. It lives to wait for your answer.”

The man took over. “You don’t have to answer now. You don’t have to answer this week or this month or this year. Our devices are watching you. They will watch you for the rest of your life. From now on, all you have to do is say yes, and wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your weapon will come for you. Like she said, your weapon is patient. Say yes tomorrow. Say yes thirty years from now. Say yes on your deathbed. Your weapon will come and restore you and bring you to the fight.”

The man stood up. The woman too. On the way out the woman snapped her fingers and he gasped at the pins and needles prickling his awakening legs. He held onto his laptop. The heat from its racing chips burned his stomach.

“Hey, are you all right?” It was the girl, the pretty-plain barista. “Are you OK? Mr. – I’m sorry, I know your face, but I don’t know your name.” The boy with the laptop looked up, looked away, typed furiously.

A man left his home, and in the silence that came after he left, he was not missed.

Argument

Argument has rules. Argument is not a game – the rules are more in spirit than in letter – but there are rules. Certain moves – certain appeals – appeals to personal experience, to scripture, to studies and statistics, even to logic – break the rules and make argument impossible. Of course these are all useful instruments of judgment. But judgment and argument are different things. Judgment ends argument, but arguments do not want to end.

“Arguments want?” Arguments want what we want. Sometimes we argue selfishly, to win. Sometimes we argue selflessly, to keep the conversation going. But mostly we argue precisely to prevent judgment: to reassure ourselves that some matter is open to question, that equivocation is not irresponsible.

Argument has rules, but agreeing to definitions is not one of them. That is putting the cart before the horse. Definitions are liquid: when they meet, they mix. These triboluminescent encounters are what argument is for. All the valid moves in argument – making a distinction, putting in context, elaborating, unpacking – these are all ways to make definitions meet, merge, and mature. Definitions are always at the center of arguments because shaping definitions is what arguments are for.

Argument is harder than it looks. In large part this is because, while contradictions, fallacies, and biases break the rules, pointing them out is a far worse offense. Argument at the level of fallacies and biases is boring. Argument about argument is not argument. Whatever the point at stake, the opponents are in the same old ring, trading the same old jabs and blocks.

Argument is not a way of deciding. It is a way of not deciding, of doing something else instead: learning, wondering, waiting. You know it is the real thing when it is unpredictable – irreducible – and, therefore, nontrivial. Argument wants; and more than anything else, argument wants surprise.

Knots

Are knots technology? Knots were never invented: like fires, knots happen naturally. But unlike fire they cannot not be made useful by propagation: they have to be translated. Like language, knots are immaterial, passed on by example and subject to regional variation. Unlike language, knots are finite – there are only so many – and eternal – the same knots recur worlds and ages apart.

Like tools, knots are useful and increase our power over nature; but unlike tools, we carry them in our heads, not our hands. When they parallel tools, it is on a different level of abstraction. The trucker’s hitch is an image in cord of a block and tackle. It is no more a tool than a picture of a tool is – and yet it has the power of a tool.

Knots are a form of mathematics, but math with a difference. Arithmetic has a history of progress: but before history began, knots already embodied the highest level of mathematical abstraction. Knot theory is a twentieth century invention. Only in the twentieth century, only after thousands of years of development, did exoteric mathematics finally equal the mathematics esoteric in knots.

Knots are magic. With a piece of cord and a sequence of gestures we produce direct results in matter. “The rabbit jumps out of the hole, runs around the tree, and jumps back down the hole”: what is this but an incantation? Reasoning from knots, we get magic; reasoning from tools, we get technology. Technology works, magic doesn’t; nonetheless, the existence of knots violates the order of nature that technology presumes.

Animals

The facts of life cannot be hidden from people whom live among animals. Birth and death are as open and current among them as weather. Human beings cannot learn much from one another; we conceal too much in shame and pride. The short and unreserved lives of animals are the true parables. They enact life back to us on a scale we can grasp. The horse, the cow, the dog, the cat, the chicken (like the llama, the camel, and others) – these are the truly ancient sages.

Sometime in the nineteenth century it became possible for masses of people to live away from animals. Deprived of its foundation in the shared witness of animal life – left untethered – culture became a castle in air.

