Death and Our Times

Margalit Fox announced her retirement as an obit editor at The Times and here is a part of the epitaph she wrote, “She was a decent stylist. She didn’t get too many things wrong. She didn’t tick too many people off. At times she wrote obits with tears in her eyes, but far more often she wrote them with joy. It was the joy that sprang from the extraordinary privilege of tracing the arc—in sweet-smelling newsprint, damp with ink—of lives well lived." ("She Knows How to Make an Exit. You're Reading It,"NYT, 6/28/18) Of course, it’s easy to write your own obit when you've been doing it for a living. You're used to writing endings so there isn’t any problem with form and from the standpoint of content the occupation's quirky and glamorous in an indecorous way. “The child has not been born who comes home from grade school clutching a theme that says, ‘When I grow up, I want to be…an obituary writer,’” Fox remarked. Fox also appeared in Obit, a recent movie that documents The Times's famed  "morgue.” Another Times writer John Leland recently wrote a piece entitled "The Positive Death Movement Comes to Life," (NYT, 6/11/18) in which one of his subjects Shatzi Weisberger coins the term “FUN-eral” to describe the rehearsal/parties she and her friends have been throwing in anticipation of their demise. And Times reviewer Parul Seghal recently reviewed Advice for Future Corpses and Those Who Love Them by Sallie Tisdale (NYT, 6/26/18). Maybe it’s time to read the writing on the wall or Tombstone as it were. Are you going to spin your legacy or leave that to posterity?

Life is Like a Pyramid

Pyramid at Giza (photo: Nina Aldin Thune)

Life is like a pyramid. The early years constitute the bottom in which there's a level playing field. You exist with numbers of other infants. Every year the terrain narrows until as with mountain climbing, if you are lucky, you arrive at a high point where the air is thin and there are few who have made it. The perils of ascending most peaks become greater at those heights. The final ascents are often are characterized by steep and dangerous grades, similar to the pitfalls some individuals face due to sickness, accidents or other acts of God, which can interrupt a climb before it has even begun. Of course, it can be disconcerting to see your fellow hikers falling along the wayside and sometimes there's an aftershock like the concept of après coup in psychoanalysis when the reality of what’s actually happening only makes itself apparent long after it’s occurred. It’s not only death too that takes it’s toll, but from the heights you can’t fail to miss the specter of wreckage left by those who have experienced pain and loss. You witness the misery which befalls some and not others, who have been struck down by their circumstances. They might have barely survived the calamity that characterizes their lives, but they're the wounded who you tend to, yet are forced to leave behind as you continue along your way.

Homo Ludens

There is ludic which refers to play. A Luddite, a person who resists technology and innovation. Luddite derives from someone named Ned Ludd who flew off the handle and broke some stocking frames. HIs name was appropriated by those who had a gripe with industrialization. It's doubtful that Ludd would have taken to Marx’s early writings (the 1844 manuscripts)  which deal with the kind of alienation that derives from the division of labor--if he had lived long enough to read them. But there's a direct connection between ludic and Luddite if we remember that homo ludens is man at play and the title of a book by the Dutch cultural historian, Johan Huizinga (and that Ludens, by the way, is the name of the well-known brand of cough drops). There’s of course Yvetushenko the famous Russian poet and the nonsense contrarian rhyme “not to Shenko.” But what about outstinct? If there is an instinct which is a natural or biological drive, there must be the opposite which accounts for all that does not derive from the ANS or autonomic nervous system. If you are not depending on your instincts you certainly must fall back on your outstincts, which comprise everything else, consciousness, mind and the kind of thinking upon which reason depends emanating from the cerebral cortex. Instinct is usually associated with what is known as lower brain or limbic activities, where emotion resides. Words at play, logos ludens?

