As a kid I was obsessed with the fantasy of superheroes. Here’s a testimony to what real, ordinary super-heroism looks like.
Posted by: cctracker | April 25, 2012
Wendell Berry, American Hero – NYTimes.com
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted by: cctracker | April 24, 2012
Backyard Walkabout
Photo of Oecophora bractella and House Sparrow eggs at nytimes.com
No matter how many times I’m taught the lesson, I’m surprised over and over again to relearn it.
Abstracted as process, it goes something this:
Look.
See that?
Pay attention.
Closer!
Yes, that.
Now, OBSERVE.
Repeat, everywhere.
Take a look here at a wondrously good New York Times article that reinforces the lesson.
Now I’ll grant that as a science writer on exotic species Carol Kaesuk Yoon is uniquely prepared to absorb this wisdom, but she was in her BACKYARD for goodness sake and the critter was sitting a few inches from her nose in dazzling, iridescent color!
Her story begins with a moth on her kitchen screen. I was schooled in the lesson last summer when a fly caught someone else’s eye.
I teach in an outdoor summer program called Walkabout. A “Walkabout” in its Aboriginal Australian context refers to an extended ritual journey in the wilderness for an adolescent male.
Our program is three weeks of classes in reading, writing, art and field biology for 6th grade boys with hiking field
Photo James Burton
trips every other day in the heat of a midwest summer. It’s great fun, but despite the modest scale of the hikes and an experiential emphasis in the classroom, it can be an ordeal for the boys.
We were hiking steeply up hill in full sun.
I walked at the head of the line crunching out rhythmic steps on an unremarkable gravel path at a pace I felt the boys could match until we reached the top. Though “Awareness” is our mantra–the boys are always supposed to be looking for plants and animals of note–the hiking rule is “no complaining.” I was on guard against supposed “sightings” that were really excuses to stop. It was time to teach a little toughness.
“Hey! Look at this!” I didn’t miss a step but shouted back over my shoulder: “Whada’ygot?”
“A big fly!”
“Great! Get a look but let’s keep going!” Clearly a bogus ploy for a rest. We weren’t stopping for a horsefly.
“No, this is a COOL fly!”
Perhaps it was the sincere music in that youthful throat. Maybe it was simply a kind of blind obedience to the mantra. I stopped and turned around.
“Ok, don’t spook it! I’ll get a picture.”
This was a big fly. For a split-second I thought it might be a bumble bee, but I got close enough to confirm that the student had gotten it right. From three or four feet away, the zoom got me a pretty good shot.
The group was already moving on. “Hold up! Let me get to the front.” A few seconds later we were marching up the trail again, the fly forgotten.
Hours later I opened the day’s photos on my computer to prepare for the class the next day and there it was.
Robber Fly-Photo James Burton
I was astounded by the detail the photo had captured: bristled legs like bottle brushes, prominent, menacing, mechanical hooks emerging from the rear of the abdomen, huge oval eyes, orange and yellow hair-like tufts, a humped “backpack” just behind the head and, most terrifying of all even before I discovered its function, a long mouth tube like the barrel of a gun. The beast seemed to me a nightmarish hybrid of insect and machine, something a nefarious group of military scientists might design one day soon to infiltrate the enemy lair and give the bad guys a lethal bite in the ass.
Turns out this fella’–one of the Robber Flies– doesn’t bite at all. He grabs flying insect prey mid-air with those huge legs, lands somewhere, then injects them with an acidic saliva turning their flesh to digestible goo which he then slurps back up through his mouth tube. The students went crazy the next day. I had tried to find the exact species in the field guides so I could give them the scientific name, but insects are the hardest creatures we study in the course: so many species in such variety that all you can usually do is get the name of somebody in the family.
Though I didn’t find him in my backyard, he’s probably out there every summer terrorizing my moth population. And that’s Yoon’s point in her NY Times piece: “So Much Life on a Little Patch of Earth.” The fact that the moth she found had never been seen in North America was news, but her main point is more fundamental: We ought always to be looking. We ought to be in awe of the astonishing variety, complexity and interconnection of life around us. Inspired by the moth, she tries to document every species of life on her own small planetary plot:
“Our unimpressive lawn became a kaleidoscope of mysteries, just one square foot of it boasting multiple species of grasses, one species of dandelion, countless other unknown plants that quickly came and went, and no end of insects, algae, mosses, worms, bacteria and fungi.
Every beam of slanting light, every breath of wind, every flitter of movement revealed something unseen. A droplet of rain splashed on the deck, a potential marvel of aquatic life. A newly noticed stain on the fence proved to be a burgeoning lichen. A squirrel ran into the yard and paused to scratch itself, prompting Merrill to yell out: “Squirrel fleas! New yard species!”
Soon, she is overwhelmed:
“I wish I could give you a bottom-line species count, but I can’t. Living organisms are reliably, inspiringly unpredictable, as any birdwatcher can attest; in years of watching, we have seen many species only once, so it is very likely we have missed many more. And though we are good at spotting birds and insects, we are nearly plant-blind, so who can say what botanical change has been afoot here? The same is true for the many, many microscopic things we literally cannot see.”
She concludes:
“For those, like children, with eyes open wide, rarities can abound. On any given day, of course, you’re not likely to spot an unexpected guest. But one day it will happen. While you slice a grapefruit or fold laundry or sit at the computer, something unbelievable will be creeping or flittering through your life. Look for it, just in case.”
Every summer I testify again–even preach–about the faith to a new set of fresh faces : “Awareness!”
Photo James Burton
But the truth is, I doubt. And other times I just don’t want to bother: we’ve got to keep marching, I sometimes tell myself.
And each year its the students who stop me. Their musical voices ring out: “Hey, look!”
Their 20 pairs of eyes rove the landscape and never fail to find something riveting to look at, to believe in.
And it is so important that I do stop with them to take a look, to marvel. Because my real hope is to send them back to their backyards, where they’ll live out most of their lives, in the spirit of “Walkabout.”
And I need to have that same spirit, find that same faith, in my own backyard. If I can’t find it there I am lost indeed.
Photo James Burton
Posted by: cctracker | April 22, 2012
Ridin’ the Bus, Keepin’ It Real
It was “Care Free/Car Free Day” at school last Thursday.
Some students walked in, starting out before dawn. Many rode bikes. Those near a line took the light rail. My wife has been suggesting for years that I try our local option for public transportation, so I caught the bus.
Check out this great essay by Frank Kovarik about the layers of history and culture on my route.
–
7:05 a.m.
My wife offered to give me a ride to the bus stop on her way to work. Hopping out with my back pack, I realized I had no money.
“Here” she said, handing me a $20, justifiably a little annoyed at my spaciness. “You’ll have to walk somewhere to get change. What time does the bus come?”
I had no idea.
“You didn’t check on-line?” she asked, frustration rising.
“The site was pretty confusing. I’m sure one will come along soon enough.”
There were cars behind us and she was going to be late if she waited to see what became of me.
“Go ahead, I’m good.”
With a skeptical “OK then, good luck!” she turned her attention to her own oncoming day. The door closed with a “clunk” of finality and her car pulled away.
What came next was one of those strange moments of dislocation you have when your car breaks down. You stand on the side of the road with oblivious traffic going by. Or maybe a shock or misfortune pulls you out of your routine and onto life’s sidelines. Suddenly, you’re watching everyone else going about their normal business. Your mind mutters at you in existential nervousness: “Who are these people and where are they all going? What do they think of me standing here? Do they even notice? And where am I going, anyway? How will I ever get there?”
Fortunately, another more buoyant and literary voice in my head also had me feeling like Cary Grant waiting for George Kaplan in “North By Northwest.” It said something like: “This is interesting. I have no change. Nothing is open on this stretch of road. This story could go in any number of directions. I wonder how this day will end?”
7:12 a.m. I had an important meeting at 8:05. I guessed the trip to be about 11 miles. I started my commute walking east.
Here’s how the rest of the day went “by the numbers:”
200 meters down the road was a tiny, very lonely looking cinder block building. I assumed it was an abandoned husk. “Open” said the sign in the window and in painted lettering above the door: “Trog’s.”
I knew immediately the building reminded me of something but I couldn’t say what. A small, old gentleman was inside behind an ancient counter. Not a single product to buy in sight, so I just had to ask for the change. “What’ll it be?” he asked. I didn’t understand the question. “The bills. What do you want?” Suddenly realizing I didn’t even know what the fare was, I asked for a 10, a 5 and 5 one’s. He handed it over. I thanked him and walked back out to the road to stand at the nearest bus stop sign.
Edward Hopper's "Gas"
Looking back downhill at the shop, I saw him walk slowly out to the old-style pumps in front. He got out a rag and began wiping down the concrete posts guarding the gas. That’s when I knew where I’d seen the building–and its proprietor–before.
My eyes were back on the road, looking west for the bus. There was little else to do but stare at the pavement, so I did. As soon as my eyes found a patch of it with new grass growing up through the cracks, it felt so familiar. As a kid I’d 
stared in boredom at pavement thousands of times. It had been a very long time, but wherever and however such a specific category of experience is stored in memory, it came over me like physical sensation. I was sweating just a bit already on a warm morning. My limbs were loose and strange and my skin was breathing. It was odd to be wearing a tie.
When the phone buzzed in my pocket I was still elsewhere and it took a second or two for me to think of what it was.
“Hey, it’s me. I checked. Your bus is #57. It comes at 7:33. It’s two bucks. Ok? Bye Bye.” I was being taken care of. It happened that way all day.
7:38 a.m. The bus arrived.
I climbed in, slipped bills in awkwardly as directed by the worn illustration on the stainless steel fare counter: George-up-crown-facing-east. I settled into a seat. There were 13 of us aboard, seating capacity about 46. A fairly late bus for real working people. The passengers talked in familiar, tired, morning-work-day tones, the folks closest to me about Sea Monkeys: those tiny, shrimp-like creatures that come
Image at The Comic Book Catacombs
powdered in a bag by mail. A guy said to his skeptical seat mate: “No, I’m serious. You just put this stuff in water and you see these tiny monkeys swimming around.” She wasn’t convinced and he couldn’t explain it any further. Guy had probably been a Boy Scout. And she had probably never seen a copy of ”Boy’s Life.”
Some folks just stared into their cell phones. I wondered if in 20 years anyone would be talking to someone sitting next to them when they could be tuned in to almost anything anywhere inside their heads. Would the elites be tuning in on custom “feeds” they bought and built for themselves to maximize their opportunities? Would regular Joe’s and Jane’s have commercial streams of sights and sounds beamed into their heads as they went from Rockhill to Brentwood to Maplewood?
This route is a straight shot: a single corridor extending from the near county well into the city, through 5 gritty, established inner-ring suburban municipalities. The bus pulled into a light rail connection station at one of them and sat there for 10 minutes. The driver reassured me I could stay aboard. I asked twice just to be sure.
7:55 a.m. We got going again and I called in to let them know I’d be late for the meeting.
8:23 a.m. I stepped down onto the pavement a few blocks from school. By 8:33 I was at the conference table, blaming the bus. There were knowing snickers, eyes rolling all around. We were all mocking the bus. But I felt guilty doing it. The trip had felt so real.
–
It was a full day of meetings, paper and projects, but my class met in the middle of it all and we were talking numbers. Were they real or just human invention? Did they reflect the universe or the mind? 
Was the order they helped us discern really there in the universe as testimony to God or were we imposing the order on impossible complexity and fundamental chaos? The previous day we’d had a guest speaker on infinity. His class felt to me like the presentation of a 40-minute zen koan. He had us count, group, sort and subdivide infinity and then, when we’d worn ourselves out, come back to it as something that couldn’t be grasped. He ended with a meditation on the Eucharist: the infinite contained in a wafer of bread. We ended our unit on my bus-travel-day suggesting that maybe math didn’t say as much about God by means of what was out there as much as it pointed to the infinite–and so to God–in here. Wasn’t that another way of saying what we believe about the transcendental nature of human beings, what we mean by faith in Christ?
5:00 p.m. Leaving my office and out into the alley behind school.
Bi-State Kiosk Poster
It was a 5-minute walk back to the bus stop, but this time I was in no hurry. I stepped out of the sun into the kiosk at the stop. A young boy about 5 years old sat on the bench with his young mother. He was eating chips and drinking a soda. She sat there staring straight ahead or at her cell phone. The boy wanted to talk.
“Mom, what’s 10 x 10?”
“100. Why are you asking me that?”
“Just something I was thinking about.” I could see this was a very clever kid, his face and voice alive with constantly changing expression and musical intonations.
“How about 20 x 20?” he sang out next. “400″ she replied, still staring straight ahead.
“30 x 30?” She hesitated for just a second. “900.”
40 x 40?” She smiled and looked over at him now. “What do I look like, a calculator?” “1600.”
He giggled now, knowing he had her going. “50 x 50?”
“Now that’s enough!” she said laughing herself.
He tried one more time:”60 x 60?” She looked like she was thinking about this one, then scolded: “I told you I’m not a human calculator!”
“I wish I was a human calculator!” he said brightly. I couldn’t resist him anymore.
“I recognize a smart boy when I see one!” I said. That got his mom and I talking.
She turned my way and asked if this bus was usually on time. One trip and someone actually thought I was a veteran! She explained that she had a 5:30 doctor’s appointment at a clinic in 10 minutes.
“Buses are always late and they think they can just keep raising the rates on us.”
The boy jumped in: “You going to be late, Mom?”
“No, you are the one who is gonna be late! its your appointment.”
“Oh, yeah…” his voice trailed off as it hit him that he had to see the doctor. Then: “Oh no!”
5:23 p.m. The west-bound bus arrives.
Math Boy got on just ahead of me, turned around and gave me a big, sparkling smile. I got a full-face exposure to all of that curiosity, all of the infinite potential in that face.
I paid the $2 fare and asked the driver if this bus would get me back to my corner, 11 miles west. No. I’d have to change buses at the station. A transfer would cost 75 cents. Before I could stop myself I said: “I only have a $5.” If there’d been any doubt, now he knew I was green.
He said: “You can ask someone for change or a transfer they don’t need.” But he saw my discomfort and shouted back almost immediately: “Anybody back there have change or a transfer they don’t need?”
A young man announced without expression that he had one and held it up. I took it and thanked him. Two more real veteran commuters coming through for the pilgrim.
5:40 p.m. Math Boy and his Mom reach their stop. 10 minutes late. That should be close enough. I hoped it was just for a check- up.
5:46 p.m. We’re back at the light rail transfer station. The driver remembered that I needed #57 westbound. It was waiting, poised to depart. Two quick blasts on the horn told the bus to wait for me. “Make your move!” he shouted back. I was aboard the next bus in 20 seconds. We were moving in 30.
Bus #57, bound for far West County, was clean. New. And the AC was working on a warm day. I realized how shabby the last bus was and found myself wondering if it was just a coincidence that we’d left the city for the county.
There were 20 of us on board, seating capacity for 46. One of the signs 
above the passengers was an AIDS awareness ad. Two flawlessly beautiful, sensuous African-American faces poised inches from one another. Both the message and the medium felt so intimate, so real. I realized I hadn’t taken in ads that felt this way with any regularity since I was a graduate student riding the subway in the Bronx.
6:09 p.m. I texted my wife to let her know I was on my way and would be home soon. Her message came back: “Glad to hear it, I was starting to wonder. Do you want me to pick you up at the bus stop?”
It was two miles and the prospect of a long walk on a spring evening sounded pretty good.
“No, I’ll think I’ll leg it in.”
“See you soon. Keep it real, Dude.”
For a “Care Free/Car Free Day”–or any other day for that matter–that’s advice I hope to keep counting on.
Posted by: cctracker | April 15, 2012
Beneath Layers of Paint,Time: The Inexhaustible Mystery
The NYT has a wonderful story on Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Prado researcher Ana Gonzalez has definitively shown that the Museum’s copy of the masterpiece was created side by side and step by step along with the original. Read the piece here to see how the truth was uncovered under layers of paint and time.
We study the painting every year in my Humanities course. The story reminded me how “layers” captures something essential about this work. And it got me thinking about “layers” in a larger sense.
First, in the case of the Mona Lisa, came the layers of paint laid down by Leonardo himself: an underlying sketch, fields of color and shading over the sketch, features and details in finer brushwork on top of that and finally, in exquisite detail and delicate hand, finishing touches bringing lace, lips and landscape shimmeringly to life. Even after initially completing the piece, Leonardo added layers of alterations over many years: a slightly smaller head, a slimmed bosom, a lowered bodice.
And this was actually the decisive factor in Gonzalez’ detective work: even covered layers of alterations were a perfect match. There can be no other explanation: whoever was doing the copying was always sitting right there at the master’s side, over many years, as he refined the painting. The copy has recently been cleaned, unlike the original covered with still more layers of varnish and paint added by subsequent collectors. It reveals not only stunning new detail and virtuosity but a younger Mona Lisa. Though the scholarly world does claim the copier was always the same person, they have no idea who Leonardo’s partner was, and will likely never know.
But that’s just one of the many “layers” of mystery in the work:
To what territory does the surreal background landscape refer?
Why did Leonardo keep this painting with him until his death?
And, of course, why that enigmatic half-smile?
Wendy Beckett, the Benedictine nun turned internationally celebrated art critic, has an intriguing interpretation of the painting in her film series.
She says that the woman sitting for the painting, La Gioconda wife of Francesco Giocondo (rough translation: “Mrs. Happiness, wife of Mr. Francis Happiness”) is looking at Leonardo, not at us, and saying: “You and I share a secret and neither of us is telling.”
It is widely believed that Leonardo was a homosexual. Is that the secret? If the copier was painting, too, it might have added another layer to what she knew.
Many scholars believe that Leonardo was ultimately painting himself. Note the strong jaw line. Is that the secret? Did Lady Happiness know this secret? Did his partner?
My first encounter with Leonardo Da Vinci was through my Dad. He’d drawn an aerial view of our backyard to plan the placement of a backboard and hoop. I was fascinated with the clean lines of the drawing: the yard and fence in perspective, shrubs sketched in a corner, even the figure of a boy standing under the yet-to-be-raised standard.
“How did you do that? I asked him.
“I’m engineer; I learned it in school. Let me show you the drawings of the greatest engineer that ever lived.” He got out the encyclopedia and showed me black and white sketches like these.
He was a helicopter engineer so he told me the story of how Da Vinci had designed one 500 years before Igor Sikorski actually made one that flew.
“All he was missing was a source of propulsion,” Dad said.
I noticed Da Vinci’s drawings had the same sharp, diagonal lines to create depth that my Dad had used for the backyard.
I already had a kind of reverence for things my Dad knew how to do.
That day the name “Leonardo Da Vinci” was added to my personal hall of saints.
And so here I am years later, teaching Leonardo. Reading the latest about Leonardo. And realizing today, on his birthday as it happens, that I know almost nothing of Leonardo Da Vinci, the human being.
What does it really capture in terms of the essence of a person to call them a homosexual or an engineer or an artist? Or even to gaze in speculation and surmise upon the immediate work of their hands miraculously expressing something of the spirit of the person and nevertheless leaving so much concealed in mystery?
Time and layers of dirt will cover us all. But today, now, at this moment in all of its overwhelming complexity, immediacy and endless mystery, we are here. We are present to ourselves and to one another as Leonardo was, underneath the layers of paint and time, to Lady Happiness and his Prado Partner. As I was to my father. Somehow, miraculously, we are present to it all as it passes away. And it is present to us. The inexhaustible mystery.
Posted by: cctracker | April 12, 2012
Run Tall, Run Light!
This is a phrase I’ve probably yelled a thousand times to the distance runners I’ve coached over the years. I might add “elbows through!” if I thought I really had their attention. The fewer words you use that reach brains in ways that change bodies, the better. These really did seem to work. They still do for me now that the only runner I’m coaching is me.
Photo from SLUH XC archives
As a coach I believed in teaching running form. Many coaches don’t and they aren’t necessarily wrong. Unless you’re really willing to commit to it and build a lot of conceptual and drill support for helping runners actually improve, you might as well leave it alone. You could do more harm than good and even end up injuring an athlete.
I feel the same way about the “barefoot craze” sweeping the running world. I’ve read Born to Run. It made quite an impact on me, even after 27 years of coaching and, in fact, of teaching most of the mechanical principals author Chris McDougall advocates. But he did send my thinking to the next level in terms of how essential the forefoot strike really is and how active the whole foot ought to be on every stride. “Run light!” is great advice.
After about two years of really working on engaging the foot and staying on on the forefoot–I was always a forefoot striker most of the time– I can run 8 miles at a decent clip and almost never pound the pavement.
Photo by skeletonheb
But what if you are a heel striker or just a runner who runs and doesn’t think all that much about what your feet are doing? Should you try to get up on your toes and take off your shoes? Or perhaps just trade in your conventional trainers for one of the new “minimal” shoes?
I’d say the answer is a flat “no.” If you are into this stuff a bit, or if you are interested is seeing what a good, balanced, well-researched and reasoned piece of writing on any topic looks like, take a look at the recent NYT piece here.
It not only explains my answer but is one more example of the ever-present human temptation of being sucked in to the posture of ”evangelistic faith” in a bold or simple truth when the actual truth, though there in the flesh and blood of experience, is complex, difficult to absorb and to apply.
“Elbows through!”
Posted by: cctracker | April 2, 2012
NOLA and Me
I had a chance to spend a few days in New Orleans recently.
New Orleans Skyline (Photo credit: joseph a)
Rode clattering, unpretentious streetcars from the Garden District to the Quarter every day.
Photo James Burton
Had meals in six or so restaurants, each place its own funky or elegant world of a few square feet 10 paces from the world next door I’d never see, each dish served so hot and well-seasoned it didn’t matter how much food was on the plate. I was chewing slowly and savoring every bite because I couldn’t help it, not because it was good for me.
We walked the along the low-slung strip of Frenchman Street north of the Quarter, ducking into clubs where joyful brass arpeggios and bluesy guitar licks flowed around us and out to the sidewalk as naturally–and plentifully–as the rivers of bourbon and beer.
In short, we had a really great time. Part of it was how much I needed the break. Part of it, of course, was the utterly unique and constantly surprising flavor of NOLA. Part of it was the company of my wonderful companion.
But even with all of the pleasures, textures, endlessly engaging distractions and requisite tourist activities (yes, we had beignets and coffee at the Cafe Du Monde) to keep me occupied in the Big Easy, I still found myself, underneath it all, being drawn into territory that often engages me most when I travel: the drama of how human communities establish themselves on a natural landscape. Driving the interstate I am moved by fields, farms and pastures. I think about them. In New Orleans, I thought a lot about water.
So we took a swamp tour.
The folks at Cajun Encounters picked us up in the Quarter and, after collecting passengers at a few irresistibly quirky and cool small hotels and B and B’s, drove us out across the I-10 bridge south toward the bayou. The lower 9th Ward was too far off to the west to really get a sense of it at ground level, but as we passed through West Lake Forest we saw mile after mile of abandoned shopping centers, upscale suburban tracts and business parks. The devastating aftermath of Katrina was still in evidence at a scale I couldn’t absorb. Some neighborhoods were trying to come back. The Home Depots and Lowes were certainly up and running; our tour guide and bus driver made sure to point that out.
Image at Collin Kelly: Modern Confessional Blog
Then it was out across the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge and into the town of Slidell where the tourists cue up at a boat launch on the Pearl river to see live gators, have a few close encounters with real Cajuns and experience the absolutely magical world of a silent Cypress-Tupelo swamp. Tourist trap or no I was completely entranced.
Photo James Burton
The Cajuns, descendants of the French “Acadians” from Canada who’d been kicked out of the old original settlement of New Orleans and had to invent a life for themselves in the swamps, exist on mighty close terms with their biological niche.
Photo James Burton
Our guide was second generation Cajun and though I could tell he wasn’t a “naturalist” at all by temperament, it was also clear that he was on intimate terms with the land, the water, the birds, the plants and the trees. He knew a lot about all of them and he wasn’t really showing it off. He was just talking about home.
He didn’t mention it at all on the tour, but his home is profoundly at risk.
—–
I remember the first time I traveled to New Orleans. I was in a high-powered choir and we had a gig at St. Louis Cathedral. I knew almost nothing about nature or geography, but I guess I was still hard-wired for interest in them because all I could think about as we drove south that night was: When would I see the first palm tree? Would we catch a glimpse of the gulf? Would I at least be able to smell the open sea? I did see palms eventually and was mesmerized by them. I never saw the Gulf, of course, because the land where the Mississippi meets the ocean is a vast maze of swampy islands, marshes and streams extending down about 130 miles before you reach open water. I think I would have been shocked if I’d looked at a map back then to see where New Orleans actually sits on the edge of all that swamp land.
By the time we got back in to the city, my reflections on this place were beginning to crystallize a bit.
There is, of course, no way to articulate something as complex and multi-layered as the unique culture–”the feel” for want of a better phrase–of a particular city. Cities, even the blandest and most homogenous, are worlds within worlds and everyone is entitled to their own inexpressible take on whatever slice makes it real for them.
Photo of Springfield, Mo, at Kevin Flynn's Inside Lane site
Nevertheless New Orleans is so special and unique that people across the country and around the world do seem to share common impressions and narratives about it. A German couple sat next to us for dinner one night. My partner struck up a conversation with them. At one point the gentleman said something like: “We come from a beautiful village in Austria and we’ve been to many places across Europe and America…but we’ve never been anywhere like this.” We were in the Quarter so part of their comment was surely a reference to the sheer number of restaurants and bars within 16 or so square blocks. But it’s not just the Quarter–and it certainly isn’t just Bourbon Street–that have made New Orleans into an urban symbol for so many Americans. How else can we account for it? Mardi Gras is a good place to start.
Photo at LA Times Photo Framework Site
I’ve never been in the city for the actual celebration of Mardi Gras, but for most visitors isn’t it always Mardis Gras in New Orleans? And wherever we are when Mardi Gras rolls around each year, don’t the beads, masks and fake plumage suggest that we are all pretending to be in New Orleans? It seems that Mardi Gras has expanded to become one of those second-tier national holidays–like St. Patrick’s Day– in recent years. It wasn’t like that 20 years ago. It’s a festival that invites us into riotous joy, into spontaneous and often excessive and irresponsible expressions of our passions. It celebrates diversity, too, implicitly tolerating almost every lifestyle.
Photo at NOLA Imports website
I think that approach to diversity is an important element of what makes New Orleans unique. Unlike San Francisco, for example, where you walk from one contained ethnic niche right into another in just a few steps, the cultural, musical, ethnic, even linguistic traditions of New Orleans taste intermingled like flavors in a gumbo: Cajun, Southern, French, Creole, Gay, Seafaring, River-boating, African, Haitian, Delta, even Cuban. And visitors have permission to try on any of the masks they wish.
I remember walking down Bourbon street when I was 20 on that choir trip I mentioned earlier. The mask I was being invited to try on that night, with rather aggressive invitations as I recall, was ‘the voyeur.’ I was a pretty straight arrow. I’d turned down the invitation to wear ‘the drunk’ mask earlier that night so I certainly wasn’t going to put the next one on, especially since I was already wearing ‘the seminarian’ mask. I wanted to, though. And a part of me certainly appreciates now that there is an intoxicating freedom in putting on these masks that can be a crucial part of how someone eventually works out being real. Though I’ve always felt responsible for representing the risk side of that equation, I don’t take any credit for that anymore.
On our recent visit, my wife and I saw packs of smooth-skinned 20 year-old guys walking down the middle of Bourbon street, wearing caps turned backward, leaning forward as they strode along, looking side to side as they considered invitations. They sure looked like they had their masks on.
Photo at dnjournal.com
Here are three other ingredients that I think contribute to the recipe for NOLA joy and celebration– ingredients in ample supply both in its history and its present circumstance that make it possible in very concrete ways:
The relatively low-tech, accessible, human scale of development at which much of the city exists,
Photos James Burton
The intimate and celebrated connection the city has to its natural context: river, bayou, coastal flats,
Photo James Burton
And the abundance of the celebrated, local, and mostly sustainable food resources gathered from this landscape.
Photo at Cloture Club Website: Annual Louisiana State Crawfish Boil
But finally, since it’s Lent and I am finishing this post up on Holy Thursday, I want to come back to what I saw on my way out to the swamp tour, to Katrina, to the dramatic threat facing not only the freshwater swamps but the entire city.
New Orleans looks worn out by its struggle to survive.
And it isn’t just Katrina. There have been waves of struggles against storms and floods since Bieneville established the city in 1718. Before that, this place was for human beings what it should be in an ecological sense: a portage between the swamp and Lake Poncetrain. Just as Mardi Gras would have no meaning without Lent, so the vibrant and outrageous culture of New Orleans can’t be separated from its relentless struggle for survival in vast, swampy lowlands. Geographically speaking the city makes no sense. From the viewpoint of logic and landscape, it should never have come to be at all. But as the path of biological evolution demonstrates, creating order from mistakes and accidents is the way more complex life forms and communities always come into being. This is an underlying truth for everything alive.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I felt like New Orleans was delivering some wisdom on a deeper level I couldn’t name right away. As I’ve continued reflecting, I think the city has reminded me that there are a few more precious, essential ingredients in its wonderful simmering pot that every community needs in order to provide the spiritual sustenance all of us are seeking, however differently we might name it. The ingredients? Chaos. Suffering. Vulnerability. Death.
Bones stacked in a church near Prague. Photo Andrew Linhares
Of course each of these are already in the mix of every culture and community everywhere, all the time. So perhaps the better way to name the ingredient would be an awareness of them all, an expression of them, an inclusion of them in such a way as to encourage us to remember that they are there.
Photo at toulousestreet.wordpress.com
The people of New Orleans are aware of them now more than ever.
Katrina would not have been nearly so destructive if the maze of swamplands were as substantial and protective as they were 70 years ago. 1900 square miles of buffering wetlands–an area larger than the state of Rhode Island–have been lost in that time. As the levees and dams went up and the channelization of the Mississippi increased, the natural system for building and replenishing wetlands was disrupted. The site of New Orleans and its barrier islands are sinking, as they have been for thousands of years, but now there are no silts being delivered to build them back up. The next great hurricane, whenever it strikes, could send the whole region back to its days as a portage. The imagination boggles at the scale of the toxic catastrophe one might paddle through on such a trip in 50 years.
Photo at: 911review.org/Hurricane_Katrina/kenner.html
But isn’t that a metaphor for the whole of humanity on the planet at this point in history? Certainly there are places where cities make much more sense, but ultimately, the way we are living on this watery planet is not sustainable. A persuasive case can be made that we are in the early stages of an ecological collapse that will cause terrible disruptions to human communities, unimaginable suffering. New Orleans may not be at the cutting edge of how we ought to confront this challenge in terms of politics or science, but it is more intimately in touch than most places in the U.S. with the truth of our situation. And I believe even that degree of honesty bears good cultural fruit.
Though you could say that they haven’t had much choice about reflecting these terrifying ingredients given its history and geography, I give the city and its inhabitants credit for the way they have created a life-affirming and joyful culture in their midst. New Orleans celebrates the joy of being alive but at the same time always reflects the truth of its impermanence back to the eye and the soul of the beholder.
Christianity and many of the world’s great wisdom traditions speak to the point: abiding joy–and even true artistic creativity–like deep faith and true love, must be built on an awareness of our impermanence our vulnerability before chaos, on the inescapability of death. Only then can an experience of Resurrection have any meaning for us.
Thank you, NOLA. And Happy Easter!
Posted by: cctracker | March 18, 2012
Signs of the Times: Could The Human-Industrial “Singularity” Be Near?
Some weeks ago we were dealing with “faith and science” in my class. For a few days I was carrying around a copy of a big, fat book by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity Is Near.
“The singularity” is Kurzweil’s name for a moment coming our way in the not-so-distant future when the pace of technological progress reaches a critical breakaway point. Humans and machines merge and in a sudden, ‘whoosh’ of geometric progressions we can scarcely imagine now, human life is utterly transformed.
Mostly, I find the material terrifying.
More on that in a future post; It puts me in a winter mind and I’m ready for spring. But a series of articles and ongoing news about Apple Computer in the NY Times, despite sounding dark chords that remind me of Kursweil’s vision, also have me wondering whether a much more hopeful breakaway point in human history might be approaching.
Two sprawling articles, one in late January and the second in mid February, focus on Foxconn, Apple’s main manufacturing sub-contractor. The stories have many people taking a closer look at the glossy, futuristic, seamless, Steve-Jobs-designed iPhones and iPods we carry in our pockets or purses. They take us into the very real and present world from which these objects come: a world few of us can imagine, much less comprehend. And they remind us that there are people and communities in these places to whom we ought to feel intimately connected and for whom we are, to an important degree, responsible.
Check out the first piece highlighting the manufacturing processes at Foxconn here.
And the second article focussing on the human costs of producing Apple products here.
Here are a few details from the articles that capture something of the scale and power of these new manufacturing “communities:”
Apple sold 160 million devices last year. In the last three months they recorded one of the most lucrative quarters of any corporation in history, generating $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales. With 43,000 U.S. workers and 20,000 overseas, Apple earned $400,00 per employee, beating Goldman Sachs, Exxon and Google.
But the story of the seamless wonder in your pocket is much bigger than that: it takes over 700,000 independent contractors to actually engineer and assemble the iPhone. And that’s where Foxconn comes in. Its 1.2 million workers scattered across the world assemble an astounding 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics.
North of Shenzhen sits their largest campus. Commentators are calling it “Foxconn City” for want of a better name. It is a manufacturing facility with dorm-style living space for 200,000 and hundreds of more “luxurious” three-room apartments typically stuffed with 20 workers per unit. 300 guards are employed just to direct foot traffic to and from the factories to keep workers from trampling each other to death at bottlenecks.
Photo at geek.com.
Here is an example of what such concentrated industrial capacity can do:
In 2007, a mere month before the iPhone was due in stores, Steve Jobs changed his mind about the screens. It seems that though they were made of a scratch-resistant plastic, the one in Steve’s pocket got scratched anyway. ”I want a glass screen and I want it perfect in six weeks,” said Steve.
Photo at Forbes.com
And so it happened. Corning, Inc. could make the glass, but there was no manufacturer in the world’s largest economy that could gear up to cut and polish all those pieces in time to ship them for assembly. By the time Apple’s execs got to China to ask them about the task, Foxconn had already started construction on a dedicated factory wing for the project. Free cut-glass samples were ready for inspection when the Apple team arrived. Battalions of engineers stood ready for orders. On-site dormitories would be available 24 hours a day for the production crunch. They got the contract, of course and a month or so later, the glass arrived in the middle of the night. 8,000 employees were awakened, fed a quick breakfast of tea and biscuits and set to work installing them in 12-hour shifts.
Image at bgr.com
The particulars of all of this have been a matter of some secrecy until very recently. The NYT pieces do us a great service: educating our imaginations about the reality of industrial culture on this planet. These are mind-numbing realities at a scale most of us in the States have not yet absorbed. It is also a scale which we are likely never to be able to match. When President Obama famously asked last year why the iPhone couldn’t be made right here, it struck me just how deep our national ignorance of the magnitude of this global industrial transformation really goes.
The articles also introduce us to some of the human beings who inhabit corners of this new landscape:
We meet Lai Xiaoodong whose youth and ambition led him on a pilgrimage to Chengdu, city of the iPad and 12 million souls. He worked in a crew among 120,000. Each day at work he was greeted by a sign which read: “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow.”And so he worked, often 12 hours a day, six days a week for $22 a day. Each night he retreated to a small bedroom just big enough for a mattress, wardrobe and a desk where he obsessively played an online game called “Fight the Landlord.” He died in an Aluminum dust explosion that was 100% preventable with simple technologies that have been around for decades. His girlfriend reports that his face was partially melted away and that she was grateful that his suffering lasted days rather than weeks.
Photo at Ryan Pyle Archive
We read about workers forced to stand for hours on overtime shifts until their legs swell so much that they can hardly walk. Of thousands of employees cleaning iPhone screens with chemicals known to be poisonous. We are told that some of the exteriors of the facilities are fitted with mesh suicide nets due to a rash of attempts in 2010.
Image at fastcompany.com
My brother-in-law travels to industrial China frequently for business. I’ve never spoken with him at length about what he’s seen, but I’ve watched him go quiet when I ask about it: his face clouds over, his sentences trail off into silence. These articles helped me understand why.
—
I wanted to record my thoughts on these pieces as soon as I read them months ago, but I was too overwhelmed. So many important angles struck me at once. I’ve been meditating on them, trying to sort them out, feeling clouded over and distracted as I go through a day. If there are any itinerant preachers left out there looking for parable material, I can’t imagine better stuff. But they’d have to find a way to translate the massive scale of these stories down to individual lives: the worker carrying hopes, dreams, family obligations and very little else to the factory floor every day; the corporate officer earning a good, great or gargantuan salary, but dealing with complex pressures and burdens for which we all also, as consumers, have some level of responsibility.
Image at the blog called Siouxwire.com
But as the plot lines and character sketches for potential parables coalesced in my imagination, I was surprised to find themes of hope emerging next to brutality and pathos. Clearly we’re seeing shockingly new and rapidly evolving socio-economic structures. But might we not also be witnessing a new moment in the human story? A chapter in which our communal will, imagination and creativity are being directed in a powerful, new way toward the spiritual work of building human communities rooted in hope and love?
I want to be clear that I find most aspects of this story very disturbing. I was a middle-schooler in a Catholic school system that taught me to recognize and condemn the exploitation of workers. As a college kid I was haunted by visions of rugs made by children locked away in airless Pakistani factories and California fruits and vegetables harvested by workers sprayed with the same pesticides used to kill the pests. Most recently I am grieved, among many other examples, by the stories of Congolese children forced to work in industrial mines in horrific conditions.
Image at 1n2eastafrica.com
Nevertheless, let me try to explain why this Foxconn story has me wondering if a very powerful–and potentially humanizing– industrial “singularity” may be coming into view.
Think of Apple’s marketing campaigns. You may or may not like the look and feel of their messages yourself, but I would suggest that they have tried to associate their products with something spiritual in the nature and purpose of human beings. We dance ecstatically with their iPods, smile into one another’s beautiful faces with their iPhones, tap into our deepest creativity or devote ourselves to the pursuit of art and wisdom with their iPads.
Image at mashable.com
Image at prweb.com
What was Steve Jobs deepest legacy? He wanted the machines to conform themselves to the scale of our lives, to the appetite of our eye for beauty and elegance, to the deepest desires and longings of our hearts. In short, they were to exist for us and not the other way around. This campaign has been stunningly successful around the world. People want to use objects that are totems for their own freedom, independence, uniqueness and, yes, dignity. And they are willing to pay for them even when functionally similar products are available for much, much less.
The NYT piece makes it clear that Apple’s message is profoundly at odds with the realities of life for workers at Foxconn. And Apple knows it. For all I know, this may actually grieve some of the folks in positions of power at Apple. Across a kitchen table they would probably tell us about the colossal forces of a world market for materials and labor and the intricacies of contracts with subcontractors. About how it may take a long time for a real middle class to evolve in Asia.
But they can’t have that conversation with a global public dancing with their products. And they don’t plan to try to defend these abuses. They also don’t plan to allow the NYT or anyone else to define their brand by telling more of these compelling, human stories of exploited workers creating their beautiful, seamless objects.
So, they have decided to actually respond to the problems. A code Apple published in 2005 declared “that working conditions in Apple’s supply chain are safe, that workers are treated with respect and dignity, and that manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible.” Steps the company is taking now seem to be moving from rhetoric to reality. For the first time, the company released a list identifying many of its suppliers, in effect, taking responsibility for every part of the process involved in producing their products. They completed over 200 audits of supplier factories last year and their annual supplier responsibility reports disclose abuses we might not otherwise have know about. They show that half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007.
But this information comes to us from their own reports. One highly placed ex-Apple executive reports in the articles that “suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.” It will be hard for Apple not take meaningful action now that they have publicly started down this road.
Will those of us who use these products care enough to let them know we demand they walk down this road? Will that road lead to beautiful, functional electronic products produced by people who are treated with dignity and are being offered futures consistent with the kinds of values the company celebrates in its advertising campaigns? How long will that take?
What if what we are seeing is the beginning of a new breakaway point in global consciousness about workers and products? What if this is the beginning of a new ethos in consumer culture in which we realize that we want to consume–and are willing to pay for– products that dignify users and makers? What if what we are seeing is an emerging industrial playing field where more bright lights and cameras mean no more room for industrial criminals to hide?
If it is true, as one international captain of industry put it, that ”every company wants to be Apple today” these pieces in the NYT may be pointing to a transformational moment in human history.
–
The Foxconn website is weirdly spare. It features a large photo of a group of young employees leaping into the air.
It is a chilling image. I’d just read about their factories when I first saw it and I found the juxtaposition of the “leap for joy” message and the grim realities of workers’ lives deeply disturbing. But after looking at it for a few more minutes, I could see how they’d gotten the shot: someone had thrown something, a frisbee perhaps, and had instructed them all to look at it and jump to catch it just before it entered the frame. Or perhaps it was simply edited out.
At any rate, it is a phony and we can feel it. The image takes its place in a long and terrible line of propagandistic attempts on the part of management and capital to lie about the happy, fulfilled lives of laborers.
Here’s hoping that these NYT stories prefigure a new climate of resistance to these kinds of lies and even, perhaps, a new era of genuine universal aspiration to square our spiritual language and imagery about the value and dignity of persons with the reality of the individual and communal circumstances of workers.
Several weeks ago the NYT reported that monthly wages at Foxconn will rise by an average of $400 this year.
Posted in Economics and Politics, Faith and Spirituality, Technology | Tags: Apple, Foxconn, Future, Manufacturing, New York Times, Ray Kurzweil
Posted by: cctracker | February 20, 2012
Missouri Gems in Sandy Bottoms, Granite Knobs
It takes a little over an hour by car from St. Louis and then just a few minutes of steady walking to find yourself hidden away in an Ozark wilderness.
Photo James Burton
And if you catch a perfect February day like today, you’ll be warm and comfortable enough to stop for as long you like to be dazzled by color and texture only a late, Missouri winter can deliver.
Sparkling, slow, sandy-bottomed, spring-fed creeks wind through clefts in the hills.
Photo James Burton
High above them in the sun against an open blue sky, stand ancient knobs with polished granite benches facing south, waiting for pilgrims carrying hard-boiled eggs and oranges.
Photo James Burton
And when you’re in amid the trees neither high nor low, no leaves distract you from the simple glories of tree bark: polished like muscled-granite on Ironwood saplings, alternately grooved in purple and gray on massive Red Oaks downed by storms and, in the case of Shortleaf Pines, racked around trunks in cubed geometry like scales on the leg of a dinosaur.
There are no words for the kind of refreshment I get from a day like this. And yet, days go by and I forget–even come to doubt– this kind of grace. Until, in something like an act of faith, I take another hike.
Posted by: cctracker | February 13, 2012
Late Winter Night
Winter came back at last this afternoon in fat flakes. Heavy enough to stay down and pile up. Wet enough to stick to everything. But I couldn’t look at it much today. As night came on, I couldn’t even think much, about anything. Didn’t know what I knew. Just wanted to shake off the cold and wet, come indoors. Though we haven’t had much winter this year, it was still a late winter night in my soul.
Then the three-year old boy next store came to see us, in a shaggy moonsuit. He gave us one full- faced smile before he went on ploughing thick frosting off all the birthday cakes on our porch rail.
I’m not going back out there tonight. And I still feel thick and slow. But I am glad, again, for winter.
Illustration from Jane Yolen's "Owl Moon"
Posted in Ordinary moments | Tags: Jane Yolen, Snow
Posted by: cctracker | February 10, 2012
We Need the Eggs
The title of this post comes from a great joke in Woody Allen’s ”Annie Hall.” Take a look at the scene here.
Photo at tbnranch.com
Woody Allen uses the joke to make a point about relationships and that’s where I want to end up, but let’s start with eggs.
Driving into work this morning I heard a story on NPR’s Morning Edition about mortal enemies fighting, nearly to the death, over eggs. Over Industrial Egg farming to be specific. Listen to the story or read it here.
Gene Gregory and Wayne Pacelle were bitter adversaries: one the President of United Egg Producers the other the President of the Humane Society. We’re talking battling titans! And the war between them had gone on for years. Totally opposite visions of the issue and utterly entrenched rhetoric. Absolutely incompatible bottom lines. And on top of all that, it was personal.
And yet, these days the two are lobbying Congress together to reform the regulations on egg production.
The thaw began with a message from Gregory to Pacelle through an intermediary: “Can the two of us just talk?” They did.
Pacelle says in the piece: “We could fight the United Egg Producers for another 10 or 15 years, and spend millions of dollars on both sides. But the other option is, we could sit down together and figure out a pathway that’s good for industry and better for animals.”
The conversation lead to, you guessed it, a real relationship:
“I found him to be a man of his word,” Gregory now says of Pacelle.
“He helped me understand the daily struggles farmers go through,” Pacelle says of Gregory.
I was smiling in that last stretch to school. We can talk. We can get beyond what looks like hopeless ideological polarization to address real problems with workable strategies. I’m not sure who the intermediaries will be. And we may have to deal with our own and other’s delusions along the way.
But I do know one thing: right now, we need the eggs.
Posted in Economics and Politics, Food/Agriculture, Sustainable Culture | Tags: civility, Sustainable Agriculture, Woody Allen