Victorian prudery came first. Bowdler only becomes possible once he may suppose readers who do not know the way of a dog with a bitch. But his overthrowers were equally unworldly. Freud could only have lived in the city. (Animals, despite their undivided minds, are as neurotic as people.)

But Freud’s city was still a city of horses. When the automobile replaced the horse and left animals with zoos and field trips for their habitats, pathology became derangement. It was the analogies that the observation of animals implicitly afforded us that made reasoning about life possible. We have lost the animals, but we still need the analogies; so we grub them where we can. The machine served until it threatened to master – to remake us in its image, machines, not people. The net may yet make nodes of us.

(Of course analogy is not explanation, but a real explanation would have to explain us all, human and animal: developing a theory of human nature and trying to work animals into it parenthetically is a dead end every time.)

I invite the accusation of anthropomorphism; so be it. The dangers of anthropomorphism are abstract; the dangers of anthropocentrism are practical. It is not a question of dominion; it is a question of definition. We are the rule, not the exception: since we can no longer learn it by observation, we must be told, and trust.

Generations

Why should generations be interesting? There are two questions here, because generations have two kinds of interest. They have historical interest: a succession of generations from Lost to Greatest to Silent to Boomer to X to Millennial. And they have personal interest: the generation in the first person, what separates us from our parents and divides us from our children – “my generation,” “our generation.”

As a unit of historical analysis the generation is worse than useless. The biologist’s refutation of race applies: since variability within a generation equals or exceeds the variation supposed to divide generations, generations are supposititious.

Of course generations really are different. Every generation has its own distinctive patterns of behavior – but distinctive is not the same as characteristic. Nothing is more distinctive of a generation than its common names – but, remember, the fact that some names are common does not mean that most people have common names.

The generation is unreal, but unreal is not absurd; unreal things can exist formally, like lines on a map. The generation is likewise formal: consensual, not demonstrable. But why this consensus?

It is a pleasure to be sorted into a particular generation because being sorted, if it is not discriminatory, is inherently pleasant. Advertisers know this. They know that offering to tell you “Which x are you?” or “What kind of x are you?” tempts you, for all x.

And something loves to displace the faults of human nature to contingent aspects of it. Sentences that begin by naming “these days,” “this country,” or “our society,” generally become intelligible only once they are universalized, and referred to human beings as such. The generation provides another means for such displacements. Then such awful questions as “Why are we here?” can be rephrased in cozier terms like “My generation has no sense of purpose.”

What is it that we share when we share a generation?

Sharing a generation is the least two people can have in common (who have anything in common at all): thus we are most attached to our generation when we have few other attachments. Those who have something more definite to be loyal to – nation, religion, community, cause – they would never number their generation among the things that define them. And, inversely, those who expect their generation to define them tend to lack particular loyalties.

Sharing a generation is the weakest hold two people can have on each other, who have any hold on each other at all. It is because it is so weak that is so hard to shake off. Say: my generation is my blind spot. I think there is nothing so utterly mysterious to me as my own generation. Because I must draw lovers and friends from it, I want to believe it is better than it is, and when it disappoints me, I see mystery instead of accepting the fact of disappointment.

If it is to take hold at all, generational solidarity takes hold in childhood. Sometimes I would have to explain and defend to adults the things that I and my friends did – defend them to members of other generations. At those times I did not feel as if I were speaking for myself: I felt like an ambassador, charged with a heavy responsibility and answerable to my peers. Suddenly I was not only included, but important. Under threat of scorn from another generation people who would not otherwise speak to me leaped to my defense; people who hardly spoke at all surprised me with the capacity to form complete, reasonable, and persuasive sentences on my behalf.

To embrace the undemanding solidarity of the generation, to build life and work around this experience of inclusion and importance, is understandable. We writers are most susceptible. The generation is our fallback – once we have, for fear of prejudice, abstained from everything else. The temptation is always present: why speak for yourself, when you can speak for your generation? Why stand alone, when you can recruit their implicit support behind everything you say, or make, or do? Why be objective when at last, after everything, you could have them all on your side?