"Piece of My Heart"

Erma Franklin (1967)

The English diva Joss Stone did  "Piece of My Heart" and did a version with Beverly Knight who also did her own impassioned version. Etta James did one along with Aretha Franklin. The most famous "Piece of My Heart" is probably that sung by the raspy voiced Janus Joplin but perhaps the greatest is that performed by Erma Franklin at The Soup Kitchen in Detroit back in 1992. Erma's eyes are literally burning with passion and her back up singers and instrumentalists all exude that look that music people evince when they're in the middle of an iconic performance. Watch Jerry Butler "the Iceman" singing  "Only the Strong Survive." "I want you to come on, come on, come on and take it," Erma croons. Even though you're riveted to your seat you have the feeling that you're the one who is about to take off. It's as if it's your song and it makes you want to sing.

Pornosophy: When Camelot Was Occupied by Bonobos

It's hard to accept the concept that consciousness is just like breathing and that it’s not some superior attribute that separates man from animal. Yes Descartes famously stated, "cogito ergo sum," but he was a dualist. Though consciousness is still regarded as a mystery by some philosophers and neuroscientists, most accept it as a purely material process. "Disenchantment" was a word Max Weber used to to describe scientism replacing a belief in the ineffable and invisible. The phenomenon is roughly the equivalent of the kind of insult that occurred when Copernicus and Galileo put forth the then heretical supposition that the sun not the earth was the center of what we now know to be the solar system. When you regard consciousness simply to be another attribute of homo sapiens behavior and an extension of traits represented in species further down the food chain, it’s easy to understand why mankind has gotten itself in a fix. Humans think they're better than animals because they possess a highly developed language cortex, but they're really inhabiting the same territory as their country cousins in the animal kingdom. When you open up the newspaper and curse the dunderhead du jour for his or her latest pronunciamentos, you're simply suffering from a problem of expectations. There’s been no great decline, no worsening since the great Adamic fall. If you read Mimi Alfford's Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath, you'll hear how JFK watched as his White House intern gave a blow job to one his pals. Camelot, it turns out, was occupied by bonobos.

RBG

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the title of the book. When asked about what she has in common with the iconic Notorious B.I.G. in the film, RBG, the outspoken chief justice says that the two came from Brooklyn. The answer seems dismissive but probably says a lot. Though the two differ in their styles, they’re both fighters. If you shy away from hagiographies of either rappers or chief justices, you might miss Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s documentary, which would be a mistake. “My father did the cooking,” one of Ginsburg’s children comments, “and mom did the thinking.” What separates the movie from being just another feminist broadside is its wit and charm, both of which can be ascribed to Ginsburg herself. Nowhere is this more apparent then in the clips that detail her relationship with Antonin Scalia, the conservative justice who became her close friend despite their ideological differences. If Ginsburg’s relationship with her husband, the tax lawyer M.D. Ginsburg, testified to a reordering of traditional roles, then her relationship with Scalia with whom she enjoyed the opera amongst other things is a testament to a collegiality and equanimity of spirit that’s all but missing from public life today. The film records Ginsburg’s one serious abrogation of responsibility when as a sitting justice she attacked candidate Trump for being “a faker"—a lapse for which she quickly apologized.  

Lost in the Googleverse

Google maps is one of the most blatant examples of how technology creates an attrition in human abilities. The computer with its modern keyboard has all but killed cursive writing and similarly Google maps has eradicated not only the sense of direction (in those who were born with it), but the ability to figure out and parse where one is and find clever ways out of situations in which one is lost. People now use Google maps not just for driving but for simple walking and errands around a city like New York. God forbid you didn’t have your iPhone you might have to ask someone directions for a street like Great Jones which is not part of Manhattan's symmetrical grid. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was the ultimate survival manual and one of elemental documents of the age of discovery. Outside of sextons and simple telescopes most early transatlantic sailors had to hone their capacity to navigate using both intuition and an awareness of natural elements. Today, traits which are developed through everyday use and trial and error have become so foreign that without the latest guidance device most travelers are thrown into a state of utter panic. Deprived of their devices, they might actually have to look for landmarks, study topography and maybe even stoop to taking a look around before deciding which way to turn. However, these are precisely the traits that have been lost in the Faustian bargain with modernity